Content, Context and Compromise

Last weekend, my daughter's choir traveled to San Francisco for two performances. The choir director drafted me last minute to be videographer, which meant traveling 885 kilometers, round trip from San Diego. I wondered how 15 teenagers would occupy themselves in a van for eight hours or so.

My daughter's main entertainment source was an iPod nano, one of the video jobs. The screen may be crisp, but it's still tiny, especially for sharing video. At the UTC Apple Store, I bought her a Belkin RockStar, from which up to five people can listen to audio.

I expected her to share tunes on the trip up. Instead, she and three other teens plugged in their respective earpieces and watched "Legally Blonde" on that tiny 320-by-240 screen. In the context, a long road trip, the iPod nano's screen was good enough to watch the movie. At home, the teens would have watched on the big screen TV; we have a Vizio VU42LF 42-inch 1080p HDTV that I use for product testing. Different context, different expectation about what's good enough.

The Mac lifestyle is increasingly about context: Your stuff where and when you need it. The content adapts to the context. My daughter and friends started watching a second movie, which they never finished (Now how is that possible on an eight-hour drive?). When she synced the nano with her MacBook, iTunes cued the movie to where she had stopped watching while mobile. The same feature applies to Apple TV.

Apple TV supports content up to HDTV, which is good for the person sitting at home in the living room. For the laptop, the same movie could be watched in smaller size and smaller still for the person sitting in a doctor's office with only an iPhone or iPod.

The iPhone 2.0 software and SDK together will create even greater context around content consumption. The rumored 3G phone would go even further, not that dot-coms are waiting around. A surprising number of services—Amazon and my local bank, among many others—offer Web pages formatted for the iPhone.

I equate context with compromise. People make compromises in one situation they wouldn't someplace else. My daughter gladly watched her movie on an iPod nano during a long bus trip. But, at home, she wants the big-screen TV instead. Different context, different willingness to compromise. What Apple does well: Draw good boundaries around content, context and compromise. The iPod nano is perfect example.

The squat, video iPod nano has a tiny screen. Conceptually, it's too small for watching movies in any context. But Apple greatly improved the screen quality by pushing up to 204 dpi from 163 dpi in earlier models and by greatly improving screen brightness and contrast. The result: Video is remarkably sharp, arguably HD-like in a miniature size.

Context and compromise are easily screwed up. Early smartphones put too much emphasis on secondary features, at the expense of telephony. That music player or camera isn't worth much if it quickly kills the smartphone's battery. A phone should be a phone first. Apple did a surprisingly good job balancing content, context and compromise on iPhone. Some ways, there was too much compromise, most of which the iPhone 2.0 software should fix.

I am one of those cranky folks who criticize iPhone's integrated battery. Battery life clearly caused Apple to make feature compromises. Still, the iPhone does what it's supposed to very well. Much of the compromise is about what more people would want the device to do.

Too often, technology companies get caught up in features, which is perhaps some demented byproduct of Moore's Law. But Moore—er, more—isn't necessarily better. Apple often does more with less—but not always well. The ill-fated PowerMac G4 Cube demanded too much feature compromise for the price paid.

In December, my daughter moved to Windows Vista on a new Sony VAIO notebook. Feature for feature, the VAIO smoked the comparably priced MacBook; her older MacBook was purchased the day of launch in May 2006. But my daughter missed the Mac and, for her, how much more she could do with less. So, last month, she switched back to her old MacBook. We'll be selling the VAIO laptop.

Posted by Joe Wilcox on April 28, 2008 9:02 PM