Why Aren't I the Center of the Apple Universe?
You can sum up the most frustrating thing about being an Apple customer in three little words: "Connect to iTunes."
As a Google customer, life is easy: one log-in account; access to all your files from any computer; and soon, a smearing of the line between desktop and mobile device, as Android gains the ability to elegantly complement with your desktop browsing experience. As long as you have internet, you have Googleand every bit of data you've stored with them.
Yet when 300,000 people turned on their iPad for the first time last month, their first experience wasn't magical or revolutionary. It was depressingly retro. That little slice of the future was unusable out of the box because it's just as slavishly umbilicated to a desktop computer by the same white cable as the nearly decade-old iPod.
The iPad's embarrassing out-of-box experience is the most pointed and recent manifestation of Apple's deeper problem, one set to grow profoundly more dangerous (as Google made excruciatingly clear last week): Apple is flailing at the internet. But there's a way to fix it, right now.
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MobileMe
MobileMe is Apple's cloud service "for the rest of us." But it's $100 a year. The rub is that everything it doesemail, contacts sync, photos, online storageanother service does just as well, or even better, for free. (Except the valuable Find My iPhone service.) Google syncs contacts and pushes email, using Exchange; Flickr has way more features and a massive community; and the seamlessness of Dropbox's file syncing and storage, across PCs, Macs, iPads and phones, puts iDisk to utter shame.
MobileMe's services, writ large, really aren't perks anymore. They're table stakes. If you buy a Mac or iPad or iPhone, it should have MobileMe. It's not unreasonable to expect built-in contact syncing, online photogalleries to share photos and a smidge of in-the-cloud storagebasic internet servicesas a part of your computer package, especially from the company who's supposed to make computing easier. A computer for most people anymore is simply a way to get on the internet. Why not make that a nicer, more pleasant experience?
We don't expect MobileMe to suddenly become much richer, so freemium is the obvious way to make it happen: Email, contact syncing, and 5GB for photos and storage, free. The truly optional featuresextra storage and Find My iPhonecould run $60-$100 a year. It would make the Mac experience that much more powerful, while nudging Apple toward being more of an internet company. (We're not the only one who's had this idea, it turns out.)
And if MobileMe is free, Apple has a brand new entrenchment, a starting point of something much grander.
iTunes and the iDentity Problem
iTunes has been an internet store from the very beginning; its roots are in the web. So it's not surprising that iTunes has proven to be Apple's most flexible limb, punking and bloating like a demonic anime villain from a simple online music store to music-movies-television-books-apps-and-more bazaar.
Itunes' most valuable asset, though, isn't all of that stuff. It's the iTunes ID, of which there are many tens of millions more than MobileMe accounts. You can see where this going: Unify MobileMe and iTunes ID into a single identity. (Again, it turns out, we weren't the only one with this idea.) Part of the power of Google's services is that a single core identity ties all of them togetherGmail, Reader, Talk, Search, everythingso Apple's redefined, redesigned internet services should be the same. One account for email, music, storage, photos, iWorkeverything, basically.
The other big problem with iTunes (excerpted)...
