When San Francisco’s planners recently considered a proposal to build tiny apartments in the city, opponents of the plan began calling the spaces “Twitter apartments.” The name was a reference to their micro size — these apartments will be as small as 220 square feet, about the size of a parking space — but it was also a knock on their presumed techie tenants. The micro apartments will rent for $1,300 to $1,500 a month — crazy in most places, but a steal in San Francisco, where regular person-sized studio apartments now go for an average of more than $2,000 a month. The high price means that they’ll mainly be snapped up by young tech workers.

Or, as Sara Shortt, who heads a local tenant’s right’s group, complained to the San Francisco Chronicle: The apartments will be used as “crash pads for people who work 24/7 in Silicon Valley and need a place in the city to sleep and party.” Shortt, like many who opposed the micro units, seemed suspicious of any development plan that accommodated these incoming techies: “It’s more important to build family and affordable housing than accommodate the needs of newcomers who will come here to have a little box in SoMa and then hop on the Google bus.”

In other words: Welcome to San Francisco! Now what the hell are you doing here?

Once again, San Francisco has become a magnet for the smartest, most creative young people in the world. They’re flocking to the city to launch start-ups and to work at the world’s most respected firms. Thanks to these workers and the companies and VCs that will support them, San Francisco’s economy — like that of the rest of the Bay Area — has been on a tear. Job growth is up, the real estate market is bustling, and lots of new businesses are starting up. The success is not limited to the tech industry — according to a new study, non-tech positions, including those in retail and construction, now make up three-quarters of the city’s new jobs.

All this would sound like great news to any other city in the country. But San Francisco can’t deal with its good fortune. Every positive turn, here, is met with fresh angst: People worry about that renewed success will ruin the environment, exacerbate class divisions, push out old-timers, and make it harder for everyone to find parking. Mostly, they worry that San Francisco will change, that newcomers will alter the quaint, strange sensibilities that have long defined the city.

David Talbot, the founder of Salon.com, crystallized these worries in a much-talked-about San Francisco Magazine essay in October: “The unique urban features that have made San Francisco so appealing to a new generation of digital workers — its artistic ferment, its social diversity, its trailblazing progressive consciousness — are deteriorating, driven out of the city by the tech boom itself, and the rising real estate prices that go with it,” he wrote.

He added: “Many San Franciscans don’t feel as if they’re benefiting from the boom in any way. While 23-year-olds are becoming instant millionaires and the rest of the digital technocracy seek out gourmet restaurants and artisanal bars, a good portion of the city watches from the sidelines, feeling left out and irrelevant. Dot-com decadence is once again creeping into the city of St. Francis, and the tensions between those who own a piece of its future and those who don’t are growing by the day.”

To which I say, respectfully (Talbot is my former boss): Get over yourself, San Francisco!

Don’t look good fortune in the mouth. Yes, growth will bring some problems. But they’re not nearly as bad as the problems you’ll find in decline (ask Detroit). Instead of complaining or blocking growth, San Francisco’s old-guard would do better to propose ways to ease the city’s transition into its digital future. This doesn’t mean opposing newcomers. It means recognizing a new reality, that San Francisco needs to become much larger and more accommodating place than it is. And it means adopting polices that will make that reality a pretty good one.

In particular, for San Francisco, adopting that reality means one thing above all: It needs to build more buildings. Build taller buildings, sites that house many more people and businesses than they do now. If it accepts its fate as large metropolis, San Francisco could become the next New York, Hong Kong, or Paris — a city that’s dense with people and businesses, and all of the urban services, cultural values and environmental virtues that density accommodates.

San Francisco’s fundamental problem is that it’s a big city that likes to think of itself as a small one. The city proper is about 46 square miles in area. That’s 40 percent larger than Manhattan. But even with recent growth, there are only 812,000 people in San Francisco, which is half as many as Manhattan. San Francisco’s population density is about 17,000 people per square mile. Manhattan and Paris have more than 60,000 people per square mile.

How do those international capitals manage to house so many more people? Their skylines make it obvious: They’ve built large commercial and residential office buildings, and they’ve built public services — transportation systems, especially — to make density inhabitable. Now look at San Francisco. Other than a cluster of new buildings in the South of Market area, this city is defined by, and reveres, its famous Victorian houses. Those houses are very pretty. They’re also very inefficient. Collectively, they take up a lot of space, but don’t house very many people.

And that’s the basic explanation for San Francisco’s skyrocketing housing prices. It’s also why developers want to build tiny apartments. Technically, there’s more than enough space for bigger apartments — if developers were allowed to do it, they’d buy up small houses and apartments all over the city and replace them with highrises containing bigger, more livable housing units. (And, no, the hills and the earthquakes aren’t a problem — if Tokyo can build skyscrapers on fault zones, so can San Francisco.)

But developers aren’t allowed to do that. If you look at San Francisco’s zoning map, you’ll see height and density restrictions everywhere. There are also citywide building caps — restrictions on the number of new buildings that can be started every year. And finally there are labyrinthine regulatory procedures. Here, for your amusement, is a flowchart put together by the San Francisco Planning Department that outlines the steps a developer needs to go through to obtain a building permit. Despite the department’s use of Comic Sans, this is not meant to be a joke:

Combine all these policies and you get an obvious outcome: While demand keeps rising, San Francisco’s rules severely restrict the supply of housing. As a result, prices keep skyrocketing. This leads to predictable problems for everyone — low-income people are pushed out of the city, while even those with higher incomes have to live in places no bigger than a parking space. It’s also terrible for tech companies: In order to attract workers to this high-cost metropolis, firms like Twitter have pay out ever-higher wages. This leads to a cycle of real estate inflation — more moneyed tech workers chasing fewer apartments pushes up rents, which in turn pushes up wages, and on and on.

So, again, the answer here is obvious: Build more houses, lots and lots more, and you’ll finally start seeing rents go down. But that’s not in San Francisco’s long-term plans. Instead, Plan Bay Area, a proposal that outlines the city’s growth, calls for building 29 percent more housing units by 2040. But the same plan projects the area’s population growing by 30 percent. That means stasis — over time, we’ll continue to see the same lack of housing that we see today.

Opponents of increased density cite a couple reasons for their wish to keep San Francisco small. The first argument is that the city simply can’t handle all those people — that its resources and environment will be strained by overpopulation. The second is that density will ruin the character of the place. San Francisco’s small residential neighborhoods, each with its distinct character, is what makes it so special, they argue. Being small keeps the city strange and quirky. Alter its terrain to accommodate larger, taller complexes and you’ll turn San Francisco into a cookie-cutter metropolis — conformist, anodyne, uninteresting.

But all that’s nonsense. For one thing, urban planners have well proven that dense cities are the greenest places on the planet. People in packed cities drive less, they have fewer children, and they consume less energy to heat and cool themselves, because they live in large buildings that are inherently more energy efficient than small ones. (The author David Owen has written a fascinating book about this called “Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are theKeys to Sustainability.” For more on the virtues of dense cities and tall buildings, see Edward Glaser’s “Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier.”)

The idea that culture will flee when San Francisco grows is also absurd. It’s not as if Paris and New York and Tokyo are cultural backwaters; instead, because of their size, they’re home to some of the world’s most creative people. Growth allows for more opportunities to develop San Francisco’s character, not fewer. An influx of techies will mean more patrons for the arts, a larger tax base to fund places like parks and community centers, and lots of rich people to help pay for and push for vital city services (like, say, for instance, Marc Benioff Children’s Hospital or sf.city, a group of tech founders calling for better city infrastructure.)

Considering these possibilities, San Franciscans should be embarrassed about the fight over tiny apartments. The move to build small dwellings suggests a limited vision for the future. San Francisco could become a great big place for everyone, techies and non, if only it stopped picturing itself as small.

Look up to the sky — and build there.

[Main Image Credit: Alaskan Dude on Flickr]

Farhad Manjoo

Farhad Manjoo graduated from Cornell University in 2000. In 2008, he was hired as a staff writer for Slate magazine, covering technology, journalism and politics. Farhad is a paid contributor to PandoDaily.

The presidential election doesn’t come up often in Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley doesn’t come up often in the election.

