14 ms·

I wonder how many comments there were like this about the iPod and iPhone.

rchaud 2y ago
iPod and iPhone did not cost the equivalent of 2 months' rent. Apple also had the advantage of being an exciting upstart against boring incumbents, where it could enter the market late and still claim that they were the only ones "doing it right". None of these apply to Apple in 2024.
leptons 2y ago
iPod and iPhone didn't cost $3600 and were actually useful to the general public.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  And Apple will never introduce a cheaper version?
  - talldayo 2y ago
    Only if they fail to convince customers to buy the first, radically expensive version.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      Have you not been following Apple for the last…45+ years? But it took Apple over two years to sell the first 1 million iPods and the Apple Watch didn’t take off like gangbusters.
      - talldayo 2y ago
        Yeah, sure bud. This is going to be the one - yes every other headset has failed, but that's because Sony and HTC and Microsoft and Acer and HP and Samsung and Valve and Nreal and Meta weren't Apple, and just lack the taste and common-sense to make the technology work. This time, Apple will win with their second-mover advantage and definitely won't fall victim to the pattern of releasing and discontinuing niche products like Time Machine, Airport and Xserve. Vision Pro, this will be their flagship. Someday. > Have you not been following Apple for the last…45+ years? Not so blindly that I would lose sight of the greater market. There is a pretty clear line in the sand between "high-demand compute hardware" and "shit that is far too expensive that nobody wants". An iPad that you wear on your face falls into the latter category, in case you couldn't tell.
        JustExAWS 2y ago
        (For some reason. I am getting rate limited on my Scarface_74 account. I can’t find anything that I have been flagged over) Apple sold Airport devices from 1999-2018. I wouldn’t exactly call that a short lived device. Mac - John C. Dvorak, "The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse.' There is no evidence that people want to use these things" iPod - famously “less space than the Nomad. No wireless. Lame.” iPhone - “The PC guys won’t just come in and figure this thing out” - Palm CEO. iPad - this is the most apt comparison. There were plenty of tablet makers before the iPad was introduced
        talldayo 2y ago
        And in 10 years, people like me will cite your silly little quotes when the Vision Pro is less-remembered than the Hololens. It's one thing to follow Apple's product history, it's another thing to blind yourself with their popularity until you refuse to acknowledge their failures. People that habitually quote iPhone detractors are vanishingly rare in that first category.
        JustExAWS 2y ago
        Out of the major categories that Apple has had and I wouldn’t consider an XServe Mac a product category, the only failures have been the Newton, the Pippen, and the QuickTake camera. All of those were pre-2007.
        talldayo 2y ago
        Really makes you think, then. Apple is just so successful but can't find people to pay thousands of dollars for their superior, private VR experience. I thought it was supposed to be a game-changer product offering experiences their competitors could only dream of. Where are the killer apps? Where are the people using it on a regular basis? It obviously can't be Apple's fault since they don't release failed products anymore; it must be the users who are wrong.
  - leptons 2y ago
    Apple is a luxury brand, they don't really do "cheap".
- Ancapistani 2y ago
  It was $499 for the 4GB version and $599 for the 8GB version, in 2007. That was about twice the price of the nearest competitor, BlackBerry. The Vision Pro is about 6x the price of the Quest 3 - but it's targeted at a completely different vertical, that didn't even exist prior to the Vision Pro launch. I'm bullish on it, but I totally get why others might not be. Only time will tell.
  - pzo 2y ago
    It's not only about if something is 2x or 6x but also the final price. Many people can afford iPhone for $1k even though you can get 6x cheaper android model that in many cases would be good enough. Same with going to restaurant or buying a wine. But $3500 price tag is just hard to swallow - not many people have such a 'fun budget'
furyofantares 2y ago
Probably none, they were both massive hits immediately, nobody was calling them failed products months after release. edit: That said I'm reading now that the early reports that Apple downgraded their expectations for year 1 from 800k units to 400k units after launch were wrong, and instead they were always projecting 400k units.
- buck746 2y ago
  I had an original iPhone the day it was released. Lots of people viewed it as too expensive and "why would I need that". When iPad came out plenty of people had the notion that "no one really needs that, it's just a toy". This is a pattern with apple products going back to the original Macintosh.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - throw46365 2y ago
    When the iPad came out, people actually mostly said it was just a big iPhone. It is, in fact, pretty much still just a big iPhone. It turns out that's enough for a lot of people.
    - gattilorenz 2y ago
      True! I remember a quite funny meme where the iPad being held by Jobs during WWDC was photoshopped and replaced with 4 iPhones taped together: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ipad-spoofing https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ipad-spoofing I still chuckle at that one.
  - Ancapistani 2y ago
    > When iPad came out plenty of people had the notion that "no one really needs that, it's just a toy". Remember the iPad Mini? People were calling full-size the "Maxi iPad". That's the phase that we're in right now. The utility isn't quite there, but the promise is. These days I use my iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard as my primary web interface. That wasn't possible at first, but if you looked at the product with the future in mind, it was forseeable.
behnamoh 2y ago
Those were truly revolutionary and solved an actual problem. As opposed to AVP which was a tech-bro toy at best.
- etchalon 2y ago
  Slashdot's verdict on the iPod was famously: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
  - dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
