The stuff this is talking about is just eye candy. The original iPhone was much more than an eye candy improvement.
Touchscreen phones existed before then, but because of platform performance, was always of the "poke, wait, stuff magically appears, poke, wait, stuff magically appears..." model.
Apple didn't just invent new usage models, they invented the platform that made it implementable. The deep integration of UIKit with hardware acceleration, as well as animation as a first-class consideration in the API, were (and still are) some of Apple's greatest advantages.
Quartz, which is the drawing and compositing engine developed for OSX, is really at the core of it. For one thing, Quartz is really fast, and long before iPhone was even a rumor Apple had already tied it deeply into OpenGL and made it hardware accelerated.
Quartz is really the "secret sauce" to the responsiveness and graphics performance of iOS, and it predates iOS by a pretty wide margin. Core Graphics was built on top of Quartz, as well as Core Animation, which form the primary ways third party devs interact with the graphics layer.
If Apple hadn't done OSX first, or done it differently, I don't think they could have pulled off iPhone.
I've only owned a single smart phone so far, and it's an Android device. But I've noticed that Apple's devices have smoother interfaces. I've wondered how much of that can be traced to platform factors, and how much is simply execution and polish. And whether the OS design, and the difference between ObjC and Java, play a significant role. My impression was that Java was a dog, but it seems to run pretty well on Android. It's possible that with the meticulous attention to detail of a company like Apple, Android could be made as responsive and smooth as iOS. Or, maybe, platform issues make that virtually impossible. It would be more technically intriguing to think that native code and Quartz are decisively better, but I'm leaning toward the more boring explanation that Apple just worked harder on the UI, and expended the effort to do all the little things right. The basis for my opinion is the observation that true explanations are more often boring.
I'm not very expert on graphics, but I've had a suspicion that dedicated graphics hardware makes iPhone-type devices possible. Highly-integrated and highly power efficient graphics hardware was only just becoming available when the iPhone was in development. And, as you mentioned, the software layers to take full advantage of it in a GUI wasn't something you could just take for granted.
I disagree. Only a very small minority cares about operating systems and revolutionizing them.
What the iPhone revolutionized was user experience. For the first time, someone invented a device that was easy to understand, fun to use, and seemingly limitless in capability. When Steve went on stage and showed it off, the minds of everyone in the audience went into overdrive to start imagining all the possible things they could do with it. Both the hardware and the OS were designed to maximize those aspects of the device.
This is what sets the iPhone apart from its competitors, who to this day focus on hardware features and software gimmicks. In my opinion neither Android nor Windows Phone have managed to capture and learn to communicate in the higher level thinking that constitutes UX. They are still great operating systems. They just work in a very different context.
But the idea is the level of interactivity and the UX around iPhone would have been impossible without the platform Apple first built for OSX.
Many other manufacturers at the time had UX ambitions like Apple, but were held back by their own platforms. This infamous video comparing the concept renders of the Nokia N97 vs. what shipped really demonstrates this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJpEuMidcSU
It's not that Apple didn't innovate on the UX, they sure as hell did, but rather that they bought themselves a huge lead on the competition by having, for all practical purposes, the only platform around that could even do something like that.
Interesting that it wasn't the first time an Apple CEO went on stage and showed off a pocket tablet, and the minds of everyone in the audience went into overdrive to start imagining all the possible things they could do with it.
What the Newton, in 1993, revolutionized was user experience. For the first time, someone invented a device that was easy to understand, fun to use, and seemingly limitless in capability. Except it wasn't limitless. The public mind was thrilled with the concept, embraced the wonderous new platform, and got...egg freckles? http://fortunebrainstormtech.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/db9... The OS, hardware, UI, UX, all were revolutionary - and some revolutions fail. Steve killed it promptly upon his return, and I imagine nonetheless studied it a great deal, taking some 13 years between unveilings to get it right, making sure the engaged public didn't overwhelm the second attempt.
The other thing that iPhone had going for it was the iTunes integration that would save you from having to buy an iPod. This brought a lot of monetary value.
For the rest, I remember during the first iPhone reveal thinking it was a more polished, better funded version of the openMoko phone. ( https://www.google.ca/search?q=openmoko&safe=off&source=lnms... )
openMoko was an open source, volunteer made project. One thing openMoko had for it was their plan for promoting third party native apps from the get go, whereas Apple blocked them for almost a year.
In a 2006 article, a few months prior to the iPhone reveal we get about openMoko:
"The Neo1973 is based on a Samsung S3C2410 SoC (system-on-chip) application processor, powered by an ARM9 core. It will have 128MB of RAM, and 64MB of flash, along with an upgradable 64MB MicroSD card.
Typical of Chinese phone designs, the Neo1973 sports a touchscreen, rather than a keypad -- in this case, an ultra-high resolution 2.8-inch VGA (640 x 480) touchscreen. "Maps look stunning on this screen," Moss-Pultz said.
The phone features an A-GPS (assisted GPS) receiver module connected to the application processor via a pair of UARTs. The commercial module has a closed design, but the API is apparently open.
Similarly, the phone's quad-band GSM/GPRS module, built by FIC, runs the proprietary Nucleus OS on a Texas Instruments baseband powered by an ARM7 core. It communicates with Linux over a serial port, using standard "AT" modem commands.
