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Comment by olivierduval | Hacker News Reader

So you bought an iPhone because of its "(product) design" (how it fullfill your needs) and not about "marketing" (how to define the markets for a product and why people in these marketing will buy it...).

As I understand it, for example, there's markets for "broken watches": it can be

* broken luxury watches: to have a "rich man look" without paying the full price

* for hobbyist watch-repair

* for professional watch ressellers (after repair)

* for educational / museum...

As far as design is concerned, the watch is broken. But it can be sold if you find who will buy it and why... and that's marketing

Jobs was a great designer too... (and/or knew how to hire great designers and let them get out the best of them)

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> So you bought an iPhone because of its "(product) design" (how it fullfill your needs)

Sure. I guess my point is that its "product design" was essentially "it's a PDA with more modern technology". It did not look extra-terrestrial back then, it really looked like a better PDA.

In other examples, I have seen product people saying that they had the "vision" of connecting their app to the cloud. Or more recently, "visionaries" will suggest integrating LLMs in everything they can describe (they would suggest writing an LLM driver in the kernel if they knew the word "kernel"). And then, maybe, one such integration will work, and they will say "I had this vision that we should integrate LLM here" and forget the part where 99% of their ideas were worthless, and the one that work was actually not a revolutionary idea but just something that technically worked.

Again, not to say that Steve Jobs was not good. He certainly brought a lot. But sometimes I feel like we overdo it a bit.

> it's a PDA with more modern technology

Lots of people, including Apple with the Newton, tried to build a really great PDA - some people loved them, most found them too complex and slow.

I'd argue that when the iPhone originally shipped ( remember on shipping it didn't have an App store or even a custom app story - Steve said just write a web app ), it was simply a phone, a web browser, and a music player.

In my view it wasn't trying to be a PDA at all - all that came later.

> it was simply a phone, a web browser, and a music player.

Sure, but again not revolutionary. I had a Nokia that was a phone, a web browser and a music player. The iPhone was just better at that, but not very different in the end.

Sure everything is incremental - but I think you are missing the key feature of the iPhone that really changed how you interacted with it.

A really great multi-touch screen - sure there were touch devices before - and even multitouch ones, but my recollection was they would both miss/confuse inputs and have significant input lag and most were single input - the iPhone just worked as you'd expect - it felt magical. 'You got me at scrolling'

If you take a great touch experience, and a software user interface rather than buttons, then you have a platform with infinitely reconfigurable interaction modes.

Form is function. The user interface ( in the broadest sense of how you interact with the computer ) is key. They delivered touch that worked, in a form factor you could hold.

One of the reasons ChatGPT feels revolutionary is it has changed how people interact with their computers - creating a new conversational mode - ( and sure Eliza goes back a long way as well - but that was a toy ).

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