I think you're underestimating the amount of innovation required to make the original iPhone. The hardware required an extremely thin battery, a super-efficien

I think you're underestimating the amount of innovation required to make the original iPhone. The hardware required an extremely thin battery, a super-efficient processor, a high quality display with a built-in capacitative sensing grid, robust(ish) glass, and very small carrier, WiFi, and Bluetooth hardware. The visible software required a good touch OS with a secure file system, while the underlying carrier stack relied on data compression and adaptive line quality innovations, under a complex mix of networking protocols. The productisation required a complex logistics chain that sourced raw materials and converted them into phones at unprecedented scale with extreme precision. Very little of this existed in 1997. ADSL was just starting to be a thing, WiFi was still fairly exotic, and most people were still using dial-up. Windows 95 was everywhere and OS X hadn't been invented yet. Most phones used GPRS. Products like the Nokia Communicators might look somewhat iPhone like, in a bricky way, but they just didn't offer the same intuitive pocket-sized touch screen benefits. Modern phones are very literally the summary of modern materials science, microelectronics, comms and data compression theory, industrial engineering, and some CS, in a package that hides the physics and engineering in an almost effortless way. They seem simple, but they're anything but.