iPhone: Big Bang, Too Much Buck

After 14 months of writing this column, I thought it was about time that I left the confines of the Columbia campus and did some real shoe-leather reporting. And so it was that on a serendipitously planned family vacation and a free press pass, I found myself pounding the pavement of the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco at this year's MacWorld Expo.

For all those of you wondering, yes, it's true, I saw the iPhone, and it is certainly worth the hype that it has been receiving. For the uninitiated, the "Jesus Phone," as many have taken to calling it, is Apple's long-rumored foray into the "smartphone" market. Dominated so far by Palm's Treo and Research in Motion's BlackBerry, the competition is over a growing professional demographic that craves the functionality of a full-blown computer in a handheld, belt-clipped, portable device.

Unveiled with typical panache by Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs, the iPhone, promises to be your portable one-stop shop for phone calls, e-mail, Internet browsing, and entertainment, incorporating a full-blown version of Apple's Safari Internet browser, Apple Mail, a point-and-shoot camera, and a widescreen iPod, all in a thin silver shell with a sleek, touch-screen interface.

From a student's perspective, though, the iPhone suffers from the same potentially fatal flaw as nearly everything else-who the hell has 600 bucks to drop on a phone?

Now I know that those who have jobs lined up at Merrill or Morgan may laugh at the question. Earlier this week at Ferris Booth, one Columbia College senior working for a Wall Street firm told me that he already has two BlackBerries, though he prided himself on never having worn both at the same time. It's also true that if you were to add up the cost of buying all of the components individually, the iPhone is cheaper than the sum of its parts. If you believe a recent survey published in Marie Claire, more than half of respondents said that they believed their BlackBerrys, PDAs, or cell phones have improved their sex lives.

But with every product I saw at the Expo-from a $150 pair of wireless headphones that made the white noise of a crowded 538,000-square-foot room disappear to a guy pimping out MacBook Pros with insanely-detailed etchings-I couldn't figure out who these companies were targeting. Few who want a skull-and-crossbones engraved on their laptops have jobs that pay enough to afford them. If Adobe is going to charge $900 for Creative Suite 2, students are going to find copies on BitTorrent for the software they want.

Even when companies give content away for free, there's no guarantee that students from a generation raised on the original Napster and its followers will follow the legal route when faced with an illegal option that is faster or more flexible. That's a lesson that new-presence-on-campus Ruckus learned the hard way when, after teaming up with 100 schools nationwide, the company found that students were still using illegal services that didn't have the strings attached.

One 2005 survey asked students at American University-which offered the legal Ruckus service more than two years ago-about their use. The numbers showed that most stopped using the service soon after it was introduced.

Certainly, there have been exceptions to thrifty spending. The number of iPods and Apple laptops already on campus proves that there is a student market for high-end electronics, although Jobs placed his goal for iPhones as holding a relatively modest 1 percent of the total cellular market by the end of the first year.

But to find success at these prices, Apple and others who showed their wares at MacWorld are going to have to rely on a different demographic than the one that has driven the success of the iPod and MacBook.