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I’m an iPhone skeptic. While I appreciate good UI design considerably more than the average person, a good UI alone is not enough to make me accept a crippled and overpriced product.

At WWDC today, Steve Jobs has announced that the third party SDK for the iPhone is…make all your applications web applications, and access them from the Safari browser. Which means the user has to pay network bandwidth charges to run the application, and can’t make or receive any calls while it’s running. And of course, no service means your applications all stop working.

So basically, the iPhone is a closed platform, a very pretty but underpowered cellphone. It’s not a smartphone. It lacks even the capabilities of many low-end handsets offered by GSM networks, but it’s going to be sold at a premium price.

Let’s see how it compares with my current 2-year-old phone, for example:

To me, that’s a hell of a tough sell.

You may point out that my tiny phone’s screen isn’t great for browsing the web, but that’s just tradeoff I made because I like a phone that’s truly pocketable. If you prefer a big screen, you can get a Blackberry or Treo for $150 or less. Right now, Cingular has refurb 8525 devices for $99.

I prefer the hybrid solution: pair a small phone with my Nokia N800, and browse the web at triple the resolution of the iPhone. You can get an N800 plus a small Bluetooth phone and you’ve still saved $200 over buying an iPhone.

In addition, most of today’s phones take SD cards for memory expansion. I can dump movies onto a 4GB SD card and stick it in the Nokia. If I need more space, I’ve got a couple of extra 1GB cards floating around. What happens when you use up all the memory in your iPhone? You’re stuck, there’s no expansion option.

If the iPhone was $99, or even $199 at the most, I might be interested. At $599, it ought to sell like the similarly-priced PlayStation 3. It’s the most overpriced Apple product since the Mac Cube. (Which I loved the design of, but didn’t buy because it was overpriced.) It’s the most overhyped since the first Newton.

Oh, I’m sure Apple will sell some. I mean, the Motorola RAZR sucked, but plenty of people had to have it because it looked so cool. But then, the RAZR wasn’t $600…

There’s an article by Donald Norman that has been stirring up controversy online. Whereas last time I thought he was wrong, this time I think he’s right—mostly.

In general, he’s correct that people don’t buy the simple, well-designed stuff. Instead, they buy the stuff that looks like it has the most features; and they tell what that is by looking at how many settings and controls it has.

Not always, though. The best exception that proves the rule is the now almost ubiquitous iPod.

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It wasn’t much fun following Apple during the 90s. The transition from mono to color was painful, as it involved whole new chunks of OS and a different processor. The transition from Motorola 680×0 to PowerPC was also ugly and painful, and a lot of software simply stopped working and was never fixed. Those of us who had 680×0-based Macs quickly found them made forcibly obsolete long before they would normally have become unusable. Then came OS X, and a bunch more machines were forcibly obsoleted, more software broke, and more developers gave up.

Things have been looking pretty good in the Apple world recently, though. The technically adept have been flocking to switch to the Mac, the OS keeps getting faster and better rather than bigger and flakier, and open source and Java software now runs better on OS X than on Windows.

And now, here we go again. Except that this time, it’s going to be much worse. Whereas PowerPC processors were able to emulate 680×0 at acceptable speed, it’s going to be a lot tougher to try and emulate a 3GHz PowerPC G5 on any kind of Intel chip, even the kind shipping next year. Everyone who uses Metrowerks CodeWarrior for their Mac development (i.e. all those big old legacy Carbon applications from the 68K days) is going to be out of luck, as they’ll first have to drag their entire codebase over to Xcode, and then spend weeks (according to Jobs) fixing up the code. So one thing’s for sure–we’ll be waiting years for another release of Quark XPress this time, too.

The core problem is that the x86 is a lot less like the PowerPC than the PowerPC is like the 680×0. For starters, the x86 stores all its numbers half backwards and half forwards–the least significant bytes are stored first, but within a byte the most significant bits are stored first. (That kind of ugliness is fairly typical of Intel designs, which are legendarily unpleasant to program for at low level.) Any program that does bit or byte manipulation is likely to break. The PowerPC also has a lot more registers than the x86, which means that emulation is tough.

Ultimately, though, the fact that the x86 is a hideously ugly design doesn’t matter too much, because hardly anyone touches machine code these days.

Still, will Apple be able to pull off this kind of screwing around with their developer and user communities again? I don’t know. The more interesting question is why they are willing to risk it. With Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft all using PowerPC cores in their next-generation console systems, it really seems like a strange time to switch to Intel CPUs. Plus, if you want an x86 with PC-crushing performance and price, why not choose AMD rather than Intel?

One possible reason is that Apple is strongest in laptops, and IBM has singularly failed to deliver a G5 that can be stuck inside a laptop. AMD isn’t all that in laptops either, which would explain why Intel. But then again, there’s no reason why laptops can’t continue to use the G4, save for the perception that the G4 is “obsolete”, a perception which Apple itself has to take the blame for. Jobs says that there are no plans for improvements to PowerPC for the next few years. I don’t know whether that’s true or not; we’ll see.

Then there’s the intriguing possibility that Apple would like users to be able to run WINE. On the one hand, people could then switch to a Mac and still run their Windows software on it, for free. On the other hand, who would bother to develop Mac software if everyone could run Windows software? One possible answer might be to bring back Yellow Box for x86, which allowed Cocoa (NeXTStep) software to run on Windows. Still, even without WINE, software developers might just say “Hey, you want to run our software on your Mac? Just dual-boot into Windows!” (Jobs has already said that they’re not going to do anything to stop people running Windows on the Mac.)

So WINE on the Mac and Intel CPUs in the Mac could either be a colossal disaster that will kill the platform, or the best thing to ever happen to the Mac. I’m not going to pretend I know which is the case. I do know one thing, though: I’m sure as hell not going to buy a new Mac now, and I had been hoping to upgrade some time during the next year. No, I’m going to sit quiet and see what happens. I’ll want to see all my core applications available in native x86 versions, and an x86 based Mac that blows the doors off the G5, before I spend more money on Apple hardware. And as with the last round of turmoil (the switch to OS X), if it all goes disastrously wrong I’ll just switch to Linux everywhere.

Job losses over the last few weeks:

• Motorola: 4,000 jobs today, for a total of 22,000 since December.
• Lucent: 16,000.
• Verizon: 10,000.
• Nortel: 10,000.
• Compaq: 5,000.
• Intel: 5,000.
• Xerox: 4,000.
• Gateway: 3,000.
• Hewlett-Packard: 1,700.
• Dell: 1,700.
• Amazon: 1,300.
• 3com: 1,200.
• Oracle: 800

It’s also rumored that Sun are planning to ditch 10% of their employees, and Cisco are giving 5-10% of their staff unmatchable targets so they can force them to resign without calling it a layoff.

Conventional wisdom is to say that it’s just a “market correction” as technology stocks fall and overblown high-tech companies downsize. So how about:

• DaimlerChrysler: 26,000.
• Proctor Gamble: 9,600.
• Sara Lee: 7,000.
• Whirlpool: 6,000.
• J.C. Penney: 5,300.
• Compaq: 5,000.
• Xerox: 4,000.
• Schwab: 3,400.
• Time Warner AOL Turner: 2,400.
• Sears: 2,400.
• Electrolux: 2,000.

And don’t forget, the US balance of payments deficit is now the highest it’s been since the 1980s, and expected to get worse.