I'm keen for the Vision Pro, but the iPhone and iPod touch had already reached incredible market penetration by the iPhone 3GS. The reason the iPhone 4 leak was such a huge deal is because the iPhone had already left its mark on the industry.

It’s correct that the App Store didn’t exist but you’re still wrong about the impact (“We sold more iPhones in the first weekend of sales than in the first month of sales for any device in AT&T history.”). People kept predicting that it’d flop after the most loyal users all had one, and that just never happened.

If you weren’t working in the field at the time, it’s hard to appreciate how much that put the mobile web on the map. The places I dealt with went from not caring about it really at all to crash projects optimizing their websites because all of the executives had iPhones and wanted their apps to support them well. I know at least two large organizations where the remote access policy was changed, too. Having been involved with phone/PDA apps since the late 90s, this was very different from anything I’d seen with things like WAP just fizzling with almost no interest from clients. At WWDC in 2008, it was frenzied even before the announcement of the App Store – so many web developers had been able to get permission to attend because of all of that interest.