Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)
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The outlet's snarky responses to reader letters are also available: https://www.theregister.com/2007/01/09/apple_iphone_letters/
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Then iPhone comes in with a high spec ARM, a GPU, and Core Graphics. If I was Nokia/SE/Motorola I would have been shitting myself watching Steve demo the iPhone knowing that I'm at least five years behind now.
If I remember correctly, Nokia had good tech for smart phones, but no vision or courage to drive the market in that direction. It was not a well-managed company.
Just finished reading The Innovator's Dilemma. Phenomenal read.
- “Crossing the Chasm” in the end this book is really just a single drawing, but the text explains the problem: why early traction not only doesn’t imply future growth, but if misunderstood, can kill any future growth. Also very important for investors and people at big companies.
- I really like the underrated “Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation” by Utterback. It’s kind of a complement to the other two, full of amazing market hacks to get a new product established.
For example, 120 years ago, electric companies would put on demo sessions for the public, so the gas companies would send people with metal bars in their sleeves to short out the electrical systems (in a cloud of sparks of course!). So Edison (IIRC) got the clever idea to run the electric wiring through the gas conduit, both “for safety” and to take the gas out of service.
We often don’t understand what the true characteristics and affordances of a new technology are — and neither do the customers. That’s what this book is about.
I got into a rut in terms of just doing programming and reading technical content about a year ago. So, I started reading from a list of books mentioned in various HN posts.
As I slowly make my way through the list, I feel both like an idiot for not having read these books earlier, and at the same time thoroughly happy that there are such beautiful concepts out there to learn that's not just programming or systems design.
Hadn't heard about the Utterback one! Seems like it would be right up my alley.
Apple was unique: they were willing to bet the company on a single form factor, they had a small but loyal and vocal fan base, and they had their own retail stores to give people the opportunity to experience the phone.
Anyone else would have made it just one of a half dozen phones and it would have languished in a dusty corner of one of the crappy operator stores where no one knew how to use it or had any reason to push it.
Their phone was the full modern smartphone years before the iphone. They're the ones who met with Larry Page and got him to make a mobile version of Google.com.
Jobs met with handspring back when apple was focused on the mac PC. Jobs stood up at the whiteboard and drew a mac with all the aspects of a person's life around it. Handspring's CEO or CTO stood up and drew a handspring phone and all the same photos, music, www, etc around it. "Except you'll carry this with you everywhere you go." It was at that moment jobs realized he needed to build a phone and what it needed to look like.
Thing is, while handspring got there ~5 years before jobs did, they didn't have anything to leverage. They were a small startup and completely at the mercy of the telco carriers with their existing cellular subscribers, who then proceeded to force changes to the interface and apps. Handspring actually had to risk it all on their vision of what a phone should be.
Jobs had a healthy apple with a healthy mac computer lineup and billions in the bank. When apple went to the telcos all jobs had to do was ask "do you want access to our millions of ipod users?" and he got his way. Handed the concept and executed with essentially zero risk.
That's actually not true, all of the telcos rejected the pitch except AT&T. There was considerable risk in it from their perspective, because Apple wanted total control over the user experience: no carrier logos on the handset, no carrier logos in the operating system, no preinstalled carrier software.
Edit: for context, carriers wanted control of revenue and obviously fought against net neutrality. At the time, they made big money with SMS and other services.
Yeah, android was busy developing a platform, and they even had some vision (unusual for that industry) because of the Danger team. Yet they were shocked by the iPhone and basically restarted — luckily before having demoed anything publicly.
It’s always weird to hear. He blamed Nokia’s inability to come up with a decent mobile OS and get behind it.
Horace Dediu has written a lot about both Apple and Nokia. I recall him saying Nokia did some things really well. I think they were caught totally flat footed, and the Symbian debacle did them in
The iPhone came out when Windows XP was the default PC experience for most of the world, why would anyone need anything like iPhoneOS on a damn phone? Talk about overkill.
