14 years ago today, iPhone changed the world | Hacker News Reader

14 years ago today, iPhone changed the world

9to5mac.com

32 pointsretskrad31 comments

The original iPhone was still a beta product. It's the iPhone 3G that was truly 2 years ahead of anything else.

I recall a lot of skeptical techies and "industry experts" still betting on the legacy players (Especially BlackBerry). Then Apple announced the 3G and the App Store and a few weeks later BlackBerry announced the Storm. The Storm was at least 2 years behind. Laggy input, no app store (some buggy device specific SDK), couldn't even connect to Wifi. The 3G just worked.

The rest is history.

I'll be honest. I was in college when the iPhone dropped. I think I was my freshman year. I saw a few people with them and I was like this thing will never catch on. I had a Blackberry 8830 and I thought it was so amazing. And I never thought touch keyboards would take off in such a big way.

Obviously I was mistaken and I've had multiple iPhones now. That said for all their advancement I still, once in a while, look at the BlackBerry Passport and consider buying one...just because it's a square :)

IKR, with the first iPhone people still tended to hold it in one hand and operate with the fingers of the other hand. In public it seemed slightly out of place and pretentious. Funny how rather quickly time passes.

> I still, once in a while, look at the BlackBerry Passport and consider buying one...just because it's a square :)

Isn't the OS on it complete abandonware?

Yeah...but come on...it's a square!

I remember Apple's joint product venture with Motorola, the Motorola ROKR, which worked with iTunes but was severely crippled in terms of capacity and transfer speed. Motorola seemed to spend a fortune on advertising. Apple played Motorola hard, learned the mobile phone development process, then proceeded to eat most of the industry. Motorola executives were incredibly short sighted and lacking in vision. The CEO at the time kept referring to Samsung as "Same-sung".

I bought a 1st gen iPhone Touch for my wife who wanted a PDA (ha!, remember those?). I remember being really impressed by Mobile Safari - you could actually browse real web pages! And they rendered normally and you could interact with them normally! I had my doubts as to how much it would catch on, boy was I wrong! The first iPhone I got was a 16 Gb 4s. Two years later I got a 32 Gb 5s. Two years after that I got a 64 Gb SE. Four years after that and I got a 128 Gb 2020 SE. Notice a pattern with my storage?! :)

On my first three iPhones I used an Otterbox Defender case. For this latest one I'm using a Mous. These phones have been dropped down concrete stairs in a parking garage, I've had them in my back pocket when I slipped on ice and fell directly on them - never a cracked screen or any hardware issue. I'm pretty impressed. Meanwhile my wife has an iPhone 7 that's 5 years old and looks like new and is running the latest iOS.

It turned the internet to TV. That's what young generations do now, they spend all day zapping channels, but we think it's cool because it's "on the internetz" and not on a bad unhealthy CRT. Society is sleepwalking to a generation of uninformed media junkies whose technical illiteracy is masked only by their ability to infinite scroll. I hope the end of this era comes soon and the focus stops being how to dumb down everything to a prepackaged and preprocessed feed. As lovely as the screens are, the media ecosystem around them is worse than what we had with good old color tv+radio.

https://i.imgur.com/91sn32Q.jpg

> the media ecosystem around them is worse than what we had with good old color tv+radio

Have you forgotten how vapid TV was in the 80s and 90s? Sure, it's not fantastic now, but it's vastly superior to what it replaced. Before, there were a tiny number of content producers, and what they produced was garbage. We still have the garbage producers with deep pockets, but it's easy to find good, niche content in whatever subjects interest you.

I was discussing with my current spouse about how we spent our time before The Now Times where we now have many more entertainment options, as well as being far more wealthy than we were back then, allowing us to things other than watch TV. :-)

My conclusion was that my ex-wife and I watched a lot more TV than I watch now. And I'll bet that Miami Vice (a staple at our house back then) aged just about as well as one might think (was it really just War on Drugs propaganda, as I recall it?). And we watched Moonlighting, which gave Bruce Willis his start, and that's a show I would almost go back and watch. Other than that, I couldn't tell you a thing that was on in the '80s. All I know is that we watched the screen, but only those two shows left enough of an impression to remember 35 years later.

Ask me what we watched in this era thirty five years from today, and I'll bet I'll give you a list as long as your arm. The Wire, Battlestar reboot, Game of Thrones...

Having gone back and rewatched Moonlighting in recent years, wowsers was that show sexist! How did I not see that at the time? Same with Remington Steele, as well as Scarecrow and Mrs King. Turns out I watched a lot of shows that I would have sworn weren't full of overt sexism but actually very much were.

I feel like it goes to show that there can be times when we're really blind to these sorts of things. When I look back and watch older media like that, it helps me be more conscious of the assumptions baked into content today.

It was as sexist as real life was.

And Thomas Jefferson owned slaves.

