10 ms·

This iPhone trope has gotta die. I worked at Motorola when the iPhone came out. Every single engineer knew this thing would blow everything else out of the wate

by nvarsj 3y ago

This iPhone trope has gotta die. I worked at Motorola when the iPhone came out. Every single engineer knew this thing would blow everything else out of the water. It was one of the largest leaps in consumer tech devices ever. I assure you the Vision Pro is nowhere close to that.

IggleSniggle 3y ago
I remember being angry that my Moto Razr V3 had the power to run awesome software but as a teenager I didn't have an easy way to boot stuff up on it. IMHO it was a perfect phone, except there was no way to run what I wanted. The best I could do was program text messaging services and use those. They discontinued the phone rather than give consumers the freedom to just use the hardware. I thought the iPhone was dumb, but when the App Store came out that was game over. I really missed the convenience of having buttons and being able to text with my phone in my pocket, but at least it was consumer programmable... even if you had to pay a $100 premium to become a "Developer" in order to do so. Eventually the Moto X came along. I thought it was the perfect phone. Its voice assist features worked better than most voice assist features even today. You could easily do everything you wanted to do with the phone in your pocket and your earbuds in. It had the perfect size screen. It had a great ambient-on watch-face screen that looked nice sitting on your desk among clutter. The dimple in the back was a really nice touch, it made it like a worry-stone[0] in your pocket. It had a lower resolution, but I kinda liked that about it. I think Motorola was bought or something, but whatever the reason, the next phone in the series ditched every single thing that made the Moto X special. Those two devices were both my favorite mobile computing devices, and probably the closest I've come to getting fan-angry about a company screwing up their own magic. More to the point: you might have been able to see it at Motorola, but even looking back, I don't understand why Razr couldn't have won against the iPhone. The Razr was a surprisingly capable little machine! [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worry_stone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worry_stone
- eep_social 3y ago
  You’re gonna love this — Motorola was bought by Google in an attempt to jumpstart their hardware business but it turned out to be a failed acquisition. They ended up grabbing the patent portfolio and selling off the rest of the biz fairly quickly.
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    > You’re gonna love this — Motorola was bought by Google in an attempt to jumpstart their hardware business but it turned out to be a failed acquisition. I wouldn't call Motorola a failed acquisition - Google bought Motorola as a shield in an increasingly litigious environment: this was the age of Apple going "thermonuclear", Microsoft and patent trolls were wantonly shaking down Android vendors, and beginning to circle Google itself. Motorola (under Google) had the best value-for-money smartphones - their midrange was solid, and reasonably priced while everyone else was continuously shifting to flagships, with each release priced higher than the last. From the outside looking in, Google appeared to dispose Motorola to make Samsung happy - Samsung had been complaining loudly and widely about the Motorola acquisition, and openly flirted with other mobile platforms as a hedge. Motorola shareholders got paid, Google got the patents it wanted, Samsung remained the 600 lb gorilla in Androidland, Lenovo got a good brand and keeps making ok phones to this day. So, not a failed acquisition by any reasonable measure
    - eep_social 3y ago
      Yeah, I generally agree with that framing. That’s a good detail about samsung that I was not aware of. But I will say that from an ex-insider perspective — what you describe is mostly a failure. Google was searching desperately for revenue diversity and was acquiring pretty hard at the time. I think the intent with Moto was to acquire a hardware shop and establish a market leading brand to compete directly with Apple. They eventually arrived at Pixel by building it entirely in-house. That Moto got raided for IP and spun out to Lenovo did not meet those (high) expectations. There was no need for anyone to take a loss but I think Google wanted to make a whole lot of money and did not.
      - 3y ago
- davidmurdoch 3y ago
  Moto X was peak phone.
- kevindamm 3y ago
  IIRC, moto X was the first phone made by the Google-owned Motorola. The devices were made and assembled in the US. I was hopeful for the post-acquisition Motorola but it didn't quite pan out. The IP salvaged from the purchase was always a big part of the deal so it wasn't really a loss, just not really much of a win either.
  - IggleSniggle 3y ago
    Moto X (2013) was the device I intended to describe. You are right on both counts. I think I conflated the second gen closure of the US-based plant with the acquisition in my memory. And I'm now remembering that the real reason I was so disappointed is that the Moto X (2013) was a phone that you could operate the entirety of the screen one handed. With the Moto X (2014) you could not. I have an iPhone mini now, but it's still not small enough to 100% operate one-handed, at least not without grip adjustments. The Moto X wasn't quite a flagship phone, but it came close enough. I can't even find a properly one-handed phone anymore
- vel0city 3y ago
  Loads of phones could side-load J2ME apps. I never owned a RAZR V3, but I imagine it would have supported J2ME apps as well as I ran them on even crappier phones. The first things I'd install on my dumbphones back in 2005 was Google Maps and Opera Mini. I'd grab all kinds of J2ME games off Zedge and other sites and copy them over back in the day.
slg 3y ago
