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Comment by Veliladon | Hacker News Reader

The second Apple debuted that smooth as fucking butter interface it was clear as day how badly behind people were at the time. Pre-iPhone the form of phones was incredible but the function was dogshit garbage. Small displays rendering everything in software and failing to hit 15fps on a good day because these poor little ARM chips were being abused to within an inch of their lives. If you were seriously lucky you might get blitting in hardware.

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.

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I remember 2 audience reactions really, really clearly from the original iPhone launch:

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.

Yes, there were already phones with touchscreens before the iPhone, but they were all using a stylus, which seemed a better choice than a finger at the time, since they were more precise. But after the iPhone came out, it quickly became obvious how much better it was to use a screen with a finger with multi-touch than with a stylus. Steve or whoever made the decisions about the iPhone obviously knew very well what they were going for and 100% deserve the success.

> Yes, there were already phones

> 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.

Those stylus touchscreen phones had a 640x480 or an 800x600 resolution and a full web browser. They could use basically any web site on the internet.

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.

> The first iPhone had a 320x480 screen and could only use web sites that had a mobile version.

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.

Didn't the iPhone OS also pioneer zooming in to website elements? I.e. double tapping on for instance the content of an article would zoom to the size of the div holding that content.

I think that feature made a huge impact on usability of desktop websites on the iPhone.

It's hard to overstate just how big of a leap the iPhone was. Critics only focused on the shortcomings but neglected to see what it really was.

Steve Jobs Introducing at Macworld in 2007 is a classic for the ages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQKMoT-6XSg

> It's hard to overstate just how big of a leap the iPhone was.

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.

I like the bit where Jobs is saying he's introducing three products. The audience reaction is wildest for the phone, then the "widescreen iPod", and then just a smattering of enthusiasm for the "Internet communicator". As it turns out, that last aspect completely eclipsed the other two.

I remember a lot of tech reporters were quick to mock the iPhone for not supporting a feature they all took for granted: copy and paste.

These types of "tech reporters" are appropriately and brilliantly mocked in SNL's "iPhone workers" skit: https://youtu.be/AJJ353epH3o.

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.

Copy and paste was the reason I remember being bandied around inside MS at the time. I made the point that I was sure they could figure out cut and paste before we could figure out everything else. Other phones like O2 had capacitive touch but you couldn’t design a whole interface around it as it was very expensive and hardly anyone had it. Apple went in big and got it to price point people could afford. It saw it as clearly game changing, but being young and nieve I overestimated the ability for other companies to effectively compete even when they could see a model of what works.

3g and wifi hotspot were another two big ones (edit: that made me stick with the somewhat ridiculous htc/windows i was using) iirc

*edit: i say ridiculous as the iphone still made it look totally crap

3g came in the second gen iPhone (called iPhone 3G; afaik there has never been an iPhone 2). Only edge when outside wifi range was actually a huge downside of the first gen. It was sub par to the phone I had back then (Nokia N95). I only adopted the iPhone when it got 3g.

I once read an interview with Anssi Vanjoki, who was one of the top executives at Nokia. He said indeed that when he first held an iPhone he knew it was over for Nokia.

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.

People have often indicated we would have consolidated on iPhone-like devices in Apple’s absence, but I’m not convinced.

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.

Read up on handspring.

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.

> 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

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.

Removing carriers from the phone turned out to be one of the biggest innovations alongside having a real web browser.

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.

Total control like that wouldn't have been possible with any telcos without several million existing customers to back apple up.

> People have often indicated we would have consolidated on iPhone-like devices in Apple’s absence, but I’m not convinced.

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.

There was some fancy 6 inch or so Nokia PDA from around that time that was supposed to be amazing. It had all the good hacker features - it ran Linux, it had driver support, you could ssh from it, etc. I remember turning it on and seeing kernel printk logs scrolling, followed by the plain X cross-thatch, and then some home grown window manager where you had to use a stylus to move the mouse cursor to click on stuff. That kinda summed up Nokia for me, developing 80s tech in the 2000s.

Their S60 phones were based on Symbian and had a web browser based on WebCore and JavaScriptCore at the end of 2005. By all accounts they were good, hackable, general-purpose mobile devices.

