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Replies like this miss the point completely. The iPod wasn't aimed at people like you who know what Ogg Vorbis is/was. It was aimed at the average, non-techy pe

Replies like this miss the point completely. The iPod wasn't aimed at people like you who know what Ogg Vorbis is/was. It was aimed at the average, non-techy person and it absolutely crushed it. Same with the iPhone. The major innovation of the iPhone was that it was simple to use and anyone could pick it up and use it without knowing anything about it.

Fnoord 7y ago
Except the first iPhone was not simple to use. It didn't even have 3G. You couldn't use MMS. It lacked a ton of other basic features, such as custom software. Then there was the need for jailbreaking to get some basic features back. Ever since Web 2.0 it was clear to me that a touch-based UI would win if you used a web browser; it was Apple's capacitive touch UI which was the killer feature. Nobody had such even though Mozilla was experimenting already with a mobile browser (Fennec). (For some use-cases, a keyboard is still desirable though. E.g. a Pebble during sports is better usable than a touch-based smartwatch.) You don't need to know what Ogg Vorbis is; I knew because I ripped my CDs to Ogg Vorbis. I already paid for these. It allowed me to save even more space compared to MP3 and AAC.
- dkonofalski 7y ago
  >It didn't even have 3G. You couldn't use MMS. It lacked a ton of other basic features, such as custom software. None of these things, in any way, take away from how simple the first iPhone was to use. Once again, you missed the point completely.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    It was limited in its usage (terrible speed while 3G was widely available, limited applications while Symbian had these, could not update via repositories which my Nokia N-series could, could not even use a comm feature like MMS). Apple got away with it because of their iPod fame, and that the UI was a decent capacitive touch-based one which nobody else managed to do.
    - toasterlovin 7y ago
      Again, nothing you've mentioned made the original iPhone complex. They were missing features. But them being missing didn't make using the phone complicated to comprehend.
    - jen20 7y ago
      Did you ever actually _use_ a Symbian device of the era you are referring to? I returned two different ones as they would freeze just sat in standby. The only thing that came close to the usability and reliability of an iPhone in 2007 was the Blackberry.
      - Fnoord 7y ago
        Oh yes, Nokia E71. Brilliant device (obviously, with quirks). Keyboard did break eventually; got it repaired though. Before that a friend's Nokia Communicator.
    - dkonofalski 7y ago
      I love that you continue to double down on your responses that keep, repeatedly, missing the point.
      - Fnoord 7y ago
        I love that you keep saying I miss the point, without providing substance why I do. We clearly disagree, repeatedly, as you'd put it. What you do is, repeatedly, waving away my arguments as irrelevant, by ignoring them and saying I "miss the point". Like that is going to convince me? FWIW, I never used the original iPhone for a long period of time, but I did use the iPod Touch, and I did have usability issues with it (not in hindsight). Something simple as blocking ads, for example, it could not do without jailbreaking. I call that a design issue. That Google does such, is to be expected as it is their main source of income. Apple? Not so much. Multitasking was also something to forget about.
        dkonofalski 7y ago
  - fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
    What really cemented the iPhone for me was that, compared to early Android touchscreens, the iPhone's touchscreen was actually pleasant to use.
- baybal2 7y ago
  HTC had touch UI few years before Apple, Apple just happened to be very good with marketing. Apple spent around 40-50m on the initial rollout, a sum completely unheard of in the industry. And they bested themselves every iphone release since. Even today, closest contenders are far from that mark.
