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Comment by oflannabhra | Hacker News Reader

> ...this is a time when Amazon is pushing innovations that don’t solve any real-world problems but may create some: like smart speakers, with their threat of big brother-style surveillance in exchange for a minimal increase in convenience, or complex and expensive cashierless stores that won’t deliver much of an improvement to our shopping experience but may cost underprivileged people their jobs. This is a time when an entire driverless car industry is trying to convince the world that its products are safe before it can even come up with convincing stats – or prevent deadly accidents like the one in Tempe, Arizona earlier this year. This is a time when Google is trying to subvert new privacy regulations to turn them against content producers. A time when Facebook, blasted by media and regulators for ignoring people’s privacy concerns, starts a dating service which will collect people’s most intimate data.

That is a really pointed indictment of our current industry. Wow.

I don't agree with some of the assumptions, but it really points to how rarely an innovation like the iPhone really occurs.

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I occasionally loose sleep, wondering what products were lost due to Jobs' early death.

Edit: Ok, fine. I loose sleep wondering what ideas were out there that languished because Jobs wasn't around to see their potential and capitalize on them. The argument "he wasn't that important because he didn't actually invent X" is played out, and it fundamentally misses the point.

Steve Jobs did not single-handedly invent the iPhone.

Even a 1% shift in the direction of something as massive as Apple, compounded over an additional decade of Steve Job's tenure (assuming retirement at 65), could make a massive difference - whether this would be good or bad for humanity is another question and still debatable.

For those of us who were PDA users in the late 90s and Treo users in the early 2000s, the iPhone is an incremental improvement on those ideas.

The presence of ubiquitous wireless networking (I am lumping cellular wireless and WiFi in together) was the real game changer.

If you are not convinced, try this thought experiment: Imagine yourself in 1998 standing on the street in a major city holding a Palm pilot. It has an SDK, a TCP/IP stack and a POP email client. But no wireless connection.

Now add a wireless connection. Could you tweet or Facebook? Sure, if those things existed then.

It was not an incremental leap. It was MASSIVE.

Yes, all the technology was there. We had smartphones and they would have continued without the iPhone. The value of the internet in your pocket is too big for the smart phone not to become a huge thing.

Eventually.

But Apple NAILED the UI. They made it so simple that 3 year olds can use the UI and are confused when other computers don’t work through such great touch controls.

How long would we have been stuck with tiny screens (relative to the original iPhone) or giant devices (like the sidekick) to get a decent sized screen?

How long would it have taken to get the App Store? Would we get one? That single innovation (making it trivial for people to find/buy software) has been transformative for our industry.

The iPhone pushed us ahead years. Maybe a decade. We skipped a ton of teething time and got straight to it.

Remember, RIM thought the iPhone demo was faked and impossible. That’s how far ahead Apple was.

It really wasn't as massive a leap as you make it out to be. It's likely that we would have ended up with something very similar to today's smartphones even if the iPhone had never existed.

It wasn't the first smartphone. It wasn't the first phone to use a capacitive touch screen. The first iPhone didn't even have the app store - it launched with the 3G a year after the the first iPhone was released, if I remember correctly. At that time, Android and Blackberry both had app stores in the works. They might have released before the iOS App Store - I don't remember.

Anyways, Apple did create a great product that deserves all of the popularity it has but they absolutely did not push us 10 years into the future of computing.

How long do you think it would have taken? Seriously? It took Google a few years to catch up having their massive resources and Apple as a guidepost.

RIM had no incentive, they were trying to lock you into the BB server product and tried to get consumers on it to. The phone was a means to an end.

MS wanted to push Windows. They’d been trying since CE first appeared and it still didn’t take off. As long as Balmer was there why would they do something different? They KEPT DOING IT even with Apple to follow.

Palm was the closest. I guess they might have been my bet. But they were having trouble and had tr legacy of thinking about things the way PalmOS had done things. That might have slowed them down.

Google was just copying RIM. They’d have gone somewhere, but I don’t know it would look anything like today’s smartphones. That may not be a bad thing.

