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Comment by EliRivers | Hacker News Reader

"Obviously the iPhone was revolutionary."

The iPhone's marketing was very good. I'm not sure there was anything revolutionary about it.

Edit: Rather than answer individuals below, I'll state my terms here. Revolutionary indicates a complete change - the overturning of all that was before. We already had phones, we already had pocket computers, we already had phones that were pocket computers, we already had phones that were pocket computers that you could get extra programs for, we already had increasing use of them as time went on. We already had.

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Are you serious? It was absolutely a revolutionary product, in a number of different ways. It redefined the way one interacts with mobile interfaces (swipes, flicks, pinches and other 'touch' gestured premiered in a commercial product with the iPhone) - stylus based control was completely replaced. Apple also wrest control of the end-user experience from the carriers, preventing them from forcing their crap-ware onto their customers. It created a (much more) open ecosystem for mobile apps, that wasn't strictly controlled by the carriers. In US, Apple pushed for and got AT&T to agree to an 'unlimited' data plan. The original iPhone browser was like no other mobile browser at the time. It was actually usable. With the iPhone, the smart phone went from a niche business product to mass market adoption almost completely replacing traditional cellphones, and destroyed pretty much all existing competition (Nokia Symbian, Blackberry, Palm, PocketPC).

It wasn't just marketing. It really was a transformative product.

I think the iPhone was a nice set of improvements on the existing smartphones of the day, but I just don't see it as revolutionary in the sense that Blank means. Apple definitely forced the pace of evolution in that market substantially, but they didn't create an entirely new market.

That's not a knock on Apple, by any means. I think they're brilliant at taking an existing consumer product and dominating it by making something that's radically better designed and made. They are very willing to let other people pioneer a category and prove the market before coming in to crush their competitors, drive their executives before them, and hear the lamentation of their women. One could argue that given their particular skills, that's a much better use of their time and money than pioneering anything major.

I'm sorry, do you remember the state of touch screen consumer devices pre-iPhone? It was a much different world. If your jaw didn't drop a little the first time you saw the pinch/pull zoom on a map during the keynote, I don't know what it would take to actually amaze you.

The other day, I was setting wifi on my Dad's old Dell Axim (PocketPC PDA). I was trying to hit the keyboard with my finger and wondering why the keyboard was so small, before I realize that, of course, I was supposed to be using a stylus. It's amazing how much the landscape changed.

I do. It was a very impressive set of user interface improvements. That something amazes me does not make a revolutionary product in the sense that Blank means. For him it's a technical term.

Really. The 100-odd patents filed by Apple just to achieve that level of touch capability don't constitute a technical revolution? Compared to the state at which touch screens had been advancing prior, it was a night and day change.

they didn't create an entirely new market

The App Store provided an entirely new sales and delivery platform for inexpensive smartphone software programs.

This is a $2B market for software that didn't exist before. I'd call that an entirely new market. Perhaps not big by Apple scale, but lots of companies would kill to have a $2B market.

Not entirely new. See the Danger Hiptop / Sidekick (and its download catalog) from 2002, among other examples.

Did Apple do much better with a more powerful device and a large user population used to buying music and other media from them? Absolutely. But that's still doing it better, not doing something entirely new.

That's fair. I have heard of that device but did not realize that it had an app store.

I think Apple's (correctly) viewed as the company who "makes it work" with the right combination of technology that is cutting edge enough, but integrated superbly. When they are really out on the leading edge, the results are mixed (e.g. Newton), although that may have changed with greater vertical integration and supply logistics in recent years.

On that level, though, how "entirely new" does something have to be before it gets that stamp. If a given company invents something but doesn't bring it out of beta, and another company becomes known for commercializing it and bringing it to millions, who gets / deserves the most credit?

I don't think there's an objective way to divide the credit - different people are going to assign different weights to different parts of the process because they have different values.

That being said, it is clear many Apple fans (and Apple themselves, frankly) have gone way past a reasonable division of credit. Considering the last decade-plus of smartphone history, the idea that Apple should be suing HTC (among others) over products they developed with Andy Rubin's ex-Danger team is laughable. If either (or both) had spent a bit more time and money on patent lawyers in the early 2000s, they could have sued the iPhone out of existence. At least at HTC (at Google is a more complicated question), I'm sure there are a few people who regret that they didn't.

