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I have no idea why this sticks in my head, but way way way back when, I remember Leo Laporte being adamant, on MacBreak Weekly, that he was sure the iPhone wasn

I have no idea why this sticks in my head, but way way way back when, I remember Leo Laporte being adamant, on MacBreak Weekly, that he was sure the iPhone wasn’t really running a version of OS X, because it was impossible to do so. And mind you, as someone who has been using a Mac since System 7, and OS X as a daily driver since 10.2—yeah, at the time, it seemed wild beyond belief that a phone could run what amounts to OS X. Those first versions of OS X were not snappy.

MBCook 5y ago
Famously after the initial presentation BlackBerry had a meeting of important people and decided the whole thing had been faked because it was impossible. The original iPhone (and to a degree the iPad) really seemed to have been right at the edge of what was technologically possible.
- simonh 5y ago
  The only people in the industry who seemed to get it were the Android team. It took Microsoft 3 years to realise they actually needed to go back to the drawing board on their mobile tech stack.
  - mushyhammer 5y ago
    iPhone announcement: January 2007 Android release: October 2008 Windows Phone 7 release: October 2010 Indeed it seems that Microsoft took their sweet time to rearchitect their OS, but these dates suggests Microsoft realized much earlier than 3 years later.
    - pronlover723 5y ago
      Microsoft was shipping PDAs (of which iPhone is an evolution of) since the 90s. I had a Casio E-95. It's about the same size as an iphone. It has a single button below the display at the bottom (same place as the home button on the original iPhone). It's home screen has a grid of 3x4 icons for apps (similar to an iPhone's 4x5 grid). What it doesn't have, it doesn't have capacitive touchscreen, it has resistive so it used a stylus, though I used my fingernail often). It doesn't have cellular service (but plenty did before iPhone shipped). Its UX is not optimized for touch as much as iOS. But it runs an OS, Win-CE, on a PDA so I'm not sure anything needed to be rearchitected rather than just deprecate the desktop UI widgets for more touch friendly alternatives (yea I know that's easier said than done but it's a tiny part of an OS vs all the rest). Also I'm not under any delusion that MS would have gotten it right. The same reasoning that led them to do the minimal changes from Windows -> Windows CE would have likely always been a drag on them fully embracing letting go and making the necessary changes.
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        From early Windows CE memories, Microsoft's mobile hubris always seemed to start from "desktop Windows is the best OS." Ergo, the closer to desktop Windows they could put on mobile devices, the happier people would be. Blackberry, Palm, and Apple all realized that given hardware and interface limitations, a better solution was to cut the Gordian knot and strike a different balance between desktop and something else. Honestly, any of the three had a shot at being Apple. Palm had Graffiti and really slick for the time OSs. Blackberry had iMessage of their own. But Apple had a more complete package + Apple fans + iTunes.
        thrashh 5y ago
        I think the issue is that Microsoft only targeted enterprise users and never tried that hard to make their mobile platform for consumers. Because I remember having a Windows Mobile device and it was fairly powerful. You could do more on it than you could on Android or iOS for many years.
        Seanambers 5y ago
        And then later on Microsoft shipped Windows 8 - which was a touch first interface on millions and millions of desktop computers. I still remember the utter despair when non pro users didn't understand what was happening with the interface. You can't make this sh!t up!
        GeekyBear 5y ago
        > From early Windows CE memories, Microsoft's mobile hubris always seemed to start from "desktop Windows is the best OS." Ergo, the closer to desktop Windows they could put on mobile devices, the happier people would be. This insanity reached it's peak just before the iPhone introduction with Microsoft's "Ultra Mobile PC" handheld device initiative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-mobile_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-mobile_PC I can remember an implementation of this from ASUS that used a D-Pad to drive a mouse pointer on a handheld device running an unchanged Windows XP UI.
        gumby 5y ago
        To be fair to Microsoft,* there was customer pull for “desktop everywhere”. I remember asking 20 years ago at a city council meeting why they planned to spend so much on Exchange/Outlook rather than, say, Netscape. The answer was that the Netscape icons looked different from Microsoft’s so lack of training costs would make MS cheaper. Sounds like bullshit but back then there was enormous learned helplessness when it came to anything computerish. Walk to any desk in most companies and there would be a stack of books to explain it all. One of the best things about the iPhone was that it jettisoned all that crap and acknowledged that people aren’t idiots. The stores still offered free “training” for the fearful. * strange, I know, as they were rarely fair to others.
    - jkestner 5y ago
      I might say that Microsoft didn’t really rearchitect the mobile OS until Windows Phone 8 in November 2012, which was based on Windows NT. Windows 7 was, well a new skin on Windows CE is reductive, but CE was the kernel.
    - modeless 5y ago
