The iPhone Turns 10 (economist.com) 278
"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."
How many actual users? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does anyone have a metric on how many unique iPhone users are out there?
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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.
What? The used market for most smart phones much less the iPhone is terrible as newer models generally make the old ones obsolete. Especially in the Android market where updates stop much earlier than Apple's ecosystem. These days you can keep a phone longer than 3 years with iOS and might have updates still coming.The oldest phone compatible with the upcoming iOS 11 is the 5S which was released Sept 2013. With Android it has always been "depends"**
**Mileage may vary with manufacturer, model, version, and
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not sure what you mean by old models are "obsolete"
While the hardware may be fine for some (most?) usecases and even the OS may still be getting updates, the market share of iPhone 5 and older is less than 10% of all iPhones in current use. So while the device may be OK for your purposes, you're certainly in the minority.
I think you will find that a lot of older iPhones, at least back to the 4s, are still in use as music players, kids' game platforms, remote-controls, and other non-cellphone-related uses.This tends to skew the statistics.
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A year ago? Then I guess the blame is all on you isn't it? A year ago Android 6 was already old news. Why did you buy it?
Because it was the best rated 7-8" tablet at the time. It replaced my broken Nexus 7 which is probably the best 7-8" tablet ever made and had excellent support, but Google stopped making tablets that size.
As lousy as support from Asus is, it seems to be better than Samsung's - my friend has a Galaxy Tab that never got an upgrade off of 4. But neither of them can old a candle to Apple. Our four-year-old 4th gen iPad is still chugging along just fine running iOS 10.
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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.
What? The used market for most smart phones much less the iPhone is terrible as newer models generally make the old ones obsolete. Especially in the Android market where updates stop much earlier than Apple's ecosystem. These days you can keep a phone longer than 3 years with iOS and might have updates still coming.The oldest phone compatible with the upcoming iOS 11 is the 5S which was released Sept 2013. With Android it has always been "depends"**
**Mileage may vary with manufacturer, model, version, and carrier.
Well, regardless of the market for used iPhones, at least it has one. Android, OTOH, doesn't have a used market; because Android phones are almost always obsolete, at least software-wise, even before they are released.
Re:How many actual users? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone have a metric on how many unique iPhone users are out there?
There are roughly 700 million iPhones [fortune.com] in active use. About 200 million of those are 2nd hand.
Roughly 60% of the people in the world, or about 5 billion people, have a cell phone (more than have toilets). But many of those are not smartphones.
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Does anyone have a metric on how many unique iPhone users are out there?
There are roughly 700 million iPhones in active use. About 200 million of those are 2nd hand.
That is an interesting estimate, though it doesn't say much about the number of users. We don't know how many of those are in the hands of people who own multiple iPhones, how many are work phones, etc. It's a good start but not complete.
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You're claiming that over 60% of all iPhones /ever/ sold are still in use? That seems pretty unlikely.
60% seems reasonable to me. Keep in mind that iPhone popularity has grown, so way more current models are manufactured than iPhone-1 and iPhone-2. So those old phones may be retired, but there just weren't that many of them.
When my wife got a new iPhone, she gave her old one to our daughter. My daughter gave her old one to me. I donated my old one to Goodwill, who, I presume, sold it to someone else.
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I can tell the you're going to make a very critical marketing decision based on whatever answer some random Internet person gives you, so good luck!
I hope you get your answer, and that it's accurate! If you are thinking of making a plastic iPhone holder or an app that tells you whether reddit is up or down at the moment, and there is a 402 million person market for it, your development expense may be justified, but if there are only 216 million possible customers, you're never going to make back your inves
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They forgot to mention two important contributions (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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And certainly, someone else would have combined all this into one device eventually regardless of whether or not Apple was the first to do it in a
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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.
Mods? Dear GOD! How is the Parent "Insightful"???
More like "INsightful", as in TROLLISH!
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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.
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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.
Re: They forgot to mention two important contribut (Score:4, Interesting)
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/... [wired.com]
https://www.theverge.com/2016/... [theverge.com]
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.c... [sophos.com]
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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.
Oh, and what would that be?
If you are referring to iAds, that ENDED. And nothing else fits your meme.
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I'm not sure what you mean by surveillance state.
Apples security record has been very impressive. The latest iPhones are probably the most secure mass produced device ever. They are made so even apple can't get the data, and neither can governments.
This. This. A BEELION times, This...
Saw the iPhone @ MacWorld Expo 2007 (Score:3)
iPhone is better than everything before it (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
iPhones contributions to humanity (IMHO) (Score:5, Interesting)
- 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.