Throughout this campaign year, I haven’t had a single conversation with anyone in these parts about the presidential race—not a friendly chat about the horserace, not a serious conversation about the issues. Meanwhile, to the extent that the candidates think of the tech industry, it’s as marketing—Obama’s doing great things with Twitter!—and as an ATM: Both candidates have raised hundreds of millions online, and they both make frequent visits to the Valley to hoover up this industry’s cash hordes. It’s no surprise that the educated blue-coasters who make up the tech business have given more of their money to Obama than to Romney, but other than the money and some now-faded bumper stickers, you don’t hear much passion from techies for either candidate.

This is all in keeping with the tech industry’s psychic distance from Washington. Part of the story is technologists’ well-known libertarian bent (see Paul Carr for more on this). But the larger problem is that politics, compared to tech, is just so messy. To folks in the Valley, the political class represents an alien world—a place of irrationality and unpredictability, where science is mocked and anecdotes are considered just as important as data.

Most importantly, Washington seems to be a place where talking is more valuable than doing. For entrepreneurs, especially those whose expertise is software, the most thrilling thing in the world is thinking up an idea and then getting started. That’s not the story in Washington; in politics, doing comes last. See how Steve Jobs became disillusioned with Obama: Whenever Jobs relayed an idea for reform (for instance, that teachers should be hired and fired according to merit, and that schools stay open for 11 months of the year), the President inevitably followed up with a list of reasons that the fix couldn’t be made.

But it’s time the tech industry got over itself. Yes, politics is slow, it’s often distasteful, and most of the time it’s pretty uninspiring and pessimistic. But the tech business is hurting only itself by disarming from politics.

I don’t mean that tech companies should get better lobbying shops—all the big guys are pretty deeply invested in lobbying for their own narrow causes. I’m talking about the larger issues in this election: taxes, healthcare, education, immigration, energy and the role of the federal government in the economy, especially in the innovation economy that’s important to the tech industry. The presidential candidates harbor profound disagreements on these issues, and depending on what happens Tuesday, we could see massive changes in these policies that will affect how the tech industry operates. Yet other than hosting or attending fundraisers—Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg, Eric Schmidt and Bill Gates for Obama; Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, and Scott McNealy for Romney—tech leaders aren’t active in these elections. And their silence isn’t doing them any favors.

Let me be more specific (and more controversial): Mitt Romney’s policies are terrible for the tech industry. The factors that the industry depends on—a skilled workforce, federal support for basic research, easier immigration for foreign tech workers and entrepreneurs, and healthcare policy that makes it easier for individuals (that is, people who start companies) to get coverage—would be imperiled by a Romney win. And while Obama’s reelection won’t guarantee that all of these areas improve—politics, again, is messy—there’s a far better chance we’ll get better policies for tech under Obama than under Romney. Tech leaders ought to be making that case to the rest of the country, especially to people who argue that Romney is “better” for business.

Let’s look at the issues. Romney’s budget proposal has a couple core components: He wants to cap federal spending at 20 percent of GDP, and he wants to repeal Obama’s health law. These policies will be awful for the tech industry. Setting a cap on federal spending would necessitate huge cuts in education, both to public schools and research universities across the country. Starving education would set up a long-term catastrophe for tech; the industry’s fortunes are in many ways a function of the skills of our workforce, and if schools and universities are driven to austerity, the skills of the workforce will necessarily suffer.

Repealing or underfunding Obamacare is also a bad plan for tech. The start-up economy thrives on flexibility—on the ease with which people can quit their jobs and uproot their lives to pursue a low-probability chance of hitting it big. Obamacare supports this flexibility in several ways. It allows young people to remain on the parent’s health insurance plan until they’re 26: In other words, people who are the same age Mark Zuckerberg was when he was starting Facebook can now get health coverage even if they’re starting up something new rather than settling for a job because they like the idea of going to the doctor when they’re ill.

Obamacare also prevents insurance companies from denying coverage to individuals with preexisting conditions. This is also pivotal for start-ups. Say you’re a young woman who works at Google, but you’ve got a great idea for your own company. If you’ve got a husband and kids who depend on your health insurance, you might have been wary of leaving your job, and your insurance, to purse that start-up. Now that you can buy your own coverage—now that insurance companies can’t deny you coverage because you once had acne—you might be more willing to launch your dream.

Finally, Romney’s healthcare plan will also significantly reduce spending on biomedical research, and there’s a good chance his cap on discretionary spending will translate into reduced spending on all other kinds of research, including for the National Academies. Over the long run, these cuts would devastate the tech business: Most of the basic technologies that make today’s devices great—from the microprocessor to advanced batteries to the Internet itself—were first developed at university labs with support from federal and military grants. If that spending dries up, so will American tech innovation.

On immigration, both candidates claim to support “comprehensive reform,” which includes loosening access to H1-B visas, a policy that all major tech firms relish. But only the Democratic platform supports the idea of a start-up visa—which grants residency to entrepreneurs who start firms in the United States—and it’s Democrats who’ve been championing a comprehensive plan for immigration reform in Congress, while Republicans have mainly been pushing to shut the borders. If you remember that some of the Valley’s most storied firms were founded by immigrants, the Republican party’s bluster against immigration should worry you.

I’ve no doubt that tech leaders understand how these policy differences will affect their companies. There’s a good reason, after all, that Obama’s supporters in tech are of higher caliber than Romney’s (and that’s despite the fact that Romney’s tax policies will be much better for rich techies than Obama’s). But I’m surprised how muted they’ve been in making their case. Romney isn’t a bad guy, but his policies would be disastrous for the industry, and his party has become the standard bearer of the anti-science, anti-rational wing of America. They stand in opposition to everything that makes Silicon Valley great. Why aren’t people in the tech industry more worried?

Farhad Manjoo

Farhad Manjoo graduated from Cornell University in 2000. In 2008, he was hired as a staff writer for Slate magazine, covering technology, journalism and politics. Farhad is a paid contributor to PandoDaily.

Eric Schmidt sure has become fun since he stopped running Google. I’m not sure what the guy does, exactly, but he looks like he’s really having a good time doing it. (Look, there he is dancing Gangnam Style!) Schmidt has always been an interesting interview—he’s more thoughtful than ruthless, which was one of his shortcomings as Google’s CEO—but as chairman, he’s been able to really put his rational, expansive side on display. Schmidt’s role gives him enough inside access to understand what’s really going on at Google, yet—unlike a boss—he’s far enough removed from day-to-day operations to be able to see things from beyond just Google’s point of view. Schmidt is also not one for bluster; he won’t try to convince you that you Google’s ahead in some area of the tech business when, clearly, it isn’t. (See Google+).

All of which is to say: When Eric Schmidt makes grand pronouncements about the industry, he’s probably not just blowing smoke. You should listen to him. And when he repeated his claim, during an interview this week with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, that the tech world is ruled by just four giants—Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook—Schmidt was right on.

These four make the dominant platforms that will rule tomorrow’s digital world: Apple has iOS, Amazon has ecommerce and AWS, Google has Android and the Web, and Facebook possesses your identity and social graph. Together, they exert enormous power over every sphere of the economy—though of course they don’t work together. What’s fascinating is that they’re all working at odds with one another: Whatever industry you’re in, your next few years will be shaped by how these four battle for dominance over the world’s economy. Whatever you do, wherever you go, Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook will be in your life. (I should note I’m in the tank for Schmidt’s Gang-of-Four view of the world: I’m writing a book about their coming tech dominance.)

“You left out Microsoft,” Swisher pointed out during the interview. “Deliberate,” Schmidt said. Schmidt has said that while he believes Microsoft is a well-run company, it hasn’t yet shown that it’s going to create the future.

Schmidt is right. Early this year I pronounced 2012 to be “the year of Microsoft.” With Windows 8 and the fantastic Windows Phone, I argued that we could be witnessing the moment that Microsoft finally “shakes its malaise and takes its place alongside Apple, Google, and Amazon as a dominant innovator of the mobile age.” I still think that’s possible. Everything we’ve seen from Microsoft recently—the unveiling of the Surface tablet; the purchase of Skype; a big social-friendly redesign of Bing and the launch of Outlook.com; a sensible pricing plan for Windows upgrades—suggests that Steve Ballmer understands what he needs to do to join the four leaders.