Your arm list is basically "HBO", which was good back then too.

> As lovely as the screens are, the media ecosystem around them is worse than what we had with good old color tv+radio.

You realize this is completely subjective right? Perhaps if your interests were completely aligned with the mainstream then that past was preferable, but today anyone can “zap channels” about any niche they are interested in.

Which for many who were teenagers with internet like myself, lead to hardcore pornography addiction, lasting mental turmoil, and problems processing intimacy correctly.

Media isn't just shows and news, kids have access to an ever-expanding pool of pornographic garbage, more damaging than even the most hardcore magazines / dvds of the 80s and 90s.

People who can't process intimacy with porn can't process intimacy without it either.

We also play GTA but somehow manage to drive cars without running over prostitutes.

Absolutely false. Access to pornography during early sexual development has an obvious impact on people's ability to process sexual intimacy and intimacy in general. This has been studied and really isn't up for debate at this point.

You can let a kid pick up a videogame and let him shoot people in the head all day with probably no major effect on his psyche. What if you showed that same kid a video of someone having their head blown off?

There's literally a reason why there are laws against children seeing pornography, and to say it has no effect on the development of the brain is ridiculous.

The first iPhone was quite the sensation, but I don't blame the CEO of RIM (ne Blackberry) for being a bit incredulous. The wireless networks of the time really weren't up to the task and Apple had to make deals with specific providers to have the visual voicemail thing.

It really did change the landscape and forced wireless development in a new direction.

I was just a kid early in my career as a geek, but I remember being so excited to see the news on CNet.com's front page: Apple announced a phone!

I knew it was going to be a big deal after two events, first: my dad, a lifelong Windows diehard, bought one. Second, we were at a friend's house and the need to travel somewhere else came up and he instantly pulled up a turn by turn nav to that location. I have a distinct memory of thinking "huh, that really is going to change a lot about life."

Of course, you couldn't actually run turn by turn nav without the phone being plugged in to power - remember the days of toggling off GPS anytime you weren't driving to save juice?

Also, remember how much importance was placed on physical keyboards? I remember seeing R&D projects brought to CES that could make 3D buttons emerge from a screen but ultimately everyone just got used to touch keyboards and swipe-style input became a thing.

I still turn off GPS when I'm not using it

The things I remember thinking that had the biggest wow factor were the messaging app and maps.

I thought that finally normal people would be able to text and do it at some length with relative ease.

And the cohesiveness of searching for a restaurant, tapping the place icon, and calling the place to check hours or to make a reservation was just mind blowing.

I have just migrated my Photo collection from private NAS and and other storage mediums into iCloud. And by that I realised how my photo collection library's metadata, frequency of photos has so much increased after the smartphones became popular (and then, SLRs getting GPS sensors, etc.).

Nothing of that is surprising to me in retrospect, but browsing through that photo collection its still astonishing.

Side note: I remember back then, I had an iPod touch and a plain Nokia phone and I really failed to see the value of the iPhone as compared to this iPod touch. I got wifi almost everywhere.

I also remember when the first people my age (typically broke college students) got their smart phones, HTC was big, I wouldn't have a smartphone for 2 more years. Then going for a Samsung Bada, then various Androids (Motorola Moto G, the initial One Plus, Huaweis) and finally in 2020 I settled on an iPhone.

> I have just migrated my Photo collection from private NAS and and other storage mediums into iCloud.

Any thoughts on doing the reverse?

well, I'd just point out that you should have a proper backup in place and occasionally cycle hardware.

It was awhile before I got one - I think I waited for the 3g version - and it was the last piece of technology I've owned that felt truly like holding the future - it was so much better - contacts, calender, photos and phone that worked, visual voicemail, weather app (is this the only iphone app that hasn't changed since inception?).

I still thought a Blackberry was better for (corporate) email and messaging - keyboard and wide screen but carried two devices around until my company no longer provided a Blackberry.

Weather app has changed multiple times. It didn't have animations to match your location's current weather conditions back in the day. Rain fall over time, and other things. Plus, iOS 15 does have huge changes: https://9to5mac.com/2021/06/11/ios-15-weather-app-hands-on/

And I think a lot of the changes in iOS 15 are arriving via Apple's acquisition of DarkSky, which is going to be sunset at the end of 2022 once the features are (theoretically) folded into iOS.[0]

[0]https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/10/22527878/dark-sky-apple-i...

"No keyboard. Less space than a BlackBerry. Lame."

I don't know why it wasn't obvious at the time. It just seemed like a silly gimmick.

Ive still never owned an iPhone, but it's clear their design won. What I learned is that it's not even obvious to me what I want. I try to be much more open about what could be popular now.

One thing it had better was the web browser. I was blown away by the web browser on my Dad's first gen iPod touch. Nothing else we had compared except PCs. Way better than my PSP or friends cell phones. Websites actually looked correct.

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