7 ms·

Not just BlackBerry. The entire phone industry was caught flatfooted by iPhone. I helped cover Apple for a large investment bank. The day of the iPhone announc

by ylee 3y ago

Not just BlackBerry. The entire phone industry was caught flatfooted by iPhone. I helped cover Apple for a large investment bank. The day of the iPhone announcement in January 2007, I saw a press release from Motorola come across the wire, in which the company announced yet another phone with a keyboard. I felt pity for the unfortunate souls who had designed it, worked on its launch, and wrote the copy for the press release, and who now had to see their efforts fly into the iPhone Hurricane.

mdasen 3y ago
I'd also say that it isn't easy to pivot to respond to the iPhone. Apple spent a long time developing iOS and the iPhone. Early Android phones were really far behind. If Apple hadn't been an AT&T exclusive in the US and had adapted to the way people bought phones independent of carriers in most of the world, Android wouldn't have had a chance. Even in 2010, three years after the iPhone launched, Android was still mediocre. With most products, there's a general consensus about the way the market is going well before one company launches. They might launch first, but everyone is building in that direction. The iPhone really caught everyone off guard - even after Apple demonstrated it. Competitors said it would never sell without a physical keyboard. That wasn't just them covering their asses. They kept putting out devices with physical keyboards for years thinking that was the direction of the market. It wasn't just the day of the iPhone announcement. The Motorola Droid launched in November 2009 (2 years and 11 months after the iPhone was introduced, 2 years and 5 months after the iPhone went on sale). Apple had been selling its third-generation iPhone which was taking over the world and Motorola launched its keyboard-based Droid 5 months after. Apple had created something different enough that it required real work to catch up with - and real effort to even believe that was the direction to go. Literally, companies couldn't believe that Apple had found the right formula for the market.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  > If Apple hadn't been an AT&T exclusive in the US and had adapted to the way people bought phones independent of carriers in most of the world I think some of those risks were insurmountable for a new entrant at the time Like, too far outside of their risk profile it just wouldn't make sense to pursue
- w-ll 3y ago
  The Motorola Droid and the few after that were the best phones ever. Yes, I rock a 13 mini now begrudgingly after the SE was killed off, but if someone made another slide keyboard i'd switch back to android. My iPhone is a phone, music player, and sometimes maps. What I miss is a nearly full tactile keyboard in my pocket I can shell into servers, and to type without the ducks. I know there are at least a dozen of us.
  - tetris11 3y ago
    Amen. Nothing has come close to that experience for me since my Nokia N900 departed this earth.
  - antupis 3y ago
    It is rather weird that we are missing these kind workphones which would have good keyboard and good camera for zoom calls.
  - doix 3y ago
    Another Motorola Droid fanboy reporting in. I bought it as soon as it came out. It was truly the peak of mobile phone experience for me. If I could get the moto droid with updated hardware, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
    - BoorishBears 3y ago
      The Palm Pre was everything the Droid was but with a level of polish that was years of its time (literally, how many long until iOS went with cards?)
      - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
