Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

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I’m not going to deny that the iPhone was a successful product but what people often forget is that the world was already shifting that way.

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.

  >Apple have successfully rewritten history here, like victors often do

Nope. See my previous post on this. I'm unfortunately old enough to have been around and involved in Apple forums pre-iPhone and there's no re-writing of history here. There really was genuine excitement at the prospect of an Apple phone. Maybe we were all a bit more naive back then. But it did seem at the time like Apple had the magic touch and anything they came up with would be revolutionary.

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.

> Nope. See my previous post on this.

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 nit-picking. Your original comment was that Apple had rewritten history to make the iPhone seem revolutionary, when it wasn't. Which I disagree with. As another old fart, I was there at the time and remember just how revolutionary it seemed on launch --not as rewritten history, years later.

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.

I was there as well. I witnessed the announcement of OpenMoko, iPhone, Android, drooled over Nokia Internet Tablets that were way outside my price range, browsed discussions about them on Slashdot like crazy. Got excited over rumors about a smartphone from Apple just to be extremely disappointed once it actually arrived. There really wasn't anything revolutionary in actual devices, the whole "revolution" was cultural and marketing-induced. The craze over iPhones wouldn't have happened at all without iPods being as popular as they were, and other smartphones were already heading towards everything Apple did anyway. There was a period of time where Apple was actually bringing some innovations to the table a few years later, but that didn't last long anyway.

Exactly.

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.

I agree with the rewriting history part, but perhaps not by apple itself, but by people falsely attributing stuff to apple.

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.

A problem that I've come to notice with a lot of tech people is they either don't notice or don't value good implementation, even if that implementation is leagues ahead of everything else. It's important to develop taste and be able to look beyond feature lists.

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.

> A problem that I've come to notice with a lot of tech people is they either don't notice or don't value good implementation

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.

> 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.

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.

I'm under an impression that people who are talking about iPhone's "quality of implementation" have either never used iPhones or never used their competitors.

Maybe you're not sensitive to choppy UI rendering and high input lag, or you simply don't value responsiveness. In which case, perhaps the devices that came in the iPhone's wake were adequate to you.

> There really was genuine excitement at the prospect of an Apple phone.

“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.

No one had the sheer power of Apple though. In Australia, when the first iPhone hit, Apple was able to dictate certain things with carriers if they wanted to carry the iPhone. Plans suddenly got better and cheaper. You could just walk into an Apple store and get an unlocked phone (although the 3GS was first available only through carriers). iPhone launches had people camping out for days so Apple managed to exert their influence for years.

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.

I can’t speak for the Australian market but in the U.K. it was a very different story. The iPhone arrived locked into one specific carrier (O2 IIRC) when most handsets were available on multiple carriers. As a result, a contract for the original iPhone was more expensive than most other handsets.

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.

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