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iPhone changed everything.
by jaywalk 5y ago
iPhone changed everything.
- zozbot234 5y agoLG Prada changed everything. iPhone was a lame ripoff of that device.
- pier25 5y agoHardware wise, the iPhone or a similar device was pretty much inevitable. The same components were available to everyone. I think Apple's stroke of genius was in the software and UI/UX.
- macintux 5y ago> Hardware wise, the iPhone or a similar device was pretty much inevitable. The same components were available to everyone. I agree (more or less) with the fact that someone would have come out with something similar. I strongly disagree that it would have changed the world. Apple had the "courage" to go all-in on the form factor with the retail footprint to sell it, and of course the built-in fan base and long history of innovation to make it interesting even in its fairly primitive form. Any other manufacturer would have either been too small to be so influential, or would have hedged their bets with a dozen alternatives, and their "iPhone" would have just been another dusty device in the corner of an AT&T store that no one knew how to use.
- pier25 5y ago> Any other manufacturer would have either been too small to be so influential Maybe small manufacturers, but if Nokia or Motorola had done it first (with good software) maybe we'd be a in different world.
- macintux 5y agoYou left out the rest of that... > or would have hedged their bets with a dozen alternatives Nokia or Motorola wouldn't have bet their phone business on a single UI/hardware combination like Apple did, and so I don't believe it would have had the technological impact the iPhone did.
- pier25 5y agoThat's a good point. Maybe you're right, who knows.
- toast0 5y agoNokia pissed off too many US carriers around this time. They were pushing a preinstalled VoIP client, and US carriers responded by dropping their phones. Even if they had something great, the US focus of tech media would have made it hard to see, and the US/EU frequency differences would have made it hard to use in the US unless Nokia made a US version, but lack of distribution makes that less likely.
- Someone 5y agoIt may look like that in hindsight, and given advances in hardware, something with lots of sensors would have been built, but I’m not sure how similar it would have been. The removal of the keyboard, in particular, was far from universally perceived as a good idea at the time. I also think it would have been quite a while before anybody would have had the guts to not provide a slot for memory cards or to not have removable batteries.
- swetland 5y agoI dunno, touch-only had been done before (Newton, Palm), and I think it would have surfaced again. The UI/UX Apple built on top of the technology that was in everyone's (manufacturers) hands, I still think, was the biggest factor in pushing things forward industry-wide.
- oautholaf 5y agoAs important was Apple's brand power. Everyone already had an iPod in their pocket and loved it. That gave them legitimacy to set terms with carriers.
- Someone 5y agoBoth had a stylus. Possibly, we could have ended up with many humans embedding a tiny piece of hardware in their index fingers, so that they wouldn’t have to carry a stylus around ;-)
- swetland 5y agoYup, Apple made software and UX important. And had the clout to ship their device with their software and ignore the carriers' obsession with random checkbox features. Which, in the end, helped us a ton with Android -- post iPhone announcement everyone wanted to compete with that, nobody knew how, and the carriers eased back a bit on their absurd requirements documents full of random features nobody cared about (WAP?). At the time iPhone was announced we were already running on the prototype of what became G1 (Dream), with multitouch. We just expected it would be the second form factor to ship, after a more "traditional" blackberry wedge sort of thing (Sooner). Post-iPhone it seemed silly to ship such a device first (you can imagine the reaction), so we skipped it and shifted focus to Dream.
- oblio 5y ago> WAP WAP made sense for its time: limited computing power, limited bandwidth, super low data caps.
- swetland 5y agoSure, but it made a lot less sense on a device with a much faster data network and full featured web browser... even so carriers had their lists of all the features required for phones to be certified on their networks and it was very feature-phone-centric at that time.
- downWidOutaFite 5y agoNo one else was working on a capacitive touchscreen device.
- oblio 5y agoEasy there, rewriting history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada > It was first announced on 12 December 2006. > It is the first mobile phone with a capacitive touchscreen. > The LG Prada was announced shortly <<before>> Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007. > After the release of the iPhone the head of the LG Mobile Handset R&D Center was quoted saying he believed Apple had stolen the idea from the KE850 after it was announced as part of the iF Design Award.