      The Windows Phone 7 "tech stack" was based on the Windows CE kernel and, speaking as someone who worked on it briefly, it was a dumpster fire. It wasn't until Windows Phone 8 in 2012 that Microsoft put a real OS kernel on their phones the way Apple put Darwin on iPhones. Devices could not upgrade from 7 to 8 because they were essentially different operating systems.
      - Joeri 5y ago
        For the customer though the difference was not that dramatic. My wife had a WP7 device and I liked it enough that I replaced my android phone with a WP8, and while it was clearly better than 7, it was not dramatically better. At the time the lack of backwards compatibility was baffling for the WP7 buyers I knew, and all of them switched to iphone or android after that because of being burned by that transition. I had a similar experience when they went to WP10. While WP8 was a fast, stable and highly usable OS, WP10 was a dumpster fire (for me as a user, cannot talk about underpinnings). Constant crashes, slow, terrible battery life. This was a widely shared experience among WP10 users as far as I know. And on top of that there was another software transition that all but guaranteed no apps properly jumped to the new platform. Looking back on it I think jumping to WP10 instead of carefully incrementing WP8 was the big mistake, and rolling out WP8 without a way to make the transition easier on existing WP7 buyers was the lesser one. I don’t think a perfect execution would have saved microsoft though: they would have always been third and it is pretty clear developers cannot support more than two mobile platforms properly. The app situation would have always been bad, and without all of the popular apps a smartphone is dead in the water.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - wolpoli 5y ago
      As if the 2.5 years delay to market wasn't enough, Microsoft also decided to invent a whole new UI paradigm for Windows Phone 7. I really want to know what went on when they made that decision.
      - omegabravo 5y ago
        The new UI paradigm was fantastic for users. That was never the problem with the Windows Phone. I'm not sure if you ever used one, but I loved it. It's problem was always the ecosystem. The device was fast even on low end hardware, yet felt fresh and productive. It got out of the way. I always felt the tabs were a couple of points too large. I never wrote an app for it so suspect it sucked. On the phone, peoples social media was all integrated into one hub and while great for the user, it reduced the platforms to a transport layer - which did not appeal to them. Youtube was a big deal at the time, and didn't want their app on the new competitors platform. Microsoft wrote some, and they were taking offline. On the Windows phone, it would have been a few steps away from a storage platform. Microsoft had a brand reputation problem at the time. Windows is what your parents used for work. Apple had an emotional connection of being fresh and hip. They had the iPod and people dancing in silhouette. iTunes was available on Mac. You could run it on Windows, if you shut everything else down - the thing was a massive resource hog. I'm so scarred by it that even owning a Mac now I never user it. The Zune app was a joy to use in comparison. I used Zune app for years without even owning a Zune. You had to use iTunes to sync your iPod. The older portable MP3 players were storage devices that you just copied files onto the device. The end user experience was not the problem. edit: some of this might be slightly inaccurate since I'm going from memory here. Happy to be corrected by someone who remembers better than I.
        philistine 5y ago
        You’re so scarred by iTunes you didn’t even realize they got rid of it years ago.
        wolpoli 5y ago
        I had an iPhone at that point. I remember playing with Windows Phone 7 at a store and my gut feeling wasn't great about it. Perhaps it was a combination of that text based tab control or it was the black & white + flat + text design they adopted for live tile and for the UI controls. It's been a while, so it's possible that it wasn't as bad as I remember it.
  - olliej 5y ago
    As I understand it the android team had to complete redesign the user facing aspect of the platform after the iPhone was announced
    - randomifcpfan 5y ago
      Not really. The “I guess we’re not shipping that phone” quote was about not shipping the Blackberry-clone Sooner device, but the full-screen touch-first “dream” prototype was already on the drawing board. Android source code is publicly available, with time stamps. You can read it and see how little had to change to make it a touch first ux. Android had to add multi-touch events, make the default controls bigger, and add inertial scrolling to the list views. They didn’t even have to add a soft keyboard, because the first few gens of phones had physical keyboards.
      - WoodenChair 5y ago
        > Android source code is publicly available, with time stamps. You can read it and see how little had to change to make it a touch first ux. > Android had to add multi-touch events, make the default controls bigger, and add inertial scrolling to the list views. They didn’t even have to add a soft keyboard, because the first few gens of phones had physical keyboards. Whether or not it was a lot of code, multi-touch was a revolutionary new UI paradigm and a beautiful symbiosis between well tuned hardware and software. I don’t think its importance should be trivialized and the iPhone was undoubtedly the catalyst that brought Fingerworks’s invention to the masses.