The better analogy is probably something like the Apple Watch. Apple certainly wasn't the first smartwatch, but anyone who owned one before that was obviously a geek (said lovingly). Apple made the first mainstream acceptable smartwatch by smoothing over a lot of the complaints about their competitors, while adding some of their own in the process, just like the Vision Pro. It took a few iterations, but today people from all walks of life wear smartwatches. Certainly not as ubiquitous as smartphones, but Apple made smartwatches a standard piece of tech that millions of people own and they made plenty of money along the way. The Vision Pro will probably be similar. For example, anyone wearing a VR/AR headset on a plane today would likely get stares. I bet a few years from now there will be several people on every plane wearing one of these. That doesn't mean Apple will make the best VR/AR headset or that VR/AR headsets will be a piece of tech that everyone owns, but Apple is capable of mainstreaming a piece of technology in ways that the Facebooks and Googles of the world aren't even if that is due to their marketing prowess and the strength of their brand just as much as their technical expertise. And in that sense, the thing that is more important than any of these reviews dropping today is the Super Bowl commercial Apple has almost assuredly bought to show this thing off in two weeks.
- m463 3y ago
  Correlation does not imply causation. I think smartwatches (and step trackers) were a thing, independent of apple. I remember a friend talking about load balancers when they were first came on the market 20 years ago. Cisco had this thing called "localdirector" which I believe couldn't handle load in the first place, while competitors did load balancing in hardware. I was puzzled why people bought them. My friend said, "Look, people buy $1M of cisco equipment, and they can just add a line item for one or 10 of these with no friction" So, I think Apple made their watch a "line item". People buy a phone, and they need cables and the watch is sitting there, and they say "ok!" and try one. (aside, I love my garmin watch. I just put it on my wrist. I haven't hooked it to my phone or connected it to the internet. It is great with battery life. I track my sleep, which seems to be when most people put their apple watch on a charger. I put my watch on the charger during my shower, which is all it needs)
  - 3y ago
echelon 3y ago
Vision Pro is not earth shaking or category defining. It's entering a crowded market that isn't even that big. As the premium option. Climbing that hill is going to be a very tall order. Apple's brand will not be a moat, either. Zuck's initial response to Vision Pro [1] was the correct one: > From what I’ve seen initially, I’d say the good news is that there’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws of physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of. They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade-off and it might make sense for the cases that they’re going for. > But look, I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important. We innovate to make sure that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests. [1] https://www.roadtovr.com/apple-vision-pro-zuckerberg-reaction/ https://www.roadtovr.com/apple-vision-pro-zuckerberg-reactio...
- echelon 3y ago
  In retrospect, that was a very negative post, and I wanted to add that I'd like to see {V,A,X,*}R succeed as a sector. In fact, I'd like to see all of the players do well, including Apple. I really want to see a transportive vision of the future pan out. I don't think this will be an easy market for anyone. It's low attachment, low critical app space. I want to believe, though.
ActorNightly 3y ago
I love how people just rewrite history on the internet lol. Iphone 1 was a collosal PoC. Slow, most of web didnt work. Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on, but looked cool (which is the reason people bought it mostly). Everyone that needed mobile compute functionality was still on Blackberry and some other devices. There was a time during early 2010s where the iphone was better than everything else due to native hardware and in house software and updated functionality. However by 2016 Android caught up, and since the first Pixel came out it pretty much has been ahead ever since.
- wnevets 3y ago
  > Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on, but looked cool and motion controls. Between the Nintendo Wii and the first iPhone people were obsessed with motion controls for some reason.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I think if you talked to someone working on Meta Quest they would say this is going to blow the competitors away. If you talk to a reviewer for a tech magazine they’re going to complain about any detail they can find in the 1.0 launch of a new product line as if it’s a colossal failure (aka PoC).
  - rgarrett88 3y ago
    I think the difference is everyone knew market penetration on cell phones would be close to 90%. This may be better than the Quest but is it going to take AR/VR mainstream? Seems iffy. In which case drawbacks may never get ironed out.
  - ActorNightly 3y ago
    Quest and Vive weren't great, but they actually had working VR that set the stage for subsequent development. Iphone 1 set the stage for tech jewelry.
- pests 3y ago
  That's the history I remember tho. I remember the first time I saw an iPhone. It was 2am at a house party with a bunch of 19-25 year olds. Pretty much everyone stopped drinking or dancing and played with this dudes phone for three hours.
jsjohnst 3y ago
> This iPhone trope has gotta die It’s not a trope if it’s true. Most hard core nerds didn’t get it until they had tried it hands on (including myself, I panned the device hard until I tried it). Then it was the exorbitant price point ($650 at a time when nobody really paid for phones). Then it was the lack of hardware keyboard. No “real” apps. No copy and paste (even my older at the time Symbian S60 devices had that). The list goes on and on. I get it, if you were at another phone manufacturer, you might’ve been scared, but the reality is the iPhone didn’t really pick up steam in the market until 3G or 3GS.
