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

[CrankyFool]

I don't know, man. I wasn't a Mac person back when I finally grew tired of all the hacky mp3 player solutions out there, and paid $500 for an iPod that I was HOPING I could make work with my PC back before iTunes was running on Windows. The iPod's form factor and ease of use just ended up making it the best product for me -- enough so that I shoehorned it into a Macless ecosystem and accepted the challenges inherent within.

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

[Ol Olsoc]

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

Just think, we could all be running around with Zunes and Windows phones. And on MS-DOS 50.

Re:cult of mac

[known_coward_69]

you obviously don't remember the "smartphones" of the day. yes, they had those paper features but in real life it was easier not to use them. i remember when android was hyping the bluetooth or NFC file transfer. tried it with my father in law one time and discovered it was useless for anything over tiny text files.

other than apps the only useful feature the iphone was missing at release was corporate email support. a year later they licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft and with the 3GS it was the end of the blackberry

Re:cult of mac

[known_coward_69]

i had MP3 players since around 2000 and bought the iPod once it worked with Windows and never looked back. Best MP3 player of the day

Re:cult of mac

[fermion]

The iPhone could not even reliably make phone calls. I had an iPhone, moved from my Razr. which was also a phone that did not make reliable phone calls. The iPhone did solve a problem that I had with the Razr which is effortlessly synching from my computer so I do not have to reenter data.

I wonder what issues there were with the iPod, because I never had any. I have a nomad, and paid as much for it with no memory as I did for my iPod mini. On the Nomad it took a Very Long Time, a Pournelle used to say, to fill the small card memory card I bought an additional great expense. The firewire interface on the iPod meant that I could move singficant parts of my then 20GB library very quickly.

It has to be more than gimmick. MS has been trying to do smart phones since 1996 with Windows CE and so far they have nothing. If people were just looking for gimmicks and integration, MS would have had more that 10% of the market at any one time. Blackberry, which was a good phone, fell very quickly.

One thing that Apple has done is fearlessly try new things. As a business machine, Blackberry did not have that luxury. Apple as a more creative and consumer company can throw legacy out the window, which is really what most people hate.

Re: cult of mac

[tripleevenfall]

This is a very Slashdotty article, denigrating a product that - like it or not, really was transformative - because it came from Apple.

The iPhone changed cellphones forever, it eliminated the PDA, it ushered in the era of smartphones for the masses who didn't have a business need for one and would have never bought themselves a Blackberry.

The Model T barely had "anything associated with a car" today other than four wheels and a seat, but what we are seeing here is an argument that the Model T wasn't a big deal at all, and really was a crappy product, and not of any historical importance.

Only on /.

Re:cult of mac

[0100010001010011]

Firewire was much better than USB of the day. The iPod also functioned as an external hard drive. I remember installing OS X on it and booting off of it when fixing my main drive.

Re:cult of mac

[jbmartin6]

"Better" is somewhat subjective. The iPod, IMO, was far better than the competitors, like another poster experienced I used one for five minutes and immediately switched. I don't own any other Apple products, none of them had that sort of impact.

Re:cult of mac

[Anonymous Coward]

DVD and VHS beat LaserDiscs despite the latter's better quality.

LaserDisc did not have better image or sound quality than DVD. LD did eventually support DTS and DD but it was a pretty clever effort and it wasn't on all titles AND because LD players couldn't decode the audio, it was a secondary track that required an external decoder, a rarity at the time. DVD shipped with both bitstream and decoding support for Dolby Digital from the gate so you could hook up with 5.1 analog jacks to your existing sound system. LD did have full bitrate DTS tracks on them (whereas DVD almost always had half-rate for space issues) but doing so required sacrificing the stereo PCM track so all you got was analog stereo--if you didn't have a DTS decoder, then the sound quality was a lot worse on LD DTS titles, whereas DVD with DTS generally had a 5.1 Dolby track, with a few exceptions (Saving Private Ryan DTS edition sacrificed all the extras and the 5.1 track to get it all on disc).

As for image quality, while the first run of DVDs were a bit rough on encoding, it didn't take long for that to change. LD can resolve about 400 lines of analog video while DVD can do the full 500+ that NTSC supports. In that regard, not even close.

Re: cult of mac

[TheRaven64]

As the other poster says, the market was changing and the iPhone managed to have perfect timing. A few things about the original iPhone:

• No 3G support. I had been using 3G for over a year when the iPhone came out and only supporting EDGE (which networks had to roll out specially for the iPhone) was a bit crappy.
• No decent Bluetooth support. I had a Mac when the iPhone came out and I could send SMS and dial my phone directly from the Address Book and get on-screen notifications when my phone rang with my Nokia phone. iPhone users couldn't. It couldn't even send or receive contacts via Bluetooth, as I recall.
• No third-party app support. All of the other smartphone vendors supported apps from third parties - it was one of the big things that differentiated smartphones from feature phones. I could even run a port of Doom on my old Nokia phone.
• No support for MMS. Admittedly, MMS was a crappy invention that deserved to die horribly, but kids seemed to like it.
• No SIP support. My old Nokia phone had integrated support for SIP, so I could make cheap calls via WiFi when available. The iPhone didn't.