        ksec 5y ago
        This. The genius of iPhone UI was that it was so obvious once you saw it. There were plenty of so called Smartphones then, with or without Keyboard. But none of the touch screen phone interface were user friendly. Zero.
        Joeri 5y ago
        There was a full touch screen phone that predated the iphone, the LG prada, but if you look at the demo you can see in some places they arrived at a similar design (the dialer), in others they had a laughably bad design (T9 text message entry on the touch screen) and overall it was very unresponsive. The iphone didn’t just have the right touch ui concepts, it executed them really well. LG prada phone demo from 15 years ago: https://youtu.be/5mo7Ab6ZcJ4 https://youtu.be/5mo7Ab6ZcJ4
  - cpuguy83 5y ago
    Android didn't do anything (in the ballpark) for several years either.
    - avl999 5y ago
      Android had been working on their phone long before that. There is a story by Richard Hipp the creator of Sqlite who was flown in by Android to help with their sqlite deployements on their phones long before it was public knowledge. He also had been working with Nokia/Ericsson who reigned supreme in cell phone market at that time and according to him what he saw by Android blew him away and knew that other companies were doomed. This was well before the Iphone days, I forget the exact date he mentioned but it was circa mid-2000s. It is clear that Apple and Android had been working on a similar product, apple just got to market first.
      - cpuguy83 5y ago
        This is not how history went. Android being worked on is very different from Android being anything at all like what it ended up being. It literally took years before Android was in the same league.
    - JimDabell 5y ago
      It wasn’t several years. The G1 was released just over a year after the first iPhone, not long after the iPhone 3G, and it was roughly equivalent to the 3G.
      - cpuguy83 5y ago
        Here's the G1: https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/09/23/the-first-android-phone-was-announced-13-years-ago-today/amp/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/09/23/the-first-android-p... Here's cnet's review (literally just the first link I pulled from Google). "But still, the G1 doesn't quite offer the mass appeal and ease of use as the iPhone, so it won't be a good fit for someone making the jump from a regular mobile to their first smartphone." https://www.cnet.com/reviews/t-mobile-g1-review/ https://www.cnet.com/reviews/t-mobile-g1-review/
  - 8note 5y ago
    There was a really similar mp3 player that had been out for a while. It was too expensive for me to buy one, so I don't remember the name
    - bradleyankrom 5y ago
      Zune?
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  OS X at its core, is just Mach + FreeBSD. People were running Darwin in limited resource environments for years. By the time the iPhone hit the market, there were already plenty of handheld devices that had similar specs that were running full-blown Linux. Pretending that the iPhone was "at the edge of what was technologically possible" is rewriting history.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    It was at the edge in a few small ways but it was carefully profiled to be that; it had limitations (single process model) that didn't really matter (except the absence of 3G) in favour of performance (graphics, capacitive multitouch) that did. It was out in front in a lot of ways but not witchcraft.
    - cpuguy83 5y ago
      That's just it, craft. They took the time to craft the system to fit a certain profile which people found desirable and it changed the industry.
      - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
        Right. The common criticisms about Apple kit, at any point in time, will be led by feature comparison rather than benefit comparison. On almost every level, the iPhone prioritised benefits (consistency, simplicity, responsiveness, discoverability) over features. And in all but really two of the feature cases (text management/copy and paste, and the absence of 3G), they gambled right: people cared about the benefits they'd engineered for, and not about the features they'd skipped. (They managed to bluff past the apps question: we knew they had to be working on it and they managed to tell us they were working on it without telling us they were working on it) Commentators still make this mistake with Apple.
    - imwillofficial 5y ago
      “It was out in front in a lot of ways but not witchcraft.” I’ve been running Linux since 14. Had all the great smartphones of the age. At 19 I purchased the first iPhone. It was fucking witchcraft.
- protomyth 5y ago
  BlackBerry's hang up was they couldn't figure out how Apple was able to power such a device and how could they be allowed to use so much bandwidth by AT&T when that was a such a point of contention. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250096067/losingthesignal https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250096067/losingthesignal
  - wodenokoto 5y ago
    “So much bandwidth”? It was an edge device in a 3g world. It relied on Wi-Fi for location service when high end phones had used 3g towers and gps for years. In so many ways the iPhone was a poor high end phone on paper.
    - wmf 5y ago
      OTOH the iPhone accessed the real HTTP Web not WAP and it didn't use a split browser architecture. For comparison, the Danger Hiptop/T-Mobile Sidekick was only allowed to have an unlimited data plan because all traffic from the phone went through proxy servers that compressed everything. AFAIK Blackberries also routed everything through a BES/BIS proxy.
