Apple's iPhone Turns 10 (www.bgr.in)

An anonymous reader shares a report: "Every once in a while there is a revolutionary product that comes along, that changes everything," that's how Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone 10 years ago. To think about it, the iPhone did not have anything that anyone associated with a smartphone. On top of that, it was expensive, you could not share files over Bluetooth, it did not support 3G, it did not have an expandable storage slot and you needed iTunes for everything. But despite that, and to the horror of its rivals, everyone wanted one. Veteran journalist Steven Levy spoke with Phil Schiller, VP of Worldwide Marketing at Apple on the occasion.

Comments

cult of mac

[ganjadude]

On top of that, it was expensive, you could not share files over Bluetooth, it did not support 3G, it did not have an expandable storage slot and you needed iTunes for everything. But despite that, and to the horror of its rivals, everyone wanted one.

just goes to show the best product doesnt always win - same is true with the ipod, there were better options at the time. the term "cult of mac" became known for a reason

Re: cult of mac

[millertym]

I thought the iPhone was a huge gimik when it came out. I was very dismissive of a phone with no tactile keyboard buttons. ... and then I used one for 10 min at lunch one day. My co-worker had bought it that morning. By the time I handed it back I knew it was a better than any cell/smart phone I had used to date. It's configuration options put blackberry's quagmire to shame. It's smoothness in function and even typing on the glass surface was astounding.

Re:cult of mac

[Registered Coward v2]

On top of that, it was expensive, you could not share files over Bluetooth, it did not support 3G, it did not have an expandable storage slot and you needed iTunes for everything. But despite that, and to the horror of its rivals, everyone wanted one.

just goes to show the best product doesnt always win - same is true with the ipod, there were better options at the time. the term "cult of mac" became known for a reason

Very true. There are plenty of examples where a better product lost out; generally because the lesser one offered some feature that made it more compelling. VHS beat Beta despite Beta's better picture quality; DVD and VHS beat LaserDiscs despite the latter's better quality. VHS had the advantage of longer recording times, VHS and DVDs had a better selection of movies and you could rent VHS tapes a lot easier than you could a Laserdiscs are just some examples of why an arguably inferior product won out. One challenge that the Phone faces is there is much less of a network effect for phone than a product such as a DVD where once you have a reasonably large installed base a format becomes a standard and others find it tough to compete. A phone, beyond apps, is easily replaced with a different model since internet access, ability to call / text / email is not something that has a network affect; that is why companies like Apple try to build close ecosystems to make it a lot harder to switch. Cloud computing, despite it's being sold as anything anytime anywhere is another way to close an eco system through the use of proprietary security and other protocols that only one manufacturers device can use. Expanding into home control is another way to try to create network effects. If enough manufacturers embrace HomeKit then Apple can control the hub and access to the network (phone/tablet/TV box/computer) while letting others add accessories that tie into the network.

Re:cult of mac

[fred6666]

The iPod was pretty much the only MP3 player on which you couldn't just drop a bunch of MP3 over USB mass storage and listen to them instantly. This (and iTunes) is enough for declaring it the worst MP3 player of all times.

Re:cult of mac

[Anonymous Coward]

just goes to show the best product doesnt always win

Sure it does - the product that wins in a given category is, implicitly, "the best product" in that category.

What you mean to say is, "The product I like the best doesn't always win," and that's a horse of a completely different color. It just tells you that you've got requirements and desires that are outside the mainstream for that category.

Re:cult of mac

[teg]

On top of that, it was expensive, you could not share files over Bluetooth, it did not support 3G, it did not have an expandable storage slot and you needed iTunes for everything. But despite that, and to the horror of its rivals, everyone wanted one.

just goes to show the best product doesnt always win - same is true with the ipod, there were better options at the time. the term "cult of mac" became known for a reason

Actually, the iPhone showed that it was better to do some things well than to everything poorly - to have you features be a check on a long list.

I had an Nokia N95. On paper, this is a far more capable device than the iPhone. However, when I switched to an iPhone 3GS it was a massive improvement. Mail worked very well, the browser was usable, text entry was quick and by that time, the AppStore had launched. Far, far better than going around hunting individual apps and updates. They were a lot cheaper too. All of this was an order of magnitude better than the Nokia.

