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"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

"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.

mushyhammer 5y ago
As a Symbian and Windows Mobile user at the time let’s not kid ourselves. Those smartphones and PDAs were in some aspects far superior (high res screens, cameras, 3G, apps, etc) but the software was junk if compared to the iPhone, especially browsers. I did like my HTC Diamond though (which came after the iPhone)
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  Yes, the software was not great (though I still found it a very useful mobile terminal). But the software was a legacy product. The hardware was not -- it was older and it had less RAM and flash, but it wasn't worlds apart. (Indeed as you say they had higher-density displays on some hardware). And they took those S60 products to market 14, 15 months earlier, with hardware designed much earlier. The point, again, is learning from the competition, and then execution. (Execution is why, after all, those Nokia products had to shoehorn Blackberry enterprise support into much more modern hardware; at that point the market cared about Blackberry because Blackberry knew how to execute. The world ran on Blackberry) We should expect those who come later to do so with better hardware and software. I think the iPhone was impressive but I still think it is worth putting in the effort to see the context and not pretend that it came out of the blue, fully formed and perfect.
tambourine_man 5y ago
> 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 It was amazing and dog slow. It wasn’t until the Intel transition that OS X was on par with classic on “snappiness” for me. Even if a G3 was probably dozens of times faster than a 68k, the window server was doing so much more drawing there was really no competition. Every single menu and window were composited in real time with transparency and drop shadows. Phew. I remember running a patcher app (haxies, shadow killer, something like that) to remove all drop shadows and make the damn thing usable.
- ec109685 5y ago
  I was an intern at Apple right around the time of the beta. The performance was bad. They had a program where the best performance improvement for the week would net a top of the line Mac development machine. They did a whole bunch of tuning over the years, including parallelizing the startup sequence and optimizing linking to make startup faster that really made a difference.

mushyhammer 5y ago

As a Symbian and Windows Mobile user at the time let’s not kid ourselves. Those smartphones and PDAs were in some aspects far superior (high res screens, cameras, 3G, apps, etc) but the software was junk if compared to the iPhone, especially browsers. I did like my HTC Diamond though (which came after the iPhone)

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
Yes, the software was not great (though I still found it a very useful mobile terminal). But the software was a legacy product. The hardware was not -- it was older and it had less RAM and flash, but it wasn't worlds apart. (Indeed as you say they had higher-density displays on some hardware). And they took those S60 products to market 14, 15 months earlier, with hardware designed much earlier. The point, again, is learning from the competition, and then execution. (Execution is why, after all, those Nokia products had to shoehorn Blackberry enterprise support into much more modern hardware; at that point the market cared about Blackberry because Blackberry knew how to execute. The world ran on Blackberry) We should expect those who come later to do so with better hardware and software. I think the iPhone was impressive but I still think it is worth putting in the effort to see the context and not pretend that it came out of the blue, fully formed and perfect.

tambourine_man 5y ago

> 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 It was amazing and dog slow. It wasn’t until the Intel transition that OS X was on par with classic on “snappiness” for me. Even if a G3 was probably dozens of times faster than a 68k, the window server was doing so much more drawing there was really no competition. Every single menu and window were composited in real time with transparency and drop shadows. Phew. I remember running a patcher app (haxies, shadow killer, something like that) to remove all drop shadows and make the damn thing usable.

ec109685 5y ago
I was an intern at Apple right around the time of the beta. The performance was bad. They had a program where the best performance improvement for the week would net a top of the line Mac development machine. They did a whole bunch of tuning over the years, including parallelizing the startup sequence and optimizing linking to make startup faster that really made a difference.