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Comment by bipson | Hacker News Reader

I had to exit at this quote:

Apple’s goal was not to build a phone but to build an even more personal computer; their strategy was not to add on functionality to a phone but to reduce the phone to an app; and their tactics were not to duplicate the carriers but to leverage their connection with customers to gain concessions from them.

I disagree here, this is hindsight and speculative, and the provided link is from 2013. The initial iPhone did not come with a market (the 'iTunes App Store') and AFAIK we don't know for sure if it had been planned from the beginning to pan out the way it did.

I am not trying to play down the success of the iPhone and how it has changed the world. Yes, it was incredibly successful, yes it all panned out nicely. I am just questioning if it was all planned to come out exactly this way from the beginning, or maybe there were some decisions made after initial success and someone came up with even better ideas.

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Ben Thompson(the author of stratechery) is a smart guy, but his free articles, even though that they seem deep, do lack domain/technical knowledge. I've noticed that on the subjects of self-driving-cars, car-sharing and now on logistics/delivery/e-commerce - notice how abstract and detail free this article is.

But actually, that could be a great content authoring strategy: create a really good, smart name for yourself. write articles that the smart people of the internet like to read. give them the wrong answer, they will be forced to correct you. collect replies(including those from you your closed forum) and grab the right answer. publish and charge.

Don't know if that's the strategy. But it could work.

> give them the wrong answer, they will be forced to correct you.

Before Stack Overflow, the savvy knew that this was a great way to get help with anything Unix-related. If you just went to Usenet or mailing lists and asked "how do I X?", you'd be pummeled by uppity greybeards going "RTFM, n00b". Ah, but if you created a sockpuppet and posted the wrong answer in reply to your question, then you'd be guaranteed to get useful advice.

Yep, that's definitely Cunningham's Law [0] in action.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Cunningham.27s...

Ha! I never knew it had a name. I thought I independently discovered this phenomenon, but I guess it's so obvious others realized it too.

Wow, this is genius. Makes so much sense.

Variation on that was to say something like, "Linux sucks! It won't do x." If the answers weren't sufficiently straight-forward, you could follow up with, "It's so much easier on MS!" Required a thick skin though.

" Ah, but if you created a sockpuppet and posted the wrong answer in reply to your question, then you'd be guaranteed to get useful advice."

I've gotten some great information on forums like this doing exactly that. I usually pose it as a challenging assertion or question rather than a statement of a fact I'm sure about. Gotta balance using that for it's benefit vs effects on one's own reliability.

It's really cherry picking and reverse engineering good outcomes at it's best. Sure Palm said this and that. What about all the thousands of others companies that paid no heed to some potential business threat and made out fine? The thing that appeared to maybe be a big threat that didn't ever happen? You can't protect and spend time on all possibilities. It's like trying to block all acts of terrorism. [1]

[1] Which is what happens after an event it then seems as if someone should have known in advance it could have happened the way that it did and taken steps to prevent it from happening the way that it did.

I distinctly remember the way Steve Jobs presented it: "It's a phone, it's an iPod, and it's an Internet communications device."

That just comes off to me as though even he didn't realize how ubiquitous phones would become, and how integral to our lives they would become, even replacing computers for so many tasks. It's my phone, my iPod, my work outside of office hours, schedules and times my workouts, my alarm clock, my camera, my GPS and mapbook, my library, my notebook, my flashlight, my scanner, my TV, the way I look at cat pictures and the way I look up where to find an AED in an emergency.

"There will be web dialtone everywhere." – Steve Jobs, 1996

– https://www.wired.com/1996/02/jobs-2/

I found the school voucher idea to be the best part of that article. I didn't know the cost was so close for some of those public and private schools:

"I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I've seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers—so it's not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.

If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, "Let's start a school." You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they'd start schools. And you'd have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies."

> I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.

> If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left.

But if the public spends $4,400, that's not what goes to the school, since the total includes state and district oversight that is outside of the school.

This money would not be available to alternative schools unless you are suggesting that they should receive public funds without equal accountability.

Im just quoting it in case knowledgeable people show up with links to good info, proposals, or precedents. I haven't done research on it myself. I'm not suggesting anything since Im not informed enough on the topic. :)

Fine, assuming that the accountability overhead is 10% over the cost of actually doing the job and maintaining the facilities, so get a $4000 voucher.

Personally I think that Jobs/Apple were expecting the Apple TV to be the next big thing. In the world of 2007, TV was still almighty and winning the living room should have been a revolution. It should have been the entry into the post-PC world, with iPad-like and maybe real TV devices following a few years later.

The iPhone was really mostly an iPod phone with internet thrown in like on the kindle.

This is obviously based 100% on gut feeling :-)

"That just comes off to me as though even he didn't realize how ubiquitous phones would become, and how integral to our lives they would become, even replacing computers for so many tasks."

No one did, though. Go back and watch that keynote — there's thunderous applause for the iPod and phone portions of that sentence, and (relative) awkward silence for the "internet communicator" bit.

