Dead Ink Vinyl

My MacBook Pro serves two purposes in my life. First, it is my personal computer — where I email, chat, tweet, and browse online, and where I write documents, edit photos, watch videos, and otherwise stay in touch. I want these functions to just work whenever I open the laptop. Zero hassles.

Second, my MBP is my development computer. Development computers get the snot kicked out of them. They are constantly in flux. Install the new Ruby; install the new Xcode; install the new iPhone SDK beta and the new Drizzle and CouchDB and LLVM. Update the new MacPorts and Homebrew and OpenPKG. Upgrade my git, hg, and svn. Try Erlang, and Haskel, and Hadoop. Then uninstall and reinstall some or all as needed. Eventually, I cross the beams and it’s time for a fresh start¹.

On the one hand, I crave stability. On the other, I’m pushing constant change. On the one hand, I have simple requirements that can be met with a simple, 1.5 pound portable device. On the other, I’m a power user demanding the biggest, the fastest, the most of everything in a 17” form factor.

I’ve tried various schemes to manage the conflicting requirements of these two modes of interaction with my computer. On occasion, I’ve completely lost my mind and try outlandish solutions such as dual booting or running my personal computer as a VM inside my development computer (hey, at least it was easy to backup). These solutions never worked because I often wanted to jump between both worlds quickly and effortlessly.

Then the iPhone came along. It was nearly perfect, allowing me to separate my personal computing from my development — in a package that was eminently more portable than my 17” MBP. However, the iPhone has certain constraints that require me to maintain a personal computing presence on my laptop. I don’t like writing long emails on my iPhone. Certain web sites are so poorly designed they must be viewed on a full computer². I can’t create content (documents, spreadsheets, presentations, diagrams) on my iPhone. Ultimately, the iPhone is a satellite device.

The iPad promises to be my dedicated personal computer. It promises to email, chat, tweet, browse, write, edit, and watch — all while just working. (And, might I add, from anywhere.) That frees-up my laptop to be a dedicated development platform that I can use and abuse without consequence.

I want an iPad to keep my simple personal computing needs separate from my developer computing needs.

¹ I subscribe to the Ripley school of developer workstation maintenance: nuke the entire site from orbit — it’s the only way to be sure.

² I’m not even talking about Flash — I’m talking about sites that screw up HTML that badly.

Brad Larson of Sunset Lake Software and creator of Molecules gave an excellent presentation about OpenGL ES development for the iPhone at iPhoneDevCamp Chicago this past weekend. Today, he posted the non-NDA-breaking highlights of his presentation online. It’s an excellent resource for anyone starting out with OpenGL development. I find it very inspiring that someone can go from “I know nothing about OpenGL” to finished application in three weeks working only nights and weekends.

UPDATE: With the NDA lifted, Brad has generously released the source code for Molecules!

The excellent blog Going Private discusses Apple’s new iPhone revenue model, whereby Apple allowed AT&T to subsidize the price of the iPhone (leading to more iPhones being sold) but gave up the profit-sharing on new iPhone service contracts. The deal is analyzed entirely from the perspective of whether the increased sales volume offsets the lost service contract revenue:

I suspect the figures are pretty offsetting, leaving any future gain in iPhone revenue as a percentage of total revenue really subject to iPhone sales growth v. other sales growth at Apple… and not the new revenue model which is probably pretty neutral.

I didn’t see a way to leave a comment, so I’ll post my comment here. If the only components to this deal were subsidies and contract revenue, then it would be a nearly complete win for AT&T. But this analysis fails to account for the additional revenue that Apple will gain through the App Store selling applications to iPhone (and iPod Touch) owners.

The service contract revenue lost by the new deal is not offset against increased hardware sales—it is offset against App Store revenues. The more people who own iPhones, the more revenue the App Store can be expected to generate. Apple gave up contract revenue primarily in exchange for permission to run its own store selling software over-the-air directly to the iPhone device. In the traditional mobile marketplace, it is the carrier who sells applications and keeps a generous percentage of the application price. Apple negotiated with AT&T (and, apparently, dozens of other carriers internationally) to allow iPhones to purchase and download applications from Apple’s App Store. To secure this, Apple agreed to no longer take a cut of the iPhone service contracts. Additionally, Apple will allow AT&T to subsidize the iPhone, which is now good for both parties. (This new arrangement is apparently much more pleasing to carriers internationally as well, giving Apple more markets in which to sell its product.)

It’s a win for AT&T because they can attract (or retain) many more customers and they no longer split those contract revenues with Apple. Additionally, I suspect that AT&T even gets a small cut of the 30% Apple keeps for applications sold over-the-air through the App Store to AT&T customers.

Apple wins by dramatically increased hardware sales and the right to sell apps over-the-air to iPhones. And the App Store benefits from networking effects. The more people who own iPhones, the more developers will be attracted to build and sell applications in that marketplace. The more applications there are in that marketplace, the more people will want iPhones. The iPhone’s killer app will no longer be it’s revolutionary interface and ease of use, but rather be the applications that run on it. Finally, Apple wins by attracting huge numbers of new developers to its operating system, libraries, and development tools. John Gruber reports that “two engineers from Apple told me that [interest] wasn’t just for the iPhone — that they were seeing plenty of new-to-Cocoa developers in the Mac-specific sessions and labs, too”.

Everyone benefits.