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- 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.
-Convince people to spend $700 on a phone.
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PDA predates (Score:2)
PDAs were already doing this for quite some time.
Make a complex pocket-sized super-computer usable for normal people
done by PDAs for decade by this point. They weren't designed for highly technical people neither.
The only details is that PDAs were usually marketed toward business, students, doctors, etc.
Apple marketed their to Joe Random.
Put a proper webbrowser into a pocket sized device
...ever heard of Opera Mini ?
Though yes theirs was a bit better than what was available elsewhere.
implement the concept of an online marketplace for software (henceforth called "Apps" - short and poignant so everyone can use the word)
Wut ?
The well developped PalmOS apps ecosystem that existed before begs to differ.
Apple's actual only success is managing to lock the users i
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I used Nokia smartphones several years before iPhone, with a real browser and running other desktop similar tasks (watching videos, listening mp3, playing really cool games).
The marketplace idea existed before in Debian based distros (mainly Ubuntu with a proper catalog software, but not nicely implemented as Apple one).
Kill flash: yes, but the reason why they've made it was because Flash is terrible with touch, and with Flash in browser, basically you'd have access to many games that they expect to see in
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The iPhone didn't have apps when it launched. It was only because other phones had apps and everyone wanted them for the iPhone that they added the capability later.
The first iPhone was extremely basic. You couldn't even set the wallpaper. Only Apple software, no third party apps. The hardware of the day was not really up to the task - the available CPUs and RAM that could run for a reasonable time off a battery were just not very good. But Apple hid it well, carefully limiting the functions of the phone an
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Let us not forget the most important feature of the Pocket PC, though: the reset hole on the back of every device. Be sure to keep a paperclip handy, so you can stick it in the reset hole every couple of hours to reset your device.
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No. Obviously, you never owned a PocketPC or Windows CE device. The reset hole was a DAILY occurrence. Some devices even came with the tool to stick in the hole. Some devices just had a recessed button.
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. Most namely the Pocket PC and Windows CE, before the iPhone Windows Mobile and Pocket PC "apps" were sold by the millions through PocketGear and Handango, which were third party app stores that existed for many years.
And if you had Windows CE at the time, you would know how terrible it was.
These devices were open like Android as far as customization and installation, had web browsers, all kinds of apps and devices, there were even add on hard drives for them.
Oh many phones even some dumb phones had web browsers but they were all crap. Browsing was painful at best.
PalmOS (Score:2)
Most namely the Pocket PC and Windows CE, before the iPhone Windows Mobile and Pocket PC "apps" were sold by the millions through PocketGear and Handango, which were third party app stores that existed for many years.
And before that PalmOS had a tremedous success.
A better question is (Score:2)
what might have been created if the iPhone never came out. Their usage model was very good, and became dominant. What might have been instead if it never came to be? Maybe someone would have come up with a holographic display like star wars had? Or some other compeltely different concept? Might have been better, might have been worse. Think silicon/GaAs. Because silicon was so dominant and so much money was thrown at it, GaAs never got a chance.
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Think silicon/GaAs.Because silicon was so dominant and so much money was thrown at it, GaAs never got a chance.
You've reversed the premise and and the conclusion. Silicon is dominant because it is more abundant and cheaper. Thus more money is thrown at it. Silicon is the 2nd most abundant element (26%) after oxygen (46%). Gallium is 35th with (0.0019%) . Arsenic is in trace amounts at 0.00021%. Add to that, arsenic is more toxic to work with, there's a reason why GaAs isn't leading.
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What makes a question that can't be answered better in any way?
Because if you DO manage to answer it, you might learn where things went wrong for any particular action or event.
The original iPhone is actually 12 (Score:2)
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then we'll explain it to you young-uns. The first smartphone to work with iTunes was made by Motorola. the iPhone was revolutionary because of...exactly nothing.
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And I don't think "iTunes syncing capbility" is worth the toilet paper I wipe my ass with as a feature. It certainly doesn't define what a smartphone is.
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oh I'll agree about the iTunes...but that's the kind of marketing hype that made the iphone
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You're using today's standards, young-un. ROKR had a browser, games, email and MMS messaging (photos, music, video)
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Apple does not like to be reminded but the original iPhone was made by Motorola and it was called the ROKR. [wikipedia.org]
Nothing about that makes any sense.
Well the ROKR did have a castrated version of iTunes installed and if you are a girlfriendless cellar dweller who's only purpose in life is to cook up conspiracy theories about Apple you can probably rationalise that into some kind of conspiracy. You might have to dink a keg of beer and smoke a bunch of weed and maybe finish by dropping some acid but you'd get into the zone eventually.