It did have a big capacitive touchscreen, but it wasn't even the first phone to do that (though it was a very close-run thing). The iPhone didn't really become interesting until the second version, when they had third-party apps and 3G. The first version was a high-end feature phone that appealed to people who had never owned a smartphone.

Re:cult of mac

[Voyager529]

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

Oh, the memories that have been lost to history...

Okay, first off, remember that in 2007, iTunes libraries were expansive, encompassing, and well-curated. Virtually everyone had an iPod, which synced with iTunes. DRM had only *just* come off the files they sold, meaning that plenty of users still had hundreds of purchased songs that couldn't play on anything else.

The iPhone didn't do *lots* of things that contemporary smartphones did...but the iPhone wasn't competing with them. The iPhone was competing with Feature Phones - the LG Chocolate and similar handsets that were popular at the time, and shared pocket space with the iPod. Consolidating the two devices into a single gadget was one of a few major things the iPhone brought to the table.

Bluetooth file transfer was used by a handful of people...but keep in mind that Verizon had a habit of blocking that from most of their phones at the time, so it wasn't missed. Even if it was, if Apple loses points for Bluetooth file transfer, Blackberry loses points for making the Blackberry Curve without WiFi. What was sorely needed though, was a phone that did mobile web browsing and didn't suck. Internet Explorer Mobile sucked, horridly. Every attempt it made to lay out a page on a 320x240 screen was basically an exercise in shuffling cards - it never, ever worked right...but miraculously, even it was a step up from the Blackberry browser, which couldn't do anything right. Showing a full website and pinching in and out to navigate it? That really was incredible for the time. We have mobile website *now*, which is nice, but no one cared about cell phone web traffic in 2007.

Threaded messaging was available in BBM, but even Blackberry made it nearly impossible to split longer SMS messages. They made their name on e-mail, but didn't do HTML mail in any meaningful sense. Blackberry did music, but it was the "drag-and-drop MP3s to a MicroSD card" method that negated most of the benefits of iTunes like playlists and play counts and automatically syncing new purchases. The iPhone, by contrast, had beautiful threaded messaging with few functional limits - many feature phones at the time could only store a few hundred messages so deleting old messages by hand was a common task. We take kinetic scrolling for granted now, since everyone has it but it was truly a "wow" moment during Steve's keynote. Visual Voicemail was also something new to the masses and took years for others to implement.

The initial release of the iPhone wasn't about having a massive amount of features to compete with every bullet point on the box of the Curve or the Q or the Blackjack, it was about the ability to go from carrying around two devices to just one, with a solid web browsing experience, in a package far more streamlined and polished than anyone else on the market.

So yes, it couldn't use 3G or map, but I will definitely give credit where it is due. The iPhone didn't do everything, but what it did do was done right, given what was prevalent amongst users at the time of its release.

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

[fred6666]

the era of smartphones for the masses

By "masses" you mean those willing to waste $650+ for a phone?

Re:cult of mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly! When the iPhone came out, I had already been carrying full VGA PDAs for 4 years (at first a Toshiba e800, then a Dell Axim X51v), to watch movies while on the subway, so when I first saw the iPhone up close my first impression was "What kind of shitty resolution is this?" followed by "what do you mean I have to convert my videos through iTunes?".
It is quite funny when you think that they made Retina such a big deal. If they had started from a semi-decent display, it would not make such a huge difference...

Re: cult of mac

[b0bby]

Yes, the first time I used iOS I knew that they had nailed it. Think of the Palms and Blackberries of the time - they were clunky and hard to use, even for a geek. I still prefer Android, but credit where credit's due.

Re:cult of mac

[evilviper]

What was sorely needed though, was a phone that did mobile web browsing and didn't suck. Internet Explorer Mobile sucked, horridly. Every attempt it made to lay out a page on a 320x240 screen was basically an exercise in shuffling cards - it never, ever worked right...but miraculously, even it was a step up from the Blackberry browser, which couldn't do anything right. Showing a full website and pinching in and out to navigate it? That really was incredible for the time.

Opera did mobile browsing right, many years before the iPhone came out, and it was available on multiple platforms.

"The first version of Opera Mobile Classic was released in 2000 for the Psion Series 7 and NetBook, with a port to the Windows Mobile platform coming in 2004. One of Opera Mobile Classic's major features is the ability to dynamically reformat web pages to better fit the handheld's display using small screen rendering technology. Alternatively, the user may use page zooming for a closer or broader look." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

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

[dgatwood]

IMO, the price and the lack of 3G were the only problems. The other stuff was just noise. And, of course, the price came down with subsidies, and 3G came in the second hardware rev (which IMO should have been the first). And now that the subsidies are gone, Apple is having trouble with sales again. Apple is, of course, in the best position to take advantage of the lack of subsidies by continuing OS support for existing hardware for much longer than Android makers so that their hardware is perceived as less disposable. Whether they will do so or not remains to be seen.