But he’s not there yet. And he’s not guaranteed to get there, for one simple reason: We don’t have any clue, yet, what most customers—i.e., regular non-tech people—think of Microsoft’s mobile efforts. When Windows 8 hits the streets later this month, will people consider it a fresh, exciting take on an aging interface? Or will they recoil at the jarring difference between the new and the old, at how radically they’ve got to change how they work to accommodate the new software? And will the new Windows Phone finally push people to take a look at Microsoft’s left-behind mobile OS? Or will they be too thrilled by the iPhone to even care? At the moment, these huge, company-defining questions loom over Microsoft’s future.

But soon we’ll have answers. Indeed, it’s not an exaggeration to call the next month the most important time in Microsoft’s history since the launch of Windows 95. There’s a lot to love about the new Windows, and if people give themselves time to get used to it, they may well come to regard the software as a sign of Microsoft’s rebirth.

Microsoft is betting that users will want a single interface that does everything—an OS that feels the same across your phone, your tablet and your desktop. It’s a huge gamble, but if Microsoft gets it right, the strategy could play off: The firm would be able to leverage its PC monopoly to push developers into building apps for tablets and phones—potentially bringing Microsoft’s app store to parity with Apple’s. Meanwhile, by building the Surface, it is forcing other PC manufacturers to create world-class hardware for Windows 8—if Dell and HP and Lenovo don’t step up, they’ll be outshined by Microsoft itself. In that way, the Surface steals a page from Google’s playbook: In the same way that the search giant built Chrome as a way to spur competitors to improve their browsers (because, in the end, better browsers are better for Google), Microsoft is hoping that Surface-sparked competition will create a new class of not-awful non-iPad tablets.

So if all that happens—and if, as a bonus, all the joy for Windows 8 bleeds over into renewed enthusiasm for Windows Phone—then Microsoft will be back. The gang will expand to five.

But there’s another story that could unfold in the next few weeks. A dire one. If Windows 8 doesn’t fly, if people react to it with fury rather than joy, the fall of 2012 could mark the beginning of the end of Microsoft. This is not implausible. The new Windows is just different enough from the old to cause massive anxiety for hundreds of millions of people around the world.

If that anxiety becomes the Windows 8 launch narrative—if initial reviews dwell on the big adjustments that dyed-in-the-wool Windows users will have to make to accommodate the upgrade, and if office workers start complaining that they can’t figure out how to do anything they used to do in this blasted new thing—that would quickly seal the fate of Windows 8.

And if Windows 8 fails, it would be calamitous for Microsoft. Remember that Microsoft doesn’t have a Plan B. This isn’t like New Coke, where, if people hate the new thing, Microsoft could easily fix the software by replacing it with Windows Classic. That’s because people won’t tolerate Windows Classic much longer either; the Windows Classic business is dying—that was the entire point for coming up with something new. For Microsoft, Windows 8 is the only game in town. It will all come down to this.

And, honestly, I have no idea what will happen. I think desktop Windows users will be initially spooked by 8, but I can’t say how long their stress will last. If it doesn’t last long, Microsoft has a chance. Otherwise, the decades’-old Intel-Windows empire will begin to crumble. The stakes couldn’t be bigger. By the end of the year, we’ll know whether we’ve just witnessed a new tech beginning—or the beginning of the end.

Farhad Manjoo

Farhad Manjoo graduated from Cornell University in 2000. In 2008, he was hired as a staff writer for Slate magazine, covering technology, journalism and politics. Farhad is a paid contributor to PandoDaily.

In a single succinct, sincere, and brilliant note, Tim Cook has put Apple’s Maps fiasco to bed. It was a beautiful thing. He offered a clear assessment of the problem (“we fell short”), and took full responsibility for it. He put forward a heartfelt apology (“we are extremely sorry”), and gave customers an easy, pretty-good short-term solution to the problem—they could get one of many rival maps apps from the App Store. Finally, not only did he explain how Apple will handle the situation—Maps would improve as more people use it—but he staked Apple’s brand on the promise that it would get better: “We know that you expect [the best] from us, and we will keep working non-stop until Maps lives up to the same incredibly high standard.”

There was no better way for Apple to have handled this royal screw-up. I was not expecting it. I’d grown used to another, more aloof Apple, the sort of company that apologizes as a last resort, and even then makes you feel bad for it. In other words, I’d grown used to Steve Jobs’ Apple. This note illustrates that Tim Cook’s Apple is a more clear-eyed, pragmatic, and—not that it’s important, but it’s not nothing—a nicer place.

As has been amply documented, Apple was in a long-term pickle with maps. It signed on with Google without really thinking about the consequences. Apple, according to the New York Times, wasn’t even planning to build a maps app until a few weeks before the iPhone’s unveiling in 2007. Ever since, it has had to figure out a way to extricate itself from an increasingly troubled relationship with a firm that had grown into its fiercest rival.

It could have—and should have—pulled off this launch better. The best thing would have been a soft launch: Apple could have offered its own maps as an App Store download, while keeping Google’s Maps the default service for another year. In that time, millions of people would have tried out the new app and reported its flaws. Then, in iOS 7, after Apple ironed out the issues, it could have made the new app to prime time.

That would have been ideal. But what actually happened is the second-best outcome. In the short run, the terrible Maps app is going to hurt Apple’s brand, deepening the perception that it just can’t build decent Internet services. But I have a hard time believing it will affect what’s most important to Apple—iPhone sales. Perhaps there are some people in the world who will delay or decide against buying the iPhone 5 because of Maps. But demand for the iPhone is still far greater than supply, and it seems likely to continue that way for several weeks (by which time we may have a Google Maps app). The important question is whether there are enough people who will put off buying the iPhone to materially affect demand—to bring demand back down below the number of iPhones Apple can make.

That’s hard to believe. Objectively, Antennagate was a far bigger problem. Even Jobs admitted that the flaw increased the iPhone’s dropped calls, and of course you couldn’t fix the issue in software. Plus, Apple handled it terribly. The message of Jobs’ press conference was, Hey, we’re no worse than everyone else! But if you don’t believe me, fine, take this free case. And yet there’s no evidence that Antennagate affected sales of the iPhone 4 nor the long-term perception of the iPhone; Apple sold as many as it could make, and it kept doing so.

Given that history, it’s hard to see how this far less troubling problem, one that will ultimately be resolved, can dampen sales. That’s especially true after Cook’s apology. His note is going to clear the media firestorm. Then, as more users find acceptable alternatives to Apple’s broken maps, folks will see that it’s far from a crippling problem, and demand for the iPhone 5 will get back to where it was.

Indeed, for all the attention that Maps got this week, the biggest real problem for the iPhone 5 might be low supply. Apple’s Web store is still reporting three- to four-week shipping delays. Every afternoon this week, I called several Apple retail stores in Northern California to ask if they had any iPhones on hand. None did. At the moment, then, Apple can’t make enough iPhones. That’s not as big a headache as the reverse situation, but it’s not that much better: Low supply and low demand both lead to the same place, low sales. As I pointed out a few weeks ago, to continue with past trends, Apple will need to sell 50 million iPhones over holidays this year. If it can make that many, it can sell that many. But at this point it’s an open question whether it can make that many.

So Mapgate isn’t devastating to Apple. But that’s not the only fall-out here:

Google screwed up, too. News accounts this week suggested that Google was caught off-guard by Apple’s decision to kick it off the iPhone, and that the search giant will take a few more weeks, if not months, to get its iOS maps app ready. When I wondered on Twitter why Google would drag its feet, some people argued that the move was purposeful. Not only did Google want to see Apple squirm, but it may see Apple’s inferior Maps as a selling point for Android.

I really hope that’s not what Google is thinking. If it had its own iOS Maps app ready for launch, it could have become the default alternative mapping service for millions of iPhone users—which is much more important for Google’s long-term future than selling a few more Android devices. Remember, Google is a Web company, a firm that makes money through ad-supported, high-volume online services: Its mission and future success depends on its software being available on every computing platform, especially on the major mobile platforms.

