Steve Claus

Steve Jobs delivers lots of goodies to his loyal troops every time he stands in front of them. Macworld was no different. But I think he had two lumps of coal in his sleigh this time.

The first is the promise of Maps without GPS. The experience is likely to be like this I wrote about. He should have waited for the 3G iPhone and embedded GPS on it. Cell tower or WiFi based location is close enough - to get lots of people lost and in accidents.

The other is movie rentals on iTunes. If it was Japan or Korea, where broadband is 20X to 30X faster than in the US, no problem. But people will gladly volunteer for root canals than spend hours downloading movies. And cable companies and telcos want the bandwidth but not at the flat rate we want to pay them.

In fairness to Apple, as with many of its products, its ability to innovate is often miles ahead of its ecosystem.