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"Obviously the iPhone was revolutionary." The iPhone's marketing was very good. I'm not sure there was anything revolutionary about it. Edit: Rather than answ

"Obviously the iPhone was revolutionary." The iPhone's marketing was very good. I'm not sure there was anything revolutionary about it. Edit: Rather than answer individuals below, I'll state my terms here. Revolutionary indicates a complete change - the overturning of all that was before. We already had phones, we already had pocket computers, we already had phones that were pocket computers, we already had phones that were pocket computers that you could get extra programs for, we already had increasing use of them as time went on. We already had.

mkr-hn 14y ago
Apple set some standards with the iPhone, but Android brought smartphones to the masses. I would go as far as evolutionary for the iPhone, but it was still a niche product. Some of the cars that existed before Ford were pretty slick, but few people owned one. Credit for revolutionizing a market should go to whatever brings it to that market in large enough numbers to matter. This is why we usually credit Ford for revolutionizing transportation, even though many interesting automobiles preceded his. It's hard to see from the SV bubble, but most people were introduced to smartphones with Blackberry and Android. It wasn't long ago that the iPhone was seen as an interesting toy used by celebrities and a few friends by people outside of tech circles.
- Retric 14y ago
  Umm, they have sold over 200 million iPhones, how is that a nitch product?
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    How many had been sold when Google started promoting Android? I doubt it was more than a few million. Other companies outsell Ford a century later, but they still revolutionized the industry. We're talking about history here, not the current market. Apple revolutionized smartphone design, but they didn't revolutionize the industry. Google did that by creating a good smartphone operating system that anyone could use freely.
    - Retric 14y ago
      Android outsold iPhone for the first time in 2010 at which time the iPhone had been out for 3 years. In 2012 they sold 50% more phones in 2012 which while significant is hardly the type of dominate market position your talking about. If you look at the iPhone growth in the US it's mostly a question of increasing the number of carriers vs increasing the market share at any one carrier, so no Google had little impact on promoting iPhone sales.
      - mkr-hn 14y ago
        I'm talking about impact, not sales. I started off using sales as a measure of impact, so I can see where the misunderstanding came from. That's a possible measure of impact, but probably not useful here. Android made it easy to make a good smartphone by removing the biggest hurdle. What matters in the history books is who had a lasting impact. Will the future look like Android where the basic software is free to duplicate and modify? Or will it look like Apple's tightly controlled system? History doesn't seem to favor Apple's way of doing things. Apple's way can never create as diverse a market as Google's has.
        pbreit 14y ago
        You're in a big hole already. Stop digging.
        mkr-hn 14y ago
        What?
        patrickk 14y ago
        I guess what he meant in essence was - would Android exist at all if iOS hadn't shown the world how great smartphone OSs could be? Just like Apple showed the world how good PC OSs could be back in the 80s. Very important not to underestimate the polish and usability that iOS brought to the table. I remember looking into developing an app for symbian and realising how tricky it would be (tools, guides, lack of examples, crappy devices, etc).
JackC 14y ago
Ubiquitous pocket computers are revolutionary. If you compare usability and adoption before and after the iPhone, I think Apple deserves a fair bit of credit for that. Of course not nearly all of it, but they are certainly a hero of this revolution. (I was going to go into a whole rant about why ubiquitous pocket computers are revolutionary, but maybe I'll let someone else tag in on that one if it's in question ...)
ziadbc 14y ago
Pre iPhone: Carriers control software ecosystem of mobile phones. Post iPhone: Apple/Google control software ecosystem of mobile phones. Revolution: A forcible overthrow of a government or social order for a new system.
- EliRivers 14y ago
  "Revolution: A forcible overthrow of a government or social order for a new system." By your own definition; _same_ system, just different controller, so no revolution.
  - glogla 14y ago
    I would cynically add that that's how most of the revolutions work in practice. In this case, I would suggest that while the system may seem similar, the end user experience differs greatly, for better or worse,
    - flinty 14y ago
      yes and in addition our new overlords are more affable generally than the old ones, atleast till the status quo changes again.
TeMPOraL 14y ago
First really widely accepted smartphone? It seems that a true revolution happens not when someone invents a new thing, but when someone figures out how to make it useful to masses. Printing press is much older than Gutenberg. Steam engine is much older than Watt.
- incongruity 14y ago
  For whatever it's worth, the framework I use to discuss innovation/what succeeds is the balanced breakthrough model, afaik, credited to Larry Keeley at the Doblin Group. Basically, the gist is that to be successful, idea/offering/product/service needs to not only be 1) technologically advanced, yet feasible, but also 2)desirable from a user perspective and 3)viable from a business perspective. Only when you put strongly advanced yet feasible, desirable and financially viable innovations out there do you get really successful and revolutionary advances. Lots of cool tech fails to make an impact because it doesn't solve a need or can't be clearly fit into a business case – and you can repeat that story for any of the three key parts of this model. It seems obvious, right? Except you can point to an endless string of failures, big and small, that clearly didn't account for at least one of those three parts.