- bnralt 3y ago
  People thought Apple making a phone was odd. No one thought mobile phones, or even smart phones were odd. Mobile phones were common when the iPhone came out, and even smart phones weren't uncommon. And once the iPhone did come out, there was immediate interest. AR though, that's something the public hasn't shown much interest in yet. These products are looking more like the Segway (which was once supposedly going to revolutionize transportation) - cool, popular in a few niche markets, but not the revolution that people imagine them to be.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    Nobody thought Apple making a phone was odd. Even prior to the announcement of the original iPhone and prior to any rumors about actually making a phone, the internet was full of amateur 3D mockups of what an "iPhone" could be like, including looking like an iPod with a click-wheel. They had conquered the personal media player market, and now people wanted a phone with the design of an iPod to carry less stuff in their pockets.
    - jc_dc 3y ago
      Everyone forgets that the nerds had windows ce phones before Apple hit the market. It was the 3GS and 3rd party dev arcade games that converted me. Apples challenge now is how to convince people who hate them to go to work for them.
paulkrush 3y ago
Peak Blackberry was 2011. It's easy to forgot that that the iPhone takeover took years and many releases.
- internet101010 3y ago
  I kind of find that hard to believe but maybe there were government/enterprise purchases boosting it or something? As far as I'm concerned Blackberry died with the Blackberry Storm 2 in 2009, which was a huge piece of junk. I used to go back and forth to Shenzhen all the time trading refurbs and by 2010 I straight up would not buy anything other than Android devices because 1) iPhone was actually more expensive in mainland China due to it being a grey market item back then and 2) demand for everything else fell off a cliff.
kj99 3y ago
How can you assure us that Vision Pro is nowhere close to that? Do you have one? As someone who bought the original iPhone, it was extremely impressive, but had many many flaws. The browser was practically unusable over 2g and the whole pinch to zoom the New York Times desktop site was never actually practical. I think the parallels are clear. I also bought the original MacBook Air. Now that truly was terrible and stupidly overpriced. More expensive than the Vision Pro when adjusted for inflation, and with major functional problems. Today it’s the world’s most popular laptop.
- jojobas 3y ago
  Iphone was made from pretty much what was available to other manufacturers plus some secret software sauce, and was priced like a Blackberry of the time. There was immediately plenty of use cases that competitors kinda did, but not so well. These googles are as bespoke as it gets, are priced at 7x the competition and more than a flagship laptop, steer clear of the most popular existing use case, which is games, and offers... what exactly again? That's quite some difference.
  - kj99 3y ago
    > Iphone was made from pretty much what was available to other manufacturers plus some secret software sauce, and was priced like a Blackberry of the time. Neither of these statements is remotely true.
    - jojobas 3y ago
      Samsung CPU, samsung oled display, Balda touchscreen analogous to what LG has used previously, Marvell wi-fi, Skyworks cellular, various Intel and Infineon aux chips. $499 vs Blackberry's 8320 at $449. Not even remotely.
      - cromka 3y ago
        Samsung OLED? iPhone X was first to feature OLED display. Surely you meant LCD?
teekert 3y ago
I do think iPhone is often made more mythical than it was. Sure it was good and we could finally use our sausage fingers to navigate it. But I recently heard someone say on Radio that iPhone was the first phone with a touch screen. Meanwhile me an the guys (yeah all guys) we’re rocking Sony Ericsson P800’s and the like in 2003,4,5. I had an HTC touch when iPhone came out and I was most envious that you could do two finger zooming in Google maps instead of tapping zoom buttons.
- Agraillo 3y ago
  Many things Apple related are very often about applying existing technologies to a novel place. Many forget that the touch screens at the time were resistive [1] that required pressing (small but nevertheless) at the screen and mostly usable with styluses. As long as I recall the novelty was to apply a capacitive touch screen [2] to navigation, it does not require physical force and that's where the fingers shined. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_touchscreen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_touchscreen [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#Capacitive_touchscreen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#Capacitive_touchsc...
  - teekert 3y ago
    Sure. But one can argue that capacitive touchscreens were about to happen anyway (like ARM laptops..). And HTC with their touchflow were moving into sausage friendly UIs. But I agree, Apple is absolutely good at taking all this tech at the right time and making a compelling product. Steve insisted on glass/capacitive and that is just the best choice. Also, the UI didn’t feel like a layer (that you could easily get out off) as with touchflow. I’m also an iPhone user atm. Switched from Android about 3 years ago. The whole experience feels like higher quality to me still now. Although I have friends that would argue against that.
pjmlp 3y ago
I worked at Nokia and we certainly did not had that opinion, specially since we already had a couple of touch based Symbian devices. If we weren't busy with Symbian vs Linux internal feuds, and the Microsoft deal, things would have turned out much differently.

