9 ms·

Who Invented the iPhone?

53 points by extarial 8y ago

gregw2 8y ago
Lame analysis. The iPhone wasn't great because it had a good touchscreen, battery and the web. I had "smart phones" before that with those. The real innovation was the software UI, pinch zoom and wall of all icons with high resolution pixels.
- rando444 8y ago
  The article doesn't argue that the iphone was great because any of those things. The article is arguing that technology is iterative, and that great inventions are often built on many other great inventions. The article is focusing on the iphone as an example of breakthrough technology.. but the question implied by the article is whether or not it's great because of the inventors ability to build on a larger than average amount of previous work.. and ends with the conclusion that greater freedom of information allows for breakthroughs, not "genius" lone-wolf inventors.
  - Cobord 8y ago
    But the fact remains that the iPhone is used as the example, and so the myth of Jobs as a lone-wolf who did it remains. Had to have that hook to focus the article, but still feeds into that narrative for all the people who read the title but not the article.
  - davidcollantes 8y ago
    Still, the article is weak. Based on the same argument, very few people invented anything. The article missed electricity, cables, wires, electronic components... see? The article is rubbish.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jri93jf72 8y ago
  So, Hollywood then Since I’m pretty sure those things were on display in movie UIs before 2007. Star Trek invented tablet computers. Apple built the first good all-in-one version
- monocasa 8y ago
  It wasn't that high resolution. The iPhone 1.0 had a 320x240 screen. Pinch zoom was Fingerworks around 1999 (albeit Fingerworks was then acquired by Apple in 2005).
  - tlb 8y ago
    It was 320x480.
    - monocasa 8y ago
      Ok, my bad. Half of the resolution I had while running Windows 3.1, instead of a quarter.
      - joshtynjala 8y ago
        You're ignoring the pixel density, though. Half the resolution, but a screen many times smaller in physical dimensions than the monitor that you are comparing it to.
        monocasa 8y ago
        Plenty of Windows Mobile devices had full on 640x480 screens years before the release of the iPhone. Nothing about the iPhone's resolution was revolutionary at the time. Hell, for a long time the apple cult was touting how their low resolution was really a benefit, saying that because it was easier on the GPU it led to better graphics albeit at a lower resolution.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
kerng 8y ago
I don't own one, but Apple invented the iPhone. Innovation happens in small steps, building on work of others and adding a few new things and experiences. The iPhone is no different but this article is not really worth the read.
cheeko1234 8y ago
No mention of Corning or gorilla glass: http://techland.time.com/2013/01/11/a-story-about-steve-jobs-steel-balls-and-gorilla-glass-you-with-the-cracked-phone-read-this/ http://techland.time.com/2013/01/11/a-story-about-steve-jobs...
CapitalistCartr 8y ago
I had a Windows phone. The UI sucked, of course, but they all did because of the tiny form factor. They had to, right? Then my buddy and I went to lunch one day, and he showed me his new "I-phone". The heavens opened up and the truth was shown to me. I immediately realized, they didn't have to suck, after all. What a revelation.
- dmarlow 8y ago
  Windows phone or Windows mobile? I agree that Windows mobile was in a different class to the iPhone, but I disagree that the UI of Windows phone sucked. I think parts are/were better than iPhones'.
  - rerx 8y ago
    When the iPhone came out, "Windows Phone" wasn't an OS yet. If your phone had Windows, it ran "Windows Mobile" based on Windows CE.
- usermac 8y ago
  I disagree. I super enjoyed the UI of Windows Phone and only gave it up recently when MS formally dropped support.
  - dagw 8y ago
    Given that they're was talking about events happening around the launch of the iPhone, they probably meant Windows Mobile. I agree that Windows Phone was pretty great (especially 8 and 10)
  - mikestew 8y ago
    In the time period to which parent refers, the Windows Mobile UI was nothing like what you're referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile_6.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile_6.0
    - usermac 8y ago
starky 8y ago
I expect better from Scientific American, yes technology these days stands on the shoulders of many smaller innovations, but it is the sum of all these small components and the software that makes a tech product innovative. Also, the article refers to lithium-ion/lithium polymer batteries as lithium batteries. This is wrong, as lithium batteries are what you call primary cells with lithium anodes (e.g. button cells), not secondary cells like are used in a cellphone.
