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Comment by 1023bytes | Hacker News Reader

Apple devices are luxury products, not necessities. Sure, they may make your life marginally better, but it's nothing world changing

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I think that’s why they are able to hold to their vision to some extent. They have margin, which makes it possible for them to resist the siren call of ads and dark patterns to at least some extent.

A deflationary race to the bottom ends at the bottom.

iPhones aren't world changing?

$80 Android phones are world changing

Mobile phones in general were world changing. iPhones, on their own, not so much.

The iPhone literally created the smartphone/mobile market and killed off flip phones, where Windows Phone, Blackberry, Palm, et al. all failed to do so.

Android was already going to happen if the iPhone never came out; that said, Apple's influence over the direction of the devices probably killed Flash on the web in general, and made it both easy, cheap, and a viable business strategy to develop mobile apps… but Google may have done the same on both anyway and for similar reasons.

That they killed off Blackberry and Windows Phone is impressive from a business standpoint, but which fruit the phones have as a logo probably didn't change the world all that much.

I owned an ipaq hx4700 in 2004, two years before the first iPhone came out. Take a look, that device was actually better than early iPhones. The screen was better, the specs were better. It even supported 3rd-party apps (and there were many), while early iPhones did not have app store at all.

Apple is very good at marketing, but they did not invent the concept of PDA (that's how these devices were called back then) with the iPhone - they just came up with a yet another PDA which was decent, and were very good at marketing.

> Apple is very good at marketing, but they did not invent the concept of PDA (that's how these devices were called back then) with the iPhone - they just came up with a yet another PDA which was decent, and were very good at marketing.

The term Personal Digital Assistant was coined by John Sculley while CEO of Apple when describing the Newton MessagePad, so akshually they did invent the concept.

Yes there were Windows CE devices that predate iPhone. I had a few, including the hx4700. They universally sucked.

I know downplaying Apple’s role in computing history is the cool thing to do on the orange site, but get real. The mobile world completely changed when Apple announced iPhone. We know that Google pivoted on the acquired Android OS. Would they have done so as quickly had the iPhone never happened? Given their track record, probably not.

People seem to forget when the iPhone 1 came out it was the first device where the browser actually worked with almost all non-flash websites.

I was on windows mobile before iPhone and the browsers were essentially useless. It was a game changer when safari mobile was a thing.

Apple killing off flash by refusing to support it was a great moment for the mobile web.

> I was on windows mobile before iPhone and the browsers were essentially useless. It was a game changer when safari mobile was a thing.

I'm a couple decades late with this advice, but - did you try Opera Mobile on PocketPC back then?

It was good. I had no chance to compare with early Safari on iOS, but it was on par or better than the default browser on my early-2010s Android device.

It is so weird how this all was forgotten.

I never said anything about Apple inventing smartphones, there were plenty of earlier examples of smartphones.

What Apple did was achieve bringing the first smartphone to market that reached critical mass in sales and mainstream adoption. They didn't invent smartphones, but they did create the mobile market.

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