Here's what I see...
Around every quarterly report from the major cell phone service providers who are partnered with Apple, we always see the same 2 basic commentaries: 1) great year with lots of sales of iPhone and 2) subsidizing iPhone is very expensive relative to all of the other phones. In short, they love the revenues that iPhone helps deliver but hate how much they have to pay Apple in the subsidy relative to how much other smart phones cost them. Pay attention next time; it's the same story every quarter.
Then there's this growing sense of "where's the beef?" in terms of the classic view of Apple's big innovations reputation. Think about it. How often have we heard that there is very little money for Apple in the iTunes store music sales... that iTunes exists to help sell hardware?
Now, why digital radio? It's already led by some pretty strong players in Pandora & Spotify. There's still completely free* radio over the air. There's also Sirius for the subscription hounds wanting commercial free. Is radio really that important to the masses anymore- especially in devices that you can load with all of your favorite music commercial free? Some might argue about "discovery" but can't we discover new music we like with 30-second previews of any song in the iTunes store? Or from our friends playing something we like? Or from free radio? Or when we hear the tune on television, at the mall, etc?
We also note that the bulk of Apple's business is heavily dependent on iDevices, especially iPhone. Since the bulk of who actually directly pays for the iPhone is not the classic customer (us consumers) but this handful of cell service partners, it is obviously paramount to keep that very big cash cow as happy as possible.
So, what do you do when you hear the cash cow grumbling about the relative expense of iPhone vs. other smart phones they also carry? Being Apple, you don't cut the cost of each phone to be more competitive and kill the Apple margin. So what else can you do? Well, being Apple, you could turn the internal innovation machinery on to focus on how to make those partners more revenues from iPhone.
How can AT&T, Verizon, etc make more revenues? The easy way is to get the masses to burn more data because with the tier limits in place, burning into higher tiers yields more money for them.
What has been the heralded iDevice "big things" from Apple over the last few years: Siri, iMessage, Maps, iCloud, Facetime, etc. Now, here comes iRadio. What do they ALL have in common? A high dependency on internet data burn. Each doesn't work (or work very well) without a live connection to data.
iRadio seems poised to be a monster in terms of data burn. Stream all that music from "the cloud" seems to be a great recipe for getting average data burn per customer up so that we are generally paying up for the next level(s) tiers.
Pair that with the wonders of LTE- which seems to be AT&T, Verizons, etc contribution to helping us chew through more data faster than ever and these kinds of "big innovations" seem ideal for putting much more money in AT&T, Verizon, etc pockets.
I'm a huge music lover. HUGE. But radio seems like it's about 1950-1985. I occasionally turn on Pandora or Spotify but, as much as I love music, neither really gets me going. There's also all that fantastic Sirius music beaming down at me from space, but it's ready availability doesn't motivate me to shell out the monthly fee to get it either. And while I know I'm not the market for this iRadio, is there really a market that are going to gush all over digital streaming radio that has the Apple brand stamped on it?
When I look at it, I see it throwing another bone at the cell service partners much more than bringing some revolutionary resurrection of radio to a hungry market just dying for more radio. I just don't see an Apple Pandora or an Apple Spotify being that great. Is it another Ping or MobileMe? Is it half-baked like Maps or even Siri? Or is it just more of that magical innovation machine focused in the wrong place (how to make revenue-essential cell service partners happier by innovating things that will almost certainly yield more profits for them).
Some people talk about Apple losing their way by not innovating "next big things" as they have in the past. It does feel past due for a whopper-level innovation like an iPod, iPhone or iPad to me too. I see rumors like this iRadio and wonder if Apple hasn't lost it's way at all- it's just focused it's innovation machine on where the bulk of it's bread is buttered.
Apple innovation used to be focused on blowing us consumers away because we were the bulk of the revenue potentials (we paid up for Apple stuff directly). iPhone changed that. They tried to sell iPhone like they sell the rest of their wares but that didn't go that well (the full-price iPhone sold well to the most Apple faithful and then started waning with the masses without the subsidy support). The subsidy business showed Apple a way to still make all it wants to make, still get its brand in millions of consumer's hands and get a few big partners to actually pay for most of the hardware cost in the background. Great... but it also made that handful of subsidy partners much, much more important to Apple than anything like them had been before iPhone subsidies.
Prediction of the next, next big thing after iRadio: iVideo as a streaming video "innovation" in a world with hard (tight) tiers for cellular service usage is a AT&T, Verizon, etc revenue-boosting dream to end all dreams. We can burn 2GB in a single movie stream... even easier at retina-quality resolutions... even faster at LTE speeds. The iTV, Apple Television, etc rumor seems to heavily revolve around this idea of streaming tons of video from iCloud. Wouldn't it be exciting to be one of the tollmasters who completely controls the connection between millions of consumers and iCloud?
Whether right or wrong: I wish the next, next big thing out of Apple would not be something that seems innovated to help AT&T, Verizon, etc make much more money. It would be good to get back to industry disruptive innovations rather than duopoly-fueling ones. AT&T, Verizon, etc are rich enough. How about innovating something for us consumers that doesn't add even more revenues to their coffers?
