3 ms·

And they didn't. Iphone 1 was far from a commercial success. 3GS was the first one that approached the cult status. It tool them 4 generations to get there, an

• jbullock35 6y ago
  > Iphone 1 was far from a commercial success. I don't think that's true. For example, less than a year after its release, the iPhone accounted for 28% of smartphones sold in the U.S. (and presumably for a greater percentage of smartphone-sale revenue): see https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/02/iphone-owns-28-percent-of-us-smartphone-market/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/02/iphone-owns-28-perce.... And half a year after that, the news was better still: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/10/apple-officially-surpasses-10-million-iphones-sold-in-2008/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/10/apple-officially-sur...
  • peddling-brink 6y ago
    There weren't that many smartphones then. Most people were using feature phones.
  • kllrnohj 6y ago
    To put that 10 million sales in 2008 into context, the Motorola Razr sold 140 million devices over a 4 year period ending in 2007. So... by & large nobody had an iPhone or smartphone. They all had Razrs (or other feature-phones) instead.
• ska 6y ago
  > Iphone 1 was far from a commercial success. That's a difficult statement to support. It set the stage for everything that came after, and it knocked the industry back on its heels. I'm not sure of the margin or unit numbers but for lots of values of "commercial success", that alone is hard to ignore.
• rangoon626 6y ago
  People were waiting in lines for DAYS to get the first iPhone.
• onethought 6y ago
  4 years you mean, generating profit the entire time. You have a very high bar for commercial success.