OMG, I CAN HAZ IPHON 4?

(sorry for the title..)

My office is behind the iPhone store on Michigan, so I always know when Apple bestows on the world a new product. Leaving work last night around 5pm, I saw a line already around the block, and iPhone employees handing out umbrellas for protection against the tornado-warning weather.

This morning, the line was zigzaging back an forth so much, I really have no concept of how big it was or where it ends, but clearly, something important has arrived.

Some other articles:

How many American jobs will Steve Jobs destroy?

Or look at the app review process. The problem with how Apple does this is there’s no guarantee that an app you build will ever see the light of day. The problem is, if you can’t be sure to be able to bring your app to market, can you afford to waste a year of your time building a substantial piece of code?

Many developers can’t and most developers shouldn’t. This is why there are so many silly iPhone and iPad apps, and why there are very few exceptional apps of serious substance.

But the issue isn’t even whether or not developers gamble with their time and investment, it’s that Apple keeps changing the rules.

The Pulse application was summarily dropped from the App store (coincidentally on the very same day Steve Jobs demonstrated it to the world) when the New York Times bizarrely complained that an RSS reader was reading its RSS feed.

Hundreds of developers found their applications summarily dumped from the App store this spring when Apple changed it’s mind on whether or not it liked breasts. Thousands of other developers found their incomes interrupted when Apple changed its terms of service to disallow the use of application generators to create iPhone apps.

R.I.P., Macintosh

The future, for Apple, is all about iPhones and iPads, and, more important, the operating system software that powers them—the sexy new iOS 4, which these days seems to be getting most of Steve’s attention.

(Click to take a look at the “insanely great” career of Steve Jobs._

As Steve himself told a developer via e-mail recently:

We are focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on iPhone OS this year. Maybe next year we will focus primarily on the Mac. Just the normal cycle of things. No hidden meaning here.

Little hint: when Steve says there’s “no hidden meaning,” what he means is, “Duh, loser, isn’t it obvious?”