Apple did not move us up just 2 or 3 years. I don’t know how to come up with an exact number, and obviously it’s not something crazy like 20 or 50. But I could see a decade.

How long did it take the rest of the industry to catch up to the Mac from ‘84? How long would it have taken if they didn’t have the Mac to look at?

Paradigm shifts in UIs are hard to predict. Even if you make a good one it can be really hard to break in when something else is successful (even if only adequate).

Apple defined the modern smartphone, and it wasn’t an IBM PC like thing of taking existing parts and just putting them together. It took a ton more work outside the existing molds.

It would take exactly a year for Google to clean up Android enough. They had to scram because iPhone just outran them.

About the only major thing iPhone brought was direct carrier deals from AT&T and Verizon for big data plans.

Also lost the keyboard. (Not the first device to do so either.)

The actual history of Android disagrees with your hypothesis.

"Chris DeSalvo, who worked alongside Andy Rubin at Danger before joining Google to build its mobile OS, says that the iPhone's announcement forced everyone on his team to realize that they 'are going to have to start over.'

Already in intensive development for two years by 2007, Android was Google's vision for a mobile operating system of the future. Still, in spite of all the work that had already gone into it, the Mountain View company was sure it couldn't carry on along the trajectory it'd been following — the earliest Android devices looked very much like Googlified BlackBerrys — and had to alter its plans to compete with the iPhone's new touch-centric interface. A book excerpt in The Atlantic cites Andy Rubin, who led the early development of Android, as saying "I guess we’re not going to ship that phone," in reference to the Sooner project Google was initially planning to reveal to the world."

https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5229618/android-started-...

The iPhone did no "outrun" them. They weren't even in the same race. When the iPhone came out Google did a massive overhaul of android in order to emulate the iPhone. Prior to that android was meant to look like blackberry.

>How long did it take the rest of the industry to catch up to the Mac from ‘84?

The Amiga was '85. It did take a while for PC-compatibles, of course.

I knew the Amiga was pretty close, but in the grand scheme of things it’s somrthing of an also-ran (sadly). I didn’t know the exact years for the Amiga though.

I was thinking of MS world. Windows 3 wasn’t until 1990. You could argue it took until Windows 95 for most everyone to go GUI.

> It's likely that we would have ended up with something very similar to today's smartphones even if the iPhone had never existed.

I'm not so sure.

A picture says a thousand words:

https://www.cultofmac.com/145083/what-phones-looked-like-bef...

The LG Prada is certainly worth some words of acknowledgement, but acknowledging it wouldn't fit the narrative that page is attempting to cultivate. There are also examples going further back, such as the IBM Simon, and of course Apple's own Newton, which is technically not a smart phone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

Agreed:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/76/Ap...

I was there. It was an absolutely massive leap. It captured people's imagination and proved that imagination could be reality in a way nothing else has since.

It's quite easy to trivialize things in retrospect. But at that time, in that context, that device was pure magic.

It changed so many people's relationship with general computing period.

And like many people pointed out here, it's not about any individual piece, but it's more about how all the individual pieces fit together into one product, and one story that was so different from the prevailing story at the time. It was absolutely the execution that set them apart and moved our industry forward.

I remember back then, in the early days of the smartphone era, the lack of good Android phones that could be comparable to an iPhone. Even the supposed high-end Android devices were severely lacking in terms of performance and smooth UI when compared to the latest iPhone.

I think that the first Android phone that could actually compete with an iPhone must have been the Samsung Galaxy S3, in 2012, 6 years after the release of the original iPhone in 2007.

Apple was way ahead of the competitors back then, they basically set the golden standard for what a smartphone should look like and it took many years for the competition to catch up.

We wouldn't have, because Apple was the only company that was user-focused, not technology-focused.

Windows, RIM, Nokia, and others had all tried to produce similar devices. They invariably ended up with a clunking mess of buttons and features that appealed to geeks and/or business people, and no one else.

The genius wasn't in putting the parts together - although that was a significant achievement. It was in making a device that was uniquely beautiful, elegantly understated, and so easy to use it could (literally) be picked up by almost anyone.

No other company has ever taken the obsessive interest in design and aesthetics that Apple had under Jobs.