quitit 5y ago
There were a lot of people in tech and the media who made all sorts of claims that we appreciate as nonsense. One that stuck out to me was a “tech guru” stating that the screen must be using heat to detect touch, and that this means the screen will wear out with use over time. Even back then it felt utterly comical to see that on TV.
- macintux 5y ago
  After the iPad was announced, some industry expert wrote a long post about his knowledge of screen technology and how the promised battery life was clearly a flagrant lie, that there was no way the initial iPad could last more than 2-3 hours.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    I remember one of the spoof commercials (on MadTV perhap?) when the iPhone was first released that described all the awesome features and wrapped up with a battery life of 5 minutes (or some such small number). The other thing that we forget about now that was expected back then was that fingerprints would render the display unreadable after a short time. Also turned out to not be an issue (largely thanks to a combination of glass design and a strong backlight).
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    Amazingly, my 2014 iPad Mini lasts longer on standby than my 2018 iPad Pro. Even with all optional stuff turned off (and no cellular antenna), the new Pro lasts about 2 weeks, while the old Mini lasts a month. I'm not sure, but I think the difference is that the old iPad can't update to iPadOS, which has worse standby performance. It's pretty frustrating to pick up the Pro after a week of standby and find the battery half depleted.
tedunangst 5y ago
Although the iPhone launched coming into the leopard era, which wasn't that bad.
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
"A version of OS X" is potentially a bit misleading for many at that point, because while the iPhone had a slimmed down Darwin kernel and a slice of the same UI framework on top, its process management was completely different. The first version of the iPhone's OS had a brutal process management approach not unlike PalmOS, as I recall -- with the exception of bits of the system apps, if the app wasn't on screen, it wasn't running. And that really changes the equation. There's a completely different notion of performance and memory management because you don't have multitasking. There was no window management, no interprocess communication, no unix subsystem. (Essentially no text selection and no copy and paste!) So it wasn't "running Mac OS X"; that was a red herring. It was running a Mach kernel and a big chunk of Cocoa. My guess is that people at Palm would have understood this right from that first demo. And it wouldn't for example have been surprising to anyone at Compaq, because the iPaq series at that point was producing not-too-dissimilar devices in terms of power, able to run Linux and X11 while multitasking. Likewise it wouldn't have surprised anyone at Nokia that here was a very powerful device with a high resolution screen and a pretty much desktop-capable webkit browser that played streaming video and audio, because Nokia had already shipped a device with some of those characteristics and shipped it 14 months earlier; like many in the UK and Europe I had a webkit-capable 3G device in my hand on the day the iPhone was launched (an E61) and had been using it (and testing websites on it) for months. So what Apple had done on a technical/OS level wasn't so mindblowing if you knew your way around the decisions others had made, and had a view of the devices on the market (outside the USA where it was seemingly Windows CE or nothing). They were ahead, but they weren't so far ahead as for it to be completely unbelievable. They had made careful choices and tuned the device for them. (Seriously: no copy and paste until 2009, right? No 3G.) The difference was -- as it always is with Apple -- execution. People (including me!) should have been paying more attention not to this sort of OS-level achievement but to the design and delivery of the UI and apps. Serious thought had been given to capacitive touch and multitouch, which Apple didn't invent but did perfect, right out of the gate. The CPU performance, the OS technicalities, whether it was OS X or not, didn't sell it to _anyone_. Indeed, Apple confounded anyone interested in features over benefits -- it didn't support third party applications. What sold it was that it was understandable and comfortable. > Those first versions of OS X were not snappy. I ran OS X on day one of the public beta, on a blue and white iMac, and I don't recall its performance being bad (apart from the absence of sound). I remember it being amazing. But it's important to note that OS X on a Mac was a very different operating system; a fully preemptive-multitasked, multi-window OS with a BSD subsystem, IPC, swap, etc. etc., and running on hard disks, not flash.
vl 5y ago
I saw NT running on ARM candy-bar smartphone at internal MS demo in 2004. There was a start button and it opened notepad. This was surreal, but not surprising since NT was engineered to be portable from the start. MS was dysfunctional at the time, and they continued to ship abysmal Windows Mobile instead of replacing it with NT. Not that it would help, it takes more to make a good smartphone than good kernel.
pfranz 5y ago
I don't mean to understate the accomplishment, but the pedigree of OS X was NeXTSTEP. That was released in 1989. I'm sure a lot of bloat was added over the decades, but the underpinnings were running on hardware almost 20 years old at the time.

