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The iPhone Turns 10 (economist.com)
"Every once in awhile a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything," said co-founder and former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, as he kickstarted the iPhone keynote. Ten years ago, thousands of people around the world listened to him in a mock turtleneck talk about a phone. They liked it so much that they decided to wait outside Apple stores for hours on end to buy one. Little did anyone know the phone -- called the iPhone -- would go on to revolutionize, in the truest sense of the word, the smartphone industry as we know it.
From an Economist article: No product in recent history has changed people's lives more. Without the iPhone, ride-hailing, photo-sharing, instant messaging and other essentials of modern life would be less widespread. Shorn of cumulative sales of 1.2bn devices and revenues of $1trn, Apple would not hold the crown of the world's largest listed company. Thousands of software developers would be poorer, too: the apps they have written for the smartphone make them more than $20bn annually. Here's how some journalists saw the original iPhone. David Pogue, writing for the New York Times: But even in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years. It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles. Walt Mossberg, writing for the Wall Street Journal: Expectations for the iPhone have been so high that it can't possibly meet them all. It isn't for the average person who just wants a cheap, small phone for calling and texting. But, despite its network limitations, the iPhone is a whole new experience and a pleasure to use. John Gruber's first impressions of the iPhone: The iPhone is 95 percent amazing, 5 percent maddening. I'm just blown away by how nice it is -- very thoughtful UI design and outstanding engineering. It is very fun. Jason Snell, writing for Macworld: To put it more simply: The iPhone is the real deal. It's a product that has already changed the way people look at the devices they carry in their pockets and purses. After only a few days with mine, the prospect of carrying a cellphone with me wherever I go no longer fills me with begrudging acceptance, but actual excitement. Recode has some charts that show how the iPhone has grown over the years. Here's the primer: 1. The iPhone put the internet in everyone's pocket.
2. The iPhone transformed photography from a hobby to a part of everyday life.
3. The iPhone App Store changed the way software was created and distributed.
4. iPhone apps changed everything, even how people work.
5. The iPhone made Apple the world's most valuable company. Apple commentator Horace Dediu writing for Asymco: The iPhone is the best selling product ever, making Apple perhaps the best business ever. Because of the iPhone, Apple has managed to survive to a relatively old age. Not only did it build a device base well over 1 billion it engendered loyalty and satisfaction described only by superlatives. To summarize I can offer two numbers:
1. 1,162,796,000 iPhones sold (to end of March 2017).
2. $742,912,000,000 in revenues. $1 trillion will be reached in less than 18 months. In closing, security researcher Mikko Hypponen tweeted, "iPhone is 10 years old today. After 10 years, not a single serious malware case. It's not just luck; we need to congratulate Apple on this."
From an Economist article: No product in recent history has changed people's lives more. Without the iPhone, ride-hailing, photo-sharing, instant messaging and other essentials of modern life would be less widespread. Shorn of cumulative sales of 1.2bn devices and revenues of $1trn, Apple would not hold the crown of the world's largest listed company. Thousands of software developers would be poorer, too: the apps they have written for the smartphone make them more than $20bn annually. Here's how some journalists saw the original iPhone. David Pogue, writing for the New York Times: But even in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years. It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles. Walt Mossberg, writing for the Wall Street Journal: Expectations for the iPhone have been so high that it can't possibly meet them all. It isn't for the average person who just wants a cheap, small phone for calling and texting. But, despite its network limitations, the iPhone is a whole new experience and a pleasure to use. John Gruber's first impressions of the iPhone: The iPhone is 95 percent amazing, 5 percent maddening. I'm just blown away by how nice it is -- very thoughtful UI design and outstanding engineering. It is very fun. Jason Snell, writing for Macworld: To put it more simply: The iPhone is the real deal. It's a product that has already changed the way people look at the devices they carry in their pockets and purses. After only a few days with mine, the prospect of carrying a cellphone with me wherever I go no longer fills me with begrudging acceptance, but actual excitement. Recode has some charts that show how the iPhone has grown over the years. Here's the primer: 1. The iPhone put the internet in everyone's pocket.