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That's just it. Between Motorola and LG there was a definite trend towards removing the buttons, and making a phone that is all screen.
What Apple did do was jump in head first without checking the water depth or looking for sharks. They took a gamble going straight to the end rather than slowly edging the market in this direction, and it paid off for them.
I think it's important to bring up... (Score:2)
Re:Who Cares? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, the important thing is that you've found a way to feel superior to both.
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"Que"??? The Spanish word for "what"? Huh?
CUE, you illiterate fool!!!
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it could also have been "queue"
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" Thousands of software developers would be poorer"
And millions would be richer if they hadn't wasted their time on apps and instead took a minimum wage job.
Also, it never "put the internet into everyone's pocket." Android has a far better claim to that. And this sort of overhyped starry-eyed bs is why so many people love to hate on Apple fanbois.
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Or "queue", as in they're going to line up to bash. But the article deserves to be bashed.
" Thousands of software developers would be poorer"
And millions would be richer if they hadn't wasted their time on apps and instead took a minimum wage job.
Also, it never "put the internet into everyone's pocket." Android has a far better claim to that. And this sort of overhyped starry-eyed bs is why so many people love to hate on Apple fanbois.
Android doesn't have a far better claim to anything except as a malware distribution platform par excellence!
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Cue them into the queue.
On a more topical note:
While I rather hate the iPhone and iOS walled garden way of doing things I do have to acknowledge that Jobs and Ive really did revolutionize the entire computing market.
iPhone didn't just change the handheld computing landscape, or just the cellular phone landscape, it also changed the datacenter landscape. I would go so far as to argue Facebook would not be what it is today (if it even existed) if the changes sparked by the iPhone didn't happen.
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Queue is an interesting word: it is the letter q, followed by four silent vowels.
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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.
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It's also a totally pointless letter - in English, anyway. Q is almost useless without a following "u", and yet it's sound is the same as "Kw". It's not as if it's a shortcut saving you from writing or typing out more letters.
On that note, "C", is pretty pointless too.. it does "S" and it does "K", but we already have those. "C" should just be used for the "Ch" sound, and drop the "h". But I digress.
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No, that doesn't make "que" an English word.
Let's check that... Que... chiefly Californian for barbeque... Que... abbreviation for Quebec... Looks like an English word to me.
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/que [dictionary.com]
It means no such thing since like your sex life, it doesn't exist.
Not sure how my sexuality (or lack thereof) is relevant to this discussion.
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No, that doesn't make "que" an English word.
Let's check that... Que... chiefly Californian for barbeque... Que... abbreviation for Quebec... Looks like an English word to me. http://www.dictionary.com/brow... [dictionary.com] [dictionary.com]
The OP was not talking about BBQs in French Canada though, was he?
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The OP was not talking about BBQs in French Canada though, was he?
I quoted the person who wrote that "que" wasn't an English word. A quick Google search proved that premise false.
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California Barbeque all the Applephiles & Apple Bashers
That might even make Slashdot relevant again.
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Next time you post Anonymous Coward, don't quote your actual user name in the copy and paste.
It's a bogus output with IP addresses that I've never used.
Or, you're trolling. Either way, it's stupid.
Yes to both.
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Fucking guy doesn't know what private networks are?
Actually, I do. That's why I was able to call bullshit on the output. None of those IPs corresponds with the IP ranges that I use. Not at home, not at work, not at my hosting provider. Trying to trick me into thinking that I've been hacked doesn't work.
Re:Who Cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The market was already moving in this direction (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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After the iPhone, every single smart phone is now like the iPhone.
Not entirely. Despite its flaws, at least the Android platform has avoided several artificial technical limitations. (Of course, avoiding malware because it cannot do much was not tremendously difficult for iOS.) But it is true that outside of these limitations, iDevices got closer to DynaBook than many previous attempts. It's just sad that Apple's policy effectively prevents them from ever becoming it.
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After the iPhone, every single smart phone is now like the iPhone.
Not entirely. Despite its flaws, at least the Android platform has avoided several artificial technical limitations. (Of course, avoiding malware because it cannot do much was not tremendously difficult for iOS.) But it is true that outside of these limitations, iDevices got closer to DynaBook than many previous attempts. It's just sad that Apple's policy effectively prevents them from ever becoming it.
Your dismissive reasoning behind the stark contrast between the malware picture on Android vs. iOS is both incorrect and oversimplified.