Re:cult of mac

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The fact that it became several times more successful that all others combined should give you a hint that this form of simple wasn't what people wanted. Else they would have paid more for an iPod. Maybe it's your opinion that's the worst of all times. Almost everybody seems to think so.

Re:cult of mac

[known_coward_69]

yeah, i had those and they sucked. ipod and itunes you could organize your music by artists and whatever and listen to an album or just mix the artist. Then they added playlists making it even better.

the itunes sync was awesome because it made it easy and fast to add or delete music more than one file at a time

Re: cult of mac

[thegarbz]

The iPhone changed cellphones forever, it eliminated the PDA, it ushered in the era of smartphones for the masses who didn't have a business need for one and would have never bought themselves a Blackberry.

The question is where would we be without it? Given that the iPhone predominantly was little more than a continuation of current industry trends (see LG's bridging smartphone with a very large touch screen, icons, and buttons for apps), I don't see the iPhone as having changed anything.

The App Store model on the other hand changed EVERYTHING. That was the transformative component. Phones were always going to end up being flat pieces of glass as this was nothing more than an attempt to implement what we have been seeing in Sci-Fi for 30 years. That an ecosystem would provide instant access to a world of apps at a push of a button, that was truly original.

Only on /.

Only on /. do we see through the haze. The Model T wasn't an amazing car either. What was transformative is the method of construction, the consumerism, and the final price of the automobile that was made by that process. The Model T itself was completely insignificant. It's quite the same as people lauding the iPhone for the yet another product that it really is.

But I'm sure there's an app for that.

Re:cult of mac

[Anonymous Coward]

(Cr)apple products have only survived through the years because they convinced shallow, narcissistic, self important iDiots to buy them! (Cr)apple has always sold poorly designed, poorly made crap!The last quality product that they sold was the IIE! There have always products that were better, and less expensive than (Cr)apple's.

Without iDiots, (Cr)apple would have died out and been forgotten long ago!

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.

Re:cult of mac

[ganjadude]

except when you already had a collection of music organized and you import to itunes and it screws every manual win amp tag you already set up

Re:cult of mac

[teg]

Opera did mobile browsing right, many years before the iPhone came out, and it was available on multiple platforms.

"The first version of Opera Mobile Classic was released in 2000 for the Psion Series 7 and NetBook, with a port to the Windows Mobile platform coming in 2004. One of Opera Mobile Classic's major features is the ability to dynamically reformat web pages to better fit the handheld's display using small screen rendering technology. Alternatively, the user may use page zooming for a closer or broader look." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I used Opera on my Nokia N95. While it was a bit better than the horrible default web browser, Mobile Safari on 3GS was an order of magnitude better. Pages rendered better, and using it didn't feel like torture.

Re:cult of mac

[TheFakeTimCook]

except when you already had a collection of music organized and you import to itunes and it screws every manual win amp tag you already set up

So, who cares about WinAmp tags when you're using iTunes as your Librarian?

And if you're upset because it "reorganized" your files, well then, maybe you should have done a little studying before you just turned it loose on the only copy of your music library, eh? Because it doesn't HAVE to do that. You just TOLD it to.

Re:cult of mac

[TheFakeTimCook]

(Cr)apple products have only survived through the years because they convinced shallow, narcissistic, self important iDiots to buy them! (Cr)apple has always sold poorly designed, poorly made crap!The last quality product that they sold was the IIE! There have always products that were better, and less expensive than (Cr)apple's.

Without iDiots, (Cr)apple would have died out and been forgotten long ago!

What an intelligent, erudite post.

Re:cult of mac

[Just Some Guy]

just goes to show the best product doesnt always win

Just goes to show your metric for "best" isn't aligned with the rest of the market's. iPods were the best portable MP3 players: we all took a vote with our wallets and it won. They might not have had highest values for individual specifications, but the total package was better than the competition. The same was true for iPhones. Some competitors were faster, or had higher resolution cameras, or had more storage, but none packaged everything in such a way that millions of people saw it and immediately wanted to throw cash at it.

iPhones and iPods were much better than anything that came before them. You can disagree by touting specific numbers, but almost no one outside Slashdot and similar forums cares about specs. Everyone else just wants to use the stuff they bought. Apple came to market with the first devices that concentrated on usability rather than specs and made an absolutely killing. You can't say Apple's stuff wasn't the best without naming something better, and in these cases there was no better to name.

Re:cult of mac

[Just Some Guy]

This (and iTunes) is enough for declaring it the worst MP3 player of all times.

LOL *cough* PlaysForSure *cough*

iPods aren't even in the top 10 of anti-consumer MP3 players.

Disclaimer: my first iPod was a gen 4 Touch and I'd been using Sansa devices flashed with Rockbox before it. I never owned a classic scrollwheel iPod. I sure wanted one, though, because it was far nicer than anything else at the time.

Re:cult of mac

[fred6666]

Even if a MP3 player supported PlaysForSure, you could still choose not to use that function, isn't it?
You could still drag and drop MP3 files through the file explorer. The iPod was the exception.

