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

Posted by msmash on from the revolutionary dept.

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.

30 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. cult of mac by ganjadude · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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

    --
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    1. Re: cult of mac by millertym · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:cult of mac by CrankyFool · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:cult of mac by Registered+Coward+v2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
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    4. Re:cult of mac by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    5. Re:cult of mac by known_coward_69 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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

    6. Re: cult of mac by tripleevenfall · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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 /.

    7. Re:cult of mac by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    8. Re:cult of mac by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    9. Re: cult of mac by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2
      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.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    10. Re:cult of mac by Voyager529 · · Score: 2

      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.

    11. Re: cult of mac by b0bby · · Score: 2

      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.

    12. Re:cult of mac by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    13. Re:cult of mac by teg · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  2. Lame by tylersoze · · Score: 4, Funny

    No wireless. Less space than a Nomad . Lame.

    1. Re:Lame by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  3. Re: and no apps by tylersoze · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Personality and charisma by Volanin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
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  5. Can folks here be grateful instead of flaming? by blahbooboo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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...

  6. Re:BB, RIP by known_coward_69 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  7. Re:And they stole the idea from Palm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  8. Terrible summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Terrible summary by Overzeetop · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
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  9. Re:Marketing to the Cult by Goaway · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  10. As someone that had used a Palm for many years by aussersterne · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
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  11. Re:Marketing to the Cult by known_coward_69 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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

  12. Thanks from an Android user by iampiti · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  13. Re:Marketing to the Cult by dgatwood · · Score: 2

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

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  14. Re:Marketing to the Cult by Dr.+Evil · · Score: 4, Informative

    "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.

  15. Haters Got To Hate by mschwanke97402 · · Score: 2

    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.