Then Steven Elop left Microsoft to become Nokia CEO; decided to move everything to Windows Phone; publicly pointed out everything was on fire; crashed the stock price by 85%; sold Nokia to Microsoft at a massive discount; and then finally rejoined Microsoft. If it wasn’t an act of corporate sabotage designed to obtain Microsoft an established phone vendor subsidiary at a fraction of its cost, then it’s hard to see how he could have done a better job on purpose.
In fact there were competing phones with Windows Mobile or Symbian that did have similar hardware specs. (Really if you have to pick the single defining hardware innovation of the iPhone, it was the full slate capacitative touchscreen.) And in some areas the iPhone was clearly behind, shipping with a EDGE-only radio at a time where other networks were rapidly deploying 3G hardware.
But the big missing bit was the app store, which didn't exist yet. When the iPhone shipped, it was a very expensive phone with a web browser, and nothing else. Jobs was going on stage saying that web apps were all anyone needed, and people were laughing at him. When the app store was finally released it only barely beat Android to market.
It wasn't really until the 3G/3GS generation that the product really hit its stride, and a few more revs after that before it became the sine qua non accessory for the tech set.
In hindsight, yeah, that was a huge inflection point. But at the time there were a lot of reasons to prefer other devices.
Again, there were existing app ecosystems on Symbian/Nokia and Windows, and none of that stuff, or anything like it, ran on an iPhone. You couldn't even get your email on the device outside of a handful of open source web clients (its inability to run the gmail client was a big hole, heavily reported at the time).
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5229618/android-started-...
Totally false. The first iPhone shipped with Mail, which handled POP and IMAP accounts very well, including gmail accounts.
You see his vision as a big miss. I see his vision as evidence of good taste and also an eventuality.
This is a myth. Jobs was genuinely against a native SDK and made the final decision to go for it on the 2nd of October 2007. Then Apple had to rush out the first version of the iPhoneOS SDK in just over three months. This is documented in contemporaneous emails produced during discovery for the Epic trial.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/04/this-one-email-explains-ap...
> now that Apple owns that 30% fee
It’s been 15% for years. The only people who pay 30% are people who earn more than a million dollars a year through the App Store. Almost everybody pays 15%.
Right. And by the same logic Amazon makes exactly zero revenue from AWS, which is completely free for "almost everybody". You knew what I meant.
Jobs clearly wasn't resistant to app stores.
> Wrong, here's receipts.
30%!
> Wrong, 15% unless you're a whale.
Don't argue. Just read my mind through the screen, you already agree with everything I said.
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I don't get a dopamine hit from threads like this, they drain me. The opposing side gets a dopamine hit, reputation be damned.
I wish everyone would broaden their media sources as well as treasure history more (myself included.) I do appreciate flippant vs. philosophical exchanges like these to sift the comments for nuanced truths.
It changed industry's and the public's perception of what a "phone" could be.
Steve Jobs Introducing at Macworld in 2007 is a classic for the ages.
*edit: i say ridiculous as the iphone still made it look totally crap
Point being, it's fine to say "sure, it's missing cut-and-paste, but not hard to see how that's a really insignificant nit for most people that will easily be addressed in a subsequent software update," but all too often I see tech reporters latch on to some relatively small detail that they try to make a huge brouhaha over because they have nothing better to say.
To date, the biggest single advancement in the mobile web has been Apple porting their open-source WebKit to iPhoneOS (as Jobs put it: “a desktop-class browser”). Nothing else even comes close. Before the iPhone came out, the mobile web was virtually synonymous with shitty m.example.com WAP sites nobody wanted. In the space of about a year, everybody commissioning a website was asking for real, responsive mobile websites that worked on an iPhone.
> Critics only focused on the shortcomings but neglected to see what it really was.
Critics were sure the iPhone wouldn’t be a success until Mobile Safari supported Flash. They were certain Jobs would back down. About five years later, Adobe gave up on Flash on mobile.
1. the reactions to "flick to scroll".
2. reaction to pinch-to-zoom.
