Its the reality distortion field. (this term comes from the register)
The original iphone was full of tradeoffs that made it not a great phone at launch. It had no apps, it had no copy paste, it had no 3g, it had no flash.
The browser was good (apart from the lack of flash) and the touch screen was good. The big reason why it became a behemoth is that it had great music support, and it was fashionable.
The apps, and the thing that actually drove it to monster success only really happened because the public gave them the benefit of the doubt (and developers changed their products to fit)
The only reason Google and Android took off? Well it didn’t hurt to have a mole/spy Eric Schmidt on the Apple board.
It actually comes right from Apple. Andy Hertzfeld, an early Apple employee, has claimed it was originally said in 1981 by another employee, Bud Tribble, to describe Steve Jobs. It was supposedly a reference to Star Trek.
No, it was the touchscreen and new UI paradigms.
The area where all the other existing foldable phones are dead in the water is the OS software integration with the hardware and unlike the first time around, they are competing with Apple that has four other ecosystems that can interface with the new phone seamlessly.
And more importantly, all the developers who bothered to follow most of the rules will have most of their stuff running on that new phone on day one.
They were not cool.
Their phones were not cool. The music services bundled were shit.
What made the iphone cool? no buttons, screen running at 60hz. nice animations.
Hard disagree. It was a great phone. The only disadvantage was battery life, if you were a heavy phone user you needed to charge it to get through the day, but as a phone itself (phoning/messaging people) it was delightful!
Look at the clip here of Steve scrolling through contacts like it is butter and the awe of the audience: On other phones large contact lists were cumbersome.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9kahkr/11_years_ago_...
Than visual voicemail! On other phones you called into voicemail and had to hear sequentially through all. With At&t Apple had the unique feature that one can scroll selectively through voice mails.
Of course the second iPhone 3G with the wjooshing sounding light saber app and the app were a beer is poured out made it cultural viral. And then Apple noticed withe the 4/4S that a good camera in your pocket was THE must have killer feature (especially for the women and newborn parent demographics). But the first model was a great tool for just phoning people.