macspoofing 14y ago
Are you serious? It was absolutely a revolutionary product, in a number of different ways. It redefined the way one interacts with mobile interfaces (swipes, flicks, pinches and other 'touch' gestured premiered in a commercial product with the iPhone) - stylus based control was completely replaced. Apple also wrest control of the end-user experience from the carriers, preventing them from forcing their crap-ware onto their customers. It created a (much more) open ecosystem for mobile apps, that wasn't strictly controlled by the carriers. In US, Apple pushed for and got AT&T to agree to an 'unlimited' data plan. The original iPhone browser was like no other mobile browser at the time. It was actually usable. With the iPhone, the smart phone went from a niche business product to mass market adoption almost completely replacing traditional cellphones, and destroyed pretty much all existing competition (Nokia Symbian, Blackberry, Palm, PocketPC). It wasn't just marketing. It really was a transformative product.
- wpietri 14y ago
  I think the iPhone was a nice set of improvements on the existing smartphones of the day, but I just don't see it as revolutionary in the sense that Blank means. Apple definitely forced the pace of evolution in that market substantially, but they didn't create an entirely new market. That's not a knock on Apple, by any means. I think they're brilliant at taking an existing consumer product and dominating it by making something that's radically better designed and made. They are very willing to let other people pioneer a category and prove the market before coming in to crush their competitors, drive their executives before them, and hear the lamentation of their women. One could argue that given their particular skills, that's a much better use of their time and money than pioneering anything major.
  - greghinch 14y ago
    I'm sorry, do you remember the state of touch screen consumer devices pre-iPhone? It was a much different world. If your jaw didn't drop a little the first time you saw the pinch/pull zoom on a map during the keynote, I don't know what it would take to actually amaze you.
    - 14y ago
duck 14y ago
I'm not going to argue if the iPhone was revolutionary or not like the others commenting here... but if it was, then you would have to say Windows 3.1 was as well.
- deleted 14y ago
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deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
joedev 14y ago
If you don't remember what mobile phones were like before the iPhone, you must have either a short memory or a revisionist memory.
Retric 14y ago
iOS killed the pseudo-pen for touch screens. PS: Remember when people paid for ring tones?
- nextstep 14y ago
  People still pay for ringtones, on iOS even. If you have an iPhone: Settings -> Sounds -> Ringtone -> Buy More Tones.
  - Retric 14y ago
    People still pay for text messaging even though they don't need to. If you care, the iPhone includes built in support for custom ring tones and there are apps that make it even simpler. http://www.demogeek.com/2009/07/31/how-to-add-custom-ringtones-to-your-iphone/ http://www.demogeek.com/2009/07/31/how-to-add-custom-rington...
- fpgeek 14y ago
  I didn't pay for custom ringtones on my Treo 650 (and I suspect mine wasn't the first Treo that supported custom ringtones).
bitops 14y ago
> We already had. This is one of those truisms that technologists love to repeat over and over again. "It already exists, so it is not revolutionary." I think it just a curse of the people working on the tech. To technologists, the tech isn't that amazing or revolutionary. "We already had that 5 years ago!". What they miss, and will probably continue to miss as long as there is technology, is that what is amazing is making it available to everyone in an accessible format. It's the go-to example, but that was the genius of Apple. Sure, all the tech was already there, but what was revolutionary was starting the path to putting a computer in every home. A machine or piece of technology by itself isn't any more amazing than anything else. Having it available and easy to use for all of humanity is very revolutionary.
- fpgeek 14y ago
  > A machine or piece of technology by itself isn't any more amazing than anything else. Having it available and easy to use for all of humanity is very revolutionary. Absolutely. But I feel compelled to point out that the wealthier slice of the developed world isn't "all of humanity" by a long shot. Right now the revolution that is encompassing all of humanity is the mobile phone itself. The smartphone's going to get there, but it still has a long way to go.
- pm90 14y ago
  Having it available and easy to use for all of humanity is very revolutionary. That's stretching it a bit, don't you think? Apple devices are neither ubiquitously available (i.e outside US), nor are they within the price reach of "all of humanity" edit: oops, I did not read fpgeek's response before posting
pbreit 14y ago
Carrying the internet around in your pocket is, indeed, revolutionary.
franze 14y ago
everything in tech is an iteration of something that has come before. still new technologies can be revolutionary.. before the internet we already has arpanet, tcp/ip, newsgroups, telnet. there is nothing revolutionary about the internet? or is there?
philwelch 14y ago
We already had, but it was shit and almost nobody used it. Thanks to Apple it's not shit, and everyone uses it. This is actually almost as important as inventing the thing.