The entire Android security, OS updating, and software distribution model is broken, remains broken, and is unlikely to be improved before MILLIONS more users fall victim to its clearly inferior design and execution.
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I'm with you. Windows method is way too lax and broad, Linux is still clunky and complicated, just give me a desktop OS that has a phone-like permissions out-of-the-box. As long as I can override it as a superuser when necessary, I'd prefer all of my apps to be restricted to doing only what they ask me for permission to do first.
That's kind of what macOS has now.
Gatekeeper's defaults and macOS' warnings make it nearly impossible for a novice (or simply unwary) user to accidentally fall victim to malware. But despite that, if you have a SuperUser login/password, you are only a Right-Click away from overriding the Holodeck Safety Protocols, and installing/launching anything your little heart desires. And, if you want a more permanent change, you need only adjust Gatekeeper's settings for a more "relaxed" set of safety-protocols.
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Re:The market was already moving in this direction (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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,
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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
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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.
Just a little correction here. AT&T wasn't desperate. Cingular Wireless was desperate. They made the deal with Apple, but didn't happen fast enough to save them, and they were acquired by AT&T between the time that the iPhone was announced and the time it was released. I believe that Apple went to AT&T after being rebuffed by Verizon, only to get the same response.
So while the iPhone launched on AT&Ts network, it was only because AT&T bought Cingular and was forced to honor its contract,
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Yeah I should have clarified - AT&T was the only one desperate at the time. I mean, the wireless market was and is competitive but AT&T was the main one hurting.
It's true they would have gone on to the next desperate national carrier except I don't think there was one. But if all four major national carriers (in the USA anyway) were comfortable to the point of saying no li
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No, LG released something more or less identical to the first iPhone a few months before the latter was announced [wikipedia.org]. The market was definitely going in that direction.
More or less????
A LOT less, you mean.
Re:The market was already moving in this direction (Score:5, Insightful)
> However that was done by marketing, not by innovation.
That's not entirely true. The Apple's 381th Patent [uspto.gov] 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 [thenextweb.com]
* Who invented inertial scrolling on iOS [quora.com]
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But we'd had inertial scrolling on laptop touch-pads before this, not really a game changer to keep that function when you combine it with a screen.
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I am not an Apple fan. Not even close. I do agree that it was the iPhone that changed the market. However that was done by marketing, not by innovation.
Say that to the face of any of the engineers on the iPhone Project. I dare you.
Some of them practically lived at 1 Infinite Loop for the two-years that "Project Purple" was Priority #1.
That's not marketing, bub.
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There were "smart phones" before the iPhone.
I had one before I got an iPhone. It was always butt calling my boss whenever I got underneath a desk to disconnect/reconnect PCs on a PC refresh project. Never had that problem with the iPhone.
PDA (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Giving Apple credit for "inventing the smartphone as it exists today" is dishonest. The iPhone was very similar to "earlier designs", and Android was also being developed independently and in parallel (its release delayed by its acquisition by Google).
What set the iPhone apart from other high volume offerings was its use of a capacitive screen and lack of keyboard, reasonable choices for the consumer market, but not so good for the business market. Other vendors dropped the keyboard only once capacitive scr
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The first LG Prada was not a smartphone at all. Then again, the first iPhone was also so limited that some say it was not one either.
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No. That's fanboy reality distortion field BS.
The LG Prada smart phone was winning design awards almost a year before the Iphone was actually released, and the Iphone looked almost exactly like the Prada and used the same typical smart phone interface. The only arguments that the fanboys have come up with are qualitative claims, such as the Prada's web browser or touch screen was not as "good" as that of the Iphone, and such subjective claims are not only dubious, but they have nothing to do with the innovation of the smart phone.
Nope. The LG Prada beat the later Iphone, but neither LG nor Prada had the legion of blind followers that Apple had.
Apple has actually originated very little.
Sorry. The iPhone didn't look like the Prada (other than the fact that they are both rectangular); but the Samsung phone looked EXACTLY like the iPhone.
https://www.wired.com/2007/02/... [wired.com]
http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/1... [cnn.com]
So now what?
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Putting wifi on phones or handheld devices is obvious, and, saying "many smart phones didn't have wifi built-in at the time" means that some smart phones did have wifi at the time. So, Apple didn't "invent" wifi on the smart phone.
If it was so obvious why didn't the Prada have Wifi? if you are the one that praised the LG Prada, that seems like a huge technology feature that was missing.The problem which many people ignore and seem to forget that Wifi to put a smart phone was technically possible but also impractical without some engineering. The size of the wifi chip had to be shrunk down. The chips themselves were not as efficient as they are today. That's why many didn't have Wifi at the time.