2. The iPhone transformed photography from a hobby to a part of everyday life.
3. The iPhone App Store changed the way software was created and distributed.
4. iPhone apps changed everything, even how people work.
5. The iPhone made Apple the world's most valuable company. Apple commentator Horace Dediu writing for Asymco: The iPhone is the best selling product ever, making Apple perhaps the best business ever. Because of the iPhone, Apple has managed to survive to a relatively old age. Not only did it build a device base well over 1 billion it engendered loyalty and satisfaction described only by superlatives. To summarize I can offer two numbers:
1. 1,162,796,000 iPhones sold (to end of March 2017).
2. $742,912,000,000 in revenues. $1 trillion will be reached in less than 18 months. In closing, security researcher Mikko Hypponen tweeted, "iPhone is 10 years old today. After 10 years, not a single serious malware case. It's not just luck; we need to congratulate Apple on this."
1.1 billion is an admirable number of phones to sell, no doubt about it. But how many users are represented by those 1.1 billion phones? It seems that few iPhone users buy just one and are happy about it; their model seems based in no small part on people buying a new iPhone (at least) every two-three years. The used market seems to have nearly evaporated for them due to the hysteria surrounding the new models, so it is generally fair to expect each phone to have only one owner before going to disposal.
Does anyone have a metric on how many unique iPhone users are out there?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Well, the important thing is that you've found a way to feel superior to both.
"Que"??? The Spanish word for "what"? Huh?
CUE, you illiterate fool!!!
An great leap forward in marketing and in improving the efficiency of the surveillance state. It turns out spying is cheaper and easier if you let the private sector do it for you.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
There were "smart phones" before the iPhone. But none of them were anything like the iPhone.
After the iPhone, every single smart phone is now like the iPhone. The earlier designs disappeared completely.
So in that sense, Apple did in fact invent the smartphone as it exists today.
I took the train up to San Francisco to see the iPhone under the domed glass after Steve Jobs gave his keynote address at the MacWorld Expo 2007. I wouldn't get an iPhone for another seven years as the Great Recession came and went, picking up an iPhone 5C and later an iPhone 6s. Thinking about upgrading to the Red iPhone 7 in the near future.
Lots of companies could have invented the iPhone, but no one did. Neopoint definitely wasn't on that path, nor was black berry or Nokia. Apple deserves credit for creating the interface that changed mobile computing.
- Make a complex pocket-sized super-computer usable for normal people
- Put a proper webbrowser into a pocket sized device
- implement the concept of an online marketplace for software (henceforth called "Apps" - short and poignant so everyone can use the word)
- kill Flash and trailblaze it's replacement by an open standard web
My first all-touch device after my Blackberry was the HTC Desire.
And while it was way better than the iPhone at the time in every aspect, you still have to hand it to Apple: They started an entirely new industry.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I used an iPhone 4S until about a year ago. I bought it off lease at the tail end of it's production. I then upgraded to an iPhone 5 which I'm using now with the latest iOS.
Not sure what you mean by old models are "obsolete" The Asus Android tablet I bought a year ago is still stuck on 5.1 with no signs that they will offer an update to 6, much less 7.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
No, LG released something more or less identical to the first iPhone a few months before the latter was announced. The market was definitely going in that direction.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Queue is an interesting word: it is the letter q, followed by four silent vowels.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I'm genuinely curious if Apple has ever been "first" with any technology or feature? I've never seen it personally. They tend to always lag several years behind the competition (though I'll admit that the original iPhone was only a few months (rather than their normal few years) behind other devices in the new form factor that has now come to dominate smartphones)
Smartphones and their apps track and trace peoples purchases, movements, social groups, etc. Apple itself is but a small portion of it but they created a surveillance ecosystem.
Google (Hint: the maker of Android) reads your mail, tracks your browser history, your shopping habits and your movements among other things. I'm pretty sure Apple is an amateur convention compared to Google when it comes to monitoring every single thing their customers do.
There was a guy who used to work at RIM (BlackBerry) R&D who posted on a game forum I frequent. He had some good insight on the mobile market.