The iPhone, not Android, is Google’s most important mobile platform. The company has admitted that it makes more in ads on the iPhone than it does on Android devices. When Asymco’s Horace Dediu tried to estimate the difference, he came up with a vast gulf—Google makes about $6 annually on each iPhone, compared to less than $2 for each Android, Dediu says.

Apple’s determination to remove Google services from the iPhone—while at the same time cozying up to Google’s social-networking rivals—is a clear threat to Google’s long-term mobile ad business. But Apple’s Maps mistake was a chance to prove to iPhone users why they should trust Google with Web services. If its app was ready, Google could have earned a permanent spot on every new iPhone sold this year. Google blew that chance. Imagine how many iPhone users are now downloading…Bing!

This is ultimately a win for users. The best thing about Tim Cook’s note is the part where he lists alternative maps apps for the iPhone. Sure, he had no choice, but this may be an unprecedented thing for Apple: Can you recall the company ever telling people that something it made isn’t as good as something made by others?

As Hamish McKenzie points out, Apple’s push into mapping will drive further innovation in the entire industry. Google keeps improving its mapping, and when it does release an iOS app, Apple will be forced to approve it. But now that iPhone users know they have a choice in where to get mapping, even Google won’t be assured success. Now we can decide between Apple, Bing, Google, Mapquest, and a host of start-ups. All the competition will fuel further investment in maps—in the same way that all browsers got better after Google began building Chrome, all mapping will get better now that Apple has decided to take on cartography.

And if iPhone users see that there are other map apps in the App Store, what other “core” apps will they try? Chrome instead of Safari? Kindle instead of iBooks? We’ll see. For now, what matters is that Apple has affirmed something that is in the best interest of users: Choice.

Farhad Manjoo

Farhad Manjoo graduated from Cornell University in 2000. In 2008, he was hired as a staff writer for Slate magazine, covering technology, journalism and politics. Farhad is a paid contributor to PandoDaily.

Anyone who cares about fostering a dynamic, competitive tech industry should be rooting for Nokia. Even if you’re not as gaga for Windows Phone as I am—I think it’s the best-designed mobile OS on the market—you’ve got to concede that the Finnish phonemaker has the capacity to be a genuine force for innovation in phone and tablet hardware.

Indeed, Nokia may be the only company capable of playing at Apple’s level. Who else is there? Google may one day do wonders with Motorola, but so far all we’ve seen is more bizarre product names. (The Motorola Droid RAZR Maxx HD: The extra X is for Xwasted opportunity.)

Samsung, meanwhile, is only as innovative as the spec sheet allows—its m.o. is to stuff enough top-end components into generic-looking hardware to win the numbers war, but otherwise its devices are uninspired. Don’t bother writing in with your fulsome praise for Samsung phones; I think the Galaxy SIII is just as good as any phone on the market. But I’m looking for mobile makers that aim for the stars, giving us brilliant innovations—like the Retina display—before others in their class. Samsung isn’t the kind of company that does that sort of thing. Apple is one such firm. Nokia could be another.

Well, it has to be. A couple months ago I praised CEO Stephen Elop for making a big, bold bet on Windows, but I warned that Nokia looked to be “entering its death spiral” anyway. Its only chance at survival was to keep wowing us, to keep making devices that get people to take a second look at a brand few of us think about anymore. Now, the plain truth is that Nokia could do everything right and still lose. So there’s absolutely no room for error, no chance to misfire. It’s got to hit it out of the park every single time.

And Nokia is not doing that. It’s not even close. This week we saw a company snatch defeat from the jaws of getting on the field. (Forgive me, I don’t know sports.) Nokia unveiled a phone that should have been the toast of the industry. Not only is the Lumia 920 quite handsome—especially if you’re a neon yellow fetishist—but it packs legitimately interesting features: Its camera does seem to take significantly better low-light pictures than competing phones, as The Verge documented. Then there’s wireless charging, a feature that Nokia isn’t the first to offer, but one that could now be ready for prime time.

If Nokia had managed the launch well, the Lumia 920 could have been a phone that worried Samsung, piqued Apple, and inspired hordes of customers around the world to at least take a look before signing up for the new iPhone. But none of that happened, because Nokia made a hash of the whole affair.

I’m not just referring to its marketing department’s mind-bogglingly stupid decision to fake a video documenting the Lumia’s image-stabilization system. The revelation—again, documented by The Verge—that Nokia was pulling one over its customers was only the most conspicuous error in what seems to have been a disaster from the start.

That’s because, if you look into why the marketing department had to fake its video, what becomes clear is that the video-stabilizing technique that Nokia talked up on stage doesn’t actually exist. After its fakery was revealed, Nokia offered The Verge a chance to test out the 920’s camera against rivals. But the company only showed off low-light shots, prohibiting any testing of the touted image stabilization for video. There’s only one thing to conclude from that: Nokia may have gotten the image-stabilization for video working in its testing, and it may well be ready when the phone launches, but it’s not working well enough yet. And if it’s not working well now, it’s not working.

That gets to the larger problem: The entire phone isn’t ready. On stage, Nokia had nothing specific to say about when the Lumia would go on sale. A day later, perhaps after noticing that providing a launch date for its make-or-break phone could be somewhat important to the future of its entire business, the firm leaked word that it is planning to launch the 920 in November. That’s about a decade from now in mobile time. In particular, it’s more than a month after the new iPhone will go on sale, a month during which Apple could sell 20 million or more devices around the world.

This is inexcusable. This phone should have launched now; I should be able to assess it side by side with the new iPhone, because the only way the Lumia will win is by turning iPhone users around. I suspect that if Nokia were able to speak candidly about the launch timing, they’d blame Microsoft, which set Windows Phone 8′s launch date for late October. What’s more, as Ars Technica’s Peter Bright points out, that release date is looking shaky because Microsoft has been delaying the release of its SDK for third-party developers to build apps for the phone. That’s a big deal because programming for Windows Phone 8 is going to be different from doing so on 7, and developers need time to prepare. They’re not going to get it.

So, sure, blame Microsoft. Redmond should have gotten the OS done sooner. It should have had it done in the summer so that manufacturers could have released their devices early in the fall. At the very least, Microsoft could have given Nokia—its primary hardware partner and the only remaining hope for Windows Phone’s success—some kind of dispensation to release phones carrying a not-quite-final version of the OS, allowing for launch alongside the iPhone. In hands-on videos with the Lumia, after all, Windows Phone looks pretty much done, and its “release to manufacturing” date is next week—so it’s not like Microsoft and Nokia couldn’t have done something, given their terrible market positions, to accelerate the launch.

In the end it doesn’t matter which of these firms should shoulder responsibility for the delay. All that matters is that Nokia missed its chance—perhaps its final chance—to make a big impression. Just watch: When the Lumia launches on Nov. 2, it will win glowing reviews. Critics will praise its beauty, its stylish and intuitive interface, its unmatched camera and handy innovations like wireless charging.

And you know what the raves will amount to? Nothing. No one will care, because—once again—the launch will fit into a storyline that has dogged Windows Phone from the beginning: Fantastic stuff, pity it’s so late.

Pity indeed. Two months ago, I was declaring Nokia dead. This week might have been—should have been—a chance for resurrection. Instead it was a royal screw-up, and now Nokia looks even deader than before.

Correction: I edited the post to make clear that the Lumia 920 feature that isn’t working yet is image-stabilization for video; the image-stabilization system is also used for low light shots.

Farhad Manjoo

Farhad Manjoo graduated from Cornell University in 2000. In 2008, he was hired as a staff writer for Slate magazine, covering technology, journalism and politics. Farhad is a paid contributor to PandoDaily.

In the fall of 2008, just a year after it released the iPhone, Apple became the most profitable phone maker in the world. The milestone wasn’t much remarked upon by the press. At the time, Apple was still selling only a tiny number of phones compared to its rivals, and it wasn’t clear that it could ever become a global juggernaut in the phone business.