by nvarsj 3y ago

IggleSniggle 3y ago

I remember being angry that my Moto Razr V3 had the power to run awesome software but as a teenager I didn't have an easy way to boot stuff up on it. IMHO it was a perfect phone, except there was no way to run what I wanted. The best I could do was program text messaging services and use those. They discontinued the phone rather than give consumers the freedom to just use the hardware. I thought the iPhone was dumb, but when the App Store came out that was game over. I really missed the convenience of having buttons and being able to text with my phone in my pocket, but at least it was consumer programmable... even if you had to pay a $100 premium to become a "Developer" in order to do so. Eventually the Moto X came along. I thought it was the perfect phone. Its voice assist features worked better than most voice assist features even today. You could easily do everything you wanted to do with the phone in your pocket and your earbuds in. It had the perfect size screen. It had a great ambient-on watch-face screen that looked nice sitting on your desk among clutter. The dimple in the back was a really nice touch, it made it like a worry-stone[0] in your pocket. It had a lower resolution, but I kinda liked that about it. I think Motorola was bought or something, but whatever the reason, the next phone in the series ditched every single thing that made the Moto X special. Those two devices were both my favorite mobile computing devices, and probably the closest I've come to getting fan-angry about a company screwing up their own magic. More to the point: you might have been able to see it at Motorola, but even looking back, I don't understand why Razr couldn't have won against the iPhone. The Razr was a surprisingly capable little machine! [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worry_stone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worry_stone