Not even the current Apple, which understands visual presentation, but seems to have prioritised ease-of-manufacture and profit margins over user delight.

Jobs was hardly infallible, but when he had a hit he hit it out of the park.

As for what we don't have - VR, smart home, and health, are all bumping along when they could be soaring.

The other big miss was handing content creation over to YouTube. Apple could easily have set up a content store to match/beat YouTube, as a follow-up to podcasts and the app store.

I have no idea if Jobs even considered any of the above. But Cook doesn't really get content, so Apple are unlikely to win big in these markets now - more likely to offer a not-quite-right product like Watch, which was mildly interesting, but not the game changer it might have been.

https://youtu.be/auXc0tgdJSo?t=49m1s

It wasn't the first smartphone, but it was the first phone of any kind that wasn't bundled with crapware from the cellular companies and locked into their ecosystems. That was a huge win for consumers, and it was solely due to the persuasive power of Steve Jobs.

It doesn’t exactly fit the article or my original comment but what Apple did to carriers is just as big, possibly bigger, than the hardware/software of the iPhone.

The carriers dictated the phones you could buy (in the US). They dictated the siftware on them. They dictated the interfaces. If they didn’t like a feature hey turned it off. I remember a camera phone that had Bluetooth support for sending files but Verizon turned it off because it competed with their expensive MMS service.

I remember paying $5 for a terrible version of Bejeweled. I remember Sprint wanting to charge me $4 A MONTH to have Tetris on my RAZR.

Android still suffers the crapware and delayed updates. Maybe Google’s latest attempt will finally fix that.

But the iPhone RULED over the cell companies. They did what APPLE wanted because Apple held all the power.

Verizon couldn’t tell you which games you could buy from the App Store. AT&T couldn’t make you use their email client. You never saw a Sprint branded browser or video startup screen. They were largely irrelevant. They were demoted to what they truely are: infrastructure.

Does anyone want to go back to the world where carriers had 100% of the power over phones?

What a difference that made. And I do wonder if anyone else could have ever done that. Apple had the right product at the right time (AT&T losing bad) to get enough leverage to do it.

Yep. Jobs originally went to Verizon, which balked when he said they would have no control over the phone. That's why the original iPhone carrier was AT&T and only AT&T.

I'll give you accessibility and decent touch controls in a pretty package. But I can't let this slide:

>How long would it have taken to get the App Store? That single innovation (making it trivial for people to find/buy software)

Package management was not an Apple innovation, and before iOS 2.0 there were no officially supported native third party applications at all, and the only way power users accomplished this was by installing a package management system based on APT (installer.app/cydia). Jobs believed that web applications with native controls would be all anyone needed with the original iPhone.

So what do they do in iOS 2.0? Give you a crippled, prettier package management solution that requires Apple hardware, and fees, to develop and publish on, and gave the finger to power users.

I know it was in iOS 2.0.

And I don’t believe Jobs EVER thought that, that was his spin. Everything that has come out since seems to indicate that he knew web apps sucked but that was what they could get out the door fast. The internal APIs didn’t seem to be in a releasable state.

Normal people have never used APT.

I remember how you got software for Palm or WinCE. It was a pain, you had to search the web or buy it boxed. You better not lose that memory card or download file. And since you bought it from tons of places you always had to put your card in.

What I’m talking about is the simplicity end users had never seen on any device (to my knowledge). The store already had your card, just type in your password. It knew what you bought, you could redownload it for free. No sketchy websites. And one central place to search.

That was miles ahead of any other way of buying software.

>And I don’t believe Jobs EVER thought that, that was his spin

If you read his biography he had to be convinced to have users create their own apps and install them on the iPhone. He vehemently shot down the idea before he had to be convinced of the idea by Bill Campbell (the coach) when Steve was vacationing in Hawaii.

Read the book and you’ll understand more of the backstory

Oh, I understand he wanted to keep it sacred so the ‘commoners’ couldn’t sully it with their lack of taste (see: fart apps).

But it was immediately clear that everyone wanted to program for it. And once they decided to go down that path my impression from articles and interviews is that webapps were something of a stopgap until they could get native code ready to release.