In both cases the audience was just gobsmacked: oohs, ahs and cheers all around.
For people saying there were other devices out there at the time with similar or better hardware specs, or even comparable feature sets, I think you are totally missing the point. That kind of comparison is making the same mistake as the infamous "Less space than a Nomad. Lame" Slashdot comment re the iPod. I remember trying out the original iPhone the second day it was on sale, and just being blown away - and I worked in the mobile industry at the time and was well aware of the features of other phones.
The overall experience of the iPhone was just legions ahead of anything else that existed at that time.
The first iPhone had a 320x480 screen and could only use web sites that had a mobile version.
I figured that access to the entire web was a killer feature that would let the clunkier stylus phones compete successfully with an iPhone. Not a prediction that aged well.
That's just totally wrong. In fact, IIRC the original iPhone announcement showed a visit to the NY Times website to show how you could scroll around and zoom "full screen" websites.
If anything, the ability to navigate "desktop" sites on the iPhone was much better than other phones because those other versions of "full web browser" were clunky incarnations that made it difficult to zoom in and scroll around. It was pinch and double tap to zoom, and finger-on-screen to scroll that made browsing sites on the "normal" web much better than anything else at the time.
I think that feature made a huge impact on usability of desktop websites on the iPhone.
> with touchscreens before the iPhone,
> but they were all using a stylus
The LG Prada was the first capacitive touchscreen phone and was on sale before the iPhone. Technically its specs were underwhelming, but it was the pioneer of finger-UI.
It wasn’t so much Apple bribing Cingular as it was Apple/Jobs selling Cingular on the strategy of using iPhone exclusivity as an accelerant for their plans to become a top tier mobile provider.
It worked.
> As customers start to realise that the competition offers better functionality at a lower price, by negotiating a better subsidy, sales will stagnate. After a year a new version will be launched, but it will lack the innovation of the first and quickly vanish.
There was a good few years there where everyone was looking for the "iPod-killer". There's even a chance the Zune would have got there, except by time they got close .. that's not where the puck was.
But I always found it interesting that after all that search for the "iPod-killer", none was ever crowned - instead the entire market just slipped silently into the night.
Handspring built a modern smartphone and got roasted by the telcos. All jobs had to do was ask "do you want access to our millions of ipod and imusic subscribers?" and he got his way.
And I really don't think this is a bad comparison, given that in 2006, iTunes is still very much fresh in the mind.
Early that year pretty much everyone had introduced tablet PCs and convertible PCs at CES. Apple had announced the iPad but it wasn't going to ship until April.
Most major magazines, reviewers, bloggers, podcasters, and such had high praise for those tablets and convertibles, saying that they were going to change how we all worked with PCs, and said iPad was late to the party and was really just a bigger iPhone without the phone, and was fatally limited compared to the versatility of the PC tablets and especially the PC convertibles, and was sure to bomb.
One of the few major podcasters who said it would succeed was Leo LaPorte. On one of his podcasts he said it would sell about 5 million in its first year, and everyone else on the show told him he was insane.
It actually sold 5 million in around 4 months, and 20 million in its first year.
https://www.theregister.com/2007/01/09/apple_iphone_letters/
Any other great insights Bill Ray?
>Mobile phones are not complex to use because of bad interface design, they are complex to use because they are complex devices with a myriad of features.
Reminds me discussions about how "shells are fine" and couldn't possibly be much better.
That wrong? No.
I was one who believed this up until the announcement. I grossly underestimated Jobs’ ability to negotiate/strong arm the carriers, who were and remain one of those industries who fear and proactively hate their customers.
(Side point: I accidentally typed “nagotiate” which was autocorrected but surely is a word every parent could use)
The only company that bit was Cingular, aka "the new AT&T", because they bought AT&T Wireless and took that brand for themselves. Before that Apple was actually considering an Apple MVNO[0], which was a fairly popular business arrangement in 2006 for some reason. The cost of getting their control was a five year exclusivity deal with AT&T, which would turn out to be a huge pain in the ass for iPhone users as AT&T's network was not at all designed to handle everyone being able to use data at the push of a button. In fact, it makes me wonder if the carriers were deliberately designing their other phones to make it more of a pain in the ass to use data...
