6 ms·

For those of us who were PDA users in the late 90s and Treo users in the early 2000s, the iPhone is an incremental improvement on those ideas. The presence of

For those of us who were PDA users in the late 90s and Treo users in the early 2000s, the iPhone is an incremental improvement on those ideas. The presence of ubiquitous wireless networking (I am lumping cellular wireless and WiFi in together) was the real game changer. If you are not convinced, try this thought experiment: Imagine yourself in 1998 standing on the street in a major city holding a Palm pilot. It has an SDK, a TCP/IP stack and a POP email client. But no wireless connection. Now add a wireless connection. Could you tweet or Facebook? Sure, if those things existed then.

MBCook 9y ago
It was not an incremental leap. It was MASSIVE. Yes, all the technology was there. We had smartphones and they would have continued without the iPhone. The value of the internet in your pocket is too big for the smart phone not to become a huge thing. Eventually. But Apple NAILED the UI. They made it so simple that 3 year olds can use the UI and are confused when other computers don’t work through such great touch controls. How long would we have been stuck with tiny screens (relative to the original iPhone) or giant devices (like the sidekick) to get a decent sized screen? How long would it have taken to get the App Store? Would we get one? That single innovation (making it trivial for people to find/buy software) has been transformative for our industry. The iPhone pushed us ahead years. Maybe a decade. We skipped a ton of teething time and got straight to it. Remember, RIM thought the iPhone demo was faked and impossible. That’s how far ahead Apple was.
- mattmcknight 9y ago
  The original iPhone didn't have the AppStore. It was an incremental development on the original iPhone. Palm and Blackberry devices at the time did have AppStores. I was a happy Treo user...and the iPhone didn't have the ability for me to build apps for it. I also used my finger to touch the screen. What the iPhone didn't have was a physical keyboard. That was the primary design innovation.
- wilsonnb 9y ago
  It really wasn't as massive a leap as you make it out to be. It's likely that we would have ended up with something very similar to today's smartphones even if the iPhone had never existed. It wasn't the first smartphone. It wasn't the first phone to use a capacitive touch screen. The first iPhone didn't even have the app store - it launched with the 3G a year after the the first iPhone was released, if I remember correctly. At that time, Android and Blackberry both had app stores in the works. They might have released before the iOS App Store - I don't remember. Anyways, Apple did create a great product that deserves all of the popularity it has but they absolutely did not push us 10 years into the future of computing.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    How long do you think it would have taken? Seriously? It took Google a few years to catch up having their massive resources and Apple as a guidepost. RIM had no incentive, they were trying to lock you into the BB server product and tried to get consumers on it to. The phone was a means to an end. MS wanted to push Windows. They’d been trying since CE first appeared and it still didn’t take off. As long as Balmer was there why would they do something different? They KEPT DOING IT even with Apple to follow. Palm was the closest. I guess they might have been my bet. But they were having trouble and had tr legacy of thinking about things the way PalmOS had done things. That might have slowed them down. Google was just copying RIM. They’d have gone somewhere, but I don’t know it would look anything like today’s smartphones. That may not be a bad thing. Apple did not move us up just 2 or 3 years. I don’t know how to come up with an exact number, and obviously it’s not something crazy like 20 or 50. But I could see a decade. How long did it take the rest of the industry to catch up to the Mac from ‘84? How long would it have taken if they didn’t have the Mac to look at? Paradigm shifts in UIs are hard to predict. Even if you make a good one it can be really hard to break in when something else is successful (even if only adequate). Apple defined the modern smartphone, and it wasn’t an IBM PC like thing of taking existing parts and just putting them together. It took a ton more work outside the existing molds.
    - AstralStorm 9y ago
      It would take exactly a year for Google to clean up Android enough. They had to scram because iPhone just outran them. About the only major thing iPhone brought was direct carrier deals from AT&T and Verizon for big data plans. Also lost the keyboard. (Not the first device to do so either.)