The success was massive, the innovation aspect just part of incremental (small) progress in the grand scheme of things I would say.

Why do you think the innovation was small?

How long would it have taken to get the App Store?

You mean like HandNGo (spelling?) that existed several years before the iPhone came out, let alone the iOS App Store? Quite popular with Windows Mobile folks, that was. There were others that I've long since forgotten about, but they existed.

I agree with everything you said. But just as important as the technical leap was the business model improvement. Before the iPhone, at least in the US, carriers dictated what functions could and could not be present in the phones. The video offerings were nothing but short snippets of content offered at steep prices from the carriers. Phone manufacturers considered the carriers to be their real customers, and the carriers wanted to make sure that every phone feature was a money stream for them. Apple was the first manufacturer with enough clout to get a carrier (Cingular) to offer a smartphone that was not crippled by the carrier. Once the iPhone became popular, it was no longer possible for carriers to hobble the smartphones they sold, in order to nickle-and-dime their customers.

Totally agree. I thought of that later (and I wasn’t sure how well it fit into the narrative of my original comment/the article) and wrote about what they did to the carriers here [1].

I remember when I got my RAZR, it was the first phone I had that could play video. I was able to watch a 3m cartoon from Boomerang (Tom and Jerry or something like that). The quality was surprisingly good.

It used up 60-70% of my battery and the little phone got very hot.

And that was a $15/month service.

And let’s not formget the mapping ‘services’ that Google and Apple completely killed.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16979353

The original iPhone didn't have the AppStore. It was an incremental development on the original iPhone.

Palm and Blackberry devices at the time did have AppStores. I was a happy Treo user...and the iPhone didn't have the ability for me to build apps for it. I also used my finger to touch the screen.

What the iPhone didn't have was a physical keyboard. That was the primary design innovation.

I thought my Sony Clié was ahead of it's time ~2002

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sony-CLIE-PEG-NZ90.jpg

He did not. But he DID repeatedly question the value propositions that Apple is based on, and produce a new value proposition that cannibalized the existing business.

Apple is now fundamentally following the course of milking the last value proposition that they were left with. There is a lot of profit to milk, but long term the industry will leave that value proposition behind and Apple will wind up one of the losers.

In the long term, we're all dead. Apple has been "doomed" for years, but seems to have hung on for 42 years. I think it's highly likely to survive another decade. I'd say that 50+ years in technology is pretty good for a business.

Indeed, the iphone was coming with or without steve jobs. At the time almost everyone had a mobile phone, the only thing they didn't all have was internet / wifi / gps on their phone, and a capacitive/useful touch screen. When the iphone dropped it combined it all of this into a great product but nokia, samsung and others were all on their way with competing products that would have filled the void had the iphone not been there.

> nokia, samsung and others were all on their way with competing products that would have filled the void had the iphone not been there

We used smartphones in the labs at Motorola when I started working there in 2001. They ran Linux and had all the capabilities you would consider essential to a smartphone, not just the form factor. They were targeted for public sale in 2002 or 2003, if I remember correctly, but got shelved because the dotcom crash caused the networks to delay upgrading their infrastructure (yes, high-speed data networks had been in the works since the 1990s). A smartphone for sale in 2003 would have been absolutely useless. You'll remember that the phone networks could barely handle (or couldn't depending on your viewpoint) the iPhone for the first few years.

I didn't work in the cell phone division so I can't say for sure, but I think that most of the manufacturers let their smartphone development stagnate or stall from the early 2000s until 2006 or 2007, while Apple kept plugging away at it. When they proved that people would buy a smartphone even when their mobile network couldn't handle the traffic, all the manufacturers put effort back into development but by then they were far behind Apple.

Yeah they had a lot of deep institutional knowledge built up working with arm on the apple newton when Jobs was over at Next. Its arguable that if Apple had not already gone deep into Newton before Jobs arrived there would not have been the skills necessary on board to birth the iphone. While Jobs killed the newton he didn't lay that team off by any means they essentially flipped from Newton into ios, using the same arm skills they intially developed working on Newton.