eep_social 3y ago
You’re gonna love this — Motorola was bought by Google in an attempt to jumpstart their hardware business but it turned out to be a failed acquisition. They ended up grabbing the patent portfolio and selling off the rest of the biz fairly quickly.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > You’re gonna love this — Motorola was bought by Google in an attempt to jumpstart their hardware business but it turned out to be a failed acquisition. I wouldn't call Motorola a failed acquisition - Google bought Motorola as a shield in an increasingly litigious environment: this was the age of Apple going "thermonuclear", Microsoft and patent trolls were wantonly shaking down Android vendors, and beginning to circle Google itself. Motorola (under Google) had the best value-for-money smartphones - their midrange was solid, and reasonably priced while everyone else was continuously shifting to flagships, with each release priced higher than the last. From the outside looking in, Google appeared to dispose Motorola to make Samsung happy - Samsung had been complaining loudly and widely about the Motorola acquisition, and openly flirted with other mobile platforms as a hedge. Motorola shareholders got paid, Google got the patents it wanted, Samsung remained the 600 lb gorilla in Androidland, Lenovo got a good brand and keeps making ok phones to this day. So, not a failed acquisition by any reasonable measure
  - eep_social 3y ago
    Yeah, I generally agree with that framing. That’s a good detail about samsung that I was not aware of. But I will say that from an ex-insider perspective — what you describe is mostly a failure. Google was searching desperately for revenue diversity and was acquiring pretty hard at the time. I think the intent with Moto was to acquire a hardware shop and establish a market leading brand to compete directly with Apple. They eventually arrived at Pixel by building it entirely in-house. That Moto got raided for IP and spun out to Lenovo did not meet those (high) expectations. There was no need for anyone to take a loss but I think Google wanted to make a whole lot of money and did not.
    - 3y ago
davidmurdoch 3y ago
Moto X was peak phone.
kevindamm 3y ago
IIRC, moto X was the first phone made by the Google-owned Motorola. The devices were made and assembled in the US. I was hopeful for the post-acquisition Motorola but it didn't quite pan out. The IP salvaged from the purchase was always a big part of the deal so it wasn't really a loss, just not really much of a win either.
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  Moto X (2013) was the device I intended to describe. You are right on both counts. I think I conflated the second gen closure of the US-based plant with the acquisition in my memory. And I'm now remembering that the real reason I was so disappointed is that the Moto X (2013) was a phone that you could operate the entirety of the screen one handed. With the Moto X (2014) you could not. I have an iPhone mini now, but it's still not small enough to 100% operate one-handed, at least not without grip adjustments. The Moto X wasn't quite a flagship phone, but it came close enough. I can't even find a properly one-handed phone anymore
vel0city 3y ago
Loads of phones could side-load J2ME apps. I never owned a RAZR V3, but I imagine it would have supported J2ME apps as well as I ran them on even crappier phones. The first things I'd install on my dumbphones back in 2005 was Google Maps and Opera Mini. I'd grab all kinds of J2ME games off Zedge and other sites and copy them over back in the day.

slg 3y ago

The better analogy is probably something like the Apple Watch. Apple certainly wasn't the first smartwatch, but anyone who owned one before that was obviously a geek (said lovingly). Apple made the first mainstream acceptable smartwatch by smoothing over a lot of the complaints about their competitors, while adding some of their own in the process, just like the Vision Pro. It took a few iterations, but today people from all walks of life wear smartwatches. Certainly not as ubiquitous as smartphones, but Apple made smartwatches a standard piece of tech that millions of people own and they made plenty of money along the way. The Vision Pro will probably be similar. For example, anyone wearing a VR/AR headset on a plane today would likely get stares. I bet a few years from now there will be several people on every plane wearing one of these. That doesn't mean Apple will make the best VR/AR headset or that VR/AR headsets will be a piece of tech that everyone owns, but Apple is capable of mainstreaming a piece of technology in ways that the Facebooks and Googles of the world aren't even if that is due to their marketing prowess and the strength of their brand just as much as their technical expertise. And in that sense, the thing that is more important than any of these reviews dropping today is the Super Bowl commercial Apple has almost assuredly bought to show this thing off in two weeks.