Still, because rivals couldn’t match Apple’s average sales price and profit margins, they were falling behind. In the fourth quarter of 2008, Nokia, which had long been the phone industry’s profit leader, sold 113 million devices worldwide, about 15 million of them smartphones. It made about $1.2 billion in profit on all those phones. That same quarter, Apple sold just 4 million iPhones. But that single device earned Apple a profit of $1.3 billion.

These numbers—which Asymco’s Horace Dediu has helpfully archived here—provide the backstory to an industry in panic. If you were a phone maker watching the iPhone’s sudden rise in 2008, you had to make a quick decision. A storm was blasting through your business and your survival depended on how you reacted.

One option was to do nothing. A lot of firms opted for this path—Nokia and RIM, for instance, seem to have decided that the iPhone was a blip, a cultish device that would never reach mass appeal, so why bother taking it on?

Another option was to try to leapfrog Apple. You could spend many months, maybe even years, working on devices that aimed not just to match the iPhone’s innovations, but to beat them. This was Palm’s idea. Belatedly, it’s what Microsoft began to do, too.

Then there was a third choice. You could just copy Apple. You could borrow the iPhone’s key ideas, make a half-hearted attempt to dress them up in your own brand, and bake them all into your product line-up.

On Friday, a federal jury decided that Samsung was guilty of doing just that. But you don’t need this decision, nor any of the damning internal documents uncovered during the patent case, to realize this. Just look at the devices Samsung released in response to the iPhone—for instance, the 2010 Galaxy S, pictured above. If that’s not copying, the term has no meaning.

It’s tempting, after such a sweeping verdict in Apple’s favor, to conclude that Samsung’s decision to mimic the iPhone was a terrible mistake. The firm will now be on the hook for at least $1 billion in damages, and the judge could triple that amount. Samsung will likely face sales injunctions on many of its products, and will be forced to quickly design around Apple’s patents in its current and upcoming devices, if not to pay a steep licensing fee. Other companies that took inspiration from Apple—including Motorola, HTC and, at the top of the chain, Google—will also be stung by this decision.

But if you study what’s happened in the mobile industry since 2007, a different moral emerges. It goes like this: Copying works.

Of the three paths open to tech companies in the wake of the iPhone—ignore Apple, out-innovate Apple, or copy Apple—Samsung’s decision has fared best. Yes, Samsung’s copying was amateurish and panicky, and now it will have to pay for its indiscretions. But the costs of patent infringement will fall far short of what Samsung gained by aping Apple. Over the last few years, thanks to its brilliant mimicry, Samsung became a global force in the smartphone business. This verdict will do little to roll back that success.

The other two strategies, meanwhile, haven’t panned out. Ignoring Apple ended in disaster for RIM and Nokia. Nobly attempting to beat Apple also didn’t work. Palm spent so much money and time coming up with an answer to the iPhone that, by the time it released the Pre in the summer of 2009, it needed the thing to be a mega-blockbuster. When that didn’t happen, it was curtains for Palm.

Now Microsoft is facing a similar problem with its completely different and really amazing Windows Phone. Why is Redmond having a hard time getting folks to look at its wonderful OS? I suspect it’s because while tech pundits like novelty, most consumers appreciate familiarity. When people around the world close their eyes and picture a “smartphone,” the iPhone is what springs to mind. The iPhone’s interface and design have become embedded in the culture, as familiar, now, as the mouse pointer or the steering wheel. Departing from the iPhone’s template, even for something better, isn’t something many people want to do.

Perhaps that’s why, since 2007, only two handset makers have consistently booked strong, growing profits: Apple and its doppelganger Samsung. Apple’s profits have, of course, been historic—since the release of the iPhone, it has made at least $70 billion from that device alone. But Samsung’s numbers aren’t anything to scoff at. Over the same period, Samsung has collected about $25 billion in handset profits. If the patent trial ends up costing the company $3 billion of that, it would certainly be a hit. But it wouldn’t be catastrophic compared to the money Samsung did make from copying.

And copying Apple didn’t just result in monster profits. It also helped Samsung earn a reputation, among consumers and tech reviewers, as a company that can make compelling devices. Yes, it was clear that many of Samsung’s ideas weren’t original. But customers don’t care about originality—if they did, Windows wouldn’t have won the PC world, and we’d all be using Friendster instead of Facebook.

While Samsung’s ideas weren’t novel, its phones did work well enough for many people, and unlike some of its other competitors, Samsung was able to offer the kinds of technical upgrades—better screens; lighter, thinner devices; better batteries—that customers demanded every year. It also got the basics of phone production and distribution. It produced the best alternatives to the iPhone at the lowest cost, and sold them in more markets, at better prices, than any other rivals. Now, this verdict notwithstanding, Samsung remains better positioned than any other company to make gains on Apple.

Samsung’s decision to copy Apple has also been inarguably good for consumers. If it weren’t for Samsung and Google, Apple would have faced no meaningful competition in smartphones—which would have been great for Apple shareholders but terrible for everyone else, including for Apple’s customers. After all, if it weren’t for fierce competition from Samsung, would Apple have decided, for instance, to make its year-old model available for $100 off every year? Would it have added the costly Retina display without increasing the price of its phone? If it didn’t see competition from Android, would it have turned MobileMe into iCloud? We can’t know for sure, but the fact that Samsung and other Android makers were moving so fast had to have factored into Steve Jobs’ and Tim Cook’s decisions.

Now, to its credit, Samsung is moving away from straight mimicry. Its latest devices don’t look like rip-offs, and the company seems genuinely interested in building legitimately innovative things. With the world’s patent authorities watching, of course, Samsung has no choice but to do so—and in the long run, innovation, rather than Xeroxing, will pay off for the firm.

But you can’t get to the long run without paying attention to the short run. Samsung’s decision to ape Apple wasn’t the most graceful strategy in tech history. But faced with an emergency—a “crisis of design”—copying was the best Samsung could do. And it paid off handsomely.

Farhad Manjoo

Farhad Manjoo graduated from Cornell University in 2000. In 2008, he was hired as a staff writer for Slate magazine, covering technology, journalism and politics. Farhad is a paid contributor to PandoDaily.

Sometimes when life gets too stressful, I try to remind myself that things could be rougher. Sure, I’ve got a raucous toddler and three deadlines in two days, but at least I’m not a coal miner. At least I don’t toil in a factory that renders pink slime. And best of all, at least I’m not running a large American personal computer company that has no conceivable way of combating an existential threat to its business.

I highly recommend this as a stress-reducing technique: However ugly your life gets, just try to put yourself in Michael Dell’s shoes. Imagine what that’s like. Picture yourself at the helm of a company that rakes in $60 billion in annual revenue — and then watch the money evaporating, floating away on a post-PC cloud. You built this company on the theory that computers were a forever-business, that the world would never fall out of love with the PC, and that you would be the guy to supply their fix.

The tragedy is that you were right: The world will never fall out of love with the PC. The PC is still riding high, the PC will be bigger than ever. What blindsided you is how the word “personal computer” would come to be redefined.

The PC is not the standalone, high-maintenance, low-end commodity device that it once was, the device that made you, Michael Dell, the king of computers. The PC is now a dozen different kinds of devices that are connected through one of two or three dominant platforms. The PC includes not just laptops and desktops but also big tablets, small tablets, and surely a coming wave of hybrid devices that function as several of these things at once. All these products favor the skills that Dell, as a commodity bottom-line chaser, has never had a chance to develop: An eye for design, a flair for user interfaces, seamless data management, excellent customer service, magical marketing, and the ability to present a coherent story about how the products can fit into people’s lives.

In a week and a half, Dell will announce its second-quarter earnings results. Expect a bloodbath. In the first quarter, back in May, Dell gave the market a goose egg — analysts had expected Dell’s revenue and earnings to fall from a year ago, but the company slumped way worse than people were guessing it would. Shares tanked, and they haven’t recovered. Analysts aren’t expecting anything stellar this time — Dell said its outlook was weak — but I suspect Dell could deliver another shock, presenting numbers that will begin to confirm a permanent downward trend.

