The iPhone is unironically one of the greatest products in human history. The world pre and post the arrival of the iPhone is very different.
Feature phones could already do what the iPhone did (and in some cases even more). Multi-touch devices were available before the iPhone. PDAs had also been about for years and did everything the iPhone could do and more. And Android wasn’t far behind the iPhone and also improved upon the original iPhone.
In fact the original iPhone wasn’t even that good compared to the competition. It was lacking a lot of features people considered “must haves”. Native applications (everything was web apps originally), copy/paste, the ability to background applications, etc. And Ballmers point about the lack of a hardware keyboard was absolutely right for that era.
Apple have successfully rewritten history here, like victors often do. And so people often credit the iPhone as being uniquely revolutionary. It certainly was industry changing but it wasn’t singularly responsible for that change.
I say this as an iPhone user with an Apple Watch and other Apple hardware. So I do buy into the Apple ecosystem. But I’m also an old fart who has lived long enough to have first hand experience, both as a user and as a software engineer, pre and post the iPhone.
Before this, data was really expensive, phones were all locked. None of the other device makers exerted their power like this. Or even had that sort of power. The iPad also had a similar effect with data only plans for iPads.
There certainly where handsets that were locked to specific providers but even in those cases it was much easier to unlock them than it was to unlock the original iPhone.
In fact the iPhone has actively worked against interoperability. Take charging, everything has standardised in USB-C except for the iPhone. Their app ecosystem is another walled garden (other handsets ran a third party OS but Apple rolled their own). Lack of a support for SD cards, etc.
If anything, one of the biggest achievements of the iPhone is successfully programming people to be OK with being locked out of their own hardware. A trend we’ve seen Google, Microsoft, Tesla and others follow suit in.
If it weren’t for the fact that they are (presently) strong advocates for privacy, it would be hard to say something positive about Apple. But given the current technological climate, they’re definitely the lesser of two evils.
>Apple have successfully rewritten history here, like victors often do
It's a long long time since I've had any interest in Apple or their products. But I wonder if the same excited anticipation still exists today [eg. with rumours of Apple producing an electric vehicle]?... or was it mainly due to Steve Jobs's cult of personality and mastery of hyperbole.
They absolutely did. Just look at plenty of confused people in this very thread, who attribute things like downfall of standalone GPS devices or the rise of mobile app market to the original iPhone that didn't even have these features at all, or praising it for including sensors (camera, accelerometer) that were already common in smartphones back then.
Now you're using the fact that people can't remember for sure which iPhone model introduced feature X or feature Y as evidence that history was rewritten by Apple, when all it shows is that, years later, people can't accurately remember the minutiae of which details changed between which models.
And iPods wouldn’t have existed without MP3 players, which themselves were just a natural evolution from Walkmans and other portable music players. The cassette is an evolution of reel to reel tape and the industry was already primed with vinyl. And vinyl wasn’t even the first format for music playback.
As I posted elsewhere, we all stand on the shoulders of giants.
The only people who call things “revolutionary” are marketing firms and fanboys.
The only revolutionary that apple had was a unified big promoted appstore and marketing as magic and pompous as they usually do. They did not have a single feature that they invented or was revolutionary.
At that time people were already happily surfing, navigating, filming and listening to music on other phones like the Nokia N95 (which was a beast at this time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95), including the possibility to install Symbian apps. What was missing, were proper App stores to find those apps.
Also capacitive Touchscreens were on the market. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
The the only revolutionary thing Apple provided were Appstores and lots and lots of marketing.
It doesn't matter that the LG Prada had a capacitive touchscreen or that the Nokia N95 had a web browser: the iPhone had a smooth, vibrant and responsive multi-touch operating system with natural scrolling and a surprisingly good touch keyboard.
On the LG Prada you're poking at list items and dragging scrollbars while the device beeps at you and choppily redraws those lists like a terminal.
On the Nokia N95, you're navigating the web with a jumpy cursor controlled by directional buttons, and typing with a numpad.
There was nothing like the iPhone, and now everything is like the iPhone.