MBCook 5y ago

Famously after the initial presentation BlackBerry had a meeting of important people and decided the whole thing had been faked because it was impossible. The original iPhone (and to a degree the iPad) really seemed to have been right at the edge of what was technologically possible.

simonh 5y ago
The only people in the industry who seemed to get it were the Android team. It took Microsoft 3 years to realise they actually needed to go back to the drawing board on their mobile tech stack.
- mushyhammer 5y ago
  iPhone announcement: January 2007 Android release: October 2008 Windows Phone 7 release: October 2010 Indeed it seems that Microsoft took their sweet time to rearchitect their OS, but these dates suggests Microsoft realized much earlier than 3 years later.
  - pronlover723 5y ago
    Microsoft was shipping PDAs (of which iPhone is an evolution of) since the 90s. I had a Casio E-95. It's about the same size as an iphone. It has a single button below the display at the bottom (same place as the home button on the original iPhone). It's home screen has a grid of 3x4 icons for apps (similar to an iPhone's 4x5 grid). What it doesn't have, it doesn't have capacitive touchscreen, it has resistive so it used a stylus, though I used my fingernail often). It doesn't have cellular service (but plenty did before iPhone shipped). Its UX is not optimized for touch as much as iOS. But it runs an OS, Win-CE, on a PDA so I'm not sure anything needed to be rearchitected rather than just deprecate the desktop UI widgets for more touch friendly alternatives (yea I know that's easier said than done but it's a tiny part of an OS vs all the rest). Also I'm not under any delusion that MS would have gotten it right. The same reasoning that led them to do the minimal changes from Windows -> Windows CE would have likely always been a drag on them fully embracing letting go and making the necessary changes.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      From early Windows CE memories, Microsoft's mobile hubris always seemed to start from "desktop Windows is the best OS." Ergo, the closer to desktop Windows they could put on mobile devices, the happier people would be. Blackberry, Palm, and Apple all realized that given hardware and interface limitations, a better solution was to cut the Gordian knot and strike a different balance between desktop and something else. Honestly, any of the three had a shot at being Apple. Palm had Graffiti and really slick for the time OSs. Blackberry had iMessage of their own. But Apple had a more complete package + Apple fans + iTunes.
      - thrashh 5y ago
        I think the issue is that Microsoft only targeted enterprise users and never tried that hard to make their mobile platform for consumers. Because I remember having a Windows Mobile device and it was fairly powerful. You could do more on it than you could on Android or iOS for many years.
      - Seanambers 5y ago
        And then later on Microsoft shipped Windows 8 - which was a touch first interface on millions and millions of desktop computers. I still remember the utter despair when non pro users didn't understand what was happening with the interface. You can't make this sh!t up!
      - GeekyBear 5y ago
        > From early Windows CE memories, Microsoft's mobile hubris always seemed to start from "desktop Windows is the best OS." Ergo, the closer to desktop Windows they could put on mobile devices, the happier people would be. This insanity reached it's peak just before the iPhone introduction with Microsoft's "Ultra Mobile PC" handheld device initiative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-mobile_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-mobile_PC I can remember an implementation of this from ASUS that used a D-Pad to drive a mouse pointer on a handheld device running an unchanged Windows XP UI.
      - gumby 5y ago
        To be fair to Microsoft,* there was customer pull for “desktop everywhere”. I remember asking 20 years ago at a city council meeting why they planned to spend so much on Exchange/Outlook rather than, say, Netscape. The answer was that the Netscape icons looked different from Microsoft’s so lack of training costs would make MS cheaper. Sounds like bullshit but back then there was enormous learned helplessness when it came to anything computerish. Walk to any desk in most companies and there would be a stack of books to explain it all. One of the best things about the iPhone was that it jettisoned all that crap and acknowledged that people aren’t idiots. The stores still offered free “training” for the fearful. * strange, I know, as they were rarely fair to others.
  - jkestner 5y ago
    I might say that Microsoft didn’t really rearchitect the mobile OS until Windows Phone 8 in November 2012, which was based on Windows NT. Windows 7 was, well a new skin on Windows CE is reductive, but CE was the kernel.
  - modeless 5y ago
    The Windows Phone 7 "tech stack" was based on the Windows CE kernel and, speaking as someone who worked on it briefly, it was a dumpster fire. It wasn't until Windows Phone 8 in 2012 that Microsoft put a real OS kernel on their phones the way Apple put Darwin on iPhones. Devices could not upgrade from 7 to 8 because they were essentially different operating systems.
    - Joeri 5y ago
