We Predict the iPhone Will Bomb (2007)
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The second I saw the first iPhone announced, with its all-screen design, I knew that finally someone with some sense had designed a decent phone!
When people complained about the price, I didn't understand what they were on about. I would have paid twice that for the screen alone. And I have, because since then the price for a top-end iPhone Pro Max has gone up to about double what the original cost!
People don't "get" it. Entire mega-corps can be utterly blind to what the market actually wants, sometimes for decades.
I still rant and rave about these things, but this has shifted to:
- Only Apple makes premium laptops. Nobody else comes close, they're all still racing to the bottom. There's a handful of half-arsed attempts like the Dell XPS 13, but they're made by companies that don't have quality in their culture, and it always "leaks through".
- Manufacturers have totally abandoned the PC display market. There is nothing available at a reasonable price point that's even remotely comparable to the quality of -- as a great example -- an iPhone Pro Max OLED screen OR a mass-market OLED television. As of late 2021, it's impossible to get an 8K OLED PC display. It's impossible to obtain a 120 Hz OLED display. There are a handful of 4K+HDR+120 Hz LCD panels, but they cost 2-3x the equivalent TV's cost, despite a quarter of the glass size, which is 8-12x the expense per unit area. That's crazy.
Someone somewhere "decided" that the market doesn't want quality in those two spaces, in the same way that before the iPhone the decided that people only want cheap plastic phones. The market doesn't agree, but when they have zero options, voting with wallets doesn't work.
There was a brief period of time when I thought the iPhone had bombed.
I'd heard that after launching iTunes, Apple was coming out with a phone in conjunction with Cingular, the media was in a frenzy, and I wonder how many people remember it today:
https://macdailynews.com/2005/09/07/apple_motorola_cingular_...
A comment on the above article from "Jeff":
"$250 for a friggin phone? Not on your life. I’ll stay with my cheap Nokia."
I looked at it in a Cingular store, went "meh" and moved on.
When the iPhone came along, it needed no new technologies that didn't exist elsewhere. It was a better overall design that integrated existing things. However, it would not have been successful if attempted in 1995 or 2000. Too early.
The kind of thing that I'm complaining about is when a technology exists, is already mass-market elsewhere, but certain vendors just refuse to sell it to you in other markets. Often for absurd reasons, such as artificial market segmentation, or a perception that some things are "enterprise" or for "content creators" and hence all associated products need an extra zero or two in their price.
Do 4K and even 8K OLEDs exist? Yes!
Do OLEDs with the PPI (resolution) of a typical PC screen exist? Yes!
Do 120 Hz OLEDs exist? Yes!
Can you buy this combination as a 24-32" PC monitor? No!
Can you buy this combination as a 48" or larger television? Sure!
My point was they flopped a very short time before the iPhone, so without hindsight, it wasn't obvious they would hit a home run almost immediately.
The iPod was the big hit, along with iTunes, and it seemed entirely possible they would never have another. The lame, overpriced first attempt at a music playing phone only reinforced that.
It might be forgotten these days that the iTunes store considerably predated the iPhone.
* THAT “KEYBOARD” (virtual keyboard will be slow to type on)
* BLANK SCREENS (terrible battery life)
lol