  - macintux 7y ago
    Someday I need to turn this into a blog post. HTC may have had a touch UI, but they didn’t have a capacitive touch screen (did the XDA use a stylus? I’d wager it did). More importantly, Apple was the only company willing to: * commit all their resources to a single UI and single phone * write their own operating system for said phone to have control over its fate and optimize for that UI * offer a sales experience where people could discover the phone, see how it worked, and get expert help, with sales people who actually knew about the phone and weren’t offering users the choice of three dozen competitors at the same time This "Apple is only good at marketing" idea is vastly off the mark.
    - lmm 7y ago
      Apple could put a capacitive touch screen in because they were willing to sell a phone for $600, carrier-locked on a 2-year, $40/month contract, at a time when phones sold for about 1/3 of that, and they could run a single well-optimized UI because they were somehow able to get Verizon (I think?) to agree to let a phone run a third party's UI untouched. It may not be "marketing" per se, but their success was very much business rather than technical.
      - Fnoord 7y ago
        In the USA it was AT&T. Other than that, agreed; it was an expensive smartphone. They've always been expensive smartphones, with ridiculous prices for storage (compare with Iriver H340 series). The cheapest iPhone was an iPod Touch.
        lmm 7y ago
- kccqzy 7y ago
  > Except the first iPhone was not simple to use. It didn't even have 3G. You couldn't use MMS. It lacked a ton of other basic features, such as custom software. You are describing missing functionality, but you are not refuting the claim of iPhone's simplicity of use. There were plenty of things the iPhone couldn't do. Among these that it could, the experience was years ahead of the competition.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    > [...] but you are not refuting the claim of iPhone's simplicity of use. I already addressed that in my first post in this subthread: "[...] The major innovation of the iPhone was that it had a capacitive touch UI (which allows finger use, gestures, etc). The iPhone did not have an App Store during release. It was missing a lot of features. It was Nokia who was the market leader around that point. I wish they fully bet on Maemo and capacitive touch instead of Windows Phone (they went the right way with the N9, but the predecessors were still too much on pen and resistive touch, or hybrid). [...]"
dingaling 7y ago
> and anyone could pick it up and use it without knowing anything about it. I wouldn't say that's accurate. Like the iPod before it, the iPhone relied on experimentation and peer demonstration for UI comprehension. It wasn't discoverable. My single instance of using an iPhone resulted in total failure in determining how to switch between two running apps. I kept ending up on the home screen and having to click the app's icon again. Apples clever hack around that was to let customers get hands-on with the devices before purchase in controlled Apple Store environments where they could be nudged into thinking that they had mastered the UI themselves.
- dkonofalski 7y ago
  >My single instance of using an iPhone resulted in total failure in determining how to switch between two running apps. I kept ending up on the home screen and having to click the app's icon again. Except this was exactly how the original iPhone handled app-switching. It was only by getting people used to that paradigm that modern smartphones were even able to introduce mobile multi-tasking. At the time of the iPhone's release, Blackberry was king and switching apps was a matter of hitting the "Back" button over and over again until you got back to the main menu of the Blackberry OS. On some models, you could click on a scroll wheel/ball and click "Go back to App Launcher" (or something similar). Precisely what the iPhone did was give people a home button.