- TheRealNGenius 5y agoEverything is "pretty much inevitable" if you have the power of hindsight.
- Mikeb85 5y agoNot really. It was going to happen with or without Apple. The first touchscreen smartphone was in 1992. Microsoft had touchscreen Windows devices from the late 90's through the 00's. Symbian and BlackBerry were things. And the LG Prada which was released before iPhone. iPhone just did what Apple's good at, taking existing technology and packaging it nicely, but it would have happened with or without them.
- crmrc114 5y agoThe reason I left my Treo for the OG iPhone was the data plan. No one could touch that unlimited data at the time. To me that is what sold the iPhone. I don't know that it ever would have taken off if it had been constrained per KB as was popular at the time. Also the data plan was a bit of a requirement considering the first iPhone was all webapps. I was so pissed when I found out it lacked copy and paste.
- downWidOutaFite 5y agoiPhone's capacitive touchscreen was new and revolutionary. Microsoft had some success in the early 2000s with Windows Mobile but they inexplicably stopped investing into it after 2005. Without Apple it might have taken many more years before the mobile revolution kicked off in earnest.
- Mikeb85 5y agoLG released a capacitive touchscreen phone before Apple by a month. The technology was out there and was always going to get used by someone.
- setpatchaddress 5y agoHere's a modern review of the original LG Prada, from the noted iPhone lovers at Android Authority. You be the judge. https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-prada-1080646/ https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-prada-1080646/ >The LG Prada was the first mobile phone with a capacitive touchscreen, but there are reasons why you don't remember it.
- realusername 5y agoI'd say the iPhone 2G changed everything, the first one did not really make a revolution on the mobile landscape.
- jaywalk 5y agoI could not disagree more. No handset manufacturer ever dared to make the demands that Apple did, including full control of the software with no ability to customize or even pre-install apps. It was completely unheard of, but that's what they got Cingular to agree to with the first iPhone. And they maintain that control to this day.
- lostlogin 5y agoYou disagree but then state that Apple did something no one else had ever done?
- kllrnohj 5y agoAnd nobody has done that since. Can it really be an industry revolution if it's still a solo act over a decade later?
- jaywalk 5y agoGoogle has, with Pixel. And even though the other Android OEMs allow for carrier apps to be preinstalled, it's nothing at all like it used to be. Verizon at one point was requiring feature phones to run a custom Verizon OS. Carriers would arbitrarily disable features on phones. The carriers had complete control over everything up until Apple came along. Even Android enjoys the fruits of Apple's initial demands.
- swiley 5y agoThe iPhone changed nothing and has, infact, been holding mobile computing captive in the 2007 era. Modern hardware is more than powerful enough to run decent desktop OSes without all the crap that Apple and Google insist is necessary on a phone.
- zozbot234 5y agoMobile computing was way more limited prior to iPhone and Android. Mobile phones are embedded devices, and the embedded ecosystem has always been messy irrespective of raw computing power. Even today, this is clearly the main obstacle to running "desktop" Linux on phones. (Though one shouldn't underestimate the UX challenges involved in building a viable phone OS, these are largely solved by now thanks to Plasma Mobile and Phosh. What remains is 99% hardware bugs and lacking support.)
- swiley 5y agoI run a desktop UI on my phone. The only place it really doesn't work is when I'm driving and that's illegal anyway. The main obstacle is SoC drivers that are kept closed.
- pjmlp 5y agoWhile Symbian C++ might have been a pain to use, the phones could run J2ME, Apache (yep that web server), Python, Flash and Web Widgets (PWAs before it was even an idea!).
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- joezydeco 5y agoI'd be curious to read this book and learn more about the pivot once iPhone launched. I was at one of those TI partner companies during this time and we were contracted to assist with middleware for Android Sooner. I even got to test with one. Then everything got put on hold.