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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.
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad . Lame.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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.
If I clone myself, can I call it a thread?
If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
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
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
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.
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 /.
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.
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.
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.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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.
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.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
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.
"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.