Re:cult of mac

[ganjadude]

i was fine because you know, backups. but still way back on the first version of itunes for windows i was looking forward to it but it was utter shit

Re:cult of mac

[itsdapead]

you obviously don't remember the "smartphones" of the day. yes, they had those paper features but in real life it was easier not to use them.

This.

I had bought a Windows smartphone shortly before the iPhone came out. Yeah, it did lots of stuff that the iPhone did but it was horrible to use. Basic problem: it had a slide-out querty keyboard, a joystick, a jog wheel, a touchscreen, a toothpick stylus and a set of applications that were optimised for none of those input methods. Apple took the minimalist approach: multitouch + one home button, and everything was designed to work well that way.

After persisting with the WinPhone for a year or two I actually ended up going with Android (iPhone was more than I wanted to pay for a phone), but its obvious that Android would be nothing like it is today if the iPhone hadn't happened.

Re:cult of mac

[supernova87a]

I agree with much of what you said except iPhone's network effect. There is a huge factor in my continuing to use it, which is iMessage, Find My Friends, and iCloud sync. Pity the friend who isn't on iPhone and breaks every text conversation because it separates out the thread into green SMS chat. And being able to stay in sync with family members is huge.

Re:cult of mac

[Registered Coward v2]

I agree with much of what you said except iPhone's network effect. There is a huge factor in my continuing to use it, which is iMessage, Find My Friends, and iCloud sync. Pity the friend who isn't on iPhone and breaks every text conversation because it separates out the thread into green SMS chat. And being able to stay in sync with family members is huge.

I probaly wasn't clear by what I meant. The iPhone as a phone doesn't have a network effect so Apple has created the infrastructure you mentioned which created the network effect and ties users to the iPhone. The walled grden is the key.

Re:cult of mac

[DerekLyons]

just some examples of why an arguably inferior product won out.

But only so long as you argue on pedantic nitpicky points. In the eyes of the consumer, the ultimate judge, said products aren't arguably inferior.

Re:cult of mac

[Cmdln Daco]

Also, an untrue post.

Apple made the LaserWriter after the Apple IIe, and it was a quality product.

Or did they just slap a label on something with a Canon engine in it? I'm not certain.

Nonetheless, the LaserWriter was a quality product.

Re:cult of mac

[Cmdln Daco]

You can disagree by touting specific numbers, but almost no one outside Slashdot and similar forums cares about specs. Everyone else just wants to use the stuff they bought.

La la la la la la!!

La la la!

Look, a pony!

La la la la.

Re: cult of mac

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience exactly.

I had the Kyocera Palm phone previously - Great device. Cell phone and a palm PDA. Palm was on the way out, and I got the HTC wizard next. Windows mobile 2003, 2G data. You could browse on your phone and teather data via bluetooth or USB. Phone had Wifi and a mini (not micro) sd card slot.

The HTC wizard had all the features of the phone, more even. Browsing was pretty much useless and little better than a novelty. The UI was windows mobile which was.. Bad. Email was usable and it was a decent phone.

Then I went to the store to see what the Iphone was about. After using the thing for 10 minutes I walked out of the store with one. Browsing the internet actually worked. You could load standard pages quickly and amazingly the touch UI worked.

Then there as the day iOS got native activesync support. That was the day blackberry was mortally wounded.

Re:cult of mac

[Miguelito]

just goes to show the best product doesnt always win - same is true with the ipod, there were better options at the time.

Of course YMMV and opinions and all but... I have to disgree on this. I had dozens of mp3 players starting with the initial Diamond PMP300, which is usually considered the 2nd commercial mp3 player. This was followed by several more Rio devices, then some no-name stuff that used various memory card technologies.. eventually I had a couple CD-mp3 players and even a Creative Nomad HDD player (good lord the UX on that thing was horrible!). Then in 2003 or so I tried an ipod, and I never looked back. The UI/UX on the ipod was miles above every other player I'd had. Also while some people decry the use of itunes and prefer just dumping files directly onto the memory card/player, I found I hated those ways. I often ran into issues with the older FAT filesystems on them and files per directory limits and had to script up annoyingly dumb scripts to break the files up into subdirs. With the ipod/itunes it was done for me, or I could limit what I wanted to copy via playlists and the like. Rather than me having to take care of my device, it just worked as designed with a simple interface on the computer via itunes.

Once I eventually got an iphone (3g I think was my first) I found I no longer needed the separate ipod anymore and have stuck with iphones since.

BTW, I'm actually curious what you think which mp3 players were better options during the first few years the ipod was out.

Re:cult of mac

[TheFakeTimCook]

Also, an untrue post.

Apple made the LaserWriter after the Apple IIe, and it was a quality product.

Or did they just slap a label on something with a Canon engine in it? I'm not certain.

Nonetheless, the LaserWriter was a quality product.

Oh, and don't forget the LaserWriter 16/600 PS. That thing was a BEAST!

Re:cult of mac

[fred6666]

Again, the best product doesn't always win. Apple had the best marketing.