      For the customer though the difference was not that dramatic. My wife had a WP7 device and I liked it enough that I replaced my android phone with a WP8, and while it was clearly better than 7, it was not dramatically better. At the time the lack of backwards compatibility was baffling for the WP7 buyers I knew, and all of them switched to iphone or android after that because of being burned by that transition. I had a similar experience when they went to WP10. While WP8 was a fast, stable and highly usable OS, WP10 was a dumpster fire (for me as a user, cannot talk about underpinnings). Constant crashes, slow, terrible battery life. This was a widely shared experience among WP10 users as far as I know. And on top of that there was another software transition that all but guaranteed no apps properly jumped to the new platform. Looking back on it I think jumping to WP10 instead of carefully incrementing WP8 was the big mistake, and rolling out WP8 without a way to make the transition easier on existing WP7 buyers was the lesser one. I don’t think a perfect execution would have saved microsoft though: they would have always been third and it is pretty clear developers cannot support more than two mobile platforms properly. The app situation would have always been bad, and without all of the popular apps a smartphone is dead in the water.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - wolpoli 5y ago
    As if the 2.5 years delay to market wasn't enough, Microsoft also decided to invent a whole new UI paradigm for Windows Phone 7. I really want to know what went on when they made that decision.
    - omegabravo 5y ago
      The new UI paradigm was fantastic for users. That was never the problem with the Windows Phone. I'm not sure if you ever used one, but I loved it. It's problem was always the ecosystem. The device was fast even on low end hardware, yet felt fresh and productive. It got out of the way. I always felt the tabs were a couple of points too large. I never wrote an app for it so suspect it sucked. On the phone, peoples social media was all integrated into one hub and while great for the user, it reduced the platforms to a transport layer - which did not appeal to them. Youtube was a big deal at the time, and didn't want their app on the new competitors platform. Microsoft wrote some, and they were taking offline. On the Windows phone, it would have been a few steps away from a storage platform. Microsoft had a brand reputation problem at the time. Windows is what your parents used for work. Apple had an emotional connection of being fresh and hip. They had the iPod and people dancing in silhouette. iTunes was available on Mac. You could run it on Windows, if you shut everything else down - the thing was a massive resource hog. I'm so scarred by it that even owning a Mac now I never user it. The Zune app was a joy to use in comparison. I used Zune app for years without even owning a Zune. You had to use iTunes to sync your iPod. The older portable MP3 players were storage devices that you just copied files onto the device. The end user experience was not the problem. edit: some of this might be slightly inaccurate since I'm going from memory here. Happy to be corrected by someone who remembers better than I.
      - philistine 5y ago
        You’re so scarred by iTunes you didn’t even realize they got rid of it years ago.
      - wolpoli 5y ago
        I had an iPhone at that point. I remember playing with Windows Phone 7 at a store and my gut feeling wasn't great about it. Perhaps it was a combination of that text based tab control or it was the black & white + flat + text design they adopted for live tile and for the UI controls. It's been a while, so it's possible that it wasn't as bad as I remember it.
- olliej 5y ago
  As I understand it the android team had to complete redesign the user facing aspect of the platform after the iPhone was announced
  - randomifcpfan 5y ago
    Not really. The “I guess we’re not shipping that phone” quote was about not shipping the Blackberry-clone Sooner device, but the full-screen touch-first “dream” prototype was already on the drawing board. Android source code is publicly available, with time stamps. You can read it and see how little had to change to make it a touch first ux. Android had to add multi-touch events, make the default controls bigger, and add inertial scrolling to the list views. They didn’t even have to add a soft keyboard, because the first few gens of phones had physical keyboards.
    - WoodenChair 5y ago
      > Android source code is publicly available, with time stamps. You can read it and see how little had to change to make it a touch first ux. > Android had to add multi-touch events, make the default controls bigger, and add inertial scrolling to the list views. They didn’t even have to add a soft keyboard, because the first few gens of phones had physical keyboards. Whether or not it was a lot of code, multi-touch was a revolutionary new UI paradigm and a beautiful symbiosis between well tuned hardware and software. I don’t think its importance should be trivialized and the iPhone was undoubtedly the catalyst that brought Fingerworks’s invention to the masses.
      - ksec 5y ago
        This. The genius of iPhone UI was that it was so obvious once you saw it. There were plenty of so called Smartphones then, with or without Keyboard. But none of the touch screen phone interface were user friendly. Zero.
        Joeri 5y ago
