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Comment by jaywalk | Hacker News Reader

iPhone changed everything.

Hardware wise, the iPhone or a similar device was pretty much inevitable. The same components were available to everyone.

I think Apple's stroke of genius was in the software and UI/UX.

> Hardware wise, the iPhone or a similar device was pretty much inevitable. The same components were available to everyone.

I agree (more or less) with the fact that someone would have come out with something similar. I strongly disagree that it would have changed the world.

Apple had the "courage" to go all-in on the form factor with the retail footprint to sell it, and of course the built-in fan base and long history of innovation to make it interesting even in its fairly primitive form.

Any other manufacturer would have either been too small to be so influential, or would have hedged their bets with a dozen alternatives, and their "iPhone" would have just been another dusty device in the corner of an AT&T store that no one knew how to use.

> Any other manufacturer would have either been too small to be so influential

Maybe small manufacturers, but if Nokia or Motorola had done it first (with good software) maybe we'd be a in different world.

You left out the rest of that...

> or would have hedged their bets with a dozen alternatives

Nokia or Motorola wouldn't have bet their phone business on a single UI/hardware combination like Apple did, and so I don't believe it would have had the technological impact the iPhone did.

That's a good point. Maybe you're right, who knows.

Nokia pissed off too many US carriers around this time. They were pushing a preinstalled VoIP client, and US carriers responded by dropping their phones.

Even if they had something great, the US focus of tech media would have made it hard to see, and the US/EU frequency differences would have made it hard to use in the US unless Nokia made a US version, but lack of distribution makes that less likely.

It may look like that in hindsight, and given advances in hardware, something with lots of sensors would have been built, but I’m not sure how similar it would have been.

The removal of the keyboard, in particular, was far from universally perceived as a good idea at the time.

I also think it would have been quite a while before anybody would have had the guts to not provide a slot for memory cards or to not have removable batteries.

I dunno, touch-only had been done before (Newton, Palm), and I think it would have surfaced again. The UI/UX Apple built on top of the technology that was in everyone's (manufacturers) hands, I still think, was the biggest factor in pushing things forward industry-wide.

As important was Apple's brand power. Everyone already had an iPod in their pocket and loved it. That gave them legitimacy to set terms with carriers.

Both had a stylus. Possibly, we could have ended up with many humans embedding a tiny piece of hardware in their index fingers, so that they wouldn’t have to carry a stylus around ;-)

Yup, Apple made software and UX important. And had the clout to ship their device with their software and ignore the carriers' obsession with random checkbox features.

Which, in the end, helped us a ton with Android -- post iPhone announcement everyone wanted to compete with that, nobody knew how, and the carriers eased back a bit on their absurd requirements documents full of random features nobody cared about (WAP?).

At the time iPhone was announced we were already running on the prototype of what became G1 (Dream), with multitouch. We just expected it would be the second form factor to ship, after a more "traditional" blackberry wedge sort of thing (Sooner). Post-iPhone it seemed silly to ship such a device first (you can imagine the reaction), so we skipped it and shifted focus to Dream.

> WAP

WAP made sense for its time: limited computing power, limited bandwidth, super low data caps.

Sure, but it made a lot less sense on a device with a much faster data network and full featured web browser... even so carriers had their lists of all the features required for phones to be certified on their networks and it was very feature-phone-centric at that time.

No one else was working on a capacitive touchscreen device.

Easy there, rewriting history.

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

> It was first announced on 12 December 2006.

> It is the first mobile phone with a capacitive touchscreen.

> The LG Prada was announced shortly <<before>> Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007.

> After the release of the iPhone the head of the LG Mobile Handset R&D Center was quoted saying he believed Apple had stolen the idea from the KE850 after it was announced as part of the iF Design Award.

Everything is "pretty much inevitable" if you have the power of hindsight.

Not really. It was going to happen with or without Apple. The first touchscreen smartphone was in 1992. Microsoft had touchscreen Windows devices from the late 90's through the 00's. Symbian and BlackBerry were things. And the LG Prada which was released before iPhone.

iPhone just did what Apple's good at, taking existing technology and packaging it nicely, but it would have happened with or without them.

The reason I left my Treo for the OG iPhone was the data plan. No one could touch that unlimited data at the time. To me that is what sold the iPhone. I don't know that it ever would have taken off if it had been constrained per KB as was popular at the time. Also the data plan was a bit of a requirement considering the first iPhone was all webapps. I was so pissed when I found out it lacked copy and paste.

iPhone's capacitive touchscreen was new and revolutionary. Microsoft had some success in the early 2000s with Windows Mobile but they inexplicably stopped investing into it after 2005. Without Apple it might have taken many more years before the mobile revolution kicked off in earnest.

LG released a capacitive touchscreen phone before Apple by a month. The technology was out there and was always going to get used by someone.

Here's a modern review of the original LG Prada, from the noted iPhone lovers at Android Authority. You be the judge.

https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-prada-1080646/

>The LG Prada was the first mobile phone with a capacitive touchscreen, but there are reasons why you don't remember it.