The second part to overcome was the sof
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Again, you have already suggested that other manufacturers had wifi in their phones prior to the Iphone, so such a commercial release of prior art makes inclusion of wifi obvious to all other manufacturers. That is basic "product innovation 101" that, for some reason, Apple fan boys cannot understand.
And what you don't seem to understand is that being absolutely first does not exclusively lock down being innovative. Innovative can mean improving upon a design. Google wasn't the first search engine by years but it was far better than the predecessors.
wifi wasn't miniaturized enough for the earlier Prada phone, even though it would be obvious to include it, however wifi was smaller with the timing of the later Iphone. I doubt that this is actually the (only) reason wifi was not included as product development of advanced electronics is extremely complex.
Except that the Prada came out mid May 2007 while the iPhone came out late June 2007. It wasn't years earlier. It was 1 month earlier. Please tell me how Apple was able to miniaturize something to fit in a phone while LG didn't do it within a month. Or Apple
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Smart phones existed probably a decade before Apple. Did you have one?
Yup, actually I had my second smartphone when the iPhone came out.
Part of the problem was the earliest smart phones did not yet have the technology to be practical (Wifi, powerful yet efficient CPUs, etc).
The WiFi was fine and, unlike the first iPhone, it supported SIP calling out of the box. At the time, I was paying 30p/minute for mobile calls, 1p/minute for SIP calls, so the £50 smartphone paid for itself pretty quickly. The screen, on the other hand, was tiny and crap.
The other problem was that most of the UIs were thinly veiled desktop computer designs
No they weren't. The mostly ran Series 60, which was a direct descendant of Psion's EPOC UI, from early '90s palmtop computers. Windows Mobile's market share was a
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If I wanted to make a phone call, I pressed the green phone button under the screen and the number pad appeared on the screen.
Making a call wasn't the problem. If you were on a call and wanted to conference someone in (which happened a lot at work), how did you do that? Or forward a call. It wasn't obvious. It wasn't easy. I remember having to go to my desktop while on a call and using the web to find the answer. If I remember right, you had to tab out of the Call interface and then go to Settings and then down a few sub-menus.
I do remember when the iPhone was released and my needs were mainly for business. Unfortunately the first iteration of the iPhone was not designed with that in mind. It was more of a phone/iPod/web browser device from what I could tell. I ended up going with another Win phone with a touch screen and slider keyboard.
The first iPhones (and I would argue the iPhone in general) was never designed for businesses. Over time,
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Did Apple accelerate it?
Yes.
But don't try to sell me the Apple invented the smartphone bs.
They sure invented the Smartphone EVERYONE ELSE slavishly copied, and continue to slavishly copy, even to today.
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If Microsoft is Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, then Apple is Chase, Capture, Cripple.
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And if the smartphone hadn't already existed and had a million dollar market, Jobs wouldn't have given a microsecond of thought to considering entering the smartphone market.
If Microsoft is Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, then Apple is Chase, Capture, Cripple.
You're just saying he identified a need. So? He identified it before anyone else.
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"continue to dominate"?
Have you seen their market share? they don't in any way dominate, they have a small fraction of the smartphone market, and I don't think there has been a single time in the entire 10 year run where the iPhone has been "ahead" of the competition in terms of any functionality.
Apple has had only one solitary success, they are geniuses at marketing. They can make people think their products are better than they are, make people pay a premium for an inferior product, and inspire a cult-lik
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Have you seen their market share? they don't in any way dominate, they have a small fraction of the smartphone market, and I don't think there has been a single time in the entire 10 year run where the iPhone has been "ahead" of the competition in terms of any functionality.
They dominate in profit margin, which is a lot more important than market share.
Apple has had only one solitary success, they are geniuses at marketing. They can make people think their products are better than they are, make people pay a premium for an inferior product, and inspire a cult-like brand loyalty that any other company would envy.
Better is a matter of perspective. My wife has had several cheap Android phones, and they were all difficult to use. I finally bought her an iPhone 5s and she uses it much more than the Android phone, and I spend much less time doing "tech support" as I used to. In my opinion, that's better.
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> earth shattering" change?
Well, they had the courage to remove the headphone jack, this is earth shattering!
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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)
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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.
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*shudders at the thought of that android I tried for a short bit*
When? Early versions of Android was an ugly mess, but 4.0 was a massive redesign. Also, was it "stock" Android, or some manufacturer customization? And was it a flagship, or some low-end device?