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Comment by wmeredith | Hacker News Reader

Apple's MO is getting beaten to the punch by everything, then they figure out how to do it better and more profitably and release.

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Some reviewers still believe the S7 is a better camera, other than the optical zoom:

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-iphone-7-plus-galaxy-s7...

We'll see. My girlfriend got the iPhone 7 on launch day but hasn't done much with the camera as yet.

But iPhones aren't catching fire.

Neither is S7.

Yeah, that's really entirely tangential to the issue being discussed.

Since I know this is a polarizing topic, I feel compelled to note that neither myself nor my girlfriend own a single Samsung product other than a 40" TV.

For most of the iPhone camera comparison articles, I'm curious if the reviewers are disabling Live Photos before taking the shots. It's well documented that Live Photos increases noise in the still capture due to a faster shutter speed.

I'm not saying Apple products are bad, but I would still argue that what they do is sell things better, not necessarily execute better. So more profitable, for sure.

The original iPhone was so much better executed than the competition that it was ridiculous. The iPhone was the device that convinced everyone that they needed a smartphone. It took many generations of phones before Android really caught up. And none of the original competitors even survived.

So yes, Apple is better at selling. It's also at least sometimes better at executing.

I'll agree that the original iPhone was an exception, but not in the way you claim. The first iPhone was (basically) first at the smartphone market. But was it good? Hell no. It was extremely buggy, slow, no app store, could barely make phone calls. While I'll agree there was no worthwhile competitor until Nexus One came along and set the standard, Android surpassed iOS fairly quickly in features, and hasn't lossed the lead there yet, while speeds have been fairly equal for years.

The iPhone was not the first in the market. Smartphones had been around for years at that point. It's just that no one really bought them. The iPhone effectively created it's own market by expanding it so much, but it wasn't first by a long shot.

I'm sure the original iPhone had issues, but it was still better than the stuff it replaced. Especially a year or two later when the 3G and then 3GS landed. The 3GS was not buggy or slow. It made good phone calls and had an app store. Meanwhile Android was still trash and none of the original competitors were catching up.

Android did catch up on paper quickly. It took a much longer time before it caught up in reality. Android for a long time was very slow, the UI felt amateur, and all the hardware felt cheap. I remember several generations in, finding that Angry Birds still lagged and froze on brand new Android hardware.

I had an original iphone and I remember it a lot differently. Blackberry owned the world, if you had a business smartphone it was almost certainly a BB.

iPhone was a phenomenon. There was no app store because there were no apps. An unlimited-everything plan on AT&T (iphone's only carrier) was $120/month.

I remember phone calls working just fine - it was my main/only phone while I was doing a lot of remote consulting and I don't remember problems at all. "Slow" is relative - I came from a blackberry and never looked back.

There were a ton of apps for the original iPhone if you jailbroke. There was no App Store because Apple didn't originally plan on supporting any third-party apps. Jobs stood up in front of five thousand developers and pitched his "sweet solution" of building HTML5 "apps" that ran in Safari. Then everybody pitched a fit and Apple hastily threw together an SDK, then released the App Store in iPhone OS 2 the next year.

It was the first modern smartphone because it completely redefined what a smartphone should be.

Monetizing was Apple's success, but in the early iPhones, I'd argue it was a lot of carry over from iTunes. Apple forced you to have an Apple ID, and associated with the Apple ID meant they could seamlessly sell you things and charge you for it. At the time, no one else had this position and it made a huge impact for the iPhone as a successful device in a rapidly changing landscape (phone as phone -> phone as device to buy from carrier/provider -> phone as device to buy from marketplace).

Also: "none of the original competitors even survived"? Are you talking about tech like Sidekick here? Samsung/LG were big players in early Android, and they're obviously still around. There's a huge amount of discussion around BlackBerry, Nokia (Symbian), and Windows - but to say that none of the original competitors even survived feels hyperbolic.

> Monetizing was Apple's success, but in the early iPhones, I'd argue it was a lot of carry over from iTunes. Apple forced you to have an Apple ID, and associated with the Apple ID meant they could seamlessly sell you things and charge you for it.

I'm not clear what you mean with this. Apple made you create an Apple ID in order to use an iPhone. Whether you had an existing one because of iTunes didn't matter, because you absolutely had one if you were using an iPhone.

> Also: "none of the original competitors even survived"? Are you talking about tech like Sidekick here? Samsung/LG were big players in early Android, and they're obviously still around. There's a huge amount of discussion around BlackBerry, Nokia (Symbian), and Windows - but to say that none of the original competitors even survived feels hyperbolic.

Android didn't exist when the iPhone launched. Nokia is dead. Blackberry is basically dead. Windows Mobile died and was replaced with Windows Phone which is also nearly dead. There's no hyperbole here.

If you did have an iTunes account, you were prime for an iPhone purchase. That demographic had a clean experience of buying a mobile device that was super-capable (someone could pretty much out-of-the-box sell you things, without having ask for information - like a cc #). None of the existing devices had this, and it would be a long time until anyone was even close. I don't think this is a point of disconnect, I was highlighting one of the sometimes overlooked (imo) aspects of Apple's longer-term execution that I think made an impact.

Fair point on the competitors. It's hard to ignore Android as a competitor, and I might disagree with saying that Android wasn't an "original" competitor. But if you mean original as "existing at launch time", I'll happily agree (But by that definition, iPhone isn't a [original] competitor to Nokia/Blackberry/Windows, it just happened to destroy them - EDIT - it's a fair distinction).

> If you did have an iTunes account, you were prime for an iPhone purchase. That demographic had a clean experience of buying a mobile device that was super-capable (someone could pretty much out-of-the-box sell you things, without having ask for information - like a cc #). None of the existing devices had this, and it would be a long time until anyone was even close. I don't think this is a point of disconnect, I was highlighting one of the sometimes overlooked (imo) aspects of Apple's longer-term execution that I think made an impact.

I'm not sure I see this as a significant factor. When the iPhone launched, there was no app store. There was no iCloud, no iBooks. The only thing you could buy with the CC# Apple had for you was music, which you were already buying with iTunes.

Maybe having a CC# associated with your account helped Apple later when they launched an app store, but by that time their competitors were doing the same.

> Fair point on the competitors. It's hard to ignore Android as a competitor, and I might disagree with saying that Android wasn't an "original" competitor. But if you mean original as "existing at launch time", I'll happily agree.

Well, the first Android device to ship was the HTC Dream, and that was over a year after the iPhone shipped, so by definition it was not an original competitor. Also, if you had tried a Dream, you'd likely not have thought it was very competitive with the iPhone 3G that was out by that time. (I tried one and was utterly unimpressed.)

> But by that definition, iPhone isn't a competitor to Nokia/Blackberry/Windows, it just happened to destroy them

In the same way that Google wasn't a competitor with Excite and Infoseek and Yahoo Search but just happened to utterly destroy them? I think if your product destroys the market for another product, that other product is the (obviously losing) competition.

Android existed but wasn't released yet when iPhone launched.

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