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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I remember hardly any significant negative criticism of the iphone, watch, or airpods.

Someone below brought up "when the iphone first came out it was 2G, was only on AT&T" - well, yeah, and those were very valid initial shortcomings that Apple pretty quickly rectified.

With the Vision Pro, I see very few comments putting down the actual technological achievements here. Comments seem to be pretty universal in thinking this is the best VR device there is. But the valid question is people are still having a difficult time imagining real, extended use cases where it doesn't feel like a novelty.

Personally, I think it's great Apple took a swing at this. I wouldn't be willing to bet one way or the other on its success, I think there are lots of unknowns, but I don't really have anything but high praise for the folks that built this.

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Watch was criticized for its poor battery life and lack of usage other than health/training management. Now battery life is improved a bit and more health features added, but I think the OG criticize point is still valid. Why is it sold well is that it seems that many people care about health device than we expected.

Also the watch launched with a bunch of expensive ultra-luxury options that were mocked. Ive tried to lean heavily into fashion which was quickly dropped in later revisions.

Yeah it wasn’t as clear where wearables were headed.

Apple Watch also isn't really the game changer that something like the iPod or iPhone (or various Macs throughout the years) was. Sure I see people wearing them, but not a tremendous amount, and not completely out of line with something like a FitBit or a Garmin.

Apple created a very competitive product in an established market with the Watch, they didn't change the game.

Which is where I could see the Apple Vision Pro ending up, but I'm sure that's well short of Apple's expectations.

AirPods were called 'q-tips in your ears' from people who thought they looked stupid but that faded pretty quickly once the utility became clear

well there was that time [0] Rudy Giuliani wore them like a space-alien, that was kind of funny.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rudy+guiliani+air+pods&ia=images&i...

The iPhone wowed everyone but its price was heavily criticized. Apple later got into the exclusive AT&T deal which "subsidized" the price. People just ended up paying more over time.

IPhone didn't have a pen. It didn't run symbian as it's OS. This is what I remember people complaining about.

Let's not forget Steve Balmer laughingly mention that no serious business user would ever use a phone without a physical keyboard. People here are negative for the sake of it.

He was negative for the shareholders

I bought one after using a blackberry and I was instantly sold on it because you could browse websites as if it was a computer, zooming in to the text section with a double tap. I remember my daughter wouldn't entertain the idea because it didn't run blackberry messenger which was the killer app for kids at the time.

It didn’t have a keyboard. Serious smartphones have keyboards.

> I remember hardly any significant negative criticism of the iphone, watch, or airpods.

Sounds like you have a memory problem. I’m sure you can find the threads archived if you need reminded of the criticisms.

Criticism of the iPhone on it's debut was absolutely vicious.

Criticism of the iPad was even worse.

I just want to point out: At the time of the iPhone launch, AT&T's business model (and every other telecom up until this tipping point) was to sell "minutes" which was essentially micro-charges for consumers who want to make calls or send texts.

This was mostly an infrastructure problem that Apple innovated on and helped AT&T solve- carriers would no longer need to sell "minutes" but could instead sell Data, which was a much better value proposition. There's a quote in the movie Blackberry along the lines of "the problem with selling minutes is that there's only 60 of them in a minute to sell".

I can only assume this attributed to the global adoption of the "data sale" model (and the iPhone with it) since the profit ceiling was exponentially higher for every carrier.

Data plans existed before the iPhone. And Europe was much more hardcore with minutes than the states at that time (I remember that ATT standard plans were not unlimited talk at that point, something that was unheard of in Switzerland where I was living in 2007). In fact, I think the innovation was something like unlimited data?

This is 100% wrong. The original iPhone plan from AT&T included unlimited data but was still capped on minutes: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007/06/26AT-T-and-Apple-Anno...

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