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Comment by fromedome | Hacker News Reader

A classic!

My favorite part: "unless the cell phone were actually running Mac OS X, which definitely is impossible"

Technically, the iPhone does not run Mac OS X, but still -- seems like John was ruling out any flavor of OS X, which, obviously, the iPhone runs.

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Hindsight is 20/20. It's easy to poke fun of Gruber now, but back in 2002 Macs, "beefy" two-processor desktop machines, were barely running OS X. I mean, the new Mac OS X mentioned in the post was Jaguar. Do you remember the awesome speed of that bad boy?

Yes, but that's only because 2007's iPhones literally had the processing power of 2002's computers, and they were pretty slow at running a stripped down OS X. Not to mention that OS X got significantly faster between 2002 and 2007. On the same hardware, 10.5 (what the iPhone's OS is a branch of) would be a good bit faster than the version 10.1 that was available when Gruber wrote his article.

And let's not forget that the article was written back in the days before flash-based iPods, so the only way to get storage on it was via hard-drive. I mean, we're talking back in the day before iPods had USB connectors, and 2 years before the iPod Photo

Given that he said that in 2002 and the first iPhone came out in 2007, one could argue that he was right at the time. The first-gen iPhone experience (especially with the release version of the OS) was sluggish enough that one could argue that it was still close to impossible.

"Impossible" was probably a bad wprd choice, though, since technology has ways of proving us wrong. :)

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