m463 3y ago
Correlation does not imply causation. I think smartwatches (and step trackers) were a thing, independent of apple. I remember a friend talking about load balancers when they were first came on the market 20 years ago. Cisco had this thing called "localdirector" which I believe couldn't handle load in the first place, while competitors did load balancing in hardware. I was puzzled why people bought them. My friend said, "Look, people buy $1M of cisco equipment, and they can just add a line item for one or 10 of these with no friction" So, I think Apple made their watch a "line item". People buy a phone, and they need cables and the watch is sitting there, and they say "ok!" and try one. (aside, I love my garmin watch. I just put it on my wrist. I haven't hooked it to my phone or connected it to the internet. It is great with battery life. I track my sleep, which seems to be when most people put their apple watch on a charger. I put my watch on the charger during my shower, which is all it needs)
- 3y ago

echelon 3y ago

Vision Pro is not earth shaking or category defining. It's entering a crowded market that isn't even that big. As the premium option. Climbing that hill is going to be a very tall order. Apple's brand will not be a moat, either. Zuck's initial response to Vision Pro [1] was the correct one: > From what I’ve seen initially, I’d say the good news is that there’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws of physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of. They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade-off and it might make sense for the cases that they’re going for. > But look, I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important. We innovate to make sure that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests. [1] https://www.roadtovr.com/apple-vision-pro-zuckerberg-reaction/ https://www.roadtovr.com/apple-vision-pro-zuckerberg-reactio...

echelon 3y ago
In retrospect, that was a very negative post, and I wanted to add that I'd like to see {V,A,X,*}R succeed as a sector. In fact, I'd like to see all of the players do well, including Apple. I really want to see a transportive vision of the future pan out. I don't think this will be an easy market for anyone. It's low attachment, low critical app space. I want to believe, though.

ActorNightly 3y ago

I love how people just rewrite history on the internet lol. Iphone 1 was a collosal PoC. Slow, most of web didnt work. Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on, but looked cool (which is the reason people bought it mostly). Everyone that needed mobile compute functionality was still on Blackberry and some other devices. There was a time during early 2010s where the iphone was better than everything else due to native hardware and in house software and updated functionality. However by 2016 Android caught up, and since the first Pixel came out it pretty much has been ahead ever since.

wnevets 3y ago
> Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on, but looked cool and motion controls. Between the Nintendo Wii and the first iPhone people were obsessed with motion controls for some reason.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
I think if you talked to someone working on Meta Quest they would say this is going to blow the competitors away. If you talk to a reviewer for a tech magazine they’re going to complain about any detail they can find in the 1.0 launch of a new product line as if it’s a colossal failure (aka PoC).
- rgarrett88 3y ago
  I think the difference is everyone knew market penetration on cell phones would be close to 90%. This may be better than the Quest but is it going to take AR/VR mainstream? Seems iffy. In which case drawbacks may never get ironed out.
- ActorNightly 3y ago
  Quest and Vive weren't great, but they actually had working VR that set the stage for subsequent development. Iphone 1 set the stage for tech jewelry.
pests 3y ago
That's the history I remember tho. I remember the first time I saw an iPhone. It was 2am at a house party with a bunch of 19-25 year olds. Pretty much everyone stopped drinking or dancing and played with this dudes phone for three hours.

jsjohnst 3y ago

> This iPhone trope has gotta die It’s not a trope if it’s true. Most hard core nerds didn’t get it until they had tried it hands on (including myself, I panned the device hard until I tried it). Then it was the exorbitant price point ($650 at a time when nobody really paid for phones). Then it was the lack of hardware keyboard. No “real” apps. No copy and paste (even my older at the time Symbian S60 devices had that). The list goes on and on. I get it, if you were at another phone manufacturer, you might’ve been scared, but the reality is the iPhone didn’t really pick up steam in the market until 3G or 3GS.

bnralt 3y ago
People thought Apple making a phone was odd. No one thought mobile phones, or even smart phones were odd. Mobile phones were common when the iPhone came out, and even smart phones weren't uncommon. And once the iPhone did come out, there was immediate interest. AR though, that's something the public hasn't shown much interest in yet. These products are looking more like the Segway (which was once supposedly going to revolutionize transportation) - cool, popular in a few niche markets, but not the revolution that people imagine them to be.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Nobody thought Apple making a phone was odd. Even prior to the announcement of the original iPhone and prior to any rumors about actually making a phone, the internet was full of amateur 3D mockups of what an "iPhone" could be like, including looking like an iPod with a click-wheel. They had conquered the personal media player market, and now people wanted a phone with the design of an iPod to carry less stuff in their pockets.
  - jc_dc 3y ago
    Everyone forgets that the nerds had windows ce phones before Apple hit the market. It was the 3GS and 3rd party dev arcade games that converted me. Apples challenge now is how to convince people who hate them to go to work for them.