- srslack 9y ago
  I'll give you accessibility and decent touch controls in a pretty package. But I can't let this slide: >How long would it have taken to get the App Store? That single innovation (making it trivial for people to find/buy software) Package management was not an Apple innovation, and before iOS 2.0 there were no officially supported native third party applications at all, and the only way power users accomplished this was by installing a package management system based on APT (installer.app/cydia). Jobs believed that web applications with native controls would be all anyone needed with the original iPhone. So what do they do in iOS 2.0? Give you a crippled, prettier package management solution that requires Apple hardware, and fees, to develop and publish on, and gave the finger to power users.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    I know it was in iOS 2.0. And I don’t believe Jobs EVER thought that, that was his spin. Everything that has come out since seems to indicate that he knew web apps sucked but that was what they could get out the door fast. The internal APIs didn’t seem to be in a releasable state. Normal people have never used APT. I remember how you got software for Palm or WinCE. It was a pain, you had to search the web or buy it boxed. You better not lose that memory card or download file. And since you bought it from tons of places you always had to put your card in. What I’m talking about is the simplicity end users had never seen on any device (to my knowledge). The store already had your card, just type in your password. It knew what you bought, you could redownload it for free. No sketchy websites. And one central place to search. That was miles ahead of any other way of buying software.
    - victor106 9y ago
      >And I don’t believe Jobs EVER thought that, that was his spin If you read his biography he had to be convinced to have users create their own apps and install them on the iPhone. He vehemently shot down the idea before he had to be convinced of the idea by Bill Campbell (the coach) when Steve was vacationing in Hawaii. Read the book and you’ll understand more of the backstory
      - 9y ago
- kerng 9y ago
  The success was massive, the innovation aspect just part of incremental (small) progress in the grand scheme of things I would say.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    Why do you think the innovation was small?
- mikestew 9y ago
  How long would it have taken to get the App Store? You mean like HandNGo (spelling?) that existed several years before the iPhone came out, let alone the iOS App Store? Quite popular with Windows Mobile folks, that was. There were others that I've long since forgotten about, but they existed.
- PopePompous 9y ago
  I agree with everything you said. But just as important as the technical leap was the business model improvement. Before the iPhone, at least in the US, carriers dictated what functions could and could not be present in the phones. The video offerings were nothing but short snippets of content offered at steep prices from the carriers. Phone manufacturers considered the carriers to be their real customers, and the carriers wanted to make sure that every phone feature was a money stream for them. Apple was the first manufacturer with enough clout to get a carrier (Cingular) to offer a smartphone that was not crippled by the carrier. Once the iPhone became popular, it was no longer possible for carriers to hobble the smartphones they sold, in order to nickle-and-dime their customers.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    Totally agree. I thought of that later (and I wasn’t sure how well it fit into the narrative of my original comment/the article) and wrote about what they did to the carriers here [1]. I remember when I got my RAZR, it was the first phone I had that could play video. I was able to watch a 3m cartoon from Boomerang (Tom and Jerry or something like that). The quality was surprisingly good. It used up 60-70% of my battery and the little phone got very hot. And that was a $15/month service. And let’s not formget the mapping ‘services’ that Google and Apple completely killed. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16979353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16979353
sizzle 9y ago
I thought my Sony Clié was ahead of it's time ~2002 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sony-CLIE-PEG-NZ90.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sony-CLIE-PEG-NZ90.jpg

