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Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

Apple has on a few occasions in the past come in after people have spent a lot of time and energy developing things and making a small market, figuring out how it should actually work, making a nice version 1.0 of how it should actually work, making that market explode 100-fold and taking all the money.

That smart homes are more trouble than they are worth currently sounds to me like ripe territory for Apple to poach.

However not sure if without Jobs and Ive if they can actually do anything like what they used to.

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Was Johnny Ive really a driver of innovation? Or just trading repairabily for vanity metrics?

You tell me, was the iPhone innovative?

No it was inevitable

the inevitable things are the greatest innovations (in the realm of technology)

Inevitable * in hindsight *

Innovation is the introduction of a new paradigm that works so well that people can no longer imagine not having

No one was close to the original iPhone at launch and they didn’t really catch up until ~iPhone 12 for truly competitive alternatives

It was inevitable in the sense the hardware was already available on the wholesale market. People tend to lionize these companies like they forged the phone out of the living earth themselves. Really they just contract with factories that assemble products out of components available on the wholesale market.

Sexy OS? You can argue that came mostly from within since that is how that software was developed, in house. But the hardware stack they ordered and had assembled for you? I’m not so sure.

Was Ive involved in the iPhone creation? Or only its enshittification?

When the iPhone was developed, Jony led industrial design but not yet software design.

Jony owned iPhone hardware design top-to-bottom through development and multiple launches

You think he’s glorified for literally nothing?

The iPhone wasn’t as innovative as the AppStore which didn’t come around until iPhone OS 2. Selling software like music changed everything

Cool. App Store extended the true innovation which was a fully capable OS in everyone’s pocket

App Store doesn’t exist without iPhone just like Windows doesn’t exist without the PC

Not really. There was a way of slab typed smart phones with capacitance touch screen windows mobile devices and they were more capable than the iPhone with on board GPS, etc. but they didn’t have an integrated App Store, which was the key to customer retention. The first iPhones didn’t have GPS and so the map app wasn’t quiet as capable as the other high end smart phones in the market as it couldn’t do directions properly. It had the best web browser, though.

Every other model of high end smart phones quickly adopted the App Store model since it was such an obviously thing to install application directly to the device, but up until it was a major missing feature. All phones at the time required a computer tethered to do the purchase and installation.

With the App Store the age of phones needing full general purpose computers was coming to an end. It was a whole cultural shift in software

Later they started the iCloud sync so backups could be done ‘in the field’ as well.

I recall getting apps on my Blackberry and Treo before iPhone existed.

He was a great designer with low business acumen (without Jobs).

His realm at Apple began crumbling when he executed a flawed strategy for the Apple watch launch as a fashion item, instead of a technology product geared toward health (Fitbit was 1st). It costed Apple 25M, and seemed like buying advertising from influencers (similar to 23andme launch).

I usually value this youtuber's insights, but he has recently been reaching the wrong conclusions: https://youtu.be/JUG1PlqAUJk?si=_Y87UQGdhIo92a7r&t=469

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