He said the real issue is not that the phone industry couldn't have come up with something like the iPhone before Apple did (though apparently RIM had a "explain why it can't be done" culture instead of a "figure out how it can be done" culture). The real problem was the carriers. If the carriers didn't carry your phone you were toast.
If you think back on it, prior to the iPhone and Apple selling phones in their stores, probably 99% of cell phone purchases were made by people at the carrier stores (as in, you went to the local AT&T store). And so if the carrier wouldn't carry or sell your phone, you were toast (and I think there's actually been some law changes since then, could be that in 2007 you couldn't just carry any network-compatible phone into a store and have them put it on their network, they may have forced you to buy a phone from them).
The carriers wanted cheap feature phones, preferably ones that lasted about a year before needing to be replaced. They liked deals where people could come in and they'd sell them a cheap phone or four and so they weren't interested in expensive phones with useful features.
Apple went to Verizon first with the iPhone. When they told Verizon that Apple would control the phone, the updates, the eventual App Store, and they wouldn't be able to put their logos on it, Verizon told them to go fuck themselves.
AT&T though, they were desperate. They were losing land line subscribers left and right and their two different cell phone companies were flailing. So they let Apple do its thing.
If AT&T hadn't been desperate we may have never seen the iPhone. And cell phones today would likely not resemble what they do today. Your Prada phone there gives no mention as to what network it was on. It may not have been carried by a carrier for that reason (too expensive). There's a reason almost no one has ever heard of it.
Apple really did change everything, or at the very least move things forward much quicker than they would have ordinarily.
Schnapple
PDAs, including all the "firsts" attributed to the iPhone in this article, predate Apple's smartphone, sometime by a whole decade.
Even *Apple's own Newton* predates the iPhone.
My first tough when I saw the iPhone back then was : Oh, yeah. Now Apple wants to jump on the "PDA" bandwagon, as if Microsoft wasn't enough already.
The form factor (screen and touch interface) was already standard since the first Palm rose to success.
(Apple's minor improvement was to be among the first with multi-touch, thank to their "capacitive touch interface" port-folio, licensed from Synaptics and used on iPod touch-wheels)
The Palm Tungsten I had in my pocket that day already had this form factor and was already old by that time.
Network access ? Has always been the staple of PDAs. Starting from the venerable Psion (using compact-flash modules), through Palm both for wifi
(Wifi SDIO modules, then later built-in) and for cell (IrDA tethering, Bluetooth Tethering, cell modules on Visor, and finally built-in cell capability with Palm Centro and such).
By the time the iPhone was announced, every single PDA (either running PalmOS or WinCE) could go online, either wifi or cell.
The only thing that Apple brought is marketing the same old concept but to masses. Before, PDA tended to be market more toward business, academics and doctors. Random people tended to have durable dump phones (Nokia) or feature phone (exemple like RAZR).
Apple's iPhone is the first that was marketed toward Joe Six-pack. (Tough before, other companies like Tapwave tried unsuccessfully to enter other market like the PDA/hanheld console hybrid Zodiac geared toward college students).
That, and managing to completely ruin the idea of battery endurance (iPhone 1 couldn't even get through the day on a single charge. Dumb phone could go between a week and a month depending on which (user-replaceable) battery was used. Most PDA could hold about a couple of days).
Apps ? PalmOS almost single-handedly invented the concept of apps.
Apple's only "invention" (actually drawback) was to leverage their iTunes platform to impose 1 single walled garden with no way to get apps from anywhere else.
And actually, You might not be remembering, but 3rd-party apps only arrived much later on. Initially Apple opinion was : either only our own apps, or 3rd mobile websites, no other choice.
Photography is the only actual field where Apple really helped things move forward.
Before, it was either crappy webcam on feature phone with minimalist possibilities (save them on the bult-in memory, send them by MMS/eMail/Bluetooth/IrDA),
or *very few* PDAs (as most PDAs where marketed toward business use, very few had built-in camera. Sony Clie was among the exceptions. A few add-ons did exist but with very limited real-world use).
As Apples' smartphone was more geared toward the general public, it made sense to equip it with some photo capabilities.