paulkrush 3y ago

Peak Blackberry was 2011. It's easy to forgot that that the iPhone takeover took years and many releases.

internet101010 3y ago
I kind of find that hard to believe but maybe there were government/enterprise purchases boosting it or something? As far as I'm concerned Blackberry died with the Blackberry Storm 2 in 2009, which was a huge piece of junk. I used to go back and forth to Shenzhen all the time trading refurbs and by 2010 I straight up would not buy anything other than Android devices because 1) iPhone was actually more expensive in mainland China due to it being a grey market item back then and 2) demand for everything else fell off a cliff.

kj99 3y ago

How can you assure us that Vision Pro is nowhere close to that? Do you have one? As someone who bought the original iPhone, it was extremely impressive, but had many many flaws. The browser was practically unusable over 2g and the whole pinch to zoom the New York Times desktop site was never actually practical. I think the parallels are clear. I also bought the original MacBook Air. Now that truly was terrible and stupidly overpriced. More expensive than the Vision Pro when adjusted for inflation, and with major functional problems. Today it’s the world’s most popular laptop.

jojobas 3y ago
Iphone was made from pretty much what was available to other manufacturers plus some secret software sauce, and was priced like a Blackberry of the time. There was immediately plenty of use cases that competitors kinda did, but not so well. These googles are as bespoke as it gets, are priced at 7x the competition and more than a flagship laptop, steer clear of the most popular existing use case, which is games, and offers... what exactly again? That's quite some difference.
- kj99 3y ago
  > Iphone was made from pretty much what was available to other manufacturers plus some secret software sauce, and was priced like a Blackberry of the time. Neither of these statements is remotely true.
  - jojobas 3y ago
    Samsung CPU, samsung oled display, Balda touchscreen analogous to what LG has used previously, Marvell wi-fi, Skyworks cellular, various Intel and Infineon aux chips. $499 vs Blackberry's 8320 at $449. Not even remotely.
    - cromka 3y ago
      Samsung OLED? iPhone X was first to feature OLED display. Surely you meant LCD?

teekert 3y ago

I do think iPhone is often made more mythical than it was. Sure it was good and we could finally use our sausage fingers to navigate it. But I recently heard someone say on Radio that iPhone was the first phone with a touch screen. Meanwhile me an the guys (yeah all guys) we’re rocking Sony Ericsson P800’s and the like in 2003,4,5. I had an HTC touch when iPhone came out and I was most envious that you could do two finger zooming in Google maps instead of tapping zoom buttons.

Agraillo 3y ago
Many things Apple related are very often about applying existing technologies to a novel place. Many forget that the touch screens at the time were resistive [1] that required pressing (small but nevertheless) at the screen and mostly usable with styluses. As long as I recall the novelty was to apply a capacitive touch screen [2] to navigation, it does not require physical force and that's where the fingers shined. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_touchscreen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_touchscreen [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#Capacitive_touchscreen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#Capacitive_touchsc...
- teekert 3y ago
  Sure. But one can argue that capacitive touchscreens were about to happen anyway (like ARM laptops..). And HTC with their touchflow were moving into sausage friendly UIs. But I agree, Apple is absolutely good at taking all this tech at the right time and making a compelling product. Steve insisted on glass/capacitive and that is just the best choice. Also, the UI didn’t feel like a layer (that you could easily get out off) as with touchflow. I’m also an iPhone user atm. Switched from Android about 3 years ago. The whole experience feels like higher quality to me still now. Although I have friends that would argue against that.

pjmlp 3y ago

I worked at Nokia and we certainly did not had that opinion, specially since we already had a couple of touch based Symbian devices. If we weren't busy with Symbian vs Linux internal feuds, and the Microsoft deal, things would have turned out much differently.