    It's a pity the iPod wasn't more successful and Apple decided to kill it. I still use my iPod Classic although the battery lasts just a few days. The newer iPods looked just like the iPhone just without phone connectivity so that was probably the nail in their coffin but I kind of liked the separation of devices for different tasks.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      they have replacement batteries and drives for those! keep the dream alive!
    - etchalon 2y ago
      The iPod was incredibly successful, for its time. It was just made obsolete by the iPhone.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
scarface_74 2y ago
https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026 https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026 “No wireless. Less space than the Nomad. Lame” Palm CEO on the iPhone “ We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone, PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” People seem to forget that it took two years to sell the first 1 million iPods and Apple only sold 10 million iPhones the first year - 1% of the total market.
- machine_coffee 2y ago
  You just have to keep rubbing it in! Poor CmdTaco, after all these years, still can't get a break.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    I can go even further back John C. Dvorak in 1984… https://www.liquisearch.com/john_c_dvorak/technological_predictions https://www.liquisearch.com/john_c_dvorak/technological_pred... > "The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse.' There is no evidence that people want to use these things."
    - machine_coffee 2y ago
      Dvorak also got pretty irate at the 'idle' task on Windows consuming so much CPU, as reported by Task Manager. Ah, simpler days.
- throw46365 2y ago
  > Palm CEO on the iPhone This quote pre-dates the iPhone by a couple of months. So it doesn't remotely qualify as a "failed product" comment. It's just a bad prediction. (And it's not that bad: the iPhone launched with 2G and without an app market or text-editing beyond delete-and-retype, for example)
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    Also the more blatant fact that OF COURSE the CEO of Palm is going to be bearish on the damn iPhone, otherwise they would have made the damn iPhone at some point! How often does a direct competitor CEO outright say that they expect a new competitor product to not be underwhelming? 99% of the time a CEO says anything future looking that isn't regulated by the SEC, they are just leaning on suvivors bias to look good retroactively.
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
bowsamic 2y ago
Very different market
futureshock 2y ago
Truly, no one was saying this except for obviously wrong people. In 2007 the first iPhone was borderline magic. The core of the user experience has not changed because it never needed to change. They 100% nailed the UX on the first try. Everyone was agog. We knew it was the future. I’d compare it to ChatGPT, but honestly there’s way more skepticism of that than there ever was of iPhone.
- addicted 2y ago
  Yeah. The iPhone had people excited when it was demoed on stage. The only people shitting on it were sitting either in an office in Waterloo, Canada or an office in Espoo, Finland.
  - pzo 2y ago
    They maybe were shitting it in public like Balmer because what they can say to journalists? That we have a worse product? There is a story about Android and Andy Rubin said that after iPhone announcement they decided they have to redesign everything from scratch.
- mlsu 2y ago
  Plenty of people were skeptical of the iPhone when it came out. On launch, it was very very expensive, carrier locked, and relatively lacking in features compared to other phones. The app store was not in place. You had the Apple apps and mobile safari which was very limited in those days -- and that was it. The revolution that was the iPhone required two pieces, both of which needed each other and only one of which was present at launch: touchscreen UI, and the app store. Those two were not fully in place until after 2008. Even then, it took some time. I think of that ~2006-2011 period as the era of BlackBerry. Of course, the vision was clear by 2010 or so. iPhone 4S/iPhone 5 was really when the rocket ship went parabolic.
  - dmarcos 2y ago
    Regardless of what people said or are saying now, the main difference is that people that bought the initial iPhone loved it and used it all the time. Most Vision Pro owners stopped using it 2-3 weeks after purchase. The iphone built on existing product categories with product-market fit: PDAs, cellphones, MP3 players, smartphones. The path to improve the initial product was clear. There was a clear target. Vision Pro launches in an unproven market (VR/AR) with only a handful of games with significant adoption that AVP can't run as well as competitors due to lack of controllers (e.g Beat Saber experience would be worse due to higher latency of hand tracking). Path to improve the product is uncertain because the target market is not clear yet. I both bought iPhone and Vision Pro on day one. And my enthusiasm and engagement with each product are completely different.
fckgw 2y ago
The iPod didn't really catch on until the 3rd gen when they dropped Firewire and went with the dock connector, and it really exploded with the 4th gen clickwheel redesign and release of iTunes store.
ClassyJacket 2y ago
The iPod wasn't 3500usd
staticman2 2y ago
I remember an internet poster in 2015 claiming iWork was going to put Microsoft Office out of business.
999900000999 2y ago
Zuckerberg argued, with some justice that you get a better product with the Quest 3. The Quest 3 has a massive gaming library, and can do 90% of what the Vision Pro can do. And it's 1/7th of the cost. If Meta wants to really step it up they'll make PC monitor support a priority with the Quest 4. Imagine if the iPod came out, cost 7x as much as it's competitors and still was behind in several aspects. I actually Apple is getting us ready for the Vision Air, it'll come in at 1999 or so.
kredd 2y ago
If you released iPod/iPhone right now, it wouldn't be as successful. I really hope VR pans out, as I always imagined it would be fun. But from every headset I've tried so far, the novelty wears off. My current problems are - it doesn't make any of my existing experiences better, and nor it unlocks new ones. Until we get a real use case and much lighter hardware, it'll be an uphill battle both for Apple and Meta to win over the consumers. Especially with AVP's pricetag.

