By now, as everyone
who could have
bought Apple stock in
2005 at $39 knows,
it shot to more than
$665 a share in
August on rumors…
rumors, that the next
new iPhone will be remarkably similar
to the last new iPhone but with a slightly
larger screen and not merely imagined LTE
capability. And while a Piper Jaffray survey
revealed that around half of Americans—
perhaps jaded by the hyped speeds versus
the disappointing true capacity of cellular
networks—could give a hoot about LTE,
around 50 million are expected to buy
the next iPhone. That’s according to an
analyst quoted in Barron’s. Citizen-J blog
site examiner.com comes up with an
unattributed sum of 250 million, which
would yield a windfall of $125 billion at
$500 a pop, which explains a lot about the
stock price.
What the new iPhone 5, and likely
6,7,8,9 and 45 will not have, is an over-the-air
mobile DTV tuner chip, the one sure way
for the service to get off the ground. Mobile
DTV, as evidenced by the Samsung Galaxy
S Lightray, requires a telescoping antenna,
the likes of which will never, ever appear on
an iPhone.
The broadcast camp is instead
introducing receiver dongles for Mac
mobile devices. I know of precisely one
person who uses receiver dongles, and that
individual is a radio frequency engineer. The
whole ethos of the iPhone is conformist
superiority, (or superiorist conformity, take
your pick). Having a chunk of hardware
hanging from it kind of defeats the purpose.
Had the broadcast community possessed
a Steve Jobs mentality when it came to
designing iDevice receivers, they would
have resembled Marc Jacobs fashion cases,
and not the facial equivalent of Wayfarers
with tape around the nose bridge.
Broadcast TV has long lacked the cool
factor propelling wireless providers to
regulatory spectrum dominance. Mobile
DTV was supposed to change that. Sadly, I
don’t see it happening.