Oh, I'd agree that the App Store actually is revolutionary. But it's not a revolutionary new consumer product. There were for-pay apps for mobile phones before. The Palm app ecosystem was well developed; I bought a bunch of apps for my Treo phone.

Apple did, thought, create a revolutionary new distribution mechanism. But imagine for a sec that some third party had invented the App Store. Who would they have sold it to? Apple, Nokia, and Microsoft. Or perhaps AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. The market for that innovative product was large companies who sold a lot of phones. Apple just happened to have an exclusive on it, and used it to crush their competitors.

Honestly, I don't think you're giving them enough justice. It was more than just a "nice set of improvements", as the corpses of PocketPC, Symbian, Palm (and soon maybe) Blackberry can attest.

>Apple definitely forced the pace of evolution in that market substantially, but they didn't create an entirely new market.

Here's one example: mobile and mobile apps. Look at the number of start-ups (and established companies) in mobile, compared to just a few years ago. The app store model made buying, downloading and installing mobile apps, brain-dead simple for users which exploded the market.

You have to give them more credit.

You do understand that it wasn't the iPhone that killed Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian and (maybe) Blackberry, right?

It certainly didn't help, but to this day (and probably for the foreseeable future), there is still a larger non-iPhone slice of the market to divide up. Existing smartphone players could have stuck with incremental improvements and held onto more than enough to survive.

As evidence, I'll note that iPhone didn't pass Symbian until somewhere between Q2 and Q4 2011 (depending on which analyst you believe) - after Nokia announced the switch to Windows Phone. Existing players could have survived the iPhone, but something else happened...

You can drive somebody else out of business without a revolutionary product. Look at how the US car companies got hammered by the Japanese for decades. Japanese cars did not fly or even hover. They were just better cars, but they still kicked Detroit's ass around the block again and again.

I'm happy to agree that Apple's App Store was a revolutionary approach to software sales, though. That really did transform a market entirely. But the iPhone itself was not revolutionary in the same sense.

> We already had.

This is one of those truisms that technologists love to repeat over and over again. "It already exists, so it is not revolutionary." I think it just a curse of the people working on the tech.

To technologists, the tech isn't that amazing or revolutionary. "We already had that 5 years ago!". What they miss, and will probably continue to miss as long as there is technology, is that what is amazing is making it available to everyone in an accessible format.

It's the go-to example, but that was the genius of Apple. Sure, all the tech was already there, but what was revolutionary was starting the path to putting a computer in every home.

A machine or piece of technology by itself isn't any more amazing than anything else. Having it available and easy to use for all of humanity is very revolutionary.

> A machine or piece of technology by itself isn't any more amazing than anything else. Having it available and easy to use for all of humanity is very revolutionary.

Absolutely. But I feel compelled to point out that the wealthier slice of the developed world isn't "all of humanity" by a long shot. Right now the revolution that is encompassing all of humanity is the mobile phone itself. The smartphone's going to get there, but it still has a long way to go.

Having it available and easy to use for all of humanity is very revolutionary.

That's stretching it a bit, don't you think? Apple devices are neither ubiquitously available (i.e outside US), nor are they within the price reach of "all of humanity"

edit: oops, I did not read fpgeek's response before posting

Pre iPhone: Carriers control software ecosystem of mobile phones.

Post iPhone: Apple/Google control software ecosystem of mobile phones.

Revolution: A forcible overthrow of a government or social order for a new system.

"Revolution: A forcible overthrow of a government or social order for a new system."

By your own definition; _same_ system, just different controller, so no revolution.

I would cynically add that that's how most of the revolutions work in practice.

In this case, I would suggest that while the system may seem similar, the end user experience differs greatly, for better or worse,

yes and in addition our new overlords are more affable generally than the old ones, atleast till the status quo changes again.

Ubiquitous pocket computers are revolutionary. If you compare usability and adoption before and after the iPhone, I think Apple deserves a fair bit of credit for that. Of course not nearly all of it, but they are certainly a hero of this revolution.

(I was going to go into a whole rant about why ubiquitous pocket computers are revolutionary, but maybe I'll let someone else tag in on that one if it's in question ...)

First really widely accepted smartphone?

It seems that a true revolution happens not when someone invents a new thing, but when someone figures out how to make it useful to masses. Printing press is much older than Gutenberg. Steam engine is much older than Watt.

For whatever it's worth, the framework I use to discuss innovation/what succeeds is the balanced breakthrough model, afaik, credited to Larry Keeley at the Doblin Group.