[0] Mobile Virtual Network Operator. Basically any company that sells mobile service by renting out another company's network.
> Mobile phones are not complex to use because of bad interface design, they are complex to use because they are complex devices with a myriad of features. The fiercely competitive mobile phone business has driven interface development at an astounding rate: it has become de rigueur for every new handset to feature a revolutionary new interface mechanism.
> Apple is extremely good at creating simple interfaces, and it is likely that the Apple phone will have a pleasing interface which is relatively easy to use and recognisably iPod branded, but it won't need to appeal to the iPod users, it will need to appeal to the network operators.
e.g. adding a camera to the phone can justify an additional price to the phone.
I'd say it's somewhat interesting this was wrong.
IIRC, the touchscreen, mobile internet, and (walled-garden) app store allow for a shift from "phone + widgets" to "smartphone".
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_UIn Europe, people buy phones SIM-free as well, so it wasn’t exclusive, but many networks offered subsidies — undoubtedly because of commercial arrangements.
I'm reminded of Linus Torvalds' rant about CVS[0] and SVN giving people brain damage. While this quote is obviously hyperbolic to the point of being offensive and demeaning, there's some truth to it. People whose only experience is with CVS and SVN might just assume that all version control has to be built in that weirdly clunky and centralized way. Likewise, people who have only ever used the garbage UIs on underpowered phones confused user hostility for essential complexity.
[0] Concurrent Versions System, not the US drugstore that used to be called Consumer Value Stores
Personally, I don't like iPhones very much but all I needed to know was observe other people. And many they were truly awed at the time. Even nvidia's APX 2500 looked like something wrapped in a hurry.
I myself was quite hesitant about touchscreens back in the day, when I was debating whether I should buy myself a Motorola Milestone (Android 2.1) after seeing a HTC Dream at work, or whether to get a BlackBerry Storm (with the tactile screen) since I wasn't sure how good a touchscreen will be or even if Android will survive.
Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9051005 - Feb 2015 (5 comments)
Yes cars and phones are hardware, but that’s relatively easy compared to the software. In cars people think software is just infotainment, but it’s really hundreds of controllers all networked and often each written by different vendors.
Tesla has brought most of them in house, and made them updateable. Enabling features like watching your dog safe and live in your car as you eat at a restaurant. Or turning down the cabin fan so the noise doesn’t interfere with a phone call.
It’s funny in like 15 years, everyone who has tried a phone OS has failed except Android.
Tesla has been slashing prices recently, and they can do that and still be profitable because, especially when it comes to batteries, they have some of the lowest production costs in the industry. This is the thing that is pretty shocking to me: Tesla has managed to build in a lower cost of hardware production, which everyone else said they were so bad at. In addition, Tesla was the only one with the foresight to build out their Supercharger network, and that is a huge competitive advantage for them. For disclosure, I despise Musk and will not by a Tesla, and I own a non-Tesla EV. I love my car, but most of the other charging networks (especially Electrify America) are downright dogshit compared to Superchargers - half the stations are randomly busted, their charging speeds max out at like 50 kW when they advertise 350 kW, etc.
I think the thing that's instructive about both Tesla and Apple is they are winning because they control entire "ecosystems": software plus very-well integrated hardware. Despite all the complaints about Tesla's shitty QA (which seem totally valid IMO), this seems like a situation that should improve over time, while it will be really difficult for legacy car companies to match Tesla's costs when it comes to battery production.
That rightfully deserves scorn and ridicule. It’s relevant 15 years on for those predicting huge failures for nascent ideas and markets—-if you want to make a big statement for the future, back it up.
If you predicted that Theranos was a total scam, you’d be vindicated. The jury is still out on Bitcoin, etc.