>...like smart speakers, with their threat of big brother-style surveillance in exchange for a minimal increase in convenience

It seems like everyone in this thread is forgetting that the HomePod[0] is a thing. Apple's privacy practices are better than the other listed companies, but they do have a smart speaker just as capable as the others.

[0]: https://www.apple.com/homepod/

Right, but I am not worried (at the moment) that the HomePod will be used to collect my private information to be sold later on. I think this is false equivalence. How is the HomePod any different from connecting my iphone to a speaker?

I think anyone who's used Siri would debate you about the "as capable as the others" part of your statement. Not to mention that when it was announced, several of its features were tied to the introduction of AirPlay 2, which still has yet to be released.

The HomePod has a very simple proposition. I give Apple money and they give me a speaker. They aren't trying to use the HomePod to gather data to see what else they can sell me.

Neither are the other two.

Bezos specifically said that the entire purpose of their hardware is to get people to buy more stuff from Amazon. You really don't think both Amazon and Google are collecting data to improve their real money makers - targeted ad revenue and marketing?

And the iPhone exists to get people to use more Apple products and services. Vendor lock-in isn't the same thing as data harvesting. Those companies may very well be collecting your data but your statement doesn't prove it.

With a 40% margin, Apple would be quite happy if you never bought anything but an iPhone. Why would Amazon sell you something that even the CEO admits that he isn't trying to make money off of?

As someone who owns a Homepod, Google Home, and an Echo - the Homepod is hardly as capable as either of the others.

It can consistently tell me the weather and set alarms, but it's bad at everything else.

Siri calls one contact (my wife), adds reminders, timers and weather consistently. Works every time Everything else is terrible.

If Apple can make all of that offline, i’d be even more loyal.

We don’t need the stupidity of sending everything you say to cloud and back. Latency just kills it.

Apple is still the most focused company of the big tech giants. They deserve kudos for that.

One thing I dislike about the homepod is the silent failures. Where I say 'hey siri turn off bedroom' and the homepod lights up and then does nothing without any sound whatsoever.

While the echo will always respond.

Those products were cancelled but his death accelerated the round of products made by young people inspired by his legacy. We’re in the lull of Jobslessness; the shock of his death.

I wonder the same about Alan Turing.

Not worth it.

Jobs was, for all intents and purposes a phenomenal business person in spite of the fact that many people early in his career didn't see it.

Name a product apple invented that was HUGE? Go ahead and think about that. GUI & Mac was Xerox, the iPhone was Xerox and palm and...

Simply put he was a master at finding good things and refining them into great things.

Lets look at the design side. MacBooks for all their glory are just advanced machining (cnc + automation) put to work at scale (and thats "new" but not groundbreaking). OSX is just *nix with a nice GUI (something open source could learn from).

Jony Ive leaves apple, then I might start to worry.

> iPhone was Xerox

LoL what?

Everything that's built with computers can be traced back to the guy who invented the transistor, but that does not mean innovation stopped then.

The first implementation of a smart phone was likely the LG Prada not the iPhone.

I mean... if you're playing that kind of naive equivalency then the first "smartphones" were the early PDA/Phone hybrids like the HP OmniGo 700LX, the pdQ, or the Nokia 9000 Communicator.

But that would be silly, because the modern "smartphone" era was absolutely started with the iPhone.

You misunderstand. My answer was to refute that the innovation in smartphones came about with the iPhone and not the LG Prada which was released the year prior, market penetration notwithstanding. I was talking about smartphones in the vein of the iPhone not of the technology that could be assembled to make a phone.

HP OmniGo 700LX, pdQ, and Nokia 9000 Communicator didn't have touchscreens and were like night and day compared to either the Prada or iPhone. You are comparing apples to oranges.

Touchscreen was simple hardware it does not make a smartphone any more than a Camera or Internet connection does. There where 3 major gaps, gestures, native apps w/App Store, and a web browser capable enough to run 'Web 2.0' apps. And while not a direct phone feature an internet plan with useful bandwidth caps for regular browsing which also a major jump in how you used them.

Android, Windows phone, and iPhone all added these core features.