That may be because Apple's implementation was absolutely lacking. The first iPhone was a vibrant, shiny feature phone disguised as a smartphone. They put their bet towards marketing and fashion, not tech and revolution - which paid off for them, as it turned out that was enough. Don't be surprised that techies aren't impressed by that though. In fact, I don't think the iPhone would be so successful if it didn't come out from Apple even if it was exactly the same as it was - it would likely find its niche, but it wouldn't be a significant threat to Nokia and others.
(actually, the real iPhone wasn't that much of a threat either, it was Android that actually killed Nokia - or made it kill itself to be exact)
> There was nothing like the iPhone, and now everything is like the iPhone.
Many things were either like the iPhone already or were heading towards being like the iPhone. Apple's implementation advantage comes from the fact that it was designed from scratch as a touch-based interface, while existing platforms were only slowly iterating towards that, but they were getting there regardless. Some existing players, like Nokia, had teams that were already going there, and other teams that were actively sabotaging those efforts, which obviously left the door for Apple wide open.
Apple's implementation sure was good enough, because marketing alone would quickly dry off otherwise. It wasn't revolutionary though. I'm certain that we would have very similar trends too had Apple not gone into mobile phone market at all. Maybe we wouldn't end up in a world where restricted walled gardens are the expected state of things on computers that we carry with ourselves all the time. Or maybe it would be worse, who knows. It wouldn't, however, be much different in how we interact with those devices, because writings were on the wall and Apple just happened to enter the market with a new thing at the right time with enough preexisting clout, as evidenced by multiple companies working on implementing Apple's "revolutions" at the same time as Apple, or even beating them by years in some cases.
They bet on coupling capacitive multi-touch technology with a novel and responsive user experience that takes advantage of that technology to the fullest extent.
> I'm certain that we would have similar devices soon afterwards had Apple not go into mobile phone market at all.
It took competitors a considerable amount of time to even approach the iPhone in terms of quality of implementation, and that's in a timeline where they had the iPhone to use as a benchmark. How long do you think it would have taken them without the iPhone? Would they have ever? Would we have to use scrollbars, like on the LG Prada? Would we still be using miniature keyboards? How much baggage from the old days of cell phones would we still be carrying with us?
I remember telling people in 2007 and 2008 that every phone was going to become like the iPhone, and still encountering plenty of doubters and naysayers. Some people simply don't get it.
I'm not the biggest fan of Apple these days, and I think touchscreens are overused, and I think some of the things the iPhone did have resulted in a decline in user experience, but it's absurd to confidently proclaim that the iPhone didn't cause a dramatic shift in the cell phone industry and beyond.
“Excitement” isn’t what we are talking about here though. I get excited about buying a new car, but it doesn’t mean that new car is industry defining.
> But it did seem at the time like Apple had the magic touch and anything they came up with would be revolutionary.
Only for a subset of people though. Lots of people didn’t like Apple products much and used other products with similar features (sometimes more, sometimes less).
What we are talking about here is technology (something tactile) and not peoples emotional state about said technology (subjective and personal).
Also I was both a consumer and a software engineer both pre and post the iPhone too.
All of which revolutionised humanity and were needed for the iPhone to ever exist. But also all of which were evolutionary ideas that emerged from several inventions predating it, already inching technology in that direction.
In short, we all stand on the shoulders of giants.
Landlines were also important. Walkie-talkies, less so.
Yes, people wil point out that Phone X had a touchscreen, Phone Y had a browser, Phone Z had something else. But the iPhone was the first phone to bring them all together in one package.
I used to run an Apple user forum way back before the iPhone was released, when all we had were the occasional rumour that Apple 'might be' thinking of bringing out a phone.
Smartphones are so ubiquitous now that I reckon people forget just how much excited anticipation there was at the prospect that Apple would do for the phone what they'd recently done for computers [remember how revolutionary the coloured iMacs seemed at the time?] and portable music [the iPod]. Back then no-one was enthusiastic about their phones. They were just some utilitarian gadget you carried, like a wallet, a pen or your car keys and there was an almost messianic belief that, if Apple brought out a phone it would be an equally miraculous device.
The launch of the iPhone actually kick-started [for better or worse] the promotion of the formerly humble phone to the ranks of 'gadgets you dreamt of owning'
Not only that, but Apple never even had (or was anywhere close to having) a majority on that market. The actual popularity of modern-day smartphone skyrocketed due to Android devices replacing all sorts of feature phones.