What people said about the iPhone 9 years ago | Hacker News Reader

What people said about the iPhone 9 years ago

garry.posterous.com

26 pointsj_baker23 comments

Critique Steve what you will. Point out iPad's lacking features what you will... The point to learn from decades of digital naysayers who proved clueless is:

Predicting how people will use (and how many will buy) is not as easy as it looks. No where as easy as Monday morning quarterbacking. And Apple/Steve certainly have no 100% track record. But they have batted >.500 - in a ballgame (CE & PCs) where batting >.300 is impressive.

Plus... it's naive (IMHO) to consider iPad 1.0 as a static target. With the Release Event behind them you can safely bet they are working on rounding out expanded features for iPad 1.x, 2.0, etc. And (reliable or not) as the following AppleInsider article suggests Apple has probably held back additional features and target audiences:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/29/apple_to_targe...

If you try to predict the long-term success of iPad based on 1.0 you just don't get it.

This reminds me of a point I heard someone make about (I think) a Heinlein novel. Heinlein (or whoever :)) had predicted the widespread use of telephone answering machines. Their point is that this was kind of easy to do - but what Heinlein also did was predict that people would use them to screen phone calls (in the book, the character hears his Dad call in, and picks up the phone and says something like "I'm in for you, Dad.")

The point is that predicting how people will use stuff is the hard part (as you say).

Good idea: Comparing criticism at the iPad's introduction to criticism at the iPod's introduction

Bad idea: Cherry-picking quotes that are catchy at best, like those that complain that new product did not meet unfounded expectations

Worst idea: Saying iPhone instead of iPod.

Yeah.... I submitted this on my iPhone. I'd edit it if I could.

I don't mind continuing to discuss the iPad, but really? We've had the exact same commentary posted in at least five different articles on HN. If we want to talk about the iPad, fine, but I don't see why there's a need to keep having articles referencing how much people hated the iPod when it came out. The points been made. We can criticize, condemn, laud, all we want, now we just have to sit back and see how it does.

You probably mean "iPod" - not "iPhone".

Don't forget about the classic Slashdot commentary...

>>No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257#to...

To be fair the iPod wasn't very good when it first came out. Criticism was warranted. Yes, it evolved to dominate the market, but that doesn't mean every new product that Apple comes out with will follow the exact same path of success.

Criticism is always warranted.

The pitfall though, is that most geeks criticize the spec sheet. And in the case of the iPod and iPhone, the spec-list criticism --though still absolutely valid-- was wholly irrelevant.

It seems if Apple had held no event and released no videos, simply mailed out a PDF of specs and photos, 90% of the reaction to this device would be identical.

And it would be just as useful in determining whether users ultimately adopted the device or not.

I think that's the point. The first iPhones were nothing special either. Apple's first products are usually "minimum viable products". They provided a springboard for future products to launch from.

Proof you can't listen to the commentators and the haters. You must continue to work on your product with extreme focus. It's easy to armchair criticize things, but hard to deliver. So... deliver. - golden words

Just because some people on a forum laughed at the iPod when it launched doesn't make the iPad awesome.

Hindsight is 20-20. I wonder how many on this forum would have said the same thing about iPod as these guys did.

I resisted the iPod b/c of it's closed system for many years. That's what I didn't like about it when it came out but eventually my resistance was eroded. I broke down and got one and haven't looked back.

Today Apple has become the dominant player in tech when they used to be a niche player. It still amazes me. There is no Pepsi to Apple's Coke. Google could be it but they seem to be wavering as of late, pun intended.

Think you are right there. The competition somehow get it soo wrong - they need to up their game.

I've seen variations of this article so many times, where are the counter examples? What were people saying about the Apple TV, Macbook Air or any other failure you can think of when it was first announced? The moral here isn't "The iPad will end up being good, too" as so many people I have seen take from it, just that it's hard to predict what will be a commercial success based on stats, or more frankly, how good it is.

Not sure why the Macbook Air is considered such a big failure. Do you have any data that supports this? I don't, but anecdotally they don't seem to be a major flop. We have a number of MBAs in our team, and everyone using them are very happy with them. They still seem to sell when I go into a Mac store.

I mentioned it only based on what I had heard from my own coworkers and such. Most of the data I'm looking up now show it being a moderate success commercially, albeit with declining profits. My point remains, though, as I don't think the majority of the comments made about it at the time of unveiling were predicting "moderate success".

I would think the iPad will be successful but that isn't what worries me.

The path apple is going down with locked down systems and being succesful with that approach kinda scares me.

I just think: "Why 2010 will be like 1984."

Wait...

1. Copy/paste text from forums

2. Post to blog

3. Profit???

You forgot step 0:

0. Invent an enormous blogging platform and be an all-around cool guy

Garry links frequently get my auto-upvote.

People said it was just another uninteresting mp3 player. They were right, no?

Didn't the iPod rise to market leader have far more to do with marketing than any performance merit?

No, it became the market leader by ignoring the feature race and creating a device that was usable by "normal people." It wasn't the samllest, or the biggest screen, or the most storage, but Apple grew the market to include everyone, not just gadget freaks.

The clickwheel and iTunes sofware were part of the equation, and the iTunes store was the other. If I had told you nine years ago that your nontechnical family members would soon be downloading music from the internet and playing it on their portable device, would you have believed it? Would any amount of marking have gotten them to use a Diamond Rio and MusicMatch?

> usable by "normal people."

I haven't owned an iPod, but I remember setting a couple up for my family on a PC. It was NOT some cakewalk. I hit problems and syncing later broke.

There was never anything notably usable about the ipod vs. competing models, especially those with the "drop the mp3 files on the usb drive" approach.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com