MBCook 9y ago

It was not an incremental leap. It was MASSIVE. Yes, all the technology was there. We had smartphones and they would have continued without the iPhone. The value of the internet in your pocket is too big for the smart phone not to become a huge thing. Eventually. But Apple NAILED the UI. They made it so simple that 3 year olds can use the UI and are confused when other computers don’t work through such great touch controls. How long would we have been stuck with tiny screens (relative to the original iPhone) or giant devices (like the sidekick) to get a decent sized screen? How long would it have taken to get the App Store? Would we get one? That single innovation (making it trivial for people to find/buy software) has been transformative for our industry. The iPhone pushed us ahead years. Maybe a decade. We skipped a ton of teething time and got straight to it. Remember, RIM thought the iPhone demo was faked and impossible. That’s how far ahead Apple was.

mattmcknight 9y ago
The original iPhone didn't have the AppStore. It was an incremental development on the original iPhone. Palm and Blackberry devices at the time did have AppStores. I was a happy Treo user...and the iPhone didn't have the ability for me to build apps for it. I also used my finger to touch the screen. What the iPhone didn't have was a physical keyboard. That was the primary design innovation.
wilsonnb 9y ago
It really wasn't as massive a leap as you make it out to be. It's likely that we would have ended up with something very similar to today's smartphones even if the iPhone had never existed. It wasn't the first smartphone. It wasn't the first phone to use a capacitive touch screen. The first iPhone didn't even have the app store - it launched with the 3G a year after the the first iPhone was released, if I remember correctly. At that time, Android and Blackberry both had app stores in the works. They might have released before the iOS App Store - I don't remember. Anyways, Apple did create a great product that deserves all of the popularity it has but they absolutely did not push us 10 years into the future of computing.
- MBCook 9y ago
  How long do you think it would have taken? Seriously? It took Google a few years to catch up having their massive resources and Apple as a guidepost. RIM had no incentive, they were trying to lock you into the BB server product and tried to get consumers on it to. The phone was a means to an end. MS wanted to push Windows. They’d been trying since CE first appeared and it still didn’t take off. As long as Balmer was there why would they do something different? They KEPT DOING IT even with Apple to follow. Palm was the closest. I guess they might have been my bet. But they were having trouble and had tr legacy of thinking about things the way PalmOS had done things. That might have slowed them down. Google was just copying RIM. They’d have gone somewhere, but I don’t know it would look anything like today’s smartphones. That may not be a bad thing. Apple did not move us up just 2 or 3 years. I don’t know how to come up with an exact number, and obviously it’s not something crazy like 20 or 50. But I could see a decade. How long did it take the rest of the industry to catch up to the Mac from ‘84? How long would it have taken if they didn’t have the Mac to look at? Paradigm shifts in UIs are hard to predict. Even if you make a good one it can be really hard to break in when something else is successful (even if only adequate). Apple defined the modern smartphone, and it wasn’t an IBM PC like thing of taking existing parts and just putting them together. It took a ton more work outside the existing molds.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    It would take exactly a year for Google to clean up Android enough. They had to scram because iPhone just outran them. About the only major thing iPhone brought was direct carrier deals from AT&T and Verizon for big data plans. Also lost the keyboard. (Not the first device to do so either.)
srslack 9y ago
I'll give you accessibility and decent touch controls in a pretty package. But I can't let this slide: >How long would it have taken to get the App Store? That single innovation (making it trivial for people to find/buy software) Package management was not an Apple innovation, and before iOS 2.0 there were no officially supported native third party applications at all, and the only way power users accomplished this was by installing a package management system based on APT (installer.app/cydia). Jobs believed that web applications with native controls would be all anyone needed with the original iPhone. So what do they do in iOS 2.0? Give you a crippled, prettier package management solution that requires Apple hardware, and fees, to develop and publish on, and gave the finger to power users.
- MBCook 9y ago
  I know it was in iOS 2.0. And I don’t believe Jobs EVER thought that, that was his spin. Everything that has come out since seems to indicate that he knew web apps sucked but that was what they could get out the door fast. The internal APIs didn’t seem to be in a releasable state. Normal people have never used APT. I remember how you got software for Palm or WinCE. It was a pain, you had to search the web or buy it boxed. You better not lose that memory card or download file. And since you bought it from tons of places you always had to put your card in. What I’m talking about is the simplicity end users had never seen on any device (to my knowledge). The store already had your card, just type in your password. It knew what you bought, you could redownload it for free. No sketchy websites. And one central place to search. That was miles ahead of any other way of buying software.
  - victor106 9y ago
    >And I don’t believe Jobs EVER thought that, that was his spin If you read his biography he had to be convinced to have users create their own apps and install them on the iPhone. He vehemently shot down the idea before he had to be convinced of the idea by Bill Campbell (the coach) when Steve was vacationing in Hawaii. Read the book and you’ll understand more of the backstory
    - 9y ago
kerng 9y ago
The success was massive, the innovation aspect just part of incremental (small) progress in the grand scheme of things I would say.
- MBCook 9y ago
  Why do you think the innovation was small?
mikestew 9y ago
How long would it have taken to get the App Store? You mean like HandNGo (spelling?) that existed several years before the iPhone came out, let alone the iOS App Store? Quite popular with Windows Mobile folks, that was. There were others that I've long since forgotten about, but they existed.
PopePompous 9y ago
I agree with everything you said. But just as important as the technical leap was the business model improvement. Before the iPhone, at least in the US, carriers dictated what functions could and could not be present in the phones. The video offerings were nothing but short snippets of content offered at steep prices from the carriers. Phone manufacturers considered the carriers to be their real customers, and the carriers wanted to make sure that every phone feature was a money stream for them. Apple was the first manufacturer with enough clout to get a carrier (Cingular) to offer a smartphone that was not crippled by the carrier. Once the iPhone became popular, it was no longer possible for carriers to hobble the smartphones they sold, in order to nickle-and-dime their customers.
- MBCook 9y ago
  Totally agree. I thought of that later (and I wasn’t sure how well it fit into the narrative of my original comment/the article) and wrote about what they did to the carriers here [1]. I remember when I got my RAZR, it was the first phone I had that could play video. I was able to watch a 3m cartoon from Boomerang (Tom and Jerry or something like that). The quality was surprisingly good. It used up 60-70% of my battery and the little phone got very hot. And that was a $15/month service. And let’s not formget the mapping ‘services’ that Google and Apple completely killed. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16979353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16979353

sizzle 9y ago

I thought my Sony Clié was ahead of it's time ~2002 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sony-CLIE-PEG-NZ90.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sony-CLIE-PEG-NZ90.jpg