Maybe because it's the middle of a long hot summer (at least here in the Mountain West where I live), but it's surprising that I've yet to hear some printer industry optimist praise the huge potential print volumes that will be driven by Apple's (NASDAQ AAPL) iPhone. It's been the tech event of the summer (really the year...anyone remember how the iPhone's original announcement at San Francisco's MacWorld in January was thought to have held back attendance at the competing CES in Vegas?). But so far...silence. I can recall SO MANY instances of some print industry visionary extolling all the pent-up print demand just waiting to be tapped from whatever the latest gadget was starting to take off, from PDA to camera phone.
Worrying that I was missing something, I googled (has that verb now been demoted to lower-case-"g" status?) the phrase in this post's subject line, and pretty much came up dry, except for this Machinist post by Farhad Manjoo titled "Why I Returned my iPhone", including a mixed review with some specific knocks on the hardware but more on the phone's much-maligned service (Cingular/AT&T). His reference to printing was actually about why he doesn't need to do as much anymore, and not so much referring to iPhone specifically but mobile devices generally.
So, it appears we'll still have to wait for the fearless prognostication about iPhones driving printed pages. Maybe it will come soon. Or maybe it has already come and as noted, I've missed it because I've been distracted. There's that matter of the summer doldrums I mentioned up front, but I'm also distracted because I've got a new iPhone, that I'm NOT returning!
Worrying that I was missing something, I googled (has that verb now been demoted to lower-case-"g" status?) the phrase in this post's subject line, and pretty much came up dry, except for this Machinist post by Farhad Manjoo titled "Why I Returned my iPhone", including a mixed review with some specific knocks on the hardware but more on the phone's much-maligned service (Cingular/AT&T). His reference to printing was actually about why he doesn't need to do as much anymore, and not so much referring to iPhone specifically but mobile devices generally.
So, it appears we'll still have to wait for the fearless prognostication about iPhones driving printed pages. Maybe it will come soon. Or maybe it has already come and as noted, I've missed it because I've been distracted. There's that matter of the summer doldrums I mentioned up front, but I'm also distracted because I've got a new iPhone, that I'm NOT returning!
Comments
Example...
I'm rushing to a meeting. The address, directions and names are in an email. I print out the email, jump in the car and go. See the difference with an iPhone in my pocket? No need to print the page.
I started noticing that corporates began to print less business documents. The reason is purely environmental. They could reduce it confidently by 90% without any impact on the business. The monitors are large enough these days to read from the screen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/technology/20print.html?_r=1&oref=slogin