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.

Well, Nokia also got a good chunk of cash for the phones division, and it didn't exactly turn into a cash cow for MS. So, maybe Nokia got the better end of that stick in the end.

I have a cousin who still fondly talks about how great Nokia was in its heyday. Great engineers, leading edge hardware and innovation, leading supply chain, etc.

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

Nokia had vision and creativity, don’t forget the N-Gage, the first phone/smartphone/console hybrid. I think it just lacked in software investment. Nobody thought it was necessary or even possible to deliver that kind of experience on phones.

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.

That's the problem with being an established market leader. You're so terrified of blowing up your own market that you're afraid to disrupt with innovation.

This is the topic of the famous book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” (one of the three or four business books actually worth reading, and unfortunately also the source of the overused word “disruption” in business)

Could you by any chance list the other books?

Just finished reading The Innovator's Dilemma. Phenomenal read.

Two other important ones for entrepreneurs:

- “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.

Thank you for the recommendation.

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.

I don’t recall the precise details, but one of the key Android people was watching the keynote and had that immediate realization: their prototypes had just been obsoleted.

Yep, their prototype was more like a BlackBerry than an iPhone and they immediately had to switch gears and make one like the iPhone instead: https://www.androidpolice.com/first-android-prototype-google...

This was the original Android demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg

That was a year later IIRC.

It was a lot less of a paradigm shift at the time than it seems like in hindsight, actually.

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.

The iPhone was a software innovation that was years ahead of the industry at the time, enabled by that one hardware innovation that you’re sounding rather dismissive of.

I don't think I'm "dismissing" anything. I replied to a comment that made what I think is an incorrect point about how the product was received at release. It's too easy to take a successful product and mythologize its origins, when in fact history was complicated and in a lot of ways the early iPhone kinda sucked.

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).

The early iPhone sucked in ways similar to how the early iPod sucked, and was received with similar reactions. In both cases, the folks who predicted failure focused too much on the technical deficiencies of the V1 product and not enough on the game-changing difference in approach. In the iPhone’s case that meant betting fully on a multitouch screen with a rich, smoothly animated GUI, and wresting software control away from the carriers. I think the latter in particular was not sufficiently appreciated.

Are you trying to argue with me as a proxy for the linked article? I didn't write it, and I didn't say any of that stuff you seem to be responding to. I'm explaining why it wasn't seen as a paradigm shift at the time, and that its dominance evolved over time (which is hardly surprising). Hyperbolizing history is generally a bad idea. The iPhone, as released, was a very mixed product.

I disagree with exactly that: I watched the intro live as someone in the industry (so it isn't "history" to me), and I and many others, including Andy Rubin [0], definitely saw it as a paradigm shift at the time, for the two reasons I stated. BTW, it was also a common belief in the industry that the emphasis on web applications was basically a smokescreen, because the SDK was not ready and Steve didn't want to focus attention on something that didn't exist yet.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5229618/android-started-...

>You couldn't even get your email on the device outside of a handful of open source web clients

Totally false. The first iPhone shipped with Mail, which handled POP and IMAP accounts very well, including gmail accounts.

How could it not be a paradigm shift if its impact is still very visible in all the top selling smartphones today? Both in form factor and software?

It changed industry's and the public's perception of what a "phone" could be.

Jobs was ahead of his time, and he pushed the vision of HTML5 and offline apps. He was resistant to app stores, I suspect, because he wanted maximum freedom for users in the future rather than the corporatized, schlock-filled, freedom restricting, walled garden the post-Jobs Apple brought.

You see his vision as a big miss. I see his vision as evidence of good taste and also an eventuality.

Jobs clearly wasn't resistant to app stores. He literally had one in the works when the product shipped. It just wasn't ready, so he spun a yarn about web apps (and yes: he was ahead of his time, and these days you can totally do that, but now that Apple owns that 30% fee, they're decidedly anti web apps).

> Jobs clearly wasn't resistant to app stores. He literally had one in the works when the product shipped.

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%.

> 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.

HN discussion quality check:

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.

----

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.

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