- jgtrosh 8y ago
  Along the same lines, they're talking about the touch-screen as if that's what they were credited for. There were lots of okay touch-screens widespread before; the iPhone had afaik the first good quality widely available multi-touch screen. There's a classic TED talk from 2004 where a guy introduces the technology and it seemed so amazing, the iPhones made direct use of that. (Albeit not being as amazing as the 2004 demo!)
  - panic 8y ago
    Jeff Han: https://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/ https://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/
  - dfox 8y ago
    The important distinction of the first iPhone is that the touchscreen was designed to be used with fingers and not with some kind of stylus as was then common for mobile devices. The fact that the screen was multi-touch capable is not that important and mostly an inherent feature of used capacitive technology.
- devilshaircut 8y ago
  I was searching through the comments for this one. 100%. I would even go further and say that an invention is more than the sum of the parts. There is a specific mixture that makes something cohesive and ring true. Early PDAs had versions of many of these technologies in various combinations. But Apple got it right as a product. The devil is, as they say, in the details. It's distressing that Scientific American's editors think pointing out that the iPhone was built of extant technologies is relevant, especially with respect to the topic of invention.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
xichu 8y ago
Introducing Jony iIve Chief Designer Apple California
blhack 8y ago
As a long time palm user, nothing about the iPhone seemed particularly new to me. The interface was almost identical, the form factor was almost identical. The only real upgrades were a cellular modem and a little bit prettier case. Saying apple "invented" modern smartphones is a bit like saying Tesla invented electric cars. No they didn't, they just made a really good one that is very popular.
- rerx 8y ago
  The capacitive multi-touch screen was definitely new.
  - joshlegs 8y ago
    honestly i think that was the biggest reason for its success. Blackberry was already a thing, but that big honking, clunky keyboard was just silly on a phone, and meant you had an exceptionally little amount of screen real estate. The developments in capacitive touch made a lot of room for other improvements to handheld devices.
    - rerx 8y ago
      I agree. I liked Palm OS back in the day and used to have two generations of Sony Clié PDAs with resistive touchscreens. The first one (an SL10) had a grayscale square touchscreen and a little "Graffiti" area below it where you could jot down simplified characters and some gestures. The second one (TG50) was really neat. It had a color screen (I remember watching videos and playing ScummVM Lucas Arts adventures on this in 2003 or 2004!) and it replaced the Graffiti area with an actual hardware keyboard. Text entry worked so much better than it used to with that pseudo-handwriting recognition. Much later, when I saw Apple and Android smartphones, I could not understand how anybody could stand the onscreen keyboards. But the truth is that the multitouch hardware allowed to progress these systems far enough that they would surpass earlier tiny physical keyboards.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- 8y ago
Y_Y 8y ago
I'm surprised that the premise that the iPhone is an "invention" is so quickly accepted. It wasn't like nobody was making any similar devices, and then this new idea came along. I know that invention can be as simple as gluing two existing things together, but the meaningful aspect has to be that there is an original idea there. No doubt it popularised a lot of existing technology, and arguably combined some of that technology in a way that hadn't been done before. All the same, that reasoning could apply to the second version of the iPhone. Was that an "invention" too?
- rayiner 8y ago
  I followed PDAs pretty closely back then, and I'm unaware of any device where the OS was built around multi-touch, like the iPhone.[1] The iPhone was one of the few devices back then to render the "real web" and being able to swipe and pinch to navigate pages was a game-changer on the order of the first mouse-based UIs. It dramatically changes how much content you can easily access on a small screen (which is why even devices with styluses today have multi-touch screens to facilitate scroll/zoom). It also improves the quality of the on-screen keyboard, enabling you to ditch the physical one (or reliance on something like Graffiti). [1] Apple didn't invent multi-touch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t35HXAjNW6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t35HXAjNW6s. I believe it was the first to build a mobile UI entirely around it.
