With the dust settling on the 2008 MacWorld event in San Francisco, attention is being turned back on Europe this week, with the news from unofficial sources that Apple has failed to garner the huge numbers anticipated to adopt the iPhone in the UK. Word on the street too is that Europe is beginning to show some interest in the attitude-changing device, but is it a success in Europe?
To be frank, the iPhone is a nirvana-esque type of device. It is without doubt the most beautiful embodiment of that holy grail of the mobile communications device that so many actors in the technology field have spent 10 years trying to bring to market. Combining the phenomenally successful iPod platform, with a cellular telephone, WiFi-capable device with full and unbridled internet abilities and an email client that brings email to the masses in a way people can understand is amazing. Giving the opportunity to people to ‘touch’ their email and music is also a huge achievement for metaphor. But the device, while revolutionary in its abilities, is a bit of a lame duck in the hands of Europeans.
While it’s certainly not the case in Ireland (where we pay the highest prices for mobile phones and services in Europe), the UK has a thriving and highly-competitive cellular phone industry. With a population of almost 80 million alone in the UK, the phone market there reached saturation some years ago – yet people continue to adopt the latest phones for the best prices. When visiting Cardiff a few years ago, I was shocked to see the latest models being flogged by mainstream carriers for almost nothing (and some at £0). But the reason is simple – competition has driven down the price of the devices and the marginal profits gained from the competitive advantage on contracts yields massive revenues for the companies involved.
Contrast this with the Apple iPhone – a device which combines so much into a device that it does indeed warrant a high-price, and people will run like hell from it. The simple fact is the iPhone is just too expensive. It’s irrelevant whether it has an iPod or email in it, for the average consumer is concerned with things like ‘What kind of camera is in it?’ and ‘How easy is it to text with?’ and ‘Is the battery good?’. The consumer isn’t going to pay top dollar for a product that they perceive to be just a phone with an iPod stuck on. However, the iPhone is more iPod than phone. It was designed as an iPod, and phone features were added to the mix in order to consolidate a user’s physical digital footprint into one single device.
The main reason therefore that the iPhone is failing in the UK (and Europe too) is its price. And as we enter a huge recession in the EU, the iPhone’s luxury must-have appeal will be sacrificed due to its costly yield. Which is a dramatic change from the years when phones such as the Nokia 8800 was the must-have device because it was more expensive than the rest (and was a crap phone to boot). Now people want functionality over form, reliability over ergonomics. And while the iPhone is a revolutionary product, it will suffer from its futuristic design.
Europeans, and none more-so than the Irish, are a text-loving breed. On average, I send over 100 SMS messages per day. This is not uncommon in Ireland, and given that I’m a man, you can imagine that the number of text messages sent by women is a multiple of that. In fact, we’re so good at ‘texting’ each other here that we can type better on our phone’s twelve-key layout, than on a 105-key keyboard. The iPhone lacks this fundamental feature of tactile touch and connection with the phone. It has a beautiful and extremely clever QWERTY keyboard. But the problem is that this keyboard is a touch-screen keyboard, which relies on super-human hand-eye co-ordination to hit each key every time. This is no good to people raised on a diet of 4-3-5-5-6 (H-E-L-L-O) keystrokes. I’ve frequently sent text messages to people in my pocket while not looking at the keys. It’s great when you’re at a funeral and someone has a funny story to tell you right at that moment. It’s not that it doesn’t happen! So imagine remembering the x-y co-ordinates of the letter ‘M’ on your iPhone keyboard when it’s in your pocket on a freezing wet November day? It’s not going to happen. The fact is, we need keys to feel our way around. Most people here text without even thinking about which buttons to press, similar to how we now type on our keyboards at work. In fact, some of the stupidest people I’ve ever met who can’t type their name on a keyboard without looking, could write a 160-character text message faster than you could say ‘What kind of phone do you have?’.
So what of the Irish situation. Well, the iPhone still hasn’t beholden itself to being sold here yet. Still no announcement from Apple as to when this might happen, despite everyone and his dog predicting it’ll be in February of 2008. But the problem is, given that there’s only a population of 4 million on this island, and about two-thirds of our population are either too old or too young to adopt the iPhone in their droves, the device will be the target of the adoration of the middle-classes. These are the people who stupidly bought houses in the last 5 years and didn’t sell them when they had the chance. They’re now poor, struggling to make ends meet and not entirely aware of the fact that they’ll spend every day until they’re 90 years old working to pay off the debt they owe to the banks. This narrows the gap to fewer and fewer potential buyers of the iPhone. To be honest, if you take the ratio of 80 million in the UK buying only 200,000 iPhones, that means that in Ireland, Apple could only hope to sell 10,000 iPhones here. At a price tag of about €300 per iPhone, that’s only €3,000,000. Apple takes only 25% of that, meaning the company will make only €750,000 for ploughing iPhones into Ireland. Think about it, how much money will actually make it back to Cupertino? And then wonder why you’re asking yourself why Apple haven’t launched it here yet??
The answer is simple. If it’s not catching on in the UK, it’ll never catch on here.
How do Apple rectify that? They really cannot. While things might work in the US for the iPhone, Europeans want a phone that is easy to text with, can take reasonably good pictures and costs nothing to own or run. The iPhone is the antithesis of this. More is the pity.
diarmy
