Product Behavior

Joe Nocera writes a column for the New York Times business section in which he comments on various aspects of the world. He recently railed against the iPhone, focusing on its non-replaceable battery. His take on the situation was a great example of how business doesn’t really understand what design is for.

In the piece (which is here if you use TimesSelect), Mr. Nocera points out that the iPhone battery cannot be replaced, and quotes Doblin’s Larry Keely as saying that it’s because designing the product this way allows it to be thinner, and that Apple’s designers “are optimizing the INSIDES of the phone to the OUTSIDE form factor that they have designed.” This is a problem for Mr. Nocera because it means you must send your iPhone back to Apple to change the battery. Mr. Nocera uses this to back his claim that Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive (Apple’s design chief) are “design snobs who care more about form than function.”

Mr. Nocera fails to understand that form *is* function. If the iPhone battery was replaceable, the phone would be thicker, would have a door on the back with associated cracks, gaps, and sliding bits to allow you to open it. In short, it would be less cool. And that’s an integral part of what the iPhone is.

You see, one could certainly make a product that does what the iPhone does, in exactly the same way, and give it a replaceable battery. But nobody does that, because they’re incapable of envisioning it. Apple products are created by people for whom the experience is the most important thing, and if a particular feature (like swappable battery) doesn’t fit the experience, it gets the heave. Features are just features. As the iPod’s competition has found out, anyone can add features, but that doesn’t make a product the right product for the market.

The iPod also has a non-replaceable battery, and there have been several bouts of hue-and-cry (including a lawsuit or two), but for the vast majority of people, it doesn’t matter. I’m sure that will prove the case for the iPhone, too. The experience is better than any other competitor, and that’s more important than any one feature. Joe Nocera will get to use his Treo while his neighbor is waiting a week for his iPhone to come back. But for the other 51 weeks in the year, his neighbor will have a better experience. What a snob.

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