Nothing in the LG Prada was innovative - it's design was that of PDAs from a decade before. It's touchscreen did nothing that previous models hadn't.

Was it a nice industrial design? Yes. Wasn't very original though (and neither was the iPhone's).

You're also shifting the goalposts - you said smartphone, not "had a touchscreen". It was the first capacitive touchscreen but not even close to the first touchscreen btw. The IBM Simon in 1992 likely takes that win.

What the iPhone did that was innovative was in how it improved upon and combined the technology. It also pushed forward a lot of things in those technologies by several large leaps.

Long story short - the LG Prada is superficially visually similar to an iPhone and, likewise, bringing it up shows a very superficial understanding of the history of the mobile phone space.

I dunno. The LG Prada deserved credit for being the first (mainstream?) phone with a capacitive touchscreen, but I think if you're really looking for a spiritual predecessor to the iPhone, so to speak, then -- assuming you don't allow PDAs with phone functionality, like Handspring's line -- the Danger Hiptop, a/k/a T-Mobile Sidekick, is probably much closer. The Prada looks much more like an iPhone but the Hiptop/Sidekick had visual voicemail, one of the best mobile web browsers on the market[1], and an on-device app store. It doesn't get nearly enough credit for the trailblazing it did.

[1] The Hiptop used server-side rewriting of web sites to adapt them to its screen. This seems bananas now, but remember, the web was less than a decade old, and the notion of "responsive design" was years in the future. Back then, most other phones were stuck with WML.

LG Proda had a capactive touchscreen, but it failed to use it. You simply pressed virtual buttons instead of using gestures. Pinch to zoom might not seem like a big deal but it's something that iPhone got right and everyone copied.

Another issue is LG Proda stuck with J2ME instead of offering native apps.

So, the Proda was close, but it really missed the mark. IMO, the fact it took 4 years to after the hardware was possible before the iPHone showed up shows how significant the innovation actually was.

"Smartphone" was coined as a marketing term by Microsoft in the early 2000s to refer to PDAs with cell radios that ran Windows CE. These early smartphones were bricks -- not Zack Morris phones, but hand-sized bricks nonetheless -- and required a stylus to operate.

Yes. That was the point. However, you are forgetting that the first "smartphone" with a _touchscreen_ was Simon made in 1992 by IBM. Even so, Simon wasn't in the vein of the iPhone, which is really what this discussion is about, not marketing terms.

I don't mourn the loss of Jobs as an inventor. I mourn the loss of Jobs as a person who could recognize great ideas for what they were.

I hear some version of "He didn't actually invent it" over and over again, and I think it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what made Jobs a visionary. Before the iPhone, nobody was making anything even remotely as good as the iPhone.

No, you don't get it.

The internet is just a bunch of sand, some pieces of metal and wood poles from dead trees?

He had an amazing ability to synergize technologies into products.

> Simply put he was a master at finding good things and refining them into great things.

I'm not sure if you mean that as an insult, but honestly it's probably the most important thing he could have done; there's no shortage of good ideas out there, but most of them have terrible execution. Being able to see through that bad execution to the good idea, and imagine a great execution not encumbered by what it had, is a profoundly valuable skill.

> Simply put he was a master at finding good things and refining them into great things.

Every great creator has stood on the shoulders of giants. That doesn't diminish their greatness. I can't think of a single creation in the past 50 years that isn't a pretty direct consequence of the knowledge that preceded it.

> OSX is just *nix with a nice GUI (something open source could learn from).

I think open source developers know this but it's not their expertise. What we need is a way to make it easier for people with that expertise to contribute to projects.

Doing a bit of work with GTK I realised just how hard it is to abstract the look/design stuff out, it's very intertwined with the code meaning folks with artistic ability have a steep learning make seemingly minor GUI changes.

This explains why the web looks really good and stuff like electron is attractive.

All I see is a bunch of proprietary connectors and dongles, and I sleep like a log.

Jobs was just the salesman. Those products aren't lost, but they may have had a harder time getting to market without the "visionary" around to hype them up.

Salesman is an oversimplification. He was a productizer that could sell. :)

Also, does anybody know what cable the longest (number of years) a specific Apple cable/connector has remained compatible with the ever-changing hardware?

