Hacker News Reader

Comment by futureshock | Hacker News Reader

Truly, no one was saying this except for obviously wrong people. In 2007 the first iPhone was borderline magic. The core of the user experience has not changed because it never needed to change. They 100% nailed the UX on the first try. Everyone was agog. We knew it was the future.

I’d compare it to ChatGPT, but honestly there’s way more skepticism of that than there ever was of iPhone.

View on HN

Plenty of people were skeptical of the iPhone when it came out. On launch, it was very very expensive, carrier locked, and relatively lacking in features compared to other phones. The app store was not in place. You had the Apple apps and mobile safari which was very limited in those days -- and that was it.

The revolution that was the iPhone required two pieces, both of which needed each other and only one of which was present at launch: touchscreen UI, and the app store. Those two were not fully in place until after 2008. Even then, it took some time. I think of that ~2006-2011 period as the era of BlackBerry. Of course, the vision was clear by 2010 or so. iPhone 4S/iPhone 5 was really when the rocket ship went parabolic.

Regardless of what people said or are saying now, the main difference is that people that bought the initial iPhone loved it and used it all the time. Most Vision Pro owners stopped using it 2-3 weeks after purchase.

The iphone built on existing product categories with product-market fit: PDAs, cellphones, MP3 players, smartphones. The path to improve the initial product was clear. There was a clear target.

Vision Pro launches in an unproven market (VR/AR) with only a handful of games with significant adoption that AVP can't run as well as competitors due to lack of controllers (e.g Beat Saber experience would be worse due to higher latency of hand tracking). Path to improve the product is uncertain because the target market is not clear yet.

I both bought iPhone and Vision Pro on day one. And my enthusiasm and engagement with each product are completely different.

The Vision Pro is probably closer to the Apple Watch launch - the Apple Watch launched as this weird high-end fashion thing with like expensive ceramic and gold options, and it didn't really know what it wanted to do.

In a generation or two, they realized it was fitness and health which was the target market and honed in on that.

Not saying the trajectory will be the same - Apple Watch is inherently both cheaper and easier to use since you just strap it on your arm instead of closing out the world, just saying they both started out as products without a really compelling purpose.

Apple Watch is an cheap iPhone accessory. Vision Pro is an overpriced strap-on full facial PC. There's no comparison between the two that makes any sense at all.

The comparison is that some devices need time to find their use case

Yeah. The iPhone had people excited when it was demoed on stage.

The only people shitting on it were sitting either in an office in Waterloo, Canada or an office in Espoo, Finland.

They maybe were shitting it in public like Balmer because what they can say to journalists? That we have a worse product? There is a story about Android and Andy Rubin said that after iPhone announcement they decided they have to redesign everything from scratch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com