iOS8

The iPhone 6 is DOA and the iPhone 6 Plus is the killer

I don’t even know why Apple bothered with the iPhone 6, because it will go the way of the iPhone 5c: a niche product; a consolation prize; the budget choice for Apple loyalists; something you get begrudgingly and regret later.

One estimate is that the iPhone 5S sold 3x better than the 5c. I expect a similar breakdown between the iPhone 6 and the 6 Plus. OK, so the iPhone 6 is not dead on arrival, but it will be the ugly step-sister to Cinderella.

Except for personal preference over size and price, the iPhone 6 Plus is categorically the superior phone.

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Yahoo Weather enters storm with only design as a defence

There was a great story on re/code about how Apple’s iOS8 has replaced Yahoo’s weather app with one from the Weather Channel.  This is an embarrassing loss for the purple icon.

The real value of Yahoo Weather isn’t in its fancy design; it’s in its data and distribution.  Neither of which belonged to Yahoo.  The data for weather was provided by — you guessed it — the Weather Channel, who unsurprisingly supplied better data for its own app.

Apple provided the bulk of the distribution.  Marissa Mayer wants “daily habits” to be the cornerstone of Yahoo’s strategy, but in this case iPhone users didn’t have a daily habit of using Yahoo Weather; their daily habit is to use whatever weather app Apple provided.  Discovery remains the biggest challenge of the apps business and Yahoo Weather is no exception to it.

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Smartphone navigation might go the way of Facebook

When Facebook first started, the homepage was essentially your profile.  You navigated by viewing a friend’s profile; and then a friend’s friend’s profile and so on.  Facebook was about jumping from one profile to another.

Then Mark Zuckerberg debuted the news feed.  Instead of having to check each person’s profile to see what’s new with that person, your friends’ updates were all pooled into one page.  People then consumed the news feed regularly, and only visited an actual profile when they wanted to go in depth on a person.  This was a fundamental shift in how people used Facebook and it’s hard to imagine going back the old way.

Profiles are static while the news feed is dynamic.

Profiles are “what is” while the news feed is about “what’s changed.”

Profiles are X, the news feed is ΔX.

I hope this distinction makes sense, because I’m about to apply it to mobile phones.

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