The 360 was not a single device at a moment in time, but a platform and an architecture. The 360 is not judged by the first machine you could buy, but by how th

The 360 was not a single device at a moment in time, but a platform and an architecture. The 360 is not judged by the first machine you could buy, but by how the machine did in the market over the long term. The iPhone line of products came to blow the doors off the “smart phone” market, like the 360 did with mainframes. You can’t seriously claim that the touch screen was “seen as a disadvantage by many” when the new line sold orders of magnitude more units than any smart phone before it, and became the dominant form factor for all mobile phones within a few years. Like the 360 did with mainframes. “obviously someone else would eventually have pulled it off” can be said about any innovation, including the 360. What IBM did, like what Apple did decades later, appears obvious in hindsight. But like IBM’s 360 and mainframe computers, Apple is the one that did it with smart phones. Low price data plans, an app ecosystem several orders of magnitude bigger than anything before it, portable computing in the pocket of billions of people. Nobody achieved that before the iPhone. Like the impact of the 360, the creation of iPhone eventually enabled a vast number of new businesses and products (for good or ill) including Uber, Snap, and countless others. Pre-existing businesses like Facebook grew significantly after the iPhone was released. Sure, lots of earlier devices had some of the features that iPhone released with, just like computers existed long before the System/360. But Apple packaged it up in a way that worked, proceeded to own the market for a decade (especially in terms of revenue), and became one of the largest companies in the world on the back of its success. Much like IBM with the 360.