  - basch 8y ago
    Multi-touch deserves too much credit. It was inertia. You could flick the screen to scroll. It calculated your intent, and applied a duration. That momentum made all the difference in the world. No longer are you sitting there flick flick flicking your screen.
    - whatever1 8y ago
      It is worth mentioning that the iPhone had the best multitouching system in the industry for at least 3 years. I remember the android devices struggling to register gestures when more than one finger was touching the screen.
mikestew 8y ago
"It all depends on what you mean by 'invented'" For practical application, the one that invented it is the one that first offered it to me for sale. Kind of like battery technology, as the industry iterates over various chemistries. Yeah, yeah, your new tech is going to blow storage wide open...just like the last folks whose names I now forget. But until I can buy one for my phone, my RV house battery, or a pack for my electric car, you might as well have invented unicorns. Who invented the car? We had engines, we had wheels, we had drive trains. But Benz was the first to glue them all together into a mode of transportation. But wait, Copeland put a steam engine on a bicycle two years before Benz got his patent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copeland_steam_bicycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copeland_steam_bicycle). And, frankly, all Benz did was glue an engine to an early tricycle design. So "invented" sometimes strikes me as not the best word to describe "who invented...?"
- ponow 8y ago
  That definition of invention as marketed product is so demotivating to anyone who would put in the decades of personal focus and study necessary to advance a particular area of engineering or science.
  - mikestew 8y ago
    Didn't really read my last sentence, eh? Who invented the iPhone? Apple. No, not even an individual (even if a name is on some patent), a corporation. Not all of the ideas that make an iPhone an iPhone came from one individual. Who invented the multitude of little parts that comprise an iPhone? People like you.
ozten 8y ago
I was hoping for some key engineers or product managers. I had a similar peak into the iPod, a key stepping stone to the iPhone. There was a time when digital music players like the Creative Nomad were gaining adoption, but people were still absorbing the shift to digital music. I worked at RealNetworks/Rhapsody music and there was a mysterious meeting where a guy pitched what would eventually come to market as the iPod. The deal didn't go through and he was latter employed by Apple. I understand that sometimes inventions will be invented nearly simultaneously by several distinct groups... and Apple may have already had a prototype device for years in their labs waiting for the BOM to hit the right size, price, and capabilities... But who were these visionaries that Apple organized, packaged their visions, and helped delivered their wares? Apple does an amazing job of marketing their myths and we've got the well known brands of Woz, Jobs, Ive... It's hard to pierce that veil.
- startupdiscuss 8y ago
  For the ipod, I don't consider the device to be the invention. There were many music players around at the time. The invention was itunes -- an easy way to buy music. And that invention required cutting deals with all the music studios to put their catalog online. That was new. Of course it had to link up with a nice ecosystem, sound, software etc.
  - macintux 8y ago
    iTunes made the iPod huge, but the iPod itself was pretty remarkable. The UI was entirely new and more intuitive than similar devices, and it was the smallest large-capacity device thanks to Steve seizing on the idea of using the new tiny hard drives Toshiba(?) had created. Firewire also made it much faster to upload music.
    - mc32 8y ago
      Rio had, PMPs, I think. They had flash storage. UI was okay but managing files and transfers left a lot to be desired.
  - basch 8y ago
herodotus 8y ago
This is a silly article. Most inventions come about when a person or group of people recognize an opportunity based on many things that are already known, or exist. The original iPhone of course relied on touch-screens, feasible batteries, wifi chips and a many, many other existing technologies. But remember that, at the time of its design, mobile phones all used keypads: either the standard telephone type, or the full (but small) keyboard of the Blackberry. Apple's big innovations (among many) were to eliminate the keypad, and to embed a full-fledged OS on a small device. The lack of keyboard was a huge risk, and it was mocked at the time. History proved Apple was right. Steve Jobs (or at least his team, with his input) did indeed invent the iPhone.