Fnoord 7y ago

Except the first iPhone was not simple to use. It didn't even have 3G. You couldn't use MMS. It lacked a ton of other basic features, such as custom software. Then there was the need for jailbreaking to get some basic features back. Ever since Web 2.0 it was clear to me that a touch-based UI would win if you used a web browser; it was Apple's capacitive touch UI which was the killer feature. Nobody had such even though Mozilla was experimenting already with a mobile browser (Fennec). (For some use-cases, a keyboard is still desirable though. E.g. a Pebble during sports is better usable than a touch-based smartwatch.) You don't need to know what Ogg Vorbis is; I knew because I ripped my CDs to Ogg Vorbis. I already paid for these. It allowed me to save even more space compared to MP3 and AAC.

dkonofalski 7y ago
>It didn't even have 3G. You couldn't use MMS. It lacked a ton of other basic features, such as custom software. None of these things, in any way, take away from how simple the first iPhone was to use. Once again, you missed the point completely.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  It was limited in its usage (terrible speed while 3G was widely available, limited applications while Symbian had these, could not update via repositories which my Nokia N-series could, could not even use a comm feature like MMS). Apple got away with it because of their iPod fame, and that the UI was a decent capacitive touch-based one which nobody else managed to do.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    Again, nothing you've mentioned made the original iPhone complex. They were missing features. But them being missing didn't make using the phone complicated to comprehend.
  - jen20 7y ago
    Did you ever actually _use_ a Symbian device of the era you are referring to? I returned two different ones as they would freeze just sat in standby. The only thing that came close to the usability and reliability of an iPhone in 2007 was the Blackberry.
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      Oh yes, Nokia E71. Brilliant device (obviously, with quirks). Keyboard did break eventually; got it repaired though. Before that a friend's Nokia Communicator.
  - dkonofalski 7y ago
    I love that you continue to double down on your responses that keep, repeatedly, missing the point.
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      I love that you keep saying I miss the point, without providing substance why I do. We clearly disagree, repeatedly, as you'd put it. What you do is, repeatedly, waving away my arguments as irrelevant, by ignoring them and saying I "miss the point". Like that is going to convince me? FWIW, I never used the original iPhone for a long period of time, but I did use the iPod Touch, and I did have usability issues with it (not in hindsight). Something simple as blocking ads, for example, it could not do without jailbreaking. I call that a design issue. That Google does such, is to be expected as it is their main source of income. Apple? Not so much. Multitasking was also something to forget about.
      - dkonofalski 7y ago
- fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
  What really cemented the iPhone for me was that, compared to early Android touchscreens, the iPhone's touchscreen was actually pleasant to use.
baybal2 7y ago
HTC had touch UI few years before Apple, Apple just happened to be very good with marketing. Apple spent around 40-50m on the initial rollout, a sum completely unheard of in the industry. And they bested themselves every iphone release since. Even today, closest contenders are far from that mark.
- macintux 7y ago
  Someday I need to turn this into a blog post. HTC may have had a touch UI, but they didn’t have a capacitive touch screen (did the XDA use a stylus? I’d wager it did). More importantly, Apple was the only company willing to: * commit all their resources to a single UI and single phone * write their own operating system for said phone to have control over its fate and optimize for that UI * offer a sales experience where people could discover the phone, see how it worked, and get expert help, with sales people who actually knew about the phone and weren’t offering users the choice of three dozen competitors at the same time This "Apple is only good at marketing" idea is vastly off the mark.
  - lmm 7y ago
    Apple could put a capacitive touch screen in because they were willing to sell a phone for $600, carrier-locked on a 2-year, $40/month contract, at a time when phones sold for about 1/3 of that, and they could run a single well-optimized UI because they were somehow able to get Verizon (I think?) to agree to let a phone run a third party's UI untouched. It may not be "marketing" per se, but their success was very much business rather than technical.
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      In the USA it was AT&T. Other than that, agreed; it was an expensive smartphone. They've always been expensive smartphones, with ridiculous prices for storage (compare with Iriver H340 series). The cheapest iPhone was an iPod Touch.
      - lmm 7y ago
kccqzy 7y ago
> Except the first iPhone was not simple to use. It didn't even have 3G. You couldn't use MMS. It lacked a ton of other basic features, such as custom software. You are describing missing functionality, but you are not refuting the claim of iPhone's simplicity of use. There were plenty of things the iPhone couldn't do. Among these that it could, the experience was years ahead of the competition.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  > [...] but you are not refuting the claim of iPhone's simplicity of use. I already addressed that in my first post in this subthread: "[...] The major innovation of the iPhone was that it had a capacitive touch UI (which allows finger use, gestures, etc). The iPhone did not have an App Store during release. It was missing a lot of features. It was Nokia who was the market leader around that point. I wish they fully bet on Maemo and capacitive touch instead of Windows Phone (they went the right way with the N9, but the predecessors were still too much on pen and resistive touch, or hybrid). [...]"

dingaling 7y ago

> and anyone could pick it up and use it without knowing anything about it. I wouldn't say that's accurate. Like the iPod before it, the iPhone relied on experimentation and peer demonstration for UI comprehension. It wasn't discoverable. My single instance of using an iPhone resulted in total failure in determining how to switch between two running apps. I kept ending up on the home screen and having to click the app's icon again. Apples clever hack around that was to let customers get hands-on with the devices before purchase in controlled Apple Store environments where they could be nudged into thinking that they had mastered the UI themselves.

dkonofalski 7y ago
>My single instance of using an iPhone resulted in total failure in determining how to switch between two running apps. I kept ending up on the home screen and having to click the app's icon again. Except this was exactly how the original iPhone handled app-switching. It was only by getting people used to that paradigm that modern smartphones were even able to introduce mobile multi-tasking. At the time of the iPhone's release, Blackberry was king and switching apps was a matter of hitting the "Back" button over and over again until you got back to the main menu of the Blackberry OS. On some models, you could click on a scroll wheel/ball and click "Go back to App Launcher" (or something similar). Precisely what the iPhone did was give people a home button.