I am guessing it is this thing:

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK122LL/A/power-adapter-e...

Apple has always had BS connectors, like the Powerbook 5300 (1996)and G3, G4 laptops power connector - an male RCA plug, but the inside contact replace with a 3.5mm headphone plug.

That brick power connector is a brilliant design. It is based on the IEC C7 connector with an extra (optional) spot for a grounding pin. You can take the power cord from a lot of small appliances and plug it into the slots as an extension cord.

Has this talk with a friend, but it was actually centered around accessibility of technology for older people (or less technologically-inclined people, if you must).

If Jobs had aged, needed reading glasses, and maybe had Parkinson's, would there be more of a push towards making devices easier to use? Would Siri be more functional?

I know Jitterbug exists, but it seems almost insulting. (If anyone has used one and feels otherwise, please share.)

Apple already goes out of its way to make the iPhone accessible.

In his biography, Jobs bemoaned the utilitarian brutalism of the medical devices he relied on in his final years of life. He absolutely would've oversaw the development of slicker accessibility.

If Jobs had aged, needed reading glasses, and maybe had Parkinson's, would there be more of a push towards making devices easier to use?

There are accessibility settings on iOS that mitigate every one of those items (and more), and iOS has consistently been one of the most, if not the most, accessible phones out there . What specifically are you looking for?

I want an iPad sized machine that displays as much as an iPhone, and I want an iPhone who's home screen has 2x3 grid of icons instead of ever-so-slightly bigger 4x5 icons when zooming is turned on.

Thankfully Android allows for alternate launchers, even though some icons are horribly ugly.

Would Apple ever admit to doing something functional-yet-ugly?

People still don't understand what is invention and what is innovation.

So no need to feel bad about it.

> The argument "he wasn't that important because he didn't actually invent X" is played out, and it fundamentally misses the point.

If I have a position to contribute it's that those ideas are still out there. Job's greatest gift was his sense of taste. He had refined a sense of good art.

If more management had such sense they would be better patrons feeding good art and killing tasteless hacks projects.

> but it really points to how rarely an innovation like the iPhone really occurs

Yeah, but don't forget that the pieces to be able to create the iPhone had to be there first.

> Yeah, but don't forget that the pieces to be able to create the iPhone had to be there first.

Like the LG Prada?

Like Palm's existing smartphone with existing smartphone apps, or blackberry.

Thank you. Yes - that is my exact point!

Or General Magic's work in the early 90s.

I migrated from a Palm Treo 650 to an OG iPhone. Superficially they're similar in functionality (I didn't really need a stylus for most Palm apps) but there was so much you could do with an iPhone that the Palm just couldn't touch.

Execution details like Apple contracting with Cingular/ATT to provide unlimited 2G for $20/mo was a huge substantive usability difference. I had to pay $40-$45/mo for similar ubiquitous signal on my Palm - needless to say I didn't - so Palm apps weren't built on that assumption.

No, like touch screens, ARM, Wifi, etc.

:) That was my point. All of those were on the LG Prada.

The innovation of the iPhone was in the execution. The ideas were around, along with a ton of failed attempts at it. A computer in your pocket had been an idea for decades. Apple made one that a critical mass of people could/would actually use.

Not really. The main innovation was business one that allowed Apple to steal US markets. They convinced two major carriers to offer expensive big data plans.

This is so dead-on. Having the idea is often the easy part—it's the execution that makes or breaks it. Yes a great idea can be valuable but it's nothing without the execution to bring it into reality.

Conversely, ideas which appear shitty or idiotic in their failure (Juicero, for eg.) might have thrived with sensible, correct execution.

This is why having the right team matters more than having the right idea and one should take a hard look at oneself as much as the product when facing failure.

I am still not convinced. I had Windows CE pocket computer in 1998 and several others after. They all start up just like an iPhone with a grid of icons to tap on. The only thing missing from them vs iPhone for me at the time was a good data connection. They didn't exist except for more than I was willing to pay.