iPod and iPhone did not cost the equivalent of 2 months' rent. Apple also had the advantage of being an exciting upstart against boring incumbents, where it could enter the market late and still claim that they were the only ones "doing it right". None of these apply to Apple in 2024.

leptons 2y ago

iPod and iPhone didn't cost $3600 and were actually useful to the general public.

scarface_74 2y ago
And Apple will never introduce a cheaper version?
- talldayo 2y ago
  Only if they fail to convince customers to buy the first, radically expensive version.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    Have you not been following Apple for the last…45+ years? But it took Apple over two years to sell the first 1 million iPods and the Apple Watch didn’t take off like gangbusters.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      Yeah, sure bud. This is going to be the one - yes every other headset has failed, but that's because Sony and HTC and Microsoft and Acer and HP and Samsung and Valve and Nreal and Meta weren't Apple, and just lack the taste and common-sense to make the technology work. This time, Apple will win with their second-mover advantage and definitely won't fall victim to the pattern of releasing and discontinuing niche products like Time Machine, Airport and Xserve. Vision Pro, this will be their flagship. Someday. > Have you not been following Apple for the last…45+ years? Not so blindly that I would lose sight of the greater market. There is a pretty clear line in the sand between "high-demand compute hardware" and "shit that is far too expensive that nobody wants". An iPad that you wear on your face falls into the latter category, in case you couldn't tell.
      - JustExAWS 2y ago
        (For some reason. I am getting rate limited on my Scarface_74 account. I can’t find anything that I have been flagged over) Apple sold Airport devices from 1999-2018. I wouldn’t exactly call that a short lived device. Mac - John C. Dvorak, "The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse.' There is no evidence that people want to use these things" iPod - famously “less space than the Nomad. No wireless. Lame.” iPhone - “The PC guys won’t just come in and figure this thing out” - Palm CEO. iPad - this is the most apt comparison. There were plenty of tablet makers before the iPad was introduced
        talldayo 2y ago
        And in 10 years, people like me will cite your silly little quotes when the Vision Pro is less-remembered than the Hololens. It's one thing to follow Apple's product history, it's another thing to blind yourself with their popularity until you refuse to acknowledge their failures. People that habitually quote iPhone detractors are vanishingly rare in that first category.
        JustExAWS 2y ago
        Out of the major categories that Apple has had and I wouldn’t consider an XServe Mac a product category, the only failures have been the Newton, the Pippen, and the QuickTake camera. All of those were pre-2007.
        talldayo 2y ago
        Really makes you think, then. Apple is just so successful but can't find people to pay thousands of dollars for their superior, private VR experience. I thought it was supposed to be a game-changer product offering experiences their competitors could only dream of. Where are the killer apps? Where are the people using it on a regular basis? It obviously can't be Apple's fault since they don't release failed products anymore; it must be the users who are wrong.
- leptons 2y ago
  Apple is a luxury brand, they don't really do "cheap".
Ancapistani 2y ago
It was $499 for the 4GB version and $599 for the 8GB version, in 2007. That was about twice the price of the nearest competitor, BlackBerry. The Vision Pro is about 6x the price of the Quest 3 - but it's targeted at a completely different vertical, that didn't even exist prior to the Vision Pro launch. I'm bullish on it, but I totally get why others might not be. Only time will tell.
- pzo 2y ago
  It's not only about if something is 2x or 6x but also the final price. Many people can afford iPhone for $1k even though you can get 6x cheaper android model that in many cases would be good enough. Same with going to restaurant or buying a wine. But $3500 price tag is just hard to swallow - not many people have such a 'fun budget'

