Agree. I don't get what's driving folks comparing this to the iPhone launch. Apples and oranges.
People were also begging Apple to make an iPhone for years before it was even announced. There were fan mockups.
Apple only made it when the engineering had caught up with the vision.
The problem with this AI pin is that the entire concept seems bad and unfixable. Their whole product is just “your phone, but the only interface is Siri”. For one, you can already do exactly that with a smart watch or phone.
That this could happen is one of the most underrated aspects of the original iPhone.
In June 2007, the iPhone launched without a way to buy music on the phone and download it yourself, without copy and paste, and without a way to install any Apps. The app story was this little shit sandwich that Steve Jobs sold as a sweet solution called web apps announced earlier in the month (Web 2.0 and AJAX! No SDK!).
By the end of the first model’s life, it had the full iTunes Store, it had the App Store full of native apps, and it had cut, copy and paste. Any other phone that launched in 2007 did not see this level of improvement just through software updates in 2008 or 2009.