But even if Dell slightly beats the whisper number, its bigger problems will remain: Dell is running out of options. In the commodity business, it’s getting eaten by better, more efficient Asian manufacturers, especially Lenovo and Acer. Hewlett-Packard and IBM, which used to compete with Dell for PC scraps, long ago pushed themselves into providing consulting and enterprise services, far more lucrative businesses than Dell’s PC game. Dell is trying to go high-end, too, but it’s moving far later, and its sales teams are having a hard time competing.

But the largest looming threat is the tablet — a business Michael Dell says he never anticipated rising as fast as it has. Don’t ding him for that; a lot of computer companies were caught flat-footed by the iPad. But when they finally understood the threat, other tech titans didn’t dither. You can blast HP for bungling the Palm acquisition, but at least it did something to fight the iPad. Google, meanwhile, is completely reworking its original Android plan, getting deep into the hardware business, even at the cost of harming its relationship with device maker. Then you’ve got Microsoft, which, with Windows 8’s new interface and the Surface, is making the boldest change to its fundamental model in years — one that it freely acknowledges could harm its business.

And Dell? What’s Dell’s plan to survive the radical transformation of the PC industry? “We have a roadmap for tablets that we haven’t announced yet,” its chief sales officer said earlier this year. OK then — guess they’re on it?

You can see the consequence of Dell’s dithering in its sales figures. Every quarter, the research firm Canalys puts out a report on what it calls the “client PC” market. The report defines “personal computer” in broad terms — it counts sales of laptops, desktops, netbooks, and tablets. In January, according to that measure, Apple became the leading PC manufacturer in the world, selling 20 million iPads and Macs over the holiday quarter last year. In that report, HP was second, Lenovo was third, and Dell was fourth. In May, Canalys released another report — this time HP was ahead of Apple by a slight margin, but Dell had slipped all the way to fifth. Then, a couple weeks ago, Canalys released its third report for the year. Apple was again back on top — it sold 21 million PCs, significantly ahead of HP’s 13 million. But Dell? It was still struggling in fifth place. Dell sold only 9 million PCs for the quarter.

You might wonder if it’s “fair” to count the iPad as a PC. If you just looked at traditional computers, Dell would still be ahead of Apple — Dell sells more grey boxes than Apple sells silver ones. Isn’t the iPad something else completely? And isn’t Dell’s traditional business still valuable even if it hasn’t come up with an answer to the iPad?

Yeah, and if you only count the times he’s asleep, I’d be faster than Usain Bolt.

Whatever “category” you put it in, the iPad is a personal computer: Yes, people don’t use it for all of the tasks that they’d do on a laptop, but we don’t use laptops for all the things we’d do on a desktop, and we put those two devices in the same category. The same goes for netbooks — nobody thought twice about calling those clunkers “PCs,” even though you couldn’t run Photoshop on your netbook.

All of these devices have their strengths and weaknesses, but if you define a “PC” based on a set of tasks rather than a set of specifications, the iPad has to be included — it allows you to do most of what most people want to do on computers, at a killer size and price that makes up for its deficits (you can’t type very fast on it).

To its credit, Microsoft, which until not long ago was the PC business’s undisputed leader, sees the way the market is shifting. Windows 8 and Surface may be bet-the-company-level gambles, but they’re gambles in the right direction — in the direction of the kind of gadgets that people want to use. Dell isn’t doing anything so bold. Leaks of its Windows 8 tablet reveal nothing spectacular. When it’s finally released, it will elicit howls of delight from no one, anywhere.

And that will be a huge, unfixable problem. By the end of this year, consumers and businesses will have lots of great tablets to choose from: The iPad and probably the iPad Mini, the Nexus 7, and two versions of Microsoft’s Surface.

Against all this competition, who would choose a plain-Jane Dell? I wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. Would anyone?

Farhad Manjoo

Farhad Manjoo graduated from Cornell University in 2000. In 2008, he was hired as a staff writer for Slate magazine, covering technology, journalism and politics. Farhad is a paid contributor to PandoDaily.

Let’s stipulate that only an idiot would panic over Apple’s third-quarter earnings “miss.” The company surpassed its own expectations for the quarter, and though it didn’t hit analysts’ predictions, the reasons it fell short are easy to understand.

As MG Siegler points out, Apple’s numbers are now largely a function of the release schedule of a single product—the iPhone. When Apple puts out a new iPhone, its numbers soar beyond all reason. As the phone gets older, people in the market for new phones reasonably decide to wait to see what Apple has in store for the next one—so Apple sells fewer and fewer iPhones throughout the year.

Analysts apparently did not anticipate how important this wait-it-out sentiment would be to Apple’s bottom line. In the previous quarter, Q2 2012, the company sold 35 million iPhones. Everyone knew Apple would sell fewer iPhones in the third quarter—according to Philip Elmer-DeWitt’s compilation, institutional analysts were expecting sales of around 29 million, while more bullish independent analysts thought we’d see 31 million. But sales were actually much, much lower than that. Apple rang up only 26 million iPhones in the third quarter, or only 74 percent what it sold in Q2. As far as I can tell, that decline represents the largest quarter-to-quarter fall in iPhone units in the product’s history. And the current quarter—Q4 2012—is likely to be even worse; the next iPhone is imminent, so even fewer people are going to decide to go with the iPhone 4S in remaining weeks before the next version.

But again—as Siegler and many others pointed out this week—this is all just a matter of timing. What Apple’s numbers show is that it has high seasonality, thanks to the fact that it now releases the iPhone in the holiday season (it used to release the phone in the summer). As long as Apple keeps hitting blockbuster holiday sales (as it did last year), it enjoys the freedom to grow only a little bit, or even slightly “miss,” during the rest of the year.

So it’s not time to panic. The sky isn’t falling. Apple is doing better than fine.

And yet, while I hate to be alarmist, I do wonder if it’s perhaps time to start thinking about considering to maybe begin preparing for the first unpleasant hint of something close to panic. Maybe the sky isn’t falling for Apple, but might the heavens be descending so imperceptibly that we all might be missing it?

Is that too vague? Here’s what I’m getting at: What Apple’s recent numbers underscore is that the company is high-wire act. Over the last few years, thanks to the iPhone and the iPad, Apple has been growing at a rate almost unprecedented in the history of large corporations. Nobody expects it to maintain that rate forever, and in fact—according to all metrics—Apple’s growth rate is now slowing.

This isn’t so bad in itself. But the challenge for Apple is making sure its growth rate declines gently rather than sharply. And that task becomes very difficult when you consider its dependence on the iPhone. Even to book steady rather than spectacular growth, every year Apple has to hit the iPhone way out of the park—and then beyond the parking lot and down the street and further still.

To put numbers on this, let’s look at iPhone sales over the past few years. In fiscal year 2009, Apple sold 20 million iPhones. In 2010 it sold almost double, 40 million. In 2011, it sold 72 million—80 percent more than the previous year. Fiscal 2012’s numbers aren’t in yet, because the year will end after the current quarter. But if we guess that the drop in iPhone units from Q3 to Q4 will match that from Q2 to Q3, then we can expect Apple to sell around 19 million phones this quarter. If that’s the case, Apple will have sold around 118 million iPhones over fiscal 2012. That will represent about 63 percent more than it sold in 2011.

See that pattern? Apple went from selling 100 percent more iPhones in 2010 to 80 percent more in 2011 to around 60 percent more this year. So let’s say that in 2013, a steadily growing Apple will need to sell about 40 percent more iPhones than it did in 2012.

What does a 40 percent growth in iPhone sales mean in real numbers? It means that after the next iPhone comes out, Apple will need to do something that sounds kind of crazy: Sell more than 51 million iPhones over the holidays.

Can it do that? I think it’s possible. But I also think it will be very hard to do. Understand that Apple has never cracked 40 million iPhones in a single quarter—last holiday season, it hit 37 million, its highest ever. To be sure, there is enormous pent-up demand for the new iPhone. But is there that much demand?

And let’s add even more wrinkles to this analyses: For one thing, it might be reasonable to consider that iPhone sales will get even more front-loaded next year, because there’s so much anticipation for the new phone that most people who want it will buy it more or less immediately. This means that over the course of fiscal 2013, we might see an even steeper quarter-to-quarter drop in iPhone sales than we’re seeing this year. If that’s the case, to maintain a 40 percent overall growth in iPhone sales for 2013, Apple’s holiday sales might need to greatly exceed a 40 percent year-over-year increase—meaning Apple might need to sell far greater than 50 million iPhone units in the quarter just to maintain steady growth.

