Hacker News Reader

Comment by ActorNightly | Hacker News Reader

I love how people just rewrite history on the internet lol.

Iphone 1 was a collosal PoC. Slow, most of web didnt work. Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on, but looked cool (which is the reason people bought it mostly). Everyone that needed mobile compute functionality was still on Blackberry and some other devices.

There was a time during early 2010s where the iphone was better than everything else due to native hardware and in house software and updated functionality. However by 2016 Android caught up, and since the first Pixel came out it pretty much has been ahead ever since.

View on HN

Not sure what you are going on about, that the original iPhone was a PoC.

Given what was available at that time (I was using a Windows Mobile O2 XDA AND a Blackberry at that time), the iPhone was simply magical. The ability to browse the full web on the go and a proper mail client, was amazing.

Worth the money to travel to San Francisco from Singapore just to get one (and the cost of the AT&T SIM masker to spoof it on the local Singapore telco network)

I think you have rose tinted glasses. I had one too, and the browser was garbage over 2g. You forget how much time was spent looking at that checkerboard pattern.

As for email. Proper email client? It was pop3 only, and you had to manually tap to fetch new messages.

You're right about the email client. I had IMAP email clients on mobile for a while before the iPhone supported it. Email on the OG iPhone was terrible.

I wouldn't bother responding to grandfather. Literally every time apple releases a new product, there's a bunch of people collectively shrugging off whatever the product claims to be bringing, and along come the "the iPhone v1 was crap too and look how that turned out" apologists. Not worth the discourse.

Again, no. You completely somehow forgot tech in late 2000s lol.

The internet on anything mobile was pretty painful when it launched in general. Websites weren't optimized for mobile, mobile data was unusably slow. Most people who wanted portability were using things like netbooks, which you could actually multitask on.

Blackberry was the goto for actual phone because it was much easier to type on due to the best keyboard at the time, well developed software for things like email, basic browser, e.t.c.

Ill leave you with this staplepiece of internet history: https://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=iphone/

I am so glad his website is still up and running.

> Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on, but looked cool

and motion controls. Between the Nintendo Wii and the first iPhone people were obsessed with motion controls for some reason.

> Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on

I could've sworn that "it's easy to type on" was the one weird trick it did right? Though perhaps I'm just misremembering the media; my first iOS device of any kind was the iPod touch with retina display.

Something about Apple having a temporary monopoly (or possibly monopsony) on capacitive touch screens, where everyone else was stuck with resistive ones?

I don't think Apple had a monopoly on capacitive screens. There were a couple other mobile devices that used them and came out around the same time. Maybe they tied up all/most the available production capacity for a bit?

Typing on the original iphone wasn't perfect, but it was generally better than tiny physical keyboards in many cases

Physical keyboards were better than any touch screen one until the swipe typing became standard. You could type on them faster, and had more features like arrow keys, which were useful for smaller screens.

There was a whole era of autocorrect and the memes that came with it due to how much it was being used with touchscreen keyboards.

Of course the advantage of a full screen for things like web and media was more important, and making fullscreen phones was cheaper, so physical keyboards died out. The size of the screen increased as well.

I think if you talked to someone working on Meta Quest they would say this is going to blow the competitors away. If you talk to a reviewer for a tech magazine they’re going to complain about any detail they can find in the 1.0 launch of a new product line as if it’s a colossal failure (aka PoC).

I think the difference is everyone knew market penetration on cell phones would be close to 90%. This may be better than the Quest but is it going to take AR/VR mainstream? Seems iffy. In which case drawbacks may never get ironed out.

Quest and Vive weren't great, but they actually had working VR that set the stage for subsequent development.

Iphone 1 set the stage for tech jewelry.

That's the history I remember tho.

I remember the first time I saw an iPhone. It was 2am at a house party with a bunch of 19-25 year olds. Pretty much everyone stopped drinking or dancing and played with this dudes phone for three hours.

This was my first experience with an iPhone too. A rich guy (friend of a friend) had one, my friend and I spent the rest of the night trying it.

I had the first Occulus when it came out. Big hit at my workplace. Anything flashy is going to get attention. The problem with Apple is that they have, do, and will continue on prioritizing flashiness over usability. Its actually pathetic that you can't install linux on Apple silicon (and no, REd hacked together Asahi linux does not count)

Internet is the new story telling at the camp fire, turning humble actions into historical myths for eternity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com