Computing and the Internet have matured and become so much more central to daily life. For better or worse, that's going to put limits on the quirks something like a smartphone can have. If your photo library, banking, social media, or even job depends on your phone, it really does need to be rock solid and reliable.

I think what people forget is pre-iPhone, we all saw _something_ coming. Maybe we didn't expect it to look exactly like the iPhone, but there was a sense of excitement around what was coming next for computing. Sony Style magazine was still in print. eCommerce was picking up. Palm phones, Blackberry, Windows Mobile. Super quirky laptops and UMPCs. I remember lusting after some wildly impractical UMPCs, because it meant that everything I did on my desktop could now fit in my pocket.

Even after smartphones took off, I remember sometimes thinking "man, imagine in the future when this stuff is good and it actually just works." A lot of stuff was basically just demos back then. Well, here we are. A huge portion of my life happens on my iPhone, and that really does mean it has to Just Work.