Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanx435 | Hacker News Reader

The palm pilot was years ahead of the iPhone, but it doesn't matter. Apple is who brought us into the age of mobile devices with the iPhone.

These guys may have had the same ideas before everyone else, but it doesn't matter. Their effect was minimal and the enlightenment didn't catch on in Ethiopia.

View on HN

Would you please not post shallow dismissals to Hacker News? This is just the sort of curiosity-killing comment we don't need here, particularly as the first post to a thread.

Historical material is interesting for plenty of reasons beyond "who won", and has always been welcome on Hacker News. So are things whose "effect was minimal", as long as they're interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Or, Apple had piggybacked off the mistakes of Palm Pilot. The same thinking will lead you to a belief that all of the things Apple had ever done were perfect and there was only one way of doing it (since they did win in the end), when the situation should account for all of the players in the act.

Also, let's not forget that Steve Jobs had repeateadedly refused to do chemo instead prefering homeopathy; and there's a huge chance the only reason those products are here are due to his highly pumped up ego, rather than the deeply thought-through design.

Or in other words, "Those who don't know history, are doomed to repeat it".

That's a strange argument. Apple had also had an earlier failure of mobile computing with the Newton, which was beaten in the market by the Palm Pilot. Palm did well for a few years, then ran into limitations of its own. Apple made a breakthrough with the iPhone, but nowadays lower-cost products built around Android arguably dominate the market. Of course, it depends on whether you measure success by unit sales, profit, device performance, or app store depth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com