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What a load of extremely distasteful manure. The Cal Newport has a negative opinion about smartphones, but instead of just presenting his own opinion, he tries

• lupire 5y ago
  What people forget about Jobs is that he always believws that Apple products were the best possible thing, and that every alternative was bad until Apple figured out out to make it the way they wanted it to. In Jobs' worldview, " not ready yet" was the same as "wrong, terrible product". This led to him changint his view the instant Apple was figured out how to make something work, like the App Store, or Intel chips, or ARM chips. This is very different from the PC/Windows/Linux view of "eh, if someone might find it useful, we'll make it, and they can deal with the compromises". Of course there was a lot of Reality Distortion too, where if Apple couldn't so something a competitor could do, Jobs said it was stupid until the day Apple became able to do it too.
  • kristianc 5y ago
    > In Jobs' worldview, " not ready yet" was the same as "wrong, terrible product". This doesn’t seem to hold up with the v1 of Apple’s products (iPhone, PowerBook, Apple Watch) being ropey to borderline average. Apple has almost always released an underpowered v1 and figured it out later.
    • asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
      Seems a bit revisionist to claim that the original IPhone was ropey or average. It was unlike anything we'd seen and far better than anything else on the market. In fact it would be years before anyone else managed to produce something that could compete with the v1 IPhone on quality. To head off accusations of fanboyism, I say this as a long-time Android user who did own a G1 phone when it first came out, along with many of the other early android devices. Likewise, the original apple watch was certainly not worse than any other smart watch on the market when it came out. I think you could make an argument that it wasn't best in class depending on use case (e.g. it was tethered) but it was far from being average.
      • hobs 5y ago
        There were plenty of crackberry users who saw no reason to switch to an iphone until the app store became inevitable.
      • Jtsummers 5y ago
        The first iPhone had no App Store and limited messaging options. It was in many ways a downgrade for Blackberry users or users of Palm Pilot like PDAs. Opening up the App Store is what gave it its real potential.
        • donio 5y ago
          Yeah, I would go as far as saying that the iPhone 1 as it was released was much closer to what we later called a feature phone than a smartphone.
          • klelatti 5y ago
            Strong Steve Ballmer vibes about this comment. "It doesn't have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U Sure the iPhone was such an evolutionary product - practically indistinguishable from my old Nokia.
            • donio 5y ago
              Do you disagree? What then makes the iPhone 1 (as originally released) more of a smartphone than a feature phone?
              • klelatti 5y ago
                Here's the wikipedia definition of smartphone: > A smartphone is a portable device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, which facilitate wider software, internet (including web browsing[1] over mobile broadband), and multimedia functionality (including music, video, cameras, and gaming), alongside core phone functions such as voice calls and text messaging. Basically a feature phone does calls and text messaging - if it has a decent email client, web browsing and multimedia it's a smartphone. The iPhone 1 was a smartphone.
    • klelatti 5y ago
      "Figured it out later" Hmmm. Multitouch, Apps (even if Apple only), Mobile Safari etc. Seems to me that the original iPhone arrived pretty much figured out from a product perspective and it was fast enough. Sure the silicon has got more powerful but that's not Apple's fault.
• jhbadger 5y ago
  He really didn't have "years to see" anything about the iPhone except in the very literal sense of more than one year. The app store opened in mid 2008. He died in late 2011, so he wasn't around for the vast majority of the iPhone's history.
  • mikl 5y ago
    How’s three years not “years to see”?
    • ksec 5y ago
      In 2008 there were already signs that Steve was not in good shape and health concern was an issue. He did Liver transplant in 2009, Tim Cook has basically taking over since then. He was barely working half of his time during 2010. By early 2011 he officially went on medical leave. Resigned 6 months later, and I still have that vivid memory he passed away in just days after the iPhone 4s announcement. Not a normal three years to me.
      • mikl 5y ago
        He was working far into 2011, and he spent a lot of time trying to secure his legacy. Don’t tell me that he somehow missed the run-away success of the App Store and how it made the iPhone his greatest achievement as CEO and one of the biggest business successes ever.