mailslot 8y ago
The real invention is taking technology and packaging it in a human way that takes a baby seconds to learn. I didn’t have to teach my one year old how to swipe photos. Touch screens existed and confounded people for decades. Just watch the average person use a touch screen ATM. Still not great. It all seems so obvious in retrospect because iPhones have defined so much of how everything works now. The original iPhone was a product no one else had the vision or balls to build.
- macintux 8y ago
  I hear people argue that someone would have invented it without Apple, but my counter-argument is that it would have still had a hardware keyboard tucked away, whoever built it wouldn't know how to market it, it would have been just one among dozens of devices at the carrier's stores, and it would have vanished after a few months of languishing there. Apple moved the world to make it succeed. No one else would have.
_Simon 8y ago
What an utter waste of bits this article is?
startupdiscuss 8y ago
There were also many key business innovations with the iphone: - convincing mobile providers to provide data plans - Wrapping up the price of the phone in the data plan (i.e. providing financing) - distribution with their own stores - eventually the app store - the itunes app also had to convince music studios to put their catalog online and price them uniformly
- trevyn 8y ago
  Um, almost all of these were done first by others.
  - startupdiscuss 8y ago
    In one sense, almost everything was done before. But not in the reinforcing way. The cell plan lets you download songs over the air. That lines up the two business deals you made. http://theconversation.com/understanding-the-real-innovation-behind-the-iphone-79556 http://theconversation.com/understanding-the-real-innovation...
pmiri 8y ago
This article ties well to the excellent book "The Entrepreneurial State" by Mariana Mazzucato. Apple did an excellent job of bringing together a lot of existing technology into a viable consumer product, but it is still important to note that much of that tech was powered by state-funded initiatives, instead of Silicon Valley, VC-funded projects.
bjoli 8y ago
I doubt the idea of such a phone was ever very unique. I got laughed at in high school (2004) for saying something along the lines of "in 10 years all our phones will be one big screen and they will be powerful enough to fulfil most of our personal computing needs". I also believed they would be docked to become full featured PCs, but I guess that niche has been filled for many with the rise of tablets. (which I appalling, but I guess thats just because I don't understand their appeal at all). TFA article claims something similar: it was apple that took a bunch of ideas and made it into something people wanted to actually use. I, and I doubt many people here, would have a good enough vision and understanding of what people actually wanted.
- Boulth 8y ago
  > I also believed they would be docked to become full featured PCs This looks like a good description of Samsung DeX.
- mbrumlow 8y ago
  Don't forget, the lot of ideas that Apple took to make the iPhone where mostly built off a bunch of other ideas them self. I find us in a strange new era of people using the past as a way to diminish the now. I grow tired of people pushing the notion that we today must pay for the sins and attribute success to past generations. If we go far enough back I am sure if the wheel had never been invented we would have none of what we have today and would still be smashing rocks around in a cave.
mar77i 8y ago
https://www.xkcd.com/343/ https://www.xkcd.com/343/ RIOT PRRL
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
CodeSheikh 8y ago
Title should be "Who Innovated the iPhone?"
S_A_P 8y ago
Maybe Im in the minority here, but I never attributed credit to Steve Jobs as the "inventor" of any of apples products. I saw him akin to a music producer. The team builds, and he guides their efforts according to his vision. This is very different than sitting down and "inventing" anything.
russellbeattie 8y ago
I find it interesting that I know more about the team that developed the Mac in the early 1980s than I know about the iPhone team. The iPhone was a watershed moment in tech that propelled Apple to be a trillion dollar company, yet the iPhone team is obscure to me. The Mac team has had how many books and articles about them?
- chaostheory 8y ago
  The One Device details the people and history well. https://www.amazon.com/One-Device-Secret-History-iPhone/dp/031654616X https://www.amazon.com/One-Device-Secret-History-iPhone/dp/0... It just came out a year ago. You can also try my user-editable site (https://theymadethat.com/things/k4z/iphone https://theymadethat.com/things/k4z/iphone) where I aim for the same goal but with a different approach. The iPhone entry still needs a lot of work.