mkr-hn 14y ago

Apple set some standards with the iPhone, but Android brought smartphones to the masses. I would go as far as evolutionary for the iPhone, but it was still a niche product. Some of the cars that existed before Ford were pretty slick, but few people owned one. Credit for revolutionizing a market should go to whatever brings it to that market in large enough numbers to matter. This is why we usually credit Ford for revolutionizing transportation, even though many interesting automobiles preceded his. It's hard to see from the SV bubble, but most people were introduced to smartphones with Blackberry and Android. It wasn't long ago that the iPhone was seen as an interesting toy used by celebrities and a few friends by people outside of tech circles.

Retric 14y ago
Umm, they have sold over 200 million iPhones, how is that a nitch product?
- mkr-hn 14y ago
  How many had been sold when Google started promoting Android? I doubt it was more than a few million. Other companies outsell Ford a century later, but they still revolutionized the industry. We're talking about history here, not the current market. Apple revolutionized smartphone design, but they didn't revolutionize the industry. Google did that by creating a good smartphone operating system that anyone could use freely.
  - Retric 14y ago
    Android outsold iPhone for the first time in 2010 at which time the iPhone had been out for 3 years. In 2012 they sold 50% more phones in 2012 which while significant is hardly the type of dominate market position your talking about. If you look at the iPhone growth in the US it's mostly a question of increasing the number of carriers vs increasing the market share at any one carrier, so no Google had little impact on promoting iPhone sales.
    - mkr-hn 14y ago
      I'm talking about impact, not sales. I started off using sales as a measure of impact, so I can see where the misunderstanding came from. That's a possible measure of impact, but probably not useful here. Android made it easy to make a good smartphone by removing the biggest hurdle. What matters in the history books is who had a lasting impact. Will the future look like Android where the basic software is free to duplicate and modify? Or will it look like Apple's tightly controlled system? History doesn't seem to favor Apple's way of doing things. Apple's way can never create as diverse a market as Google's has.
      - pbreit 14y ago
        You're in a big hole already. Stop digging.
        mkr-hn 14y ago
        What?
        patrickk 14y ago
        I guess what he meant in essence was - would Android exist at all if iOS hadn't shown the world how great smartphone OSs could be? Just like Apple showed the world how good PC OSs could be back in the 80s. Very important not to underestimate the polish and usability that iOS brought to the table. I remember looking into developing an app for symbian and realising how tricky it would be (tools, guides, lack of examples, crappy devices, etc).

JackC 14y ago

Ubiquitous pocket computers are revolutionary. If you compare usability and adoption before and after the iPhone, I think Apple deserves a fair bit of credit for that. Of course not nearly all of it, but they are certainly a hero of this revolution. (I was going to go into a whole rant about why ubiquitous pocket computers are revolutionary, but maybe I'll let someone else tag in on that one if it's in question ...)

ziadbc 14y ago

Pre iPhone: Carriers control software ecosystem of mobile phones. Post iPhone: Apple/Google control software ecosystem of mobile phones. Revolution: A forcible overthrow of a government or social order for a new system.

EliRivers 14y ago
"Revolution: A forcible overthrow of a government or social order for a new system." By your own definition; _same_ system, just different controller, so no revolution.
- glogla 14y ago
  I would cynically add that that's how most of the revolutions work in practice. In this case, I would suggest that while the system may seem similar, the end user experience differs greatly, for better or worse,
  - flinty 14y ago
    yes and in addition our new overlords are more affable generally than the old ones, atleast till the status quo changes again.

TeMPOraL 14y ago

First really widely accepted smartphone? It seems that a true revolution happens not when someone invents a new thing, but when someone figures out how to make it useful to masses. Printing press is much older than Gutenberg. Steam engine is much older than Watt.

incongruity 14y ago
For whatever it's worth, the framework I use to discuss innovation/what succeeds is the balanced breakthrough model, afaik, credited to Larry Keeley at the Doblin Group. Basically, the gist is that to be successful, idea/offering/product/service needs to not only be 1) technologically advanced, yet feasible, but also 2)desirable from a user perspective and 3)viable from a business perspective. Only when you put strongly advanced yet feasible, desirable and financially viable innovations out there do you get really successful and revolutionary advances. Lots of cool tech fails to make an impact because it doesn't solve a need or can't be clearly fit into a business case – and you can repeat that story for any of the three key parts of this model. It seems obvious, right? Except you can point to an endless string of failures, big and small, that clearly didn't account for at least one of those three parts.