Of course that being Apple, they couldn't introduce it without yet another major step back : No. Fucking. External. Storage.
Whereas most of the industry was standardizing on SD cards for PDAs (some even featuring dual slots) - (With Sony's memory stick being the only usual exception), iPhone didn't have any slot or extension ports.
Oh and another step back : Bluetooth only used for wireless audio. No way to use bluetooth to send the photos. Basically, Apple tried to put a cam that didn't suck too much on the iPhone, but then locked in all the pictures.
So over all, Apple just re-heated an already existing concept PDA, managed to market it to wider masses (so iPhone is basically to PDAs and smartphone, what Wii is to home consoles), while still fucking up quite a few point (but never mind, the masses weren't using PDAs before and won't notice the missing stuff) and make people thing they actually started the whole concept.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
California Barbeque all the Applephiles & Apple Bashers
That might even make Slashdot relevant again.
> However that was done by marketing, not by innovation.
That's not entirely true. The Apple's 381th Patent for inertial scrolling was a game changer. Adding physics to UI was absolutely brilliant.
Inertial scrolling was invented by Bas Ording. He has worked at Apple since 1998 as an User Interface Designer.
Reference:
* The Apple patent Steve Jobs fought hard to protect
* Who invented inertial scrolling on iOS
It's worth noting that this only really applies to the US market and US smartphone makers had a tiny share of the market prior to the iPhone. Nokia alone had 76% of the market and did well selling feature phones and a few smartphones via carriers, but most of their smartphones direct to customers.
The big difference between Apple and Nokia's offerings was in the userland programming environment. Nokia started with the best mobile development platform from mobile devices back when 256KB of RAM was a lot, and slowly evolved it to adapt to the world where 4MB was a lot. By the time 64MB was a lot they really had to throw it away and start again, but their internal corporate structure meant that they ended up with half a dozen replacements competing and couldn't get much traction with third-party apps.
In contrast, Apple started with the best workstation programming environment from the early '90s[1] when 8MB of RAM was enough and ripped out some of the optimisations that traded programmer effort for memory efficiency. This put them in a good position to encourage third-party developers and they also set up a better distribution channel.
Nokia smartphones could run third-party apps (they wouldn't be smartphones if they couldn't), but they rarely did. The smartphone app market prior to the iPhone 2 was similar to the mainframe software market prior to System/360: almost every new model from each vendor required you to port, if not completely rewrite, your code. This is the big change that iOS and Android caused, and the LG Prada contributed nothing to this shift.
[1] Seriously. If you haven't read the OpenStep specification, you should. It's a beautiful piece of API design. It's a little bit dated now, but I've not seen anything since that manages to be as concise and clear and uniform. Cocoa has accumulated some cruft since then, but the core ideas are there. Unfortunately, since Steve Naroff retired there's no one in Apple's toolchain group left that actually understands what made Objective-C a good language.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Queueing is also an interesting word as it's the only English word you might actually use (there are some really obscure ones depending on your dictionary) with 5 consecutive vowels. Of course, your dictionary (and Chrome) may also list queuing as an alternate spelling.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
THERE ALREADY WERE SMARTPHONES when the iPhone was introduced. You think Apple would have even GLANCED at the fucking smartphone market if it wasn't a proven market already?
Just like iPod -- there were already successful MP3 players for YEARS before the iPod.
Apple is like the Party in the book 1984. First they claim the smartphone. Next the helicopter. Someday they'll claim the fucking wheel.
Smartphones and their apps track and trace peoples purchases, movements, social groups, etc. Apple itself is but a small portion of it but they created a surveillance ecosystem.
Google (Hint: the maker of Android) reads your mail, tracks your browser history, your shopping habits and your movements among other things. I'm pretty sure Apple is an amateur convention compared to Google when it comes to monitoring every single thing their customers do.
Actually, Apple has, and continues to, take great steps to NOT track you.
Even when they want anonymized statistical data, they have instituted cutting-edge techniques to separate the data from the user's, or device's, IDs. Here's some examples:
https://www.wired.com/2016/06/...
https://www.theverge.com/2016/...