Didn't say the iPhone wasn't an improvement on the status quo with regards to UI. All I said is that it didn't invent the form nor the hardware.

In my first post on this thread, I said Apple improved the packaging of smartphones (ie. form, UI, ecosystem).

You must also think Apple invented the notch, fingerprint scanner, capacitive touchscreen phone, music playing device, the desktop GUI and mouse.

The biggest thing the iPhone did was come up with a user interaction method that made using a mobile computer/phone intuitive.

>Chris DeSalvo’s reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. “As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”

“What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties,” DeSalvo said. “It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...

Android was nearly ready to launch as a Blackberry clone when Jobs demoed the iPhone.

> The biggest thing the iPhone did was come up with a user interaction method that made using a mobile computer/phone intuitive.

What is that method you are referring to?

But Apple had a two years leap in front of everyone else shipping a useable touch interface.

I remember the BlackBerry Storm, the first touch screen phone by RIM launching at the same time as the iPhone 3G. No Wifi, slow janky scrolling, no apps (well, sure, if you don't mind downloading some random .jar that have to be recompiled for the custom fork they ran on that device). Felt like a rushed beta.

Meanwhile the iPhone just worked. Smooth scrolling, fast browser especially on Wifi. You could get apps from the AppStore, no friction.

The thing I remember about non-iPhone touchscreens in those days is seeing the little mouse icon jump to where you pressed, and tiny scrollbars. And having to get out the stylus to better hit the targets. And seeing the cross-hatch X-windows background while the phone was booting up. It felt like using a handheld oscilloscope. At least the UI was not done in Tcl/Tk :-)

I'd be curious to read this book and learn more about the pivot once iPhone launched.

I was at one of those TI partner companies during this time and we were contracted to assist with middleware for Android Sooner. I even got to test with one. Then everything got put on hold.

I'd say the iPhone 2G changed everything, the first one did not really make a revolution on the mobile landscape.

I could not disagree more. No handset manufacturer ever dared to make the demands that Apple did, including full control of the software with no ability to customize or even pre-install apps. It was completely unheard of, but that's what they got Cingular to agree to with the first iPhone. And they maintain that control to this day.

You disagree but then state that Apple did something no one else had ever done?

What? I disagreed with the statement that there was no revolution until the iPhone 3G, because what I stated was done with the original iPhone.

Apologies, I misunderstood your point.

And nobody has done that since. Can it really be an industry revolution if it's still a solo act over a decade later?

Google has, with Pixel. And even though the other Android OEMs allow for carrier apps to be preinstalled, it's nothing at all like it used to be. Verizon at one point was requiring feature phones to run a custom Verizon OS. Carriers would arbitrarily disable features on phones.

The carriers had complete control over everything up until Apple came along. Even Android enjoys the fruits of Apple's initial demands.

They did to a certain degree even on iPhones too. Remember how Verizon used to cripple hotspots?

I'm not in the US so that's why my perspective is maybe different but the first generation iPhone did not have MMS support, which was a critical feature at the time and pretty much killed it as a mainstream phone.

LG Prada changed everything. iPhone was a lame ripoff of that device.

You think iPhone ripped off a device that was announced less than a month earlier? Really?

If you entertain the idea, what has that thing got that the iPhone could be accused of copying?

I don't think either company copied the other.

The iPhone changed nothing and has, infact, been holding mobile computing captive in the 2007 era. Modern hardware is more than powerful enough to run decent desktop OSes without all the crap that Apple and Google insist is necessary on a phone.

Mobile computing was way more limited prior to iPhone and Android. Mobile phones are embedded devices, and the embedded ecosystem has always been messy irrespective of raw computing power. Even today, this is clearly the main obstacle to running "desktop" Linux on phones. (Though one shouldn't underestimate the UX challenges involved in building a viable phone OS, these are largely solved by now thanks to Plasma Mobile and Phosh. What remains is 99% hardware bugs and lacking support.)

I run a desktop UI on my phone. The only place it really doesn't work is when I'm driving and that's illegal anyway.

The main obstacle is SoC drivers that are kept closed.

Which desktop UI do you run that is usable on a phone?

FVWM2

While Symbian C++ might have been a pain to use, the phones could run J2ME, Apache (yep that web server), Python, Flash and Web Widgets (PWAs before it was even an idea!).

Android can do that today too.

Symbian was doing that in 2004.

Cool. Android can do that in 2021 and Symbian is dead.

Indeed, because it doesn't matter how free beer tastes, as long as it keeps being available for free.

> Mobile computing was way more limited prior to iPhone and Android

How exactly was it limited? My only issue with older Windows Mobile devices was non-capacitive touch, and HTC HD2 (still on Windows Mobile 6.5) did not even have that problem.

> Modern hardware is more than powerful enough to run decent desktop OSes

Good luck running a desktop OS optimized for keyboard, mouse and large screens on a mobile phone with a small screen and only touch as input.

Oh. WinMobile was like that. And the original Android was like that. People went over to iPhone in droves, and Google had to scramble to change Android to mimic iOS.

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