macspoofing 14y ago

Are you serious? It was absolutely a revolutionary product, in a number of different ways. It redefined the way one interacts with mobile interfaces (swipes, flicks, pinches and other 'touch' gestured premiered in a commercial product with the iPhone) - stylus based control was completely replaced. Apple also wrest control of the end-user experience from the carriers, preventing them from forcing their crap-ware onto their customers. It created a (much more) open ecosystem for mobile apps, that wasn't strictly controlled by the carriers. In US, Apple pushed for and got AT&T to agree to an 'unlimited' data plan. The original iPhone browser was like no other mobile browser at the time. It was actually usable. With the iPhone, the smart phone went from a niche business product to mass market adoption almost completely replacing traditional cellphones, and destroyed pretty much all existing competition (Nokia Symbian, Blackberry, Palm, PocketPC). It wasn't just marketing. It really was a transformative product.

wpietri 14y ago
I think the iPhone was a nice set of improvements on the existing smartphones of the day, but I just don't see it as revolutionary in the sense that Blank means. Apple definitely forced the pace of evolution in that market substantially, but they didn't create an entirely new market. That's not a knock on Apple, by any means. I think they're brilliant at taking an existing consumer product and dominating it by making something that's radically better designed and made. They are very willing to let other people pioneer a category and prove the market before coming in to crush their competitors, drive their executives before them, and hear the lamentation of their women. One could argue that given their particular skills, that's a much better use of their time and money than pioneering anything major.
- greghinch 14y ago
  I'm sorry, do you remember the state of touch screen consumer devices pre-iPhone? It was a much different world. If your jaw didn't drop a little the first time you saw the pinch/pull zoom on a map during the keynote, I don't know what it would take to actually amaze you.
  - 14y ago

duck 14y ago

I'm not going to argue if the iPhone was revolutionary or not like the others commenting here... but if it was, then you would have to say Windows 3.1 was as well.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

joedev 14y ago

If you don't remember what mobile phones were like before the iPhone, you must have either a short memory or a revisionist memory.

Retric 14y ago

iOS killed the pseudo-pen for touch screens. PS: Remember when people paid for ring tones?

nextstep 14y ago
People still pay for ringtones, on iOS even. If you have an iPhone: Settings -> Sounds -> Ringtone -> Buy More Tones.
- Retric 14y ago
  People still pay for text messaging even though they don't need to. If you care, the iPhone includes built in support for custom ring tones and there are apps that make it even simpler. http://www.demogeek.com/2009/07/31/how-to-add-custom-ringtones-to-your-iphone/ http://www.demogeek.com/2009/07/31/how-to-add-custom-rington...
fpgeek 14y ago
I didn't pay for custom ringtones on my Treo 650 (and I suspect mine wasn't the first Treo that supported custom ringtones).

bitops 14y ago

> We already had. This is one of those truisms that technologists love to repeat over and over again. "It already exists, so it is not revolutionary." I think it just a curse of the people working on the tech. To technologists, the tech isn't that amazing or revolutionary. "We already had that 5 years ago!". What they miss, and will probably continue to miss as long as there is technology, is that what is amazing is making it available to everyone in an accessible format. It's the go-to example, but that was the genius of Apple. Sure, all the tech was already there, but what was revolutionary was starting the path to putting a computer in every home. A machine or piece of technology by itself isn't any more amazing than anything else. Having it available and easy to use for all of humanity is very revolutionary.

fpgeek 14y ago
> A machine or piece of technology by itself isn't any more amazing than anything else. Having it available and easy to use for all of humanity is very revolutionary. Absolutely. But I feel compelled to point out that the wealthier slice of the developed world isn't "all of humanity" by a long shot. Right now the revolution that is encompassing all of humanity is the mobile phone itself. The smartphone's going to get there, but it still has a long way to go.
pm90 14y ago
Having it available and easy to use for all of humanity is very revolutionary. That's stretching it a bit, don't you think? Apple devices are neither ubiquitously available (i.e outside US), nor are they within the price reach of "all of humanity" edit: oops, I did not read fpgeek's response before posting

pbreit 14y ago

Carrying the internet around in your pocket is, indeed, revolutionary.

franze 14y ago

everything in tech is an iteration of something that has come before. still new technologies can be revolutionary.. before the internet we already has arpanet, tcp/ip, newsgroups, telnet. there is nothing revolutionary about the internet? or is there?

philwelch 14y ago

We already had, but it was shit and almost nobody used it. Thanks to Apple it's not shit, and everyone uses it. This is actually almost as important as inventing the thing.