Terrible summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows mobile was atrocious and most "smart" phones only supported 2gb of memory. The 8gb model was miles ahead of the competition. Most devices only had 64 mb of memory built in. They all used a stylus which was easy to lose and impossible to replace. Battery life was less than a day.

No other touchscreen phone would shut off the screen when you used it. It was horrible. Not to mention windows ce was crap, the smallest fucking start menu I've ever seen. Screens were plastic.

Blackberry had just released a phone with a camera, and a shitty camera at that. Web browsing in it was garbage but better than a Windows mobile. You had to scroll horizontally to see a webpage. MP3 playback was terrible as was the sound quality for music.

Bluetooth was crap for transferring files back then on the few devices that supported it. I'm talking 15/kilobytes second slow.

The only manufacturer producing anything close to a smartphone was Nokia and their products were only really available to those outside the USA. Even then Symbian was so far ahead that Nokia stopped innovating it and it went stagnant... palm was already dead having missed the "phone" part focusing on PDAs.

I thought the iPhone would be a total piece of shit only because all smartphones were essentially huge piles of shit. Especially touchscreen smartphones. I was dead fucking wrong. It was leagues better, especially if jail broken because it could have apps. Real fucking apps. It ran a sane OS based on Unix.

Also I'm pretty fucking sure at launch iOS didn't support bookmarking websites to the home screen.

Marketing to the Cult

[Anonymous Coward]

The product wasn't transformative. The marketing was transformative and the timing was exceptional.

The business strategy, though, of making you pay for a product you don't own, was ingenious. Long live the walled garden.

Re:Marketing to the Cult

[Goaway]

No, the product was 100% transformative. It was completely different from any that came before it, and it was copied by everyone who came after, because it did what people wanted much better than anything anybody had tried before. This is the very definition of a transformative product, and denying requires blinding yourself intentionally.

Sure, it had good marketing. But good marketing may get you one sale. A good product is what gets you the second and third, and there have been many second and third sales of iPhones.

Re:Marketing to the Cult

[known_coward_69]

it had the only full web browser on a phone at the time. all other phones had mobile browsers that sucked even if you compared them to IE 6.1

it really had no function except to take money from people with money to blow to have a device to kill time during lunch or some other time during the day. then it got apps before android

As someone that had used a Palm for many years

[aussersterne]

when I got my first iPhone, let me say—there is no comparison between the two.

Palm OS and Windows CE were clumsy, trying devices that you didn't trust with anything because they weren't all that stable, they were deeply, closely tethered to desktops with finicky sync systems that would break down often and whose connectivity to existing apps tended to last about 10 minutes beyond version releases, they had the capacity of a thimble, and anything you put into them was basically trapped there unless you mounted heroic and time-consuming efforts to get it back out again.

The iPhone showed that this state of affairs was *not* "as good as it gets" for a PDA and I got an iPhone because it made my life instantly immeasurably easier and saved me bucketloads of time. Plus, when apps happened, they were cheap as dirt, unlike the $34.99-$79.99-yet-still-crippled-and-often-incompatible apps that were out for Palm or CE.

Of course iOS is now not best-of-breed but rather an out-of-date, crippled (in comparison to current-best-of-breed products) just like PalmOS and CE once were and Android is running circles around it (all except in the apps space, which remains vexingly thin on Android, though that is gradually improving).

But that doesn't change the fact that the iPhone was transformative and the tech was exponentially better than anything that was present in the mobile space to that point. It hat gigabytes (not megabytes) of storage, a fast processor and a real web browser that could load any (!!!) web page, had Wi-Fi and a fast, USB-based sync, and so on. Then the app store came along and we were in a new era.

Sorry, but anyone that pooh-poohs the iPhone is as out to lunch as anyone right now that says iOS is king of the hill. The iPhone was absolutely transformative. And right now, iOS is absolutely struggling to keep up. Both are true.

Thanks from an Android user

[iampiti]

As an Android user who doesn't like iOS allow me to say thanks. Thanks for spurring everyone else to make hardware and software better than what we had before.
Once again, this proves the wonders of competition even if you don't like a specific product.

Selective memory

[hackel]

It's like nobody remembers that Nokia and Symbian S60 ever existed... Many of us had "smart" phones long before the iPhone, that included a built-in webkit-based browser, music, Google Maps and loads of other installable 3rd-party apps. Obviously that never became as popular as the iPhone, particularly in the States where they were hardly available (I bought mine in the UK), but they certainly existed and were great.