I'm not saying the iPhone wasn't amazingly better in execution and had great design. What I'm rather saying is if Apple hadn't released when they did with in a year or two the existing PDAs would have gotten cellular added and it would have been far clearer to everyone the progression was from PDA -> iPhone, an incremental step, rather than the more common mis-conception of feature phone -> iPhone that everyone mis-interprets as coming out of nowhere. There's a long history of PDAs before iPhone and if you take any one of them the jump to iPhone is not nearly as big a jump as people make out.

Yes, but Apple couldn't have made the iPhone without a touch screen, ARM, Wifi, etc, hence claiming that Apple is the sole responsible of past and future innovation in their product line is naive.

Nokia had all those things, and still lost out to a company who upgraded their popular MP3 player to support cellular.

My list of the enabling technologies for the iPhone is:

- USB 2.0 - developed by others, Apple's first use was in computers.

- Flash memory - developed by others, Apple's first use was in iPods.

- LCD screens - developed by others, Apple's first use was in laptops.

- ARM chips - developed by others, Apple's first use was in... iPods? iPhone? Not sure.

- Lithium ion batteries - developed by others, Apple's first use was in laptops.

- High-speed cellular data networks and chips - developed by others, Apple's first use was in iPhone.

- Multi-touch sensor and software - developed by Fingerworks, acquired and further developed by Apple. First use was in iPhone.

- Mac OS X - developed by NeXT, acquired and further developed by Apple.

- iTunes - developed by Soundjam, acquired and further developed by Apple.

You can see why Steve Jobs used to say that Apple is really a software company, and only designs hardware so it can do the software it wants. Most enabling technologies for the iPhone were provided by other companies; the only ones Apple acquired for exclusive use and development were the software and UI.

I'm thinking of the first iPhone here--Apple has obviously since moved a lot of chip technologies in-house too. Again, though, that seems to be tightly coupled to their focus on software.

Yvon Chouinard has a definition of innovation that I really like, which is (paraphrasing) that innovation is the application of technologies in novel ways to create new products. Thus the iPhone was an innovative product, even though Apple themselves did not originally invent any of the enabling technologies, and only owned a few.

The product wasn't even new. It was just popular due to Microsoft-class backroom negotiations with carriers to sell data plans and the fact that the launch perfectly coincided with launch of 3G networks in the USA.

> ARM chips - developed by others, Apple's first use was in... iPods? iPhone? Not sure.

ARM was created by Apple and Acorn to create low power chips for mobile devices like the Newton. You remember the Newton right? One of the first PDA's. Didn't make it but they did help shape the wave of PDA's that led to the iPhone.

I forgot Apple played a role in ARM development.

> expensive cashierless stores that won’t deliver much of an improvement to our shopping experience

Having to lineup to checkout is definitely the most time-consuming and unpleasant part of shopping. It's why I way prefer online shopping.

At a busy time at the grocer, I take 3 minutes to pick up the 3 things I want. Then all of the checkout lanes are backed up for >10 minutes. Even self check-out.

> That is a really pointed indictment of our current industry. Wow.

Is it? I read it as a series of attacks from someone who thought the status quo was just fine, and doesn't actually understand the value being delivered. Since they don't understand it, there must not be any. Since there isn't any value and it just hurts vulnerable people, it must just be callous evil.

For example, Amazon's cashierless store sounds great to me! I absolutely loathe the forced smalltalk of dealing with cashiers. I adore automated checkouts.

And Amazon has been amazing for driving down prices on daily goods. I'm happy to see them expand into something like grocery stores where high prices are a problem for everyone.

Grocery store checkout jobs are not a basic human right that should be immune to attack. Neither are content producer business models.

This isn't an indictment. It's an expression of incomprehension.

You don't have to talk to cashiers.

True!

I feel like the real point is that cashier jobs are not something to be taken for granted. They are not a constant of the universe. The position serves a purpose, and the purpose is not to employ the underprivileged.

It feels like it was written by an old man who doesn't understand how innovation in consumer technology works. Companies produce a bunch of seemingly pointless products, but some use of them sticks and is built upon until you get a product that sees widespread use. Ex. Tablets - everyone thought big phones were pointless, but now tablets are everywhere.

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