iPhone OS 3.0 Makes Me Feel Better About Waiting

Image copyright Engadget

Apple took the wraps off its iPhone OS 3.0 this morning, and it was a veritable smorgasbord of features that probably should have been included upon the initial release of the iPhone. Take a look:

• Cut, copy, and paste
• Spotlight search
• Note syncing
• MMS
• Landscape keyboard support in non-Safari apps
• Undo

I mean, seeing that list all together, it almost begins to feel remarkable that Apple made such a great device that was oddly lacking in fundamentals! Can you imagine if the original Mac had shipped without half the items in the Edit menu?

As I joked earlier on Twitter, the best headline for the day would be “Apple whips America into a frenzy by fixing iPhone’s most glaring omissions.” (And our friend Rob Beschizza actually used the thing.) People are unbelievably excited about cut, copy, and paste, for example. I actually went back 1,000 tweets from the time that the feature was announced, and I couldn’t get to the first mention of it on Twitter — at least 1,000 excited yelps about it within the first minute.

For cut, copy, and paste.

Think about that. No other company on earth could make a big deal of announcing a basic feature more than two years late. And that’s what makes Apple so awesome at what they do. They care so much about excellence — not just adequacy, but excellence — that they don’t release anything until it’s ready. They didn’t want to put out cut, copy, and paste until it was the most innovative version possible of same. Amazing.

For myself, I feel great as a late adopter this morning. I’ve said all along that I won’t buy an iPhone until I can get a 32 GB model, and I fully expect it to ship alongside OS 3.0 in late June. It’s taken more patience than I can express, but I’ll get a phone I can live with for at least two years if I continue to hold out. This is why it’s so hard to be passionate about Apple — you need to ignore it for many months or even years to get the perfect product. That’s what it took to get to last year’s MacBooks, and I’m damn sure it will be true for the third-generation iPhone released this summer…

Developers: Feel free to send us your anonymous impressions!