iPhone and .mac

This makes for some interesting reading :

 http://www.iphonealley.com/news/iphone-2-0-to-include-wireless-mac-syncing

It would appear that there are a number of hints pointing towards the possibility of the iPhone being able to sync to .mac directly instead of having to use iTunes.

I've wondered about this a lot since the launch of the iPhone since it seems to me to be the perfect value-add for the .mac service and ties in perfectly with the other syncing components of the service.  I thought it was a big missing component from the mix from day one. However, when you factor in the delays to Leopard that were due to moving engineers over to the iPhone development in order to meet the ship date, it makes sense that they weren't able to get everything into the first releases of Leopard and the iPhone.

This raises a couple of other points in my ruminations regarding the iPhone and .mac.

One: .mac is not perceived as being a good value by many people since you can get most of the primary features for free elsewhere or for a reasonable price.  Mail = Gmail, Photo Galleries = Flickr, Blog = Blogspot et al, iDisk, box.net et al.

The only stand-out service that is unequalled is the sync service. It requires you have more than one mac to make it interesting or worthwhile though.  I imagine that's a relatively small market niche (albeit one that I fall into).  It's got some problems and gets wonky from time to time, but it's still head and shoulders above anything else and most important, it's a syncing platform not a point to point solution like Plaxo, Spanning Sync and other targeted address book and calendar sync tools.

Adding iPhone syncing to the mix makes the service valuable to Mac owners who also own an iPhone. This is a much larger market than just people that have two Macs and the extensibility means that it's not just Apple that will be adding value to the proposition. Can you imagine a Yojimbo or Delicious Library iPhone client synchronized with your desktop? Yojimbo already syncs with .mac, and I think that the new version of Delicious Library is supposed to be able to do so as well.

Which brings us to Apple's other side project: Safari 3.1 on Windows. Apple is not doing this just for kicks, but is clearly spending time and money on ensuring that they have a stable of experienced Win32 developers in house. iTunes already contains the basic components to manage multi-application syncing to the iPhone... and if this were extended to .mac services for Windows users? All of the sudden .mac might be an appealing service to Windows users with an iPhone. Apple is definitely not averse to generating revenues from the Windows marketplace and finding new ways to use existing assets. I strongly suspect that under the iTunes hood is the equivalent of the old "Yellow-box" NS libraries that permit them to port OS X applications rapidly to Windows. But this is a strategic advantage that they'll keep to themselves and not make public. I would not be surprised to hear that there is a Xcode for Windows in the bowels of One Infinite Loop. The key difference with porting applications is that there has to be a strategic (read revenue) reason to do so. iTunes was an obvious port since it meant keeping the iPod user experience clean and well managed as well as access to the iTunes Music Store. Safari is generating revenue from Google ad clicks made from searches in the built-in search box. Don't expect to see the iLife suite being ported, even on a pay-for scheme since they don't bring in any service revenue (OK - iWeb with .mac and iPhoto for prints, but that's a stretch). But a .mac client, either hidden in iTunes or as a more visible external component could definitely be on the horizon.

Two: What is the current major complaint about the iPhone?  That it's tied to a unique telco by market.  AT&T in the US, Orange in France, O2 in the UK...  Now there are a number of reasons that Apple has gone this route, but one of the biggest ones has to do with the accounting for iPhone revenues.  This is an incredibly important point since it means that when accounted for as a subscription item, Apple can offer "substantial" upgrades to the iPhone's feature set without requiring payment for same (witness the $20 surcharge for the iPod Touch applications). Now what happens to the picture when Apple offers an unlocked, carrier-neutral iPhone tied to a 2 year .mac subscription? They get to keep their current accounting practices and we get to benefit from "free" OS updates. And the carriers?  Well - all of the sudden they have to compete on the merits of their data plans. The hiccup may have more to do with consumer sticker shock than anything else. Phone service is billed monthly so you're bled slowly, while .mac is by annual subscription which feels more expensive, especially if it comes on top of the price of the iPhone.

My question is will they roll this out with the 3G model iPhone? Can they? Nobody knows how the contracts are written with the telcos - is it model specific or not? Will they need to wait for the original exclusivity contracts to run to term or will a new model be outside of the scope of the exclusivity agreements? Apple's CFO, Tim Cook, stated that they're not tied to the current sales model and have no issues with unlocked phones. I suspect that much of this has more to do with the cost of directly servicing and billing several million new .mac accounts vs the convenience of getting a nice big monthly payment by country (and of course scaling up the capacity of the .mac service).

All that said, until other carriers start offering truly competitive all you can eat data packages, you're probably still better off going with the established carriers, since Apple's done the hard work of negotiating that for you. But it will be interesting to see how Apple opens up currently unserved markets...

Note - we're up to 4 unlocked iPhones in my office in France vs 2 bought through Orange. All of the unlocked phones are US imports which at current exchange rates are a steal for anyone in the Euro zone (~270€ vs 399€). They're not all going to China - there's a huge demand for unlocked phones in the markets where the iPhone is legally available. The main sticking point for most of my colleagues is that they don't like Orange or are happy with their current provider.