Re:cult of mac

[Registered Coward v2]

just some examples of why an arguably inferior product won out.

But only so long as you argue on pedantic nitpicky points. In the eyes of the consumer, the ultimate judge, said products aren't arguably inferior.

Of course. One persons better is another's meh, and in the end the consumer ultimately decides which product offers the best value and hence is "better." Winning in the marketplace doesn't always mean it has better specs or performance, just that it is more desirable to a broader range of consumers.

Re:cult of mac

[dgatwood]

It has to be more than gimmick. MS has been trying to do smart phones since 1996 with Windows CE and so far they have nothing. If people were just looking for gimmicks and integration, MS would have had more that 10% of the market at any one time. Blackberry, which was a good phone, fell very quickly.

People also like phones that don't BSOD. :-D

But seriously, Blackberry's problem, and really Windows Phone's problem as well, is a lack of app momentum. Phil Schiller's implication that the iPhone would have been successful without the App Store is kind of laughable, because we've seen what happens when other manufacturers put out innovative products without that ecosystem.

First, we have Palm, who under the leadership of no doubt the same person who pushed for a web-app-only iPhone, came out with a web-app-only Palm Pre. The product died, because web apps suck.

Then, we have Windows Phone, which has a decent UI, but has so little marketshare that nobody builds apps for it, and because nobody builds apps for it, nobody buys it. It's a chicken-and-egg situation, and until somebody at Microsoft comes up with a way to convince enough major developers into building apps for the thing so that it can take off, it will remain basically stillborn.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if Apple hadn't developed an app ecosystem when they did, iOS would have gone into a death spiral when the Android Market opened just three months later. The ability to extend the technology is so fundamental to what makes a smartphone useful that any smartphone that lacks that capability or lacks a sufficiently large group of developers taking advantage of that capability will wither on the vine. Apple still exists solely because the upper management at Apple finally listened to the engineers.

Re:cult of mac

[fred6666]

how so?

Re: cult of mac

[Cmdln Daco]

Isn't PostScript an Adobe property?

Re:cult of mac

[teg]

using it didn't feel like torture.

Such precise language. You wouldn't be a member of a cult of some sort, would you?

Did you try the browser? The screen was small, the pages not tailored to mobile (unless you were using WAP). The browser was just showing a tiny bit of a very poorly rendered page at a time, you had to scroll sideways as well as up and down to read. Remember, the screen was small and had a resolution one quarter of VGA. No proper keyboard for input.

That said, the camera was good for the time and it had GPS. Not very common back then, and a major reason why I upgraded from my Sony Ericsson W810i. But while it was a little bit step up, the iPhone was a giant leap when I tried it. Phones back then weren't pretty comparable to the iPhone, like Android flagship phones and iPhones are today. They were a giant leap.

Lame

[tylersoze]

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad . Lame.

Re:Lame

[Anonymous Coward]

Rumour says that engineers at Nokia got their hands on an early model, took it to pieces and couldn't stop laughing, saying that that's no way to make a phone, this will never succeed.

They stopped laughing pretty soon though.

Re:Lame

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it was the executives that said that. Nokia had communicator, which was already a smart phone, without the touchscreen that is. Nokia had N770 internet tablet (2005), it was great, except it missed the phone. that's why i did not buy one. The idiot executives were just that dumb not to allow a touch screen phone. Nokia had the tech way before Apple even thought about it.

Re:Lame

[hawk]

>Less space than a Nomad

In all fairness, I rarely need to control more than one starship in battle at a time with my phone, so a fraction of Nomad's space works fine . . .

hawk

Re:Lame

[seinman]

You're right, there was definitely never a consumer general-purpose computer that hooked up to a phone line before.

Marketing, my arse

[rmdingler]

...and to the horror of its rivals, everyone wanted one.

It's almost as if the people who make these purchasing decisions are unpredictable.

Re: and no apps

[tylersoze]

I know, for me personally I wonder where I would be without native apps since app development been the main my source of income for these past few years.

I still remember the day they posted on Slashdot that hackers had release the first reversed engineer SDK on jail broken phones and immediately dived in and started coding for it. I actually interviewed at Apple shortly after for unrelated position long before they announced the SDK and remember showing the engineers over lunch a port of MAME I had done. It was kind of surreal when I looked up and saw Steve Jobs across the room getting lunch.

Re: BB, RIP

[Anonymous Coward]

They thought they knew exactly what their customer base, professionals, wanted. They stuck to those ideals until it was too late all while not trying to tap the wider general consumer market.

Personality and charisma

[Volanin]

Does anybody here frequently watch Apple product launches? Then give it a try and watch the 10 minute video of Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone. I had never seen that video before. It's such a simple introduction and, nevertheless, with such personality and power... Of course it's just my opinion, but it has humor and it's daring... in a way that it makes the current Apple presentations feel like generic marketing. It's almost a lesson on charisma. Oh boy.

Re:Personality and charisma

[TheRaven64]

Steve Jobs' Apple presentations were always a little bit too slick for my taste. You can find him introducing various NeXT technologies on YouTube though, and those are well worth watching. The same style that you'll recognise from the Apple presentations, just not yet quite as polished. Also, not presenting mainstream consumer products, so much more interesting (of very dated) tech.