53 points by extarial 8y ago

Lame analysis. The iPhone wasn't great because it had a good touchscreen, battery and the web. I had "smart phones" before that with those. The real innovation was the software UI, pinch zoom and wall of all icons with high resolution pixels.

rando444 8y ago
The article doesn't argue that the iphone was great because any of those things. The article is arguing that technology is iterative, and that great inventions are often built on many other great inventions. The article is focusing on the iphone as an example of breakthrough technology.. but the question implied by the article is whether or not it's great because of the inventors ability to build on a larger than average amount of previous work.. and ends with the conclusion that greater freedom of information allows for breakthroughs, not "genius" lone-wolf inventors.
- Cobord 8y ago
  But the fact remains that the iPhone is used as the example, and so the myth of Jobs as a lone-wolf who did it remains. Had to have that hook to focus the article, but still feeds into that narrative for all the people who read the title but not the article.
- davidcollantes 8y ago
  Still, the article is weak. Based on the same argument, very few people invented anything. The article missed electricity, cables, wires, electronic components... see? The article is rubbish.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jri93jf72 8y ago
So, Hollywood then Since I’m pretty sure those things were on display in movie UIs before 2007. Star Trek invented tablet computers. Apple built the first good all-in-one version
monocasa 8y ago
It wasn't that high resolution. The iPhone 1.0 had a 320x240 screen. Pinch zoom was Fingerworks around 1999 (albeit Fingerworks was then acquired by Apple in 2005).
- tlb 8y ago
  It was 320x480.
  - monocasa 8y ago
    Ok, my bad. Half of the resolution I had while running Windows 3.1, instead of a quarter.
    - joshtynjala 8y ago
      You're ignoring the pixel density, though. Half the resolution, but a screen many times smaller in physical dimensions than the monitor that you are comparing it to.
      - monocasa 8y ago
        Plenty of Windows Mobile devices had full on 640x480 screens years before the release of the iPhone. Nothing about the iPhone's resolution was revolutionary at the time. Hell, for a long time the apple cult was touting how their low resolution was really a benefit, saying that because it was easier on the GPU it led to better graphics albeit at a lower resolution.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

kerng 8y ago

I don't own one, but Apple invented the iPhone. Innovation happens in small steps, building on work of others and adding a few new things and experiences. The iPhone is no different but this article is not really worth the read.

cheeko1234 8y ago

No mention of Corning or gorilla glass: http://techland.time.com/2013/01/11/a-story-about-steve-jobs-steel-balls-and-gorilla-glass-you-with-the-cracked-phone-read-this/ http://techland.time.com/2013/01/11/a-story-about-steve-jobs...

CapitalistCartr 8y ago

I had a Windows phone. The UI sucked, of course, but they all did because of the tiny form factor. They had to, right? Then my buddy and I went to lunch one day, and he showed me his new "I-phone". The heavens opened up and the truth was shown to me. I immediately realized, they didn't have to suck, after all. What a revelation.

dmarlow 8y ago
Windows phone or Windows mobile? I agree that Windows mobile was in a different class to the iPhone, but I disagree that the UI of Windows phone sucked. I think parts are/were better than iPhones'.
- rerx 8y ago
  When the iPhone came out, "Windows Phone" wasn't an OS yet. If your phone had Windows, it ran "Windows Mobile" based on Windows CE.
usermac 8y ago
I disagree. I super enjoyed the UI of Windows Phone and only gave it up recently when MS formally dropped support.
- dagw 8y ago
  Given that they're was talking about events happening around the launch of the iPhone, they probably meant Windows Mobile. I agree that Windows Phone was pretty great (especially 8 and 10)
- mikestew 8y ago
  In the time period to which parent refers, the Windows Mobile UI was nothing like what you're referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile_6.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile_6.0
  - usermac 8y ago

starky 8y ago

I expect better from Scientific American, yes technology these days stands on the shoulders of many smaller innovations, but it is the sum of all these small components and the software that makes a tech product innovative. Also, the article refers to lithium-ion/lithium polymer batteries as lithium batteries. This is wrong, as lithium batteries are what you call primary cells with lithium anodes (e.g. button cells), not secondary cells like are used in a cellphone.