        There was a full touch screen phone that predated the iphone, the LG prada, but if you look at the demo you can see in some places they arrived at a similar design (the dialer), in others they had a laughably bad design (T9 text message entry on the touch screen) and overall it was very unresponsive. The iphone didn’t just have the right touch ui concepts, it executed them really well. LG prada phone demo from 15 years ago: https://youtu.be/5mo7Ab6ZcJ4 https://youtu.be/5mo7Ab6ZcJ4
- cpuguy83 5y ago
  Android didn't do anything (in the ballpark) for several years either.
  - avl999 5y ago
    Android had been working on their phone long before that. There is a story by Richard Hipp the creator of Sqlite who was flown in by Android to help with their sqlite deployements on their phones long before it was public knowledge. He also had been working with Nokia/Ericsson who reigned supreme in cell phone market at that time and according to him what he saw by Android blew him away and knew that other companies were doomed. This was well before the Iphone days, I forget the exact date he mentioned but it was circa mid-2000s. It is clear that Apple and Android had been working on a similar product, apple just got to market first.
    - cpuguy83 5y ago
      This is not how history went. Android being worked on is very different from Android being anything at all like what it ended up being. It literally took years before Android was in the same league.
  - JimDabell 5y ago
    It wasn’t several years. The G1 was released just over a year after the first iPhone, not long after the iPhone 3G, and it was roughly equivalent to the 3G.
    - cpuguy83 5y ago
      Here's the G1: https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/09/23/the-first-android-phone-was-announced-13-years-ago-today/amp/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/09/23/the-first-android-p... Here's cnet's review (literally just the first link I pulled from Google). "But still, the G1 doesn't quite offer the mass appeal and ease of use as the iPhone, so it won't be a good fit for someone making the jump from a regular mobile to their first smartphone." https://www.cnet.com/reviews/t-mobile-g1-review/ https://www.cnet.com/reviews/t-mobile-g1-review/
- 8note 5y ago
  There was a really similar mp3 player that had been out for a while. It was too expensive for me to buy one, so I don't remember the name
  - bradleyankrom 5y ago
    Zune?
heavyset_go 5y ago
OS X at its core, is just Mach + FreeBSD. People were running Darwin in limited resource environments for years. By the time the iPhone hit the market, there were already plenty of handheld devices that had similar specs that were running full-blown Linux. Pretending that the iPhone was "at the edge of what was technologically possible" is rewriting history.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  It was at the edge in a few small ways but it was carefully profiled to be that; it had limitations (single process model) that didn't really matter (except the absence of 3G) in favour of performance (graphics, capacitive multitouch) that did. It was out in front in a lot of ways but not witchcraft.
  - cpuguy83 5y ago
    That's just it, craft. They took the time to craft the system to fit a certain profile which people found desirable and it changed the industry.
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      Right. The common criticisms about Apple kit, at any point in time, will be led by feature comparison rather than benefit comparison. On almost every level, the iPhone prioritised benefits (consistency, simplicity, responsiveness, discoverability) over features. And in all but really two of the feature cases (text management/copy and paste, and the absence of 3G), they gambled right: people cared about the benefits they'd engineered for, and not about the features they'd skipped. (They managed to bluff past the apps question: we knew they had to be working on it and they managed to tell us they were working on it without telling us they were working on it) Commentators still make this mistake with Apple.
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    “It was out in front in a lot of ways but not witchcraft.” I’ve been running Linux since 14. Had all the great smartphones of the age. At 19 I purchased the first iPhone. It was fucking witchcraft.
protomyth 5y ago
BlackBerry's hang up was they couldn't figure out how Apple was able to power such a device and how could they be allowed to use so much bandwidth by AT&T when that was a such a point of contention. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250096067/losingthesignal https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250096067/losingthesignal
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  “So much bandwidth”? It was an edge device in a 3g world. It relied on Wi-Fi for location service when high end phones had used 3g towers and gps for years. In so many ways the iPhone was a poor high end phone on paper.
  - wmf 5y ago
    OTOH the iPhone accessed the real HTTP Web not WAP and it didn't use a split browser architecture. For comparison, the Danger Hiptop/T-Mobile Sidekick was only allowed to have an unlimited data plan because all traffic from the phone went through proxy servers that compressed everything. AFAIK Blackberries also routed everything through a BES/BIS proxy.