Re:Personality and charisma

[TheFakeTimCook]

Does anybody here frequently watch Apple product launches? Then give it a try and watch the 10 minute video of Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone. I had never seen that video before. It's such a simple introduction and, nevertheless, with such personality and power... Of course it's just my opinion, but it has humor and it's daring... in a way that it makes the current Apple presentations feel like generic marketing. It's almost a lesson on charisma. Oh boy.

The one on the iPad is even slicker. Jobs does the demos sitting in a typical livingroom chair. Is there a better way to show the most typical use-case?

Can folks here be grateful instead of flaming?

[blahbooboo]

So rather than turning this into a flame about how android is better than iOS, how about we focus on how this device clearly changed everything on the mobile space. That without the iPhone and Apple, we would all be likely still be using those awful blackberry devices with mediocre web browsers and apps. Or, even worse, still fully using Flash on the web instead of finally escaping its horrible clutches.

Cmon Slashdot, let's see mostly positive comments for once, because this device did change everything...

Re:Can folks here be grateful instead of flaming?

[blahbooboo]

Wow, have a lot of time on your hands?

Re:BB, RIP

[known_coward_69]

RIM was a bunch of greedy bastards who thought they could make money on the professional and BYOD market. they charged you to buy the BES server, the licenses and on the device side you had to buy the expensive data plan to access that BES server

Other devices you have to pay by KILOBYTE

Iphone had the first data plan where they didn't meter you or enforce the professional email access rules

Re:And they stole the idea from Palm

[Anonymous Coward]

And Palm stole the idea from Apple's Newton.

The fact is that the iPhone was the first implementation that was good enough quality that the idea was compelling to lots of people. That's why it's so influential.

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

[mveloso]

I'm glad nobody on earth really pays attention to slashdot. So many toads.

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.

Re:Terrible summary

[Overzeetop]

The real inspiration was marrying a capacitive screen large enough for fingers with a finger-centric (finger-exclusive) OS. That, and "app" pricing at $free-$5 as opposed to the traditional $15-50/app desktop pricing which was carried over to WinMo. I owned several WinMo phones before switching to a 3G(s?) simply due to the effortless touch 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

Re:Marketing to the Cult

[cyberchondriac]

Because that defines everything about the device? If that's all you care about, maybe you should just get a computer. I've rooted my Nexus 7, but it's no big deal to me; it's cool to run Cyanogen on it, but it still does the same stuff. My iPhone does what I need it to do too.

Re:Marketing to the Cult

[MSG]

It was completely different from any that came before it

Well... It was better than PalmOS phones, certainly, but not "completely different." Most of its UI was, let's say, familiar to PalmOS users.

Re:Marketing to the Cult

[dgatwood]

Who, in turn, basically copied it from the Newton.

Re:Marketing to the Cult

[thegarbz]

No, the product was 100% transformative. It was completely different from any that came before it

LOL someone wasn't paying attention.

Re:Marketing to the Cult

[teg]

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.

Take a look at phone designs before and after the iPhone. When you can see a clear "before" and "after", it's a transformative product.

Re: Marketing to the Cult

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Marketing to the Cult

[Dr. Evil]

"True, it's the only smartphone on which you can't install an application unless approved by the phone manufacturer. Nobody had that idea before."

Other phones at the time didn't let you install an application, updates, ringtones or anything unless approved by the TELCO.

So yep, opening it up to the manufacturer to sell you apps was a huge move forward. It meant strong-arming the telcos with overwhelming demand else they wouldn't carry Apple's new little product.

Re: Marketing to the Cult

[Anonymous Coward]

Every phone that came after it was styled and designed to look and act the same. How is that not transformative again?

Re:Marketing to the Cult

[fred6666]

Wrong, you could install applications just fine on Windows Mobile and Palm OS without any authorization from anyone, Telco or manufacturer. Maybe even Blackberry.

The first iPhone didn't even have the app store on launch. So you couldn't install any application at all. How was that a huge move forward?

Re:Marketing to the Cult

[TheFakeTimCook]

Who's talking about rooting? You can still install any unapproved application on Android without rooting. On iOS you are stuck in a walled garden.

Getting REALLY Tired of this.

Your comment hasn't been true for iOS since iOS 8, several YEARS ago now.

See my UMPTEENTH post on this Subject, this one from just a few days ago.

Will you Haters ever learn?

Re:Marketing to the Cult

[TheFakeTimCook]

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.

Take a look at phone designs before and after the iPhone. When you can see a clear "before" and "after", it's a transformative product.

Exactly.

Re:Marketing to the Cult

[fred6666]

And you still need to sign the application. You can't just distribute an application to your friend and expect him to be able to install it.

Re:Marketing to the Cult

[cyberchondriac]

Well, there's always jailbreaking.