jgtrosh 8y ago
Along the same lines, they're talking about the touch-screen as if that's what they were credited for. There were lots of okay touch-screens widespread before; the iPhone had afaik the first good quality widely available multi-touch screen. There's a classic TED talk from 2004 where a guy introduces the technology and it seemed so amazing, the iPhones made direct use of that. (Albeit not being as amazing as the 2004 demo!)
- panic 8y ago
  Jeff Han: https://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/ https://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/
- dfox 8y ago
  The important distinction of the first iPhone is that the touchscreen was designed to be used with fingers and not with some kind of stylus as was then common for mobile devices. The fact that the screen was multi-touch capable is not that important and mostly an inherent feature of used capacitive technology.
devilshaircut 8y ago
I was searching through the comments for this one. 100%. I would even go further and say that an invention is more than the sum of the parts. There is a specific mixture that makes something cohesive and ring true. Early PDAs had versions of many of these technologies in various combinations. But Apple got it right as a product. The devil is, as they say, in the details. It's distressing that Scientific American's editors think pointing out that the iPhone was built of extant technologies is relevant, especially with respect to the topic of invention.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

xichu 8y ago

Introducing Jony iIve Chief Designer Apple California

blhack 8y ago

As a long time palm user, nothing about the iPhone seemed particularly new to me. The interface was almost identical, the form factor was almost identical. The only real upgrades were a cellular modem and a little bit prettier case. Saying apple "invented" modern smartphones is a bit like saying Tesla invented electric cars. No they didn't, they just made a really good one that is very popular.

rerx 8y ago
The capacitive multi-touch screen was definitely new.
- joshlegs 8y ago
  honestly i think that was the biggest reason for its success. Blackberry was already a thing, but that big honking, clunky keyboard was just silly on a phone, and meant you had an exceptionally little amount of screen real estate. The developments in capacitive touch made a lot of room for other improvements to handheld devices.
  - rerx 8y ago
    I agree. I liked Palm OS back in the day and used to have two generations of Sony Clié PDAs with resistive touchscreens. The first one (an SL10) had a grayscale square touchscreen and a little "Graffiti" area below it where you could jot down simplified characters and some gestures. The second one (TG50) was really neat. It had a color screen (I remember watching videos and playing ScummVM Lucas Arts adventures on this in 2003 or 2004!) and it replaced the Graffiti area with an actual hardware keyboard. Text entry worked so much better than it used to with that pseudo-handwriting recognition. Much later, when I saw Apple and Android smartphones, I could not understand how anybody could stand the onscreen keyboards. But the truth is that the multitouch hardware allowed to progress these systems far enough that they would surpass earlier tiny physical keyboards.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
8y ago

Y_Y 8y ago

I'm surprised that the premise that the iPhone is an "invention" is so quickly accepted. It wasn't like nobody was making any similar devices, and then this new idea came along. I know that invention can be as simple as gluing two existing things together, but the meaningful aspect has to be that there is an original idea there. No doubt it popularised a lot of existing technology, and arguably combined some of that technology in a way that hadn't been done before. All the same, that reasoning could apply to the second version of the iPhone. Was that an "invention" too?

rayiner 8y ago
I followed PDAs pretty closely back then, and I'm unaware of any device where the OS was built around multi-touch, like the iPhone.[1] The iPhone was one of the few devices back then to render the "real web" and being able to swipe and pinch to navigate pages was a game-changer on the order of the first mouse-based UIs. It dramatically changes how much content you can easily access on a small screen (which is why even devices with styluses today have multi-touch screens to facilitate scroll/zoom). It also improves the quality of the on-screen keyboard, enabling you to ditch the physical one (or reliance on something like Graffiti). [1] Apple didn't invent multi-touch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t35HXAjNW6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t35HXAjNW6s. I believe it was the first to build a mobile UI entirely around it.
- basch 8y ago
  Multi-touch deserves too much credit. It was inertia. You could flick the screen to scroll. It calculated your intent, and applied a duration. That momentum made all the difference in the world. No longer are you sitting there flick flick flicking your screen.
  - whatever1 8y ago
    It is worth mentioning that the iPhone had the best multitouching system in the industry for at least 3 years. I remember the android devices struggling to register gestures when more than one finger was touching the screen.

