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I'm part of the academic research community that focuses on mobile. My personal opinion is that both the iPhone and the iPad pushed the barrier of what was thou
by iqster 15y ago
I'm part of the academic research community that focuses on mobile. My personal opinion is that both the iPhone and the iPad pushed the barrier of what was thought to be possible.
In the case of the iPhone, it redefined browsing on small form factor devices. Yes ... pinch to zoom was published before. But the specific implementation into the web browser was pretty unique. The state of the art device prior to the iPhone was the Nokia 770 tablet. Compare that to an iPhone.
W.r.t the iPad, when Jobs claimed it would last 8 hours (I think he said you could play movies the entire way on a long distance flight), I didn't believe it. Nor could other researchers I talked to. Apple's custom silicon for media playback didn't factor into people's imagination.
- pjscott 15y agoAll those things are cool, but compare with airplanes, which made the world drastically smaller. Or with the Haber-Bosch process, which prevents us from starving. That's the kind of big breakthrough technology that Thiel is talking about. The iPhone, while really neat, doesn't quite measure up.
- iqster 15y agoOne of my history professors in college said something I found quite remarkable. Let me share it ... he said in the history of humanity, there have been very few revolutions. When humans figured out how to talk was one. You can suddenly communicate with others! The other big revolution was when people learned to write. Now, you ideas can span space or time. The advent of computers, telecommunications and the Internet was another such revolution. You can now instantly connect with anyone around the planet! While the iPhone can't take the credit for all this, perhaps you see why I disagree with Thiel :)