        Palm Pre+ user, it's still may favorite phone of all time. Excellent home brew support and basically no restrictions. Wanna unlock the FSB of the CPU to overclock it back up to the 1ghz it was designed for? Go ahead! (Originally it launched with the CPU downclocked to 500mhz due to lifespan concerns) It took a while to learn to use such a small physical keyboard but it was fine. I irrationally hate HP for killing Palm for basically no reason.
- ylee 3y ago
  >If Apple hadn't been an AT&T exclusive in the US and had adapted to the way people bought phones independent of carriers in most of the world, Android wouldn't have had a chance. I disagree. Even had iPhone been available from all major US carriers on day one, and quickly launched outside the US in à la carte form, none of that would have made it affordable to most of the world. Cost is the major differential between Apple and Android (bar one or two flagship brands), not whether the carriers in a given country tend to be postpaid or prepaid or offer phones on an installment plan. Would Apple love to have the same market share that it enjoys in the US/UK/Switzerland in the rest of the world? Yes. Would it do so by introducing $99 iPhones? No. Apple just does not play in the lowest-cost price segments, period. It didn't in 1977 with Apple II, in 1984 with Mac 128K, in 2001 with iPod, etc. Lower-priced computers, yes (such as Mac Classic in 1991). But Apple has never, ever served the lowest-priced segments that Dell, HP, Acer, and Lenovo did and do serve as part of their comprehensive product strategies. Two more examples from my time on Wall Street: * I heard Apple's CFO say that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to". Yes, yes, you can today get the previous-gen MacBook Air at the lowest base configuration for that price, and adjusting for inflation the price is significantly lower than $799 15 years ago, but the $799 computer's equivalent today is a $400 HP laptop. * Dell, HP, etc. serve all price points because they feel like they have to, but that doesn't mean they like it. Around the same time as the above, at an investor dinner with the Dell CFO, an attendee asked how sales were of a $299 computer on Dell's print catalog cover. The CFO replied, "the problem with advertising a $299 computer is that people want to buy it". The funny thing is that iPhone really is not that much more expensive than Android (excepting the aforementioned $99 street price models) if you pay attention, but the environment has to allow it. Even if the two-year contract has mostly gone away in the US, postpaid is what allows huge discounts for the savvy. I paid $200 plus tax for my iPhone 13, which I bought through Sprint when it was the current model, merely by trading in an iPhone 8 that I had bought used from Sprint a year earlier for $100. That $200 is paid in $6.67 installments over 30 months (I don't mind, since I have basically the world's greatest phone plan through Sprint/T-Mobile). Such a program just isn't available without a postpaid carrier model to subsidize it, and postpaid in turn seems to be only economically viable in wealthier countries.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
- hgomersall 3y ago
  Nokia had the N800 before the iPhone. The touchscreen was resistive which was non ideal, but the Maemo OS had lots of promise and IMO Nokia failed to adequately exploit it or invest in it.
- apple4ever 3y ago
  The rest of your post is great, but just one quibble: > If Apple hadn't been an AT&T exclusive in the US and had adapted to the way people bought phones independent of carriers in most of the world That made be true, but if Apple hadn't been an AT&T exclusive I'm not sure if they would've succeeded as quickly as they did. Back then, the carriers had immense power, and they could control the entire phone experience. Apple made a tradeoff with AT&T - we'll be exclusive on your network if you let us control the phone experience. They initially wanted Verizon, but they rejected that trade. AT&T agreed to have a leg up on Verizon, and it mostly worked.
- dvngnt_ 3y ago
  Androids had widgets in version 1.5 over a decade before the iPhone.