The Neo1973 will charge when connected to a PC via USB. It will also support USB network emulation, and will be capable of routing a connected PC to the Internet, via its GPRS data connection. [...] Moss-Pultz adds, "Applications are the ringtones of the future." [...] As for additional software components, Moss-Pultz admits, "Quite a lot is there, and quite a lot is not there. We're hoping to change this." In addition to a dialer, phonebook, media player, and application manager, the stack will likely include the Minimo browser [...] He adds, "Mobile phones are the PCs of the 21st century, in terms of processing power and broadband network access. "
If iPhone guts powering a windows phone with a resistive screen came out before iPhone, it wouldn't have sold like crazy. Windows phone software had a start menu... the fastest text input was drawing misunderstood letters with a stylus, resistive screens had to be manually calibrated and were very inaccurate unless using a stylus; iphone-like typing just didn't work.
The iPhone "couldn't do what [Apple was] demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life," Shacknews poster Kentor heard from his former colleagues of the time. "Imagine their surprise [at RIM] when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it."
http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/12/27/rim.thought.ap...
As far as 'performance', Apple has never been one to put performance numbers up as a selling point. Macs have never been marketed as an X (M|G)hz machine with Y (M|G)B RAM. Those were details Steve felt should be abstracted away from the user. So, I'd agree with you that the success of iPhone has never really been driven by 'hardware performance', as that is the popular habit of Apple.
That said, it remains that iPhone is still a fairly powerful smartphone, as they come, and the author seems to be arguing (rightfully so, IMO) that Apple is cashing in on that fact through leveraging that for the aesthetic design of their software.
Arguably, all mobile OSs have to be built with some amount of mindfulness to the performance of the lowest common denominator device. Android could be pretty low, whereas Apple's lowest common denominator device for iOS 7 still has moderately powerful specs.
Not quite true, I don't think. Around the late 90s, early 00s there was a lot of marketing around the high Mhz of the Mac CPU compared with PCs - and arguments about the merits of RISC vs CISC. That was back in the Mhz wars when Mhz was all most people cared about and paid attention to.
Funnily enough that exactly corresponds to Apple's dark period
Em, no. At a time when Apple used PowerPC instead of Intel processors, Apple wanted to de-emphasize Megahertzes because the PowerPC chips had lower clock frequencies than the Intel chips of the day. Instead, Apple would advertise the PowerMac as being twice as fast as PC workstations, and it would speak of megaflops and ‘the first desktop supercomputer’. See also ‘The Megahertz Myth’[1].
So yes, Apple did compare the performance of their pro models (PowerMac, PowerBook) with PC counterparts, but they didn’t use clock frequency or memory speed to make their point.
No, they really didn't. Any citation?
* Memory - 160MB, versus iPhone: 128MB.
* CPU - Dual CPU, 332 MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 2420 (ARM11-based), versus
Samsung 32-bit RISC ARM 1176JZ(F)-S v1.0 412 MHz
* Display - iPhone: 320x480 18-bit 3.5", versus N95: 240x320 24-bit, 2.6"
* Network ability: HSDPA 3.5G, versus iPhone: GSM/EDGE
* Camera: 5MP, versus iPhone 2MP
And even then, the specs didn't make much difference. It was just another phone, bulky, with a small, dark screen, clunky buttons and a shitty interface: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=HwT...
Whereas, of course, the iPhone was brought out as a budget, bottom line phone, marketed at low end consumers, given away by carriers...
Only in the RDF could a phone that was 15g lighter (120 vs 135), and smaller (99x53x21mm vs 115x61x12) be described as "bulky".
Of course, "bulky" will be redefined shortly to mean "less deep, which as everyone knows, is the only metric that matters" - just like the iPhone's aspect ratio was perfect - until the iPhone 5 came out, of course.
Whereas, of course, the Nokia was 40% more expensive -- at $699.
Not to mention that, hw specs aside, it was so last decade, and the inefficient BS OS it had, made it dog slow, unintuitive and unfit for the intertubes.
>Of course, "bulky" will be redefined shortly to mean "less deep, which as everyone knows, is the only metric that matters" - just like the iPhone's aspect ratio was perfect - until the iPhone 5 came out, of course.
Err, what? Bulk is about volume. Unless you have 2D pockets, the Nokia being smaller in the other 2 dimensions doesn't mean shit. Just look at the thing in the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=HwT...
Also look at the UI. Is this supposed to be a joke?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GmLchZN1Dc
So, yes, it had a better camera (since Nokia mostly slapped on a huge-ass compact camera lens on it), and it had 3G (since Nokia could not care less about battery life with 3G on).
that being said, i find it funny that you flippantly discard the number of phones with better specs in one breath, and then acknowledge them in the next. (despite them having shitty implementations)
i am totally entertained picturing you as a slavering apple fanboy raging at a hacker news thread. makes me giggle.
m3mnoch.
p.s. btw, using your number and a gsma.com estimated 500 new phone models per year, 5% of them that "have those specs" amounts to 25 phone models that had better specs than the iphone. just sayin'.
But its horse power? That would have been an exoteric opinion at the time. Legend has it that Nokia was so astonished by the iPhone, they got their high speed cameras out to see whether the phone was really doing 60fps scrolling.
The first iPhone was a towering technical achievement (except for the lack of 3G). It was a phone that made all the right compromises at exactly the right time.
I think you would have been hard pressed to find anyone disputing that in 2007. Sure, people doubted whether it would really be useful without the ability to install third party apps, people doubted whether Edge would be enough, people bemoaned missing features – all good reasons to not want the original iPhone – but the technology was without a doubt great.
And all you are engaging in is revisionist history.
(I’m writing this doubting that iOS7 will be any of that. It’s a train-wreck on the iPad currently. Yeah, it’s just a preview but an OS is so complex, I don’t see how it’s possible to turn this mess into a coherent whole in the few months they have left. No matter how many hours they pour into it. I’m pessimistic.)