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.c...
The iPhone was a truly disruptive product. It really had set other phone manufacturers back to the drawing-board and took a couple of years before they could come up with a decent competing devices.
When the iPhone came out Blackberry was the gold standard in smart phones, And other competing phones were a copy of that or a laptop with tiny keys. Android was still in development. But its design was focused on a system with a keyboard and non-multitouch.
When the iPhone came out. It forced all the companies to Change or Die.
It really change the face of Phones to the glass square. Is what we lost from the old phone worth what we gained with the iPhone designs, and should Apple still deserve to keeps its dominance well that is up for debate. But you can't just poo-poo the fact that the iPhone changed how we use mobile devices and phones.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
In Canada, the situation was so bad, that for the first 6 months of the iPhone, you needed to go to T-Mobile in the U.S. and bring back a phone and roam on it. When the iPhone was taken up by one carrier, they charged nosebleed prices for the data plan, it was still cheaper to roam.
Breaking through the carrier situation was an enormous change in the industry. Before that happened, the customer was the telco and the product was a tool to lock customers into contracts. You had to pay to upload a ringtone. You had to pay to download a photo. You had to pay to use USB. It was criminal.
The Register as usual has nothing positive to say about Apple, Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak. Reason being is that a long time ago The Register was barred from an Apple event because of some particularly snarky comments and Andrew Orlowski has never forgotten about it. I guess a brit reporter bounced from a free piss-up is someone not to be trifled with. This being example of what reporter Chris Mellor took from a recent press conference:
.. unquote
..
.. the communication between sales and marketing is sometimes a problem too within a company. But when I joined FusionIO and I had one year where I was in my office everyday. I went on every sales call I could. I wanted to hear what the customers wanted ..
..
..
...'
Chris Mellor 28 Jun 2017 at 03:03: "The Apple wizard that was, Steve Wozniak, Stephen Gary Wozniak, age 66, is sitting right next to Lance as Primary's chief scientist. Primary's execs can hardly contain themselves. Look who we have on board, they quietly beamed. Beat that, you other startups.
Then it's the Apple II designer's turn to talk. We hold our breath. And he engages Woz waffle mode. It's a pleasure to talk to us. We're thanked for taking the time to come visit. He joined Primary Data, and he'd liked FusionIO, because the company visions matched his ideas. The thing is to keep stuff simple. Kick out the middle stuff. Keep it simple and as direct as you can, by design. That was it, basically."
Now lets see a part of what Steve Wozniak actually said: The Hive - Steve Wozniak, Dave Hitz & Lance Smith
11:41: Wozniak: 'Well you know what, when we started Apple, we didn't exactly have the culture of a big company. But we felt, the few of us that were there, it was important to hire professional people who knew what they were doing, not to remain just a couple of kids. And we also had this feeling that we were on top of a revolution, we had a great product. It was going to be the seeds of making something important in the world. So for the next two years almost nobody ever left. I mean we felt we were something important in the world. And I don't know if that's the culture that remains today but I'm sure it's a big seed of it
17:39 Wozniak:
19:12 Wozniak: But Apple made a lot of mistakes too putting out products like, ten years too early, five years too early. If you miss the timing because of the price and the value, that can hurt you too
19:37 Wozniak: Even as an engineer, all my life was getting good at reducing the complexity, reducing the size, reducing the cost. Because I had no money. Having no money and not having done it before were the two greatest thing I ever did
20:17 Wozniak: First of all you gotta have some engineering and talent that knows how to built it. And you should not conceive your product thinking then I'll go and get the engineering once I have the idea. The idea and some knowledge of building parts and what can't be made. People who have spent their life as makers, completing, really developing working prototypes and models of things, should be included in the starting team and you gotta have customer support. Somebody on your starting team is a customer. That absolutely lived there and knows what they want, what's good and what's bad and they also gotta have some good thinking. They can't have been just there, they gotta be like a person who really wants things to be right and not wrong. And not anything works anything is good, no. And I think you need those three people, they could all be in one person, or they could be two people or three, but you really need that in a founding team