Reading through the Jobs biography, there's a great segment on the development of the iPod wherein Tony Fadell (I believe) details how he was coached to present the best mockups to Steve last.

Given the ordering of the three statements in that sentence you quoted, I have to imagine that someone at Apple — maybe not Steve — understood the eventual ubiquity of the smartphone.

Wasn't there a really big article about this?

http://www.theverge.com/2017/6/13/15782200/one-device-secret...

The gist of it is the entire company wanted to do a phone because of how cool it would be. The work of three secret teams unbeknownst to Steve Jobs came together in just the right ways to make the iPhone.

> the way I look up where to find an AED in an emergency.

Is that a specific thing, or would you just plan to map it?

It's a specific thing: PulsePoint has a couple of related apps. One will notify you (if you tell them you're CPR / AED certified) when there's a medical emergency you can help with in a public place near you (assuming the local emergency services work with them), and it'll tell you if there's an AED nearby. The other app lets you update their database of AEDs with GPS coordinates, photos, landmarks, etc. The latter is how I pass a lot of time in airports :)

That list is pretty overwhelming when viewed all at once. None of it could have happened with the sub-3G speeds we used to have, though.

Read back the quote again to yourself.

Phone + iPod + Internet communications device...you are pretty much describing a general purpose computer, no?

And if you go back to the keynote, that was kind of the joke. He started out describing these as if they were separate products being introduced. The punch line was it was just one device. In other words, subtly mocking the idea you needed a separate device for each kind of functionality you wanted.

Lastly, Apple was a computer company from top to bottom. How else would they envision a solution to the problem of crappy phones, but to turn them into computers with really good software? That's just who Apple was.

So the idea of the Apple strategy being replacing the mobile phone with a mobile computer is only obvious in hind sight just isn't true, it was obvious as soon as the iPhone was introduced.

A general purpose computer, or a very locked down thin client. Like the world of AOL users.

I would have suggested the latter, otherwise the system would have been a lot more open.

General purpose computers give purchasers administrator/root access by default. If you don't have that, you have a thin client run by someone else.

The Mac is Steve's baby.

The i in iMac means internet.

Back in early 2000s, the prevailing silicon valley view is that the internet is and will forever be the greatest thing ever.

The iPod was already a success. Adding a phone to it is merely a formality, and an annoying one at that considering how much negotiations and concessions and leverage had to be applied to Verizon and Cingular before they settled.

But when writing trios, the best is always last.

An internet communications device, an iDevice, is really the evolution of the iMac.

The state of mind at Apple back then is that everyone absolutely knew the iPhone will be ubiquitous.

Steve Jobs was absolutely dead set against 3rd party apps in the app store, which was one of the reasons the iPhone became such a huge phenomenon.

http://www.cultofmac.com/125180/steve-jobs-was-originally-de...

This was also the driving force behind the early jailbreaking efforts, because there wasn't a way to run ANY native code, be it Apple approved or otherwise.

Interesting:

“partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers.”

So the App Store model answered his objections. It's clear from the quotes in that article, he did want apps, but thought web development technologies would be sufficient. When that turned out not to be the case, looks like they turned to the App Store model so they could lock down the experience and keep the same degree of control as for web apps.

Was in an audience when Mark Benioff discussed Steve Jobs coming to him to acquire AppStore.com as Mark owned it at the time.

Apparently Mark and Steve discussed this concept very early on.

Just did a whois history search on the domain and it changed hands from SFDC -> Apple on 03/19/2009

That's over 2 years after the iPhone announcement in jan 2007 at Macworld.. about 1 year before the AppStore launched

The phone was always one app among many, even before the platform was opened to third parties.

I agree. At the time of its initial release the iPhone "simply" was a combination of 3 main ingredients - as repeatedly stated during the presentation: Phone, iPod, Browser. And that was ambitious enough if you consider the flawless execution: While these features have been done before they always felt subpar: Music players as an afterthought and Opera Mini as a state of the art mobile browser.

The idea of apps emerged as an obvious next step and always felt like a demand by developers and users rather than something planned long ahead in Cupertino.

I am struggling to find that article in Vogue or some magazine that gave some inside details of how the iPhone came out. By my recollection, their strategy was definitely not to reduce the phone to an app. The strategy from what I remember was to add a desktop class browser to the phone and remove the limitations of a physical keyboard. Of course these had to be built on a new OS and all that. Oh there was one more - visual voicemail.

I think the point is fundamentally they were making something that could do way more than make phone calls, where so many other devices on the market were just a phone (or pager) with some extra functionality strapped on.

They started from a clean slate.

Funny that you didn't even mention RIM's Blackberry which was the dominant device for email on-the-go among busy execs, including, if I'm not mistaken Obama at that time.

Jobs was only looking for 10% of the global mobile phone market in the 2007 keynote announcing the iPhone. The iPhone was so well received it demolished Nokia and RIM's dominance in the space of a few years.

Actually BB is why I added the "(or pager)" to my comment.

BB was a two way pager (and later email) that they literally crammed audio in to (the first phone version REQUIRED a headset as it didn't have a speaker/mic).

