the onda

The Register has a piece on the iPhone's camera aspirations for this summer that makes me wonder why all of the tea leaf readers that prognosticate on what Apple will or won't do seem to be missing one of the best predictions for 2009.

[And yes I realize that in this post I am joining them, but it is for a good cause (a product I really want). And I should preface this by saying that outside of my macro Apple prediction from 2002 (the will become the < 6lbs company), I am almost always wrong]

All of Apple's post Mac growth has come from disrupting products and industries that were delivering tenuous value to their customers. The iMac. Airport wireless home networking. The iPod. The iTunes Music Store. The iPhone.

In some cases, the existing product was just crappy, as was the case with all of the existing MP3 players before the iPod. In others, the industry incumbents were just greedy and stupid as was the case with the iTunes store. But in all cases, it has been advancing technology and the Internet that has given Apple the chance to go in and disrupt.

When I read the rumor that Apple has ordered a 5MP CMOS sensor for an unspecified product, it screamed to me of another coming disruption, this time around the point-and-shoot slice of the digital camera market. Because while the market for digicams is still growing at a healthy clip, the fat belly of point-and-shoot cameras has been relatively stalled since 2007 and shows signs of becoming a segment dominated by price and share wars— in other words, ripe for an Apple-like disruption.

A lot of the industry analysts that cover the emerging mobile space have been saying for a long time that better cellphone cameras would eventually kill the point-and-shoot, but I'm not sure that it is quite that simple. Or that is, before we get to this cellphone-as-camera nirvana, we may still have room for the iPod Touch of cameras (one that is connected but without a data plan). This would allow for all sorts of neat use cases around the concept of the "Social Camera, " some similar to what Eye-Fi allows today, albeit with richer, more mass-market integration.

And best of all, if such a device was based on the iPhone platform, we'd benefit from the same Precambrian-like explosion of apps to explore every corner of the programable camera universe in a much more rich way than any one company could.

I was going to go back and pull some IDC data to back this claim, but have decided instead to cite a personal data point: when I travel, I often take one of my two Canon cameras with me, an SD400 or a G10. But for the last dozen trips or so I've found that I leave the cameras languishing in the bag only to curse myself for settling for the blurry iPhone images and their associated networkable convenience.

They've got the platform, the ID, and the consumer savvy— and unfortunately, I think it would take all three to pull this off successfully. Still, we can hope, right?