And then there are macroeconomic forces pushing against Apple: European economies are in the toilet, the U.S. economy seems headed downward, and Apple’s growth in China appears to be slowing markedly. After expanding rapidly in recent years, the overall smartphone market appears to be slowing down, too. In the second quarter last year, global smartphone sales surged 77 percent over the year before, according to the firm Strategy Analytics. But this year they were up just 32 percent.

What’s more, Apple is facing ever-stiffer competition. As I’ve argued in the past, there was once a time when picking any phone other than the iPhone meant dooming yourself to a clearly inferior device. That’s no longer the case. Today, top-of-the-line phones that run Android and Windows are so good—and so competitive on price—that the iPhone no longer makes them look like a joke. I believe that most people will prefer the new iPhone to either of those two, but only fanboys can argue, anymore, than any one of these platforms ranks as head and shoulders above the others. For most ordinary consumers, the three phone platforms’ features will look roughly equal. And it will become increasingly difficult for Apple to stand so far ahead of the crowd.

The final thing to consider is something that seems so unlikely that I’m even wary of bringing it up. But it’s still something to think about: What if the next iPhone isn’t so great? What if it’s just OK—what if, after waiting for a redesign for over two years, people find the new phone to be not their cup of tea? What if they think it’s too similar to the current version—or, perhaps, that it’s too jarringly different? What if they find that it doesn’t have enough new features? Or what if there’s some kind of antenna-gate like flaw in it, a really consequential one this time?

Yes, this probably won’t happen. But remember that people don’t have to hate the new iPhone in order for Apple to have problems; it will be bad enough for Apple if people merely find the phone pretty good. Apple depends on the iPhone so greatly that it needs the world to fall head-over-heels for the thing. To sell 50 million units in three months, Apple will need to create something super-duper-mega wonderful. It’s certainly capable of doing so. But everyone makes mistakes.

Of course, there is one more thing to think about: The iPad. Apple is not a one-trick pony. It’s at least a two-trick pony, except one of its tricks—the iPhone—is a bring-down-the-house showstopper. But the iPad is coming along; each year, quarter after quarter, it becomes a more and more consequential part of Apple’s bottom line. In fact, it’s possible that in the current quarter, iPad sales could eclipse iPhone sales for the first time. (Apple sold 26 million iPhones last quarter and 17 million iPads; if iPad sales edge up because of the back-to-school rush, and if iPhone sales are depressed in anticipation of the next model, those numbers could well flip around this quarter.)

Now, more iPad sales don’t directly make up for the iPhone’s slowing growth, because the iPad is substantially less profitable than the iPhone. (That will be even truer if Apple puts out an iPad mini.) But if iPad sales explode over the next few years, that might not matter. The extra revenue will be enough of a cushion to keep Apple looking good even if the iPhone sometimes isn’t an unprecedented blockbuster. The iPad will pull Apple down from its dangerous high-wire act—and then we’ll all be able to take a breather.

[Flickr image by Martin Taylor.]

Farhad Manjoo

Farhad Manjoo graduated from Cornell University in 2000. In 2008, he was hired as a staff writer for Slate magazine, covering technology, journalism and politics. Farhad is a paid contributor to PandoDaily.

Aereo, the controversial television streaming company backed by Barry Diller, may be the stupidest high-profile tech start-up ever launched.

In my years of covering the tech business, I certainly can’t remember coming across many other ideas that were as ridiculous on so many levels. Webvan squandered $1.2 billion, but at least it was trying to create something useful. Pets.com lacked all business sense, but it did give us that sock puppet. You can’t say anything nearly as kind about Aereo: Even in dot-com years, not many firms ever came close to wasting so much money and so many brain cells trying to solve a problem that so clearly didn’t need solving, in a manner so spectacularly inefficient, ending up building a product that most people don’t need, at a price that sane people shouldn’t pay.

Aereo is such an idiotic idea it almost sounds like Banksy-level performance art, like a prank that a few tech-savvy dudes came up with late one night as a way to illustrate the supreme idiocy of our copyright laws—and, in the process, to get an aging media bigwig to part with his cash.

I’m being harsh. But someone has to be. In the past few months, after Aereo was hit by insane lawsuits from the television industry, it has become something of a cause célèbre for people fighting for more progressive copyright laws. No doubt it was good to see Aereo win its first legal test this week, when a federal judge denied TV companies’ request to have the firm immediately shut down.

But don’t mistake Aereo’s win as a sign of progress in copyright law or as a victory for consumers. If Aereo is successful, it will be only because it found a strange loophole in the legal thicket surrounding how we treat content. But as BuzzFeed’s John Herrman smartly points out, “loopholes aren’t a technology”—just because a company has found a legal loophole does not make it a sound business idea, a sound technical idea, or a good deal for consumers.

Here’s what Aereo does: It streams live and recorded TV over the Internet. The company claims to have devised the world’s smallest television antenna (it’s allegedly as small as a dime), and then squished thousands of such antennas into large data centers in New York. When you use the service, Aereo assigns one of these antennas to you. That antenna will capture networks that are broadcast over the air for free—ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, etc.—and then will stream your show (or record it for later streaming) to your computer or mobile device. In other words, Aereo is a streaming DVR for over-the-air channels. For now, the service is available only in New York, at a cost of $12 per month.

To understand just how ridiculous this plan is, let’s point out, first, that recording and streaming television is not a difficult technical problem to solve. Indeed, it has already been solved—many times, in many ways. Some of those ways include ReplayTV, one of the first commercial DVR systems, which, about a decade ago, offered a feature that would let you send recorded shows over the Internet to other Replay devices. A few years later, Slingbox solved the problem a different way. It hooked into your TV and Internet line, then fed the content it got from the former into the latter—allowing you to watch your shows from afar. Then there are various systems created by cable providers—like Cablevision’s cloud DVR and Time Warner’s TWC TV—that offer streaming as part of your subscription. And that doesn’t even get to the world’s most efficient method of capturing and distributing television over the Internet—the hordes of people who have turned BitTorrent into the planet’s best cable system.

But BitTorrent is legally dubious, you say. Even though it is the most straightforward way to distribute TV online, recording a show one time and then sending that copy to lots of viewers is a violation of copyright law.

So how to get around that limitation?

The obvious answer is to change the law. If Modern Family is broadcast to everyone in the country for free, then why shouldn’t I be able to snatch a copy that you put online? After all, bits are fungible; if I had recorded the show, then “my” copy would be exactly the same as “your” copy. Indeed, since all digital copies are the same, there’s no such thing as my copy and your copy. They’re all equal. It makes no sense whatsoever, then, that I am allowed to capture Modern Family when it flies over the air from ABC, but I’m not allowed to do so when it flies over BitTorrent. It’s a legal inconsistency that’s screaming out for a fix.

But changing the law to make a practice that is ethical into one that’s legal is too difficult. Instead, Aereo devised a circuitous plan that satisfies our strange law. If capturing a TV channel once and streaming it to lots of people is illegal, then why not capture the show independently for each and every viewer? That’s what Aereo does. It perpetuates the legal fiction that digital copies are somehow distinct. Aereo depends on the bizarre idea that two antennas sitting in the same data center recording the same episode of Modern Family will create two different versions of the show, one that’s legal for me and another that’s legal for you.

That’s progress? No, it’s ridiculously inefficient and monstrously unscalable, a fact that you can discern from Aereo’s high price. $12 a month for access to free shows? That’s nuts. Compare Aereo’s price to Netflix, which charges you $8 a month for access to hundreds of thousands of premium shows—that is, stuff that wasn’t originally broadcast free. Compare it to Hulu, which allows you to watch dozens of shows for free (other than having to sit through some ads). Or compare it to the BitTorrent, whose only price tag is frustration (and the small chance of legal liability).