They made the mistake everyone did. They made an X and so they tried to cram new things Y and Z into it because they were an X company. And it limited their vision of what they could do.

I'm still waiting on Visual Voicemail to come to my Carrier; i had it on a previous carrier and it was superbly useful.

From what I've heard/read it was basically a play against cannibalization of the mp3 player market by proto smartphones. There were two camps, Steve's which wanted a sleek new form factor without physical keyboard (touch input) rather than the alternate team's approach which was to shoehorn a phone onto an ipod.

I don't understand the distinction you are drawing. The original iPhone, with the addition of a usable web browser, was a general purpose computer in my mind.

Would you not call a ChromeBook a general purpose computer?

I realize there is a contingent on HN who doesn't consider a browser to be a valid virtual machine, and doesn't consider anything a real computer unless they have access to a command prompt. But that's a religious conviction, I don't see any principled difference.

Let me put it this way: the original iPhone, with only mobile Safari, was a more powerful machine in every way than every computer I owned up to probably 1999 or so, with the exception of screen size.

What am I missing?

The hardware is clearly that of a "general purpose computer". The OS and software was/is limited in ways that make me think more of an appliance, though. A complicated, customizable, but purposely limited appliance.

I can write a Javascript program, stick it on a web server, and load it in the phone's browser. Why can't I edit it on the phone and just run the program from disk? If I wanted to do so, how would I write a program to let me?

I think the core limitations for me are that I don't have direct access to the filesystem, I don't have access to the APIs required to program the device for things that I consider basic capabilities, and the vendor actively fights me being able to do those things. Any holes that they don't hit with OS and API limitations get caught during the app review when you're going to publish your code.

Compare to a Chromebook: There's a Google-provided dev mode that lets me install an OS of my choice, and a chroot environment developed by a Google engineer that gives me access to an unrestricted OS running simultaneously on the machine.

The command prompt's moot; one could theoretically write a GUI for anything and everything that it provides. The browser's "a valid virtual machine", but there are limitations of what I can do with JS, where I can host it to run the programs, and so on.

My 1st gen iPod Touch was cool after I jailbroke it (kind of a wifi-enabled single-board computer). I used to run sshd and rtorrent, and had Perl and a C compiler on it. I do similar things on my Android device running its stock OS.

I clearly presented my argument badly. I was not aiming for the general purpose computer part, but the suggested notion that the now clearly visible impact of the iPhone was intended just that way, as its main purpose, its this-is-all-or-nothing goal.

Steve Jobs and Apple in the 200x years clearly were amazing and did wonderful things, but they did not read the future, they went step by step and built on top of what they had. Some things fell into place, some things went different than expected. I can't prove it, but the shift in how we use our phones nowadays was as visible to Steve Jobs as it was to almost anyone in that field. There were predecessors. Multiple. The goal of the iPhone was to sell things, millions if possible. Everything else was in the range of: "Let's see".

It was definitely planned as a more personal computer. Bear in mind that the iPad was the original product, and they switched to a phone because the iPad would be too expensive to do at the time. So "phone" is the afterthought.

Do you have a source for that claim?

> I am just questioning if it was all planned to come out exactly this way from the beginning...

The article makes no such claim about the iPhone. The only evidence you cite is the app store. That does not refute that Apple intended on building, from the start, a "more personal computer" that "reduces the phone to an app" and "gains concessions from [carriers]". That's exactly what the original iPhone was and still is. It even launched with support for 3rd party (web) apps.

I agree, one would have to argue that concepts may have been there for some of the developers and engineers, but it's be recorded that Steve wasn't too fond of the idea. As with most products, it's been iterative improvements, that have made it the behemoth it is today.

If you exited over that you missed a great bit of analysis.

I tried to stick with it, but to me it was too obvious that he is trying to make an argument with mixing hindsight and intention.

It might make for a good analysis true, but trying to mask it as "Let me tell you about everyone's intentions, and on the next slide I show you the future" just puts me off.

A computer with apps from only one vendor is still a computer (unless you prescribe to the ideological notion that a "computer" must be "open" somehow).

To say nothing of the fact that from day one the iPhone had a best-in-class web browser. It's funny how the iPhone has been continually derided for not being open enough while having full access to the open web, the platform that is routinely held up as the future of computing by those who think local binaries are a relic of the past who also deride the iPhone for not being open enough.

Partially because it's lagging behind in "open-web technologies", although it's fair to question if all of those are really as necessary.

(Which wouldn't be an issue if you could install an alternative browser (edit: rendering engine) on it, but it's not open enough for that)

Look man, you can have any browser you want, as long as its Safari.

You're right. It's too bad we don't have all those great web browsers that existed on phones before. I remember how great PocketIE was. The Opera thing that sent down screenshots? The joys of WAP?

People complain about Safari but it was a REVOLUTION compared to what was available before.

I was strictly talking about the criticism now, not back then (I mean, Apple briefly tried to champion the web-only approach some of those critics now advocate and see Safari as in the way of. We'll see if it has more success this time)

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