mikestew 8y ago

"It all depends on what you mean by 'invented'" For practical application, the one that invented it is the one that first offered it to me for sale. Kind of like battery technology, as the industry iterates over various chemistries. Yeah, yeah, your new tech is going to blow storage wide open...just like the last folks whose names I now forget. But until I can buy one for my phone, my RV house battery, or a pack for my electric car, you might as well have invented unicorns. Who invented the car? We had engines, we had wheels, we had drive trains. But Benz was the first to glue them all together into a mode of transportation. But wait, Copeland put a steam engine on a bicycle two years before Benz got his patent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copeland_steam_bicycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copeland_steam_bicycle). And, frankly, all Benz did was glue an engine to an early tricycle design. So "invented" sometimes strikes me as not the best word to describe "who invented...?"

ponow 8y ago
That definition of invention as marketed product is so demotivating to anyone who would put in the decades of personal focus and study necessary to advance a particular area of engineering or science.
- mikestew 8y ago
  Didn't really read my last sentence, eh? Who invented the iPhone? Apple. No, not even an individual (even if a name is on some patent), a corporation. Not all of the ideas that make an iPhone an iPhone came from one individual. Who invented the multitude of little parts that comprise an iPhone? People like you.

ozten 8y ago

I was hoping for some key engineers or product managers. I had a similar peak into the iPod, a key stepping stone to the iPhone. There was a time when digital music players like the Creative Nomad were gaining adoption, but people were still absorbing the shift to digital music. I worked at RealNetworks/Rhapsody music and there was a mysterious meeting where a guy pitched what would eventually come to market as the iPod. The deal didn't go through and he was latter employed by Apple. I understand that sometimes inventions will be invented nearly simultaneously by several distinct groups... and Apple may have already had a prototype device for years in their labs waiting for the BOM to hit the right size, price, and capabilities... But who were these visionaries that Apple organized, packaged their visions, and helped delivered their wares? Apple does an amazing job of marketing their myths and we've got the well known brands of Woz, Jobs, Ive... It's hard to pierce that veil.

startupdiscuss 8y ago
For the ipod, I don't consider the device to be the invention. There were many music players around at the time. The invention was itunes -- an easy way to buy music. And that invention required cutting deals with all the music studios to put their catalog online. That was new. Of course it had to link up with a nice ecosystem, sound, software etc.
- macintux 8y ago
  iTunes made the iPod huge, but the iPod itself was pretty remarkable. The UI was entirely new and more intuitive than similar devices, and it was the smallest large-capacity device thanks to Steve seizing on the idea of using the new tiny hard drives Toshiba(?) had created. Firewire also made it much faster to upload music.
  - mc32 8y ago
    Rio had, PMPs, I think. They had flash storage. UI was okay but managing files and transfers left a lot to be desired.
- basch 8y ago

herodotus 8y ago

This is a silly article. Most inventions come about when a person or group of people recognize an opportunity based on many things that are already known, or exist. The original iPhone of course relied on touch-screens, feasible batteries, wifi chips and a many, many other existing technologies. But remember that, at the time of its design, mobile phones all used keypads: either the standard telephone type, or the full (but small) keyboard of the Blackberry. Apple's big innovations (among many) were to eliminate the keypad, and to embed a full-fledged OS on a small device. The lack of keyboard was a huge risk, and it was mocked at the time. History proved Apple was right. Steve Jobs (or at least his team, with his input) did indeed invent the iPhone.