While on the subject though, I have to say the one big flaw in iPhone, to me, is iTunes, and lack of basic MTP capability for file transfers. You can copy your photos off your iPhone to desktop easily enough, but not the other way around, and no other file types without that crapware that is iTunes.. it's a pain. But otherwise, the thing functions simply, solidly and responsively.

Re:Marketing to the Cult

[bobm]

This and the visual voicemail. That was game changing and it took someone big enough to push the telco's into getting it done.

What's sad is that Microsoft probably had the power to push for the same stuff but not the vision, my phone before my first iPhone was the Motorola MPX-200 (a windows phone - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )) and it sucked. I tried the Palm phone and while it was a little bit better the OS was just not up to getting decent apps.

So aside from everyone copying the look and feel they did manage to pull away control from the telcos which is a great thing (IMHO). I wish Google would do that for Android but I don't see that happening.

Re:Marketing to the Cult

[Cmdln Daco]

I don't need to make a free account of any sort on Android.

You can even take the thing out of the box new, and set it up, without connecting to Google in any fashion. Set the options correctly and install apps and/or any alternative appstore that you want.

All without ever logging into a Google account.

Re:Marketing to the Cult

[sr180]

Almost all phones at the time allowed J2ME apps to be installed - without authorisation from anyone.

Re:Marketing to the Cult

[Goaway]

You are reading the wrong post, unfortunately.

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.

Re:As someone that had used a Palm for many years

[timholman]

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.

And to add to that ... the iPhone was a game changer because Apple supported it directly with updates, instead of pushing off support onto the carriers. I remember futilely waiting for Sprint to issue an update for my Palm Treo, and realizing that to Sprint, "update" meant "buy a new phone from us". Apple forced the carriers into the role of data providers only. It was a huge improvement.

Direct manufacturer support is the main reason why I still prefer my iPhone over any Samsung device. In fact, the only Android phone I would ever consider is the Google Pixel. I absolutely refuse to allow my carrier to dictate when and how my phone gets updated.

Re:As someone that had used a Palm for many years

[aussersterne]

Updates are critical to me, too, but also filesystem access.

I wavered when switching from iOS the first time, I really did, but it was jailbreak carousel or "no files for you." iPhone's data model was light years ahead of other mobile devices when iOS was launched, but now it is a noose around the iOS neck.

On Android, root and filesystem access are much easier to get and maintain, and many, many more apps acknowledge the existence of files. I'm not a huge fan of managing my own updates—I'd rather have OTA—but I can do it when jailbreaking is the alternative. I refuse to use any device that doesn't give me filesystem access to work with data.

iOS is still powerful, esp. given some of its apps. For writers, Daedalus and Ulysses; for lightweight databases, TapForms or Ninox, etc.; for personal information management, DevonThink to Go. And of course there are excellent options for artists, videographers, musicians, etc. There is no equivalent to these in the Android space.

I don't have to do the art/music stuff, though, and so I'm not as tied to iOS as some. I recently tried to switch back with an iPad to be able to use TapForms, Ulysses, and DevonThink (I use all of them in my Mac OS space). I couldn't stay. Maintaining jailbreak was a massive PITA, and on top of that, the experience sucked. iOS right now is laggier, harder to use, more crashy, app-by-app, and has zero customization. It's also damned hard to sync local stuff on and off (images, music, files, etc) because iTunes is craptacular and getting worse.

On my Android devices, I plug them into USB, have USB mass storage support, copy the files over, and then can open them in any app that I please. For a work device that needs to quickly onboard and access, say, two dozen files that are a mix of Excel sheets, Word docs, and images, that workflow is head and shoulders above what iOS currently offers, even with jailbreak.

Yes, you can do the cloud thing, but then (a) you have to wait for sync and trust that it worked, then open each file one-by-one to localize (i.e. download) it using the cloud viewer app (e.g. Dropbox), then (b) hope that the app you need will be in the menu to let you open it. Eight times out of ten, maybe more, it won't.

I was sitting there one night using wget to pull files down from my own web server that I needed to access, then going into local application folders to and editing configuration files with vi to "onboard" them into the app on the iPad. Then I thought, "What am I doing?" and I logged on and bought a Galaxy Tab S then and there. Two days later it arrived, I ROMed+rooted (took about 20 minutes) and I'm back to my old workflow again.

iOS is a dream for lightweight consumer use. But for doing work—which (if you watch the original keynote) is how it was pitched—it is now behind the curve. But it's still 100,000x better than Palm or Blackjack back in the day. That was a nightmare. Even if you were totally wedded to your device for work, you always felt like "it's just not worth it" and "why am I even doing this, gaaaaah!?"

Those devices, which were state of the art just a year or two before iPhone, became laughable at the iPhone's release. Like, completely laughable. I still have a Palm 6xx somewhere around here. I stumbled across it and powered it up a while back. It's like using a mechanical typewriter vs. a Macbook Pro.

One Month Later...

[Anonymous Coward]

iJustine got her first itemized bill from AT&T and has been with us ever since.

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.

Saw the dawn of the iPhone...