by ylee 3y ago

mdasen 3y ago

I'd also say that it isn't easy to pivot to respond to the iPhone. Apple spent a long time developing iOS and the iPhone. Early Android phones were really far behind. If Apple hadn't been an AT&T exclusive in the US and had adapted to the way people bought phones independent of carriers in most of the world, Android wouldn't have had a chance. Even in 2010, three years after the iPhone launched, Android was still mediocre. With most products, there's a general consensus about the way the market is going well before one company launches. They might launch first, but everyone is building in that direction. The iPhone really caught everyone off guard - even after Apple demonstrated it. Competitors said it would never sell without a physical keyboard. That wasn't just them covering their asses. They kept putting out devices with physical keyboards for years thinking that was the direction of the market. It wasn't just the day of the iPhone announcement. The Motorola Droid launched in November 2009 (2 years and 11 months after the iPhone was introduced, 2 years and 5 months after the iPhone went on sale). Apple had been selling its third-generation iPhone which was taking over the world and Motorola launched its keyboard-based Droid 5 months after. Apple had created something different enough that it required real work to catch up with - and real effort to even believe that was the direction to go. Literally, companies couldn't believe that Apple had found the right formula for the market.

yieldcrv 3y ago
> If Apple hadn't been an AT&T exclusive in the US and had adapted to the way people bought phones independent of carriers in most of the world I think some of those risks were insurmountable for a new entrant at the time Like, too far outside of their risk profile it just wouldn't make sense to pursue
w-ll 3y ago
The Motorola Droid and the few after that were the best phones ever. Yes, I rock a 13 mini now begrudgingly after the SE was killed off, but if someone made another slide keyboard i'd switch back to android. My iPhone is a phone, music player, and sometimes maps. What I miss is a nearly full tactile keyboard in my pocket I can shell into servers, and to type without the ducks. I know there are at least a dozen of us.
- tetris11 3y ago
  Amen. Nothing has come close to that experience for me since my Nokia N900 departed this earth.
- antupis 3y ago
  It is rather weird that we are missing these kind workphones which would have good keyboard and good camera for zoom calls.
- doix 3y ago
  Another Motorola Droid fanboy reporting in. I bought it as soon as it came out. It was truly the peak of mobile phone experience for me. If I could get the moto droid with updated hardware, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
  - BoorishBears 3y ago
    The Palm Pre was everything the Droid was but with a level of polish that was years of its time (literally, how many long until iOS went with cards?)
    - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
      Palm Pre+ user, it's still may favorite phone of all time. Excellent home brew support and basically no restrictions. Wanna unlock the FSB of the CPU to overclock it back up to the 1ghz it was designed for? Go ahead! (Originally it launched with the CPU downclocked to 500mhz due to lifespan concerns) It took a while to learn to use such a small physical keyboard but it was fine. I irrationally hate HP for killing Palm for basically no reason.
ylee 3y ago
>If Apple hadn't been an AT&T exclusive in the US and had adapted to the way people bought phones independent of carriers in most of the world, Android wouldn't have had a chance. I disagree. Even had iPhone been available from all major US carriers on day one, and quickly launched outside the US in à la carte form, none of that would have made it affordable to most of the world. Cost is the major differential between Apple and Android (bar one or two flagship brands), not whether the carriers in a given country tend to be postpaid or prepaid or offer phones on an installment plan. Would Apple love to have the same market share that it enjoys in the US/UK/Switzerland in the rest of the world? Yes. Would it do so by introducing $99 iPhones? No. Apple just does not play in the lowest-cost price segments, period. It didn't in 1977 with Apple II, in 1984 with Mac 128K, in 2001 with iPod, etc. Lower-priced computers, yes (such as Mac Classic in 1991). But Apple has never, ever served the lowest-priced segments that Dell, HP, Acer, and Lenovo did and do serve as part of their comprehensive product strategies. Two more examples from my time on Wall Street: * I heard Apple's CFO say that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to". Yes, yes, you can today get the previous-gen MacBook Air at the lowest base configuration for that price, and adjusting for inflation the price is significantly lower than $799 15 years ago, but the $799 computer's equivalent today is a $400 HP laptop. * Dell, HP, etc. serve all price points because they feel like they have to, but that doesn't mean they like it. Around the same time as the above, at an investor dinner with the Dell CFO, an attendee asked how sales were of a $299 computer on Dell's print catalog cover. The CFO replied, "the problem with advertising a $299 computer is that people want to buy it". The funny thing is that iPhone really is not that much more expensive than Android (excepting the aforementioned $99 street price models) if you pay attention, but the environment has to allow it. Even if the two-year contract has mostly gone away in the US, postpaid is what allows huge discounts for the savvy. I paid $200 plus tax for my iPhone 13, which I bought through Sprint when it was the current model, merely by trading in an iPhone 8 that I had bought used from Sprint a year earlier for $100. That $200 is paid in $6.67 installments over 30 months (I don't mind, since I have basically the world's greatest phone plan through Sprint/T-Mobile). Such a program just isn't available without a postpaid carrier model to subsidize it, and postpaid in turn seems to be only economically viable in wealthier countries.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
hgomersall 3y ago
Nokia had the N800 before the iPhone. The touchscreen was resistive which was non ideal, but the Maemo OS had lots of promise and IMO Nokia failed to adequately exploit it or invest in it.
apple4ever 3y ago
The rest of your post is great, but just one quibble: > If Apple hadn't been an AT&T exclusive in the US and had adapted to the way people bought phones independent of carriers in most of the world That made be true, but if Apple hadn't been an AT&T exclusive I'm not sure if they would've succeeded as quickly as they did. Back then, the carriers had immense power, and they could control the entire phone experience. Apple made a tradeoff with AT&T - we'll be exclusive on your network if you let us control the phone experience. They initially wanted Verizon, but they rejected that trade. AT&T agreed to have a leg up on Verizon, and it mostly worked.
dvngnt_ 3y ago
Androids had widgets in version 1.5 over a decade before the iPhone.