Like many people, I was quite surprised that Apple did not go into much detail at all about the full hardware specs for the new iPhone 3GS at their WWDC keynote last week.  There was lots of talk about speed, and major speed improvements, but no revealing of, and boasting about, a specific new processor, […]
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Apple’s Silence on 3GS Hardware Specs = Good Call

Jun 15th 2009 by

BetterWithEveryApp

Like many people, I was quite surprised that Apple did not go into much detail at all about the full hardware specs for the new iPhone 3GS at their WWDC keynote last week.  There was lots of talk about speed, and major speed improvements, but no revealing of, and boasting about, a specific new processor, or details on added RAM memory.

I even thought this was a little dumb, as lots of iPhone geeks like me wanted to know this stuff.  Later last week we found out the details on the significantly better processor and doubled-up RAM in the 3GS “ and I also found an article at Apple Insider that helped me realize how dumb I was to doubt Apple, and why their desire not to focus on hardware is the spot-on right way to go. 

The very simple, and very good, reason that Apple has not chosen to talk about detailed hardware specs for the 3GS, and why that is not a key area of emphasis for them, is that it ‘s all about the iPhone OS platform, and the wealth of apps available for it, when it comes to marketing the iPhone, any iPhone.

Here ‘s an except from Apple Insider highlighting this strategy:

The unique software capabilities of the iPhone, including its ability to run the 50,000 titles on the App Store, is far more important from a marketing standpoint than the hardware specifications of the iPhone that any manufacturer can match or exceed with little effort. The company faced similar issues in working to sell the original Macintosh against DOS PCs, which were marketed primarily as having a given number of megabytes and MHz rather than having the functionality or usability of the Mac’s graphical user interface.

Rather than being compared on the basis of MHz and MB of RAM, the numbers Apple would prefer to have consumers and pundits contemplate are the installed base of more than 40 million users, the tens of thousands of apps available from thousands of developers, and the number of free regular updates that Apple ships to enhance and secure the iPhone’s operating system. Those are numbers that phones using Android, BlackBerry OS, Symbian, WebOS, and Windows Mobile are hard pressed to match.

As soon as I read Apple Insider ‘s post I thought ‘of course that ‘s the way to go ‘.  My own urges to hear about doubled RAM and faster procs had lead me to forget that it ‘s always been all about the platform with the iPhone.  It always has been for me as well.  Since the V1 iPhone launched, there have always been heavyweight phones around that boasted better cameras, more of this, better that, when it came to hardware features.

But the real revolution the iPhone brought to us was “ and is “ the OS itself, the major updates that it regularly receives, and the range of powerful apps that are available for it.

So I guess that de-emphasizing the hardware specs thing maybe isn ‘t so dumb after all, and maybe I ‘m better off not applying to be Apple ‘s Marketing Director just yet 🙂

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