[__aaclcg7560]

My friend and I made the pilgrimage from Silicon Valley to MacWorld Expo in 2007 to view the first-gen iPhone under a glass dome. That was probably the last great MacWorld Expo before Apple ditched it and it slid into obscurity. Ironically, it would be seven years before my friend and I could afford an iPhone.

A year later I would be working the Google IT help desk. One of the most popular requests that routinely denied was an iPhone for employee use. IT didn't think the iPhone was secure enough to be on the network. At a Friday beer bust, a VP stood up to announce that everyone would get iPhones for work. The help desk got slammed with 700+ tickets requesting iPhones — and we immediately closed out every ticket under existing policy. IT took a few months to work out a policy that attached so many strings to the iPhone that few people got them at first.

Re:BB, RIP

[evilviper]

Other devices you have to pay by KILOBYTE
Iphone had the first data plan where they didn't meter you

Apple got extremely lucky that their device was the trendy, up-and-coming smart phone *JUST* before 3G came out. 2G data was painfully slow, incredibly expensive, and just worthless for browsing the web.

If the iPhone came out a few years earlier, the hype would have died down as people realized their flashy and expensive Apple product wasn't very useful with slow and expensive data. If another company had been debuting their new, revolutionary smart phone at the time, instead of Apple, the world would look quite different.

Re:and no apps

[unixisc]

Sounds so much like Windows Phone 8. Where you had several web-wrappers disguised as apps - if you clicked them, it would open Internet Explorer, and then the web site of the service therein

Re:Cheers to you Apple

[unixisc]

I'm on my second - and maybe my last, although the end of the Lumia line might keep me on it. I had a 5s two years ago, but wanted its successor since the 5s did not support Apple Pay. Had I bought a phone a few months later and gone for a 6, I'd not have bought a 7.

The biggest reason to get that phone was FaceTime, which until recently, was the only major video calling app out there: Duo and WhatsApp are recent. With WhatsApp, I could even do video calling on a Lumia, which wasn't possible until now: only that Microsoft has discontinued that line. But having owned all 3 platforms, iOS is my first choice and Windows 10 Mobile my second. I like Android Marshmallow and beyond, but on tablets, not phones.

One beef I do have about Apple - music that I download from OneDrive doesn't get recognized on my iPad. That's still a big reason to prefer Windows, including Windows Phone, except that the car has an iPod player but can't play Groove or even Windows Media Player

Re:No one's denying it's an IMPRESSIVE gimmick

[TheFakeTimCook]

If it ever gets out of beta (i.e. once its owners are able to install whatever software they want to) it could be something.

Do try to keep up there, Hater.

Anyone has been free to Install ANYTHING on their iOS Device since iOS 8:

Here's about the 20th Post I have made on this Subject. That one is from just a couple of days ago.

Maybe ONE of you can take a clue from the clue box...

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.

And that's all that's been done

[DigiAngel69]

And churning out different sizes of the same tech is all Apple has done in the last ten years.....sad really :(

Re:Cheers to you Apple

[unixisc]

For that, everyone else one is talking to has to have Skype on their phone, and it doesn't come automatically preloaded. Whereas FaceTime comes w/ it, and WhatsApp is popular enough and common to enough people

Haters Got To Hate

[mschwanke97402]

My first smart phone was a Samsung running Android. It was clunky and Samsung abandoned it less than 1 year after it was released. I switched to iPhone after that and loved it. I've looked at the Galaxy S, the Nexus and the HTCs every year or so when it came time to upgrade. I am still on the iPhone and loving it.

My thanks to Steve and Apple!

So go ahead and pile on.

Re:Cheers to you Apple

[Cmdln Daco]

Yikes.

FaceTime doesn't come on my phone. Not at all. It's an Android phone.

FaceTime is nice if you only want to talk to other people with Apple Phones. Which, I am sure, is the case for a lot of people with Apple Phones. Why would they want to talk to the unwashed masses?

Re:Cheers to you Apple

[unixisc]

In the timeframe we are discussing, while iOS had FaceTime, Android had nothing equivalent. Now, Android has Duo, but previously, things like Hangouts were hardly adequate

A few weeks ago, WhatsApp introduced Video calls, which solves the problem across 3 platforms - Android, iOS and Windows Phone. FaceTime, as you point out, is iOS only, and Duo is there on Android and iOS but not on Windows Phone. Now, of course, the Lumia line is pulled, but assuming that the Windows 10 Mobile platform itself ain't yanked, WhatsApp does level b/w all 3 platforms.

It also didn't let you record video

[ayesnymous]

Competitor phones did though, so it's surprising the iPhone still took off when YouTube had already become very popular back then.

Re:and no apps

[stealth_finger]

Sounds so much like Windows Phone 8. Where you had several web-wrappers disguised as apps - if you clicked them, it would open Internet Explorer, and then the web site of the service therein

Sounds like windows phone 10 too. The facebook app is an app but youtube is weblink. Most are just wrapped web sites if they even bother to make it available.

Re:Cheers to you Apple

[Cmdln Daco]

Skype. It's been around a long time.

I had it on my iPod touch before Apple came out with FaceTime.