quitit 5y ago

There were a lot of people in tech and the media who made all sorts of claims that we appreciate as nonsense. One that stuck out to me was a “tech guru” stating that the screen must be using heat to detect touch, and that this means the screen will wear out with use over time. Even back then it felt utterly comical to see that on TV.

macintux 5y ago
After the iPad was announced, some industry expert wrote a long post about his knowledge of screen technology and how the promised battery life was clearly a flagrant lie, that there was no way the initial iPad could last more than 2-3 hours.
- dhosek 5y ago
  I remember one of the spoof commercials (on MadTV perhap?) when the iPhone was first released that described all the awesome features and wrapped up with a battery life of 5 minutes (or some such small number). The other thing that we forget about now that was expected back then was that fingerprints would render the display unreadable after a short time. Also turned out to not be an issue (largely thanks to a combination of glass design and a strong backlight).
- gnicholas 5y ago
  Amazingly, my 2014 iPad Mini lasts longer on standby than my 2018 iPad Pro. Even with all optional stuff turned off (and no cellular antenna), the new Pro lasts about 2 weeks, while the old Mini lasts a month. I'm not sure, but I think the difference is that the old iPad can't update to iPadOS, which has worse standby performance. It's pretty frustrating to pick up the Pro after a week of standby and find the battery half depleted.

tedunangst 5y ago

Although the iPhone launched coming into the leopard era, which wasn't that bad.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

"A version of OS X" is potentially a bit misleading for many at that point, because while the iPhone had a slimmed down Darwin kernel and a slice of the same UI framework on top, its process management was completely different. The first version of the iPhone's OS had a brutal process management approach not unlike PalmOS, as I recall -- with the exception of bits of the system apps, if the app wasn't on screen, it wasn't running. And that really changes the equation. There's a completely different notion of performance and memory management because you don't have multitasking. There was no window management, no interprocess communication, no unix subsystem. (Essentially no text selection and no copy and paste!) So it wasn't "running Mac OS X"; that was a red herring. It was running a Mach kernel and a big chunk of Cocoa. My guess is that people at Palm would have understood this right from that first demo. And it wouldn't for example have been surprising to anyone at Compaq, because the iPaq series at that point was producing not-too-dissimilar devices in terms of power, able to run Linux and X11 while multitasking. Likewise it wouldn't have surprised anyone at Nokia that here was a very powerful device with a high resolution screen and a pretty much desktop-capable webkit browser that played streaming video and audio, because Nokia had already shipped a device with some of those characteristics and shipped it 14 months earlier; like many in the UK and Europe I had a webkit-capable 3G device in my hand on the day the iPhone was launched (an E61) and had been using it (and testing websites on it) for months. So what Apple had done on a technical/OS level wasn't so mindblowing if you knew your way around the decisions others had made, and had a view of the devices on the market (outside the USA where it was seemingly Windows CE or nothing). They were ahead, but they weren't so far ahead as for it to be completely unbelievable. They had made careful choices and tuned the device for them. (Seriously: no copy and paste until 2009, right? No 3G.) The difference was -- as it always is with Apple -- execution. People (including me!) should have been paying more attention not to this sort of OS-level achievement but to the design and delivery of the UI and apps. Serious thought had been given to capacitive touch and multitouch, which Apple didn't invent but did perfect, right out of the gate. The CPU performance, the OS technicalities, whether it was OS X or not, didn't sell it to _anyone_. Indeed, Apple confounded anyone interested in features over benefits -- it didn't support third party applications. What sold it was that it was understandable and comfortable. > Those first versions of OS X were not snappy. I ran OS X on day one of the public beta, on a blue and white iMac, and I don't recall its performance being bad (apart from the absence of sound). I remember it being amazing. But it's important to note that OS X on a Mac was a very different operating system; a fully preemptive-multitasked, multi-window OS with a BSD subsystem, IPC, swap, etc. etc., and running on hard disks, not flash.

vl 5y ago

I saw NT running on ARM candy-bar smartphone at internal MS demo in 2004. There was a start button and it opened notepad. This was surreal, but not surprising since NT was engineered to be portable from the start. MS was dysfunctional at the time, and they continued to ship abysmal Windows Mobile instead of replacing it with NT. Not that it would help, it takes more to make a good smartphone than good kernel.

pfranz 5y ago

I don't mean to understate the accomplishment, but the pedigree of OS X was NeXTSTEP. That was released in 1989. I'm sure a lot of bloat was added over the decades, but the underpinnings were running on hardware almost 20 years old at the time.