Why is Apple selling itself short?

Recently we went to Chicago for some anthropological research. We decided to travel there by Porter Airlines, a small carrier that boasts in its slogan that it's "Flying. Refined." Leaving from a small island airport in Toronto, they cater to a business class traveler on a smaller budget. Everything about the airline is an attempt to cater to the modern traveler while also hearkening back to a day when flying was a "classier" affair.

One thing that struck us during the entire time with them had nothing to do with flying and everything to do with what was on the ground. They used iMacs exclusively. They had iMacs for their passengers in the departure lounge, but this is fairly standard. What wasn't standard was that iMacs were used to process our check-in and boarding both in Toronto and at Midway in Chicago. Now, we weren't brave enough to crane our necks around to see if they were running Boot Camp or straight up OS X, but the message was clear: running a Mac in a business environment was no longer an amateur move, and in fact they "classed up" or "refined" your operation.

Why hasn't Apple got that message?

Hints and Feints
When Apple announced Snow Leopard one thing they boasted was that it was going to have native Exchange support. For the average, day-to-day user this really didn't mean too much - most people will have configured mail.app to work with their ISP or have moved their email and contact and calendar management to the cloud. What it did indicate was that Apple was serious about making sure their system would appeal to more than just home users, media enthusiasts and graphic designers (all worthy people). Exchange support meant that smaller IT departments had one less reason to stick with the Windows platform. "Sure, let your servers run all the Microsoft software, we'll be fine on the desktop."

At the same time, they increased the power of the iPhone with the 3GS hardware and OS 3.0. They were demo-ing applications like Tom Tom and medical apps that allowed peripheral devices, like a blood pressure band, to interface with the iPhone.

At the time we were impressed and wrote that it seemed like Apple was saying (1) they could integrate in a professional environment and (2) they had a piece of hardware that was compact but also versatile and as powerful as a desktop, and the next step was going to be something a little larger, a little handier, a little more useful.

This was really the first feint from Apple that the fabled tablet was in the works. It made perfect sense. Apple was ready to compete in the small/medium business sphere and had positioned what were considered consumer level products, the iMac and the iPhone, as entry points for those businesses. People would use Snow Leopard to manage their operations, and their iPhones to give them a little more mobility and flexibility without having to spend a lot of time making all their systems play nice together.

As we stood in the line at Porter we kept thinking how nimble they could be with a tablet: They could walk the lines with the device and check in those passengers who weren't checking luggage, for example. That information could be transferred to the next tablet at boarding which would have all the passengers information on hand for verification. On the flight, any incidental charges could be processed by a tablet that the air stewards had that would be able to read the boarding pass. With the rumours of the tablet within the next year, it was getting harder and harder to not imagine such a process.

But it seems that it's going to remain just there, in the realm of imagination.

Media overcoming the message
All the rumours about the tablet seem to be pointing to it being a media platform. It is being discussed as a competitor to the Kindle, as well as a great platform for music and movies. All the pundits are talking about it in those terms, quoting their own sources. Apple has said nothing to confirm or deny anything, but lately the rumour mill has been closer to right than wrong .

If this is the case, Apple will have missed a golden opportunity, and we fear that another such window might not open for a long time.

Windows users are at a breaking point. They have another major, expensive upgrade coming in the next few months. The upgrade path is also complex and baffling for most people. As well, they are not seeing as much return for their investment - they're not getting much new in their day-to-day experience. Conversely, Apple is launching Snow Leopard, one of the cheapest and easiest upgrades for a commercial operating system ever.

At the same time Apple has entered the mainstream in a way that they could only have dreamed about a decade ago. The iPhone, for all of the bellyaching by some people, still has one of the highest satisfaction levels of any piece of hardware. People who use it find so many uses for it that it becomes like a third hand. The fact that it is a phone is almost secondary to all the other uses it has, both from third party apps and default functionality.

This would be the perfect time to converge these two strands and make one device that runs both your home and your business, something that Microsoft and RIM have been trying to do for ages, and which Google is very close to doing. This is a re-aligning moment - the moves from desktop and server based enterprise to mobile and cloud computing.

Instead, it looks like we're just going to see a larger iPod touch. And that's fine. There's a market for it and it will sell, and a lot of that market are the people that Apple has targeted for years. But it seems like a disappointment. They have shown they are capable of so much more, but instead are focusing on recreating the same experience but on a different scale. It's not so much that they've broken a promise but that they've just come up a little short in the expectations department.

A school that our sister went to had a grading system: Practical vs Potential. Apple would get an A+ on practical (they deliver very well and consistantly) but an A- or B+ on potential (they are capable of more but aren't delivering on that potential and sticking to what they're good at, only challenging themslves in increments).

We recognize that Apple doesn't just jump into new areas without thinking it through, and we appreciate and admire them for their restraint. However, we at The Times are wondering how much of Jobs' et als reputation for being cut-throat and visionary is just not the case anymore. Maybe they're still hurting from the Newton, or maybe they're happy with their place in the media computing vertical. Either way, it just feels like that with the rumours about the tablet they're hinting that someone, somewhere wants more but they're just not that into it.

Which is a shame we thought as we handed over our boarding pass to the Porter rep to return home, beacuse even when you're the new kid in a changing industry there's always room to make your experience more refined.