It’s true that Aereo has created a nice interface and some slick marketing, but it’s difficult to think of anyone who’ll see its service as a worth the cost. What about cord cutters? Wouldn’t it be a good way to get live television, a way to supplement Netflix and iTunes and such? Eh, I doubt it—are there that many people who need live streaming over-the-air television? You really need Modern Family on the go? You won’t be satisfied with watching it at home, for free, with a $20 HDTV antenna?

And even if Aereo does take off, it will be easy for all of its competitors to undercut it. If Aereo really becomes a threat, the networks could simply offer their own streaming versions of their shows (if not for free, then for less than what Aereo charges). Some even suggest they could do something more drastic: Stop offering their content over the air. Sure, they’ll lose some of their audience, but most people don’t get TV through antennas.

Whatever happens, it’s hard to see the scenario where Aereo survives. At best, its legal battle will create a new regime in TV, one in which networks lose some of the money that cable providers offer them for “retransmission.” Such fees are a racket; your cable bill keeps creeping up in part because over-the-air networks keep demanding more money to send their purportedly free shows over your line. If Aereo’s legal case ends up slashing those fees, that would be a good outcome.

But as a standalone service, Aereo makes no sense. Indeed, anyone who truly wishes for more common sense in the media business should root for Aereo’s failure, not its victory. Let’s never forget that this is a firm that will charge people a sky-high price for shows that we can all get for free. By perpetuating the idea that free television should be a service that we pay for—that merely rebroadcasting free television should incur some kind of convenience fee for customers—Aereo is cementing an indefensible policy.

Free TV should be free, wherever you get it. By suggesting otherwise, Aereo isn’t merely profoundly stupid; it’s dangerous, too.

Farhad Manjoo

Farhad Manjoo graduated from Cornell University in 2000. In 2008, he was hired as a staff writer for Slate magazine, covering technology, journalism and politics. Farhad is a paid contributor to PandoDaily.

So Google’s heads-up-display glasses are goofy.

So what? A lot of technologies are goofy until they become ubiquitous. Television is a box of moving pictures showing people doing things somewhere else. You’re watching a piece of glass instead of the real world. And those people on the screen? You don’t even know them. And the things they’re saying? They’re just reciting a script. You’re spending four hours a day watching strangers—some of whom may be dead—in your living room, and you’re having a ball.

Success has a way of turning the goofy into the ordinary. When everyone does something, it becomes normal. See also: Talking on the phone. Telling the whole world everything you like on Facebook. Trying to craft a witty review of your neighborhood’s taco truck in fewer than 140 characters. You’re used to it, so the inherent goofiness melts away.

But Google Glass is disruptive and antisocial.

Really? Hold on, let me take this call. OK, one second, just gotta finish sending this text. Now, what were you saying? Oh, right, it’s antisocial. These glasses disrupt the tender interpersonal dynamics we’ve built up over millennia of human cultural evolution. We are all such interested, attentive people, and Google Glass would never fit in with—and perhaps even threatens—our delicate social fabric.

OK, whatever you’ve got to tell yourself to sleep better.

In truth it’s hard to recall a single invention in the history of technology that was doomed for being too antisocial. Often, indeed, closing out the real world in favor of the digital one is the point of successful technologies. In 2001, Apple unveiled the first consumer electronic device of its comeback. It looked like this:

(Flickr photo by Ed Yourdon)

Five years ago, Apple launched a device that would upend how people interact with the Internet. It looked like this:

(Flickr photo by olishaw)

Then in 2010, Apple gave us something else. Here’s how people use it:

(Flickr photo by jencu)

Is this unfair? You might point out, after all, that people use the iPhone and the iPad to deepen their social connections. Texting some of your friends while you’re dining with other friends might look, to an outsider, like a grave social offense. But depending on how you do it, and depending on the context of the dinner and the implicit or explicit social permissions you’ve been granted, this behavior might be totally fine. If you’re 25 and at a birthday dinner with seven bros from college, nobody is going to feel slighted that you pull out your phone to let another bro know where you’re hanging out. If you’re 29 and meeting your girlfriend’s parents for the first time at Chez Panisse, keep it in your pocket.

The point is that apparently antisocial technologies creep into our lives all the time, and we all find a way to fit them in without ruining how society works. Yes, we’ve got to come up with rules for appropriate behavior. Sometimes those rules are technological—phones sold in Japan, for instance, can’t mute their camera’s shutter sound in order to prevent upskirt photos. Sometimes those rules are social; it’s technically possible to use your smartphone to record every single conversation you have, but you don’t do so because everyone would egg you.

Yes, some people are douches and ignore all rules. But we don’t let douches determine the future of technology.

Wait a second, though—haven’t we all had enough?

Yes, we’ve allowed ourselves to be ruled by cellphones and music players and tablets and etc., but look where that’s led us. Look how scattered we all are! Look how many things you’re juggling while you’re just trying to have a nice dinner with your bros!

Do we really want to add one more thing to the mix? Especially something you wear on your face?

I’m glad you asked. Because this gets to the real promise of Google Glass: It is the only device on the horizon that offers any hope of freeing us from the digital invasion.

Yes, you’re going to wear a computer on your face, but it’s not what you think. It’s not going to make you less accessible to the people around you. It’s going to make you pay more attention to the real world. It’s going to cause fewer distractions, and those distractions are going to be less annoying than they are with today’s devices.

Everything that the smartphone took away, the heads-up display will give back.

Why am I so sure? A few weeks ago, I interviewed Thad Starner, a technical lead on the Glass project, for a story in MIT Technology Review. Starner is a wearable computing pioneer. He’s been wearing a heads-up display—various incarnations of his own homebrew system—since the Clinton administration. At his lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Starner has done lots of research into how people react to wearable machines, and how these devices can alter social dynamics. Based on his years living with the device and his research, Starner argues that digital goggles offer one commanding advantage over phones—an improvement so fundamental that they could alter how society interacts with computers.

That advantage is access time.

You’re in a meeting. Your phone just buzzed in your pocket. The message could be important, but it could be trivial. You have no idea. How fast—and how inconspicuously—can you check it?

Go!

If you say you can do it in fewer than 5 seconds, I don’t believe you. You had to fish the phone out of your pocket, look at the screen, focus your eyes, and—depending on your phone and the type of message it was—you may have had to slide to unlock, click an app, or perform some other such nonsense.

The same task on a heads-up-display is just a matter of shifting your gaze. It’s a half-second action, like checking you speedometer while you’re driving: A quick glance to see if there’s an emergency, then shift back to the road.

In fact, Starner says, it’s even better than that, because the image on a heads-up-display can be set to the same focus as what you’re looking at in the real world. So when you look from reality to the HUD and back, your eyes don’t have to refocus. Looking at the screen is even less distracting than your car’s dashboard.

Will people notice when you glance at your in-eye screen? Maybe. They certainly will if you get absorbed in whatever message came in. But if Google Glass allows us to get distracted only by important messages, that would be an advantage over today’s mobile tech. Today, we burrow into our phones even for unimportant messages, because you have to look at your phone to find out whether it merits your attention in the first place—and each one of these status checks pulls you out of the real world.

At a press conference during Google’s I/O conference this week, Sergey Brin mentioned that in the latest prototypes of the device, the team has rigged Glass so that it plays a sound when a message comes in. But it only displays the message when you look up.

To me, this sounds like an improvement. Wouldn’t you rather live in a world where—instead of constantly looking away at panes of touchscreen glass—people would just briefly look up to check on the digital world, and then look back at your face?

Oh, but you have one more objection: It looks weird!

Really? And this doesn’t?

(Flickr photo by me and the sysop)

I don’t know if Google’s version of Glass will become a mainstream technology. But something like it—whether from Microsoft, Apple, Oakley, or someone else—will be big sooner than you think. It has to.

This week I got to try on Sergey Brin’s pair of Glasses. It was only for 20 seconds. But I was instantly hooked. I can’t wait to live in his world. Because the way we’re living now? It’s just not working.

Farhad Manjoo

Farhad Manjoo graduated from Cornell University in 2000. In 2008, he was hired as a staff writer for Slate magazine, covering technology, journalism and politics. Farhad is a paid contributor to PandoDaily.