Basically, the gist is that to be successful, idea/offering/product/service needs to not only be 1) technologically advanced, yet feasible, but also 2)desirable from a user perspective and 3)viable from a business perspective.

Only when you put strongly advanced yet feasible, desirable and financially viable innovations out there do you get really successful and revolutionary advances.

Lots of cool tech fails to make an impact because it doesn't solve a need or can't be clearly fit into a business case – and you can repeat that story for any of the three key parts of this model.

It seems obvious, right? Except you can point to an endless string of failures, big and small, that clearly didn't account for at least one of those three parts.

If you don't remember what mobile phones were like before the iPhone, you must have either a short memory or a revisionist memory.

I'm not going to argue if the iPhone was revolutionary or not like the others commenting here... but if it was, then you would have to say Windows 3.1 was as well.

iOS killed the pseudo-pen for touch screens.

PS: Remember when people paid for ring tones?

People still pay for ringtones, on iOS even. If you have an iPhone: Settings -> Sounds -> Ringtone -> Buy More Tones.

People still pay for text messaging even though they don't need to. If you care, the iPhone includes built in support for custom ring tones and there are apps that make it even simpler.

http://www.demogeek.com/2009/07/31/how-to-add-custom-rington...

I didn't pay for custom ringtones on my Treo 650 (and I suspect mine wasn't the first Treo that supported custom ringtones).

Carrying the internet around in your pocket is, indeed, revolutionary.

We already had, but it was shit and almost nobody used it. Thanks to Apple it's not shit, and everyone uses it. This is actually almost as important as inventing the thing.

everything in tech is an iteration of something that has come before. still new technologies can be revolutionary..

before the internet we already has arpanet, tcp/ip, newsgroups, telnet. there is nothing revolutionary about the internet? or is there?

Apple set some standards with the iPhone, but Android brought smartphones to the masses. I would go as far as evolutionary for the iPhone, but it was still a niche product. Some of the cars that existed before Ford were pretty slick, but few people owned one.

Credit for revolutionizing a market should go to whatever brings it to that market in large enough numbers to matter. This is why we usually credit Ford for revolutionizing transportation, even though many interesting automobiles preceded his.

It's hard to see from the SV bubble, but most people were introduced to smartphones with Blackberry and Android. It wasn't long ago that the iPhone was seen as an interesting toy used by celebrities and a few friends by people outside of tech circles.

Umm, they have sold over 200 million iPhones, how is that a nitch product?

How many had been sold when Google started promoting Android? I doubt it was more than a few million. Other companies outsell Ford a century later, but they still revolutionized the industry. We're talking about history here, not the current market.

Apple revolutionized smartphone design, but they didn't revolutionize the industry. Google did that by creating a good smartphone operating system that anyone could use freely.

Android outsold iPhone for the first time in 2010 at which time the iPhone had been out for 3 years. In 2012 they sold 50% more phones in 2012 which while significant is hardly the type of dominate market position your talking about. If you look at the iPhone growth in the US it's mostly a question of increasing the number of carriers vs increasing the market share at any one carrier, so no Google had little impact on promoting iPhone sales.

I'm talking about impact, not sales. I started off using sales as a measure of impact, so I can see where the misunderstanding came from. That's a possible measure of impact, but probably not useful here.

Android made it easy to make a good smartphone by removing the biggest hurdle. What matters in the history books is who had a lasting impact. Will the future look like Android where the basic software is free to duplicate and modify? Or will it look like Apple's tightly controlled system?

History doesn't seem to favor Apple's way of doing things. Apple's way can never create as diverse a market as Google's has.

You're in a big hole already. Stop digging.

What?

I guess what he meant in essence was - would Android exist at all if iOS hadn't shown the world how great smartphone OSs could be? Just like Apple showed the world how good PC OSs could be back in the 80s.

Very important not to underestimate the polish and usability that iOS brought to the table. I remember looking into developing an app for symbian and realising how tricky it would be (tools, guides, lack of examples, crappy devices, etc).

I guess it's an overreaction to the more zealous of Apple customers. They want to give Apple all the credit when their contribution was to create a significant stepping stone. I know most people who use Apple's products see the company as an important part of an enormous mix of players all doing something important.

Given that Google bought Android in 2005 and was reasonably far along when the iPhone came out, I'd say it is safe to say that Android would have existed whether or not iOS did.

Would it have been significantly different today? Sure. But by that standard, iOS would have been significantly different today without Android, too.

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