furyofantares 2y ago

Probably none, they were both massive hits immediately, nobody was calling them failed products months after release. edit: That said I'm reading now that the early reports that Apple downgraded their expectations for year 1 from 800k units to 400k units after launch were wrong, and instead they were always projecting 400k units.

buck746 2y ago
I had an original iPhone the day it was released. Lots of people viewed it as too expensive and "why would I need that". When iPad came out plenty of people had the notion that "no one really needs that, it's just a toy". This is a pattern with apple products going back to the original Macintosh.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- throw46365 2y ago
  When the iPad came out, people actually mostly said it was just a big iPhone. It is, in fact, pretty much still just a big iPhone. It turns out that's enough for a lot of people.
  - gattilorenz 2y ago
    True! I remember a quite funny meme where the iPad being held by Jobs during WWDC was photoshopped and replaced with 4 iPhones taped together: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ipad-spoofing https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ipad-spoofing I still chuckle at that one.
- Ancapistani 2y ago
  > When iPad came out plenty of people had the notion that "no one really needs that, it's just a toy". Remember the iPad Mini? People were calling full-size the "Maxi iPad". That's the phase that we're in right now. The utility isn't quite there, but the promise is. These days I use my iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard as my primary web interface. That wasn't possible at first, but if you looked at the product with the future in mind, it was forseeable.

behnamoh 2y ago

Those were truly revolutionary and solved an actual problem. As opposed to AVP which was a tech-bro toy at best.

etchalon 2y ago
Slashdot's verdict on the iPod was famously: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
- dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
  It's a pity the iPod wasn't more successful and Apple decided to kill it. I still use my iPod Classic although the battery lasts just a few days. The newer iPods looked just like the iPhone just without phone connectivity so that was probably the nail in their coffin but I kind of liked the separation of devices for different tasks.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    they have replacement batteries and drives for those! keep the dream alive!
  - etchalon 2y ago
    The iPod was incredibly successful, for its time. It was just made obsolete by the iPhone.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

scarface_74 2y ago

https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026 https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026 “No wireless. Less space than the Nomad. Lame” Palm CEO on the iPhone “ We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone, PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” People seem to forget that it took two years to sell the first 1 million iPods and Apple only sold 10 million iPhones the first year - 1% of the total market.