mailslot 8y ago

The real invention is taking technology and packaging it in a human way that takes a baby seconds to learn. I didn’t have to teach my one year old how to swipe photos. Touch screens existed and confounded people for decades. Just watch the average person use a touch screen ATM. Still not great. It all seems so obvious in retrospect because iPhones have defined so much of how everything works now. The original iPhone was a product no one else had the vision or balls to build.

macintux 8y ago
I hear people argue that someone would have invented it without Apple, but my counter-argument is that it would have still had a hardware keyboard tucked away, whoever built it wouldn't know how to market it, it would have been just one among dozens of devices at the carrier's stores, and it would have vanished after a few months of languishing there. Apple moved the world to make it succeed. No one else would have.

_Simon 8y ago

What an utter waste of bits this article is?

startupdiscuss 8y ago

There were also many key business innovations with the iphone: - convincing mobile providers to provide data plans - Wrapping up the price of the phone in the data plan (i.e. providing financing) - distribution with their own stores - eventually the app store - the itunes app also had to convince music studios to put their catalog online and price them uniformly

trevyn 8y ago
Um, almost all of these were done first by others.
- startupdiscuss 8y ago
  In one sense, almost everything was done before. But not in the reinforcing way. The cell plan lets you download songs over the air. That lines up the two business deals you made. http://theconversation.com/understanding-the-real-innovation-behind-the-iphone-79556 http://theconversation.com/understanding-the-real-innovation...

pmiri 8y ago

This article ties well to the excellent book "The Entrepreneurial State" by Mariana Mazzucato. Apple did an excellent job of bringing together a lot of existing technology into a viable consumer product, but it is still important to note that much of that tech was powered by state-funded initiatives, instead of Silicon Valley, VC-funded projects.

bjoli 8y ago

I doubt the idea of such a phone was ever very unique. I got laughed at in high school (2004) for saying something along the lines of "in 10 years all our phones will be one big screen and they will be powerful enough to fulfil most of our personal computing needs". I also believed they would be docked to become full featured PCs, but I guess that niche has been filled for many with the rise of tablets. (which I appalling, but I guess thats just because I don't understand their appeal at all). TFA article claims something similar: it was apple that took a bunch of ideas and made it into something people wanted to actually use. I, and I doubt many people here, would have a good enough vision and understanding of what people actually wanted.

Boulth 8y ago
> I also believed they would be docked to become full featured PCs This looks like a good description of Samsung DeX.
mbrumlow 8y ago
Don't forget, the lot of ideas that Apple took to make the iPhone where mostly built off a bunch of other ideas them self. I find us in a strange new era of people using the past as a way to diminish the now. I grow tired of people pushing the notion that we today must pay for the sins and attribute success to past generations. If we go far enough back I am sure if the wheel had never been invented we would have none of what we have today and would still be smashing rocks around in a cave.

mar77i 8y ago

https://www.xkcd.com/343/ https://www.xkcd.com/343/ RIOT PRRL

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

CodeSheikh 8y ago

Title should be "Who Innovated the iPhone?"

S_A_P 8y ago

Maybe Im in the minority here, but I never attributed credit to Steve Jobs as the "inventor" of any of apples products. I saw him akin to a music producer. The team builds, and he guides their efforts according to his vision. This is very different than sitting down and "inventing" anything.

russellbeattie 8y ago

I find it interesting that I know more about the team that developed the Mac in the early 1980s than I know about the iPhone team. The iPhone was a watershed moment in tech that propelled Apple to be a trillion dollar company, yet the iPhone team is obscure to me. The Mac team has had how many books and articles about them?

chaostheory 8y ago
The One Device details the people and history well. https://www.amazon.com/One-Device-Secret-History-iPhone/dp/031654616X https://www.amazon.com/One-Device-Secret-History-iPhone/dp/0... It just came out a year ago. You can also try my user-editable site (https://theymadethat.com/things/k4z/iphone https://theymadethat.com/things/k4z/iphone) where I aim for the same goal but with a different approach. The iPhone entry still needs a lot of work.