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Comment by blenderdt | Hacker News Reader

When I read articles like this one I always have to think about companies like Apple and Tesla.

Apple didn't invent smartphones or touchscreens but they started the revolution. Tesla didn't invent EVs but started the revolution.

What they have in common is that they pick the best of existing technologies and combine that into a product that is ahead of the competition. They don't invent new things but invent better things.

For me that means you can create better products than the competition by even using old (but good) tech. What matters most is how you apply the tech.

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It's largely about timing. the iPhone didn't come out until wifi and cellular data had become widely available. Even today, a modern smartphone is a pretty boring device if you put it in airplane mode.

I had a Palm Pilot when they were the cool thing and connectivity was the biggest issue. Syncing had to be a deliberate process, which meant it didn't necessarily happen frequently, which meant that things like calendaring and even news weren't really all that useful.

The iPhone came out just as WiFi had become pretty ubiquitous and a reasonable data plan was something that could be negotiated. And, even so, you could argue that the iPhone didn't really take off for a few more years.

(The iPod before it had a somewhat similar trajectory. It wasn't obviously a game-changing device from day one.)

ADDED: Connectivity was an issue with the iPod too. It didn't matter that much for music. But anything that required timely updates, such as podcasts, didn't work as well.

Cellular data was technically widely available for years before iPhones (see e.g. GPRS for the tech, adopted in 2000), albeit very expensive.

Apple changed that. They negotiated a special contract with AT&T and for a year or so the first iPhone was the only phone in the US with unlimited data plan.

I had unlimited 3G data on a phone on AT&T's network in 2006, and it was even cheaper than the special iPhone data plan. They didn't recognize my phone's IMEI as a "smart phone" or PDA despite running Symbian so adding unlimited data was $15/mo. Unlimited data on a smart phone or PDA was $30/mo additional on the line. It was there, it just wasn't popular.

Sprint had unlimited 2G “Vision” data as far back as 2001. You could “stream” live video from 10-12 cable channels at 1fps. By 2005 you could stream video at 15fps.

https://www.sprint.com/business/program/newsletter/march05/p...

Also capacitive touchscreens. The resitive ones of older Smartphones wouldn't have worked for the revolutinary UI

Bad resistive screens are bad, but good ones are better than capacitive because they work with styluses or when you're wearing gloves. The Nokia N900 had an absurdly good one.

Apple heavily marketed capacitive screens as an asset, so people who haven't every used a quality resistive screen still carry that around internally.

In about 2002, I had a Handspring Visor Prism, running PalmOS. I bought the VisorPhone, which was a cellular phone add-on that plugged into the back. It was somewhat ungainly, and didn't work well as a voice phone. It also had a separate battery, so you had to charge it on its own. I could use it as a cellular modem, but there wasn't a good practical use case for it, because there were only half-baked web browsers and few apps that used data. You could dial in to your desktop computer over the modem and sync remotely. It was fairly useless, but was the early precursor of what eventually became the Treo, and showed that the combination of cell phone and PDA was a good idea.

IMO, the original Nintendo DS made the concept of touch truly mainstream, but wasn't multitouch.

I'd say the Apple Newton in 1993 made touch screens mainstream quite a bit earlier. And things like PalmOS were clearly based on the excitement that came from the Newton. The Newton itself wasn't that successful due to its reliance on writing recognition that didn't work that well (at least in the initial versions of NewtonOS) but that ironically added to its place in pop culture. Like in The Simpsons where one of the school bullies has a Newton and is trying to take a note reminding him to beat up the annoying teacher's pet Martin, only for the system to interpret "Beat up Martin" as "Eat up Martha".

It had a resistive touchscreen. What made you touchscreens truly mainstream were capacitive screens

Yeah, touch was a total joke when the DS came out. It was ridiculed as a useless concept.

Just a few years later and people are more confused when their device has buttons instead of a touch screen.

I think they didn't start anything, rather, they jumped in to create a tipping point.

> I think they didn't start anything, rather, they jumped in to create a tipping point.

To me this trivializes what Apple did, as if companies could just "create a tipping point" if only they liked money. I understand that from today's vantage point, what Apple did seems inevitable. At the time, it was a "bet the farm" move by a company which had never made a smartphone before.

> Apple didn't invent smartphones…

This is like saying "the Manhattan Project didn't invent atomic bombs". It's technically true, but doesn't capture the world-changing effects of the accomplishment.

You're making my case for me.

Other auto companies have been steadily innovating on electrics cars for a very long time and have consistently outsold Tesla until recently. It's unlikely that Tesla did much other than accelerate the process by a tiny bit by bring more public validation to the market. Tesla is not an outright innovator so much as created more public excitement.

The iPhone as 'world changing' is a bit of propaganda. Other platforms were moving forward, Nokia had some very cool and popular stuff. The iPhone was effectively 'a generation ahead' - as if a 'gaming console' magically came out one generation ahead of the others - but otherwise, it was all an 'inevitability'. All those things were coming in one way or another. GPS, full screen, apps, contactless payments etc. it was all well on it's way.

I don't know if that is true.

Tesla for example did become big because they had the best range. And they still have compared to most brands.

If Tesla failed to create cars with a great range they didn't become as big as they are now.

Yes, but that's what I mean - that category had existed for a while, they did a few things to make it viable. Same with watches, smartphones and eventually 3D.

What Apple did well was marry the full screen of the Palm with the connectivity of the blackberry. The Palm V with a cradle cell modem and battery was a niche attempt, but the OS didn't really natively support always-on internet and the apps didn't integrate it. Android and IOS both did and that was the difference, although Google had to play catch up because their first phone the HTC Dream had a slide out keyboard.

Agree. I can’t wait to get a hold of the Soli radar chip from Google and put it inside of a Loodio.

After a web search I came to the conclusion those are actual things. I honestly thought you just made those words up.

That's hard to read for a (once) die hard Pebble fan ... but it is also true.

It's also true that sometimes great products just fail for whatever reason.

Just like Apple and Tesla sometimes have products that just fail to become big.

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