machine_coffee 2y ago
You just have to keep rubbing it in! Poor CmdTaco, after all these years, still can't get a break.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  I can go even further back John C. Dvorak in 1984… https://www.liquisearch.com/john_c_dvorak/technological_predictions https://www.liquisearch.com/john_c_dvorak/technological_pred... > "The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse.' There is no evidence that people want to use these things."
  - machine_coffee 2y ago
    Dvorak also got pretty irate at the 'idle' task on Windows consuming so much CPU, as reported by Task Manager. Ah, simpler days.
throw46365 2y ago
> Palm CEO on the iPhone This quote pre-dates the iPhone by a couple of months. So it doesn't remotely qualify as a "failed product" comment. It's just a bad prediction. (And it's not that bad: the iPhone launched with 2G and without an app market or text-editing beyond delete-and-retype, for example)
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  Also the more blatant fact that OF COURSE the CEO of Palm is going to be bearish on the damn iPhone, otherwise they would have made the damn iPhone at some point! How often does a direct competitor CEO outright say that they expect a new competitor product to not be underwhelming? 99% of the time a CEO says anything future looking that isn't regulated by the SEC, they are just leaning on suvivors bias to look good retroactively.

oldpersonintx 2y ago

[dead]

bowsamic 2y ago

Very different market

futureshock 2y ago

Truly, no one was saying this except for obviously wrong people. In 2007 the first iPhone was borderline magic. The core of the user experience has not changed because it never needed to change. They 100% nailed the UX on the first try. Everyone was agog. We knew it was the future. I’d compare it to ChatGPT, but honestly there’s way more skepticism of that than there ever was of iPhone.

addicted 2y ago
Yeah. The iPhone had people excited when it was demoed on stage. The only people shitting on it were sitting either in an office in Waterloo, Canada or an office in Espoo, Finland.
- pzo 2y ago
  They maybe were shitting it in public like Balmer because what they can say to journalists? That we have a worse product? There is a story about Android and Andy Rubin said that after iPhone announcement they decided they have to redesign everything from scratch.
mlsu 2y ago
Plenty of people were skeptical of the iPhone when it came out. On launch, it was very very expensive, carrier locked, and relatively lacking in features compared to other phones. The app store was not in place. You had the Apple apps and mobile safari which was very limited in those days -- and that was it. The revolution that was the iPhone required two pieces, both of which needed each other and only one of which was present at launch: touchscreen UI, and the app store. Those two were not fully in place until after 2008. Even then, it took some time. I think of that ~2006-2011 period as the era of BlackBerry. Of course, the vision was clear by 2010 or so. iPhone 4S/iPhone 5 was really when the rocket ship went parabolic.
- dmarcos 2y ago
  Regardless of what people said or are saying now, the main difference is that people that bought the initial iPhone loved it and used it all the time. Most Vision Pro owners stopped using it 2-3 weeks after purchase. The iphone built on existing product categories with product-market fit: PDAs, cellphones, MP3 players, smartphones. The path to improve the initial product was clear. There was a clear target. Vision Pro launches in an unproven market (VR/AR) with only a handful of games with significant adoption that AVP can't run as well as competitors due to lack of controllers (e.g Beat Saber experience would be worse due to higher latency of hand tracking). Path to improve the product is uncertain because the target market is not clear yet. I both bought iPhone and Vision Pro on day one. And my enthusiasm and engagement with each product are completely different.

fckgw 2y ago

The iPod didn't really catch on until the 3rd gen when they dropped Firewire and went with the dock connector, and it really exploded with the 4th gen clickwheel redesign and release of iTunes store.

ClassyJacket 2y ago

The iPod wasn't 3500usd

staticman2 2y ago

I remember an internet poster in 2015 claiming iWork was going to put Microsoft Office out of business.

999900000999 2y ago

Zuckerberg argued, with some justice that you get a better product with the Quest 3. The Quest 3 has a massive gaming library, and can do 90% of what the Vision Pro can do. And it's 1/7th of the cost. If Meta wants to really step it up they'll make PC monitor support a priority with the Quest 4. Imagine if the iPod came out, cost 7x as much as it's competitors and still was behind in several aspects. I actually Apple is getting us ready for the Vision Air, it'll come in at 1999 or so.

kredd 2y ago

If you released iPod/iPhone right now, it wouldn't be as successful. I really hope VR pans out, as I always imagined it would be fun. But from every headset I've tried so far, the novelty wears off. My current problems are - it doesn't make any of my existing experiences better, and nor it unlocks new ones. Until we get a real use case and much lighter hardware, it'll be an uphill battle both for Apple and Meta to win over the consumers. Especially with AVP's pricetag.