The biggest kickers for Apple were: a) Sensible means of payment, no need to setup credit card processing, do deals with carriers etc for developers. Oh and no

The biggest kickers for Apple were: a) Sensible means of payment, no need to setup credit card processing, do deals with carriers etc for developers. Oh and no carrier lockdown on installing applications. b) Macs going x86 based so you could develop for Windows / Linux and Apple all on the one box. Basically Apple managed to make it possible for small dev shops to work on the iPhone without spending huge amounts of cash AND get money from consumers.