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>I dunno if you were alive at the time but that's not really what happened. I was pretty alive at the time, I was an intern on the iPhone team at Apple when it
by ericd 2y ago
>I dunno if you were alive at the time but that's not really what happened.
I was pretty alive at the time, I was an intern on the iPhone team at Apple when it launched and the run-up, so I was using the first gen phone/touch all day every day, and I was paying pretty close attention to its launch (but just watching what was said in the press/by the people I knew, nothing privileged on the sales side). Looking around at sales figures, it looks like the first gen sold low single digit million units total, 1.4M in 2007. The 3G sold 1M on the first weekend (the press release tagline was "Twice as Fast at Half the Price", and that lower price is a big part of what brought it mainstream). Now they’re up to a couple hundred million phones per year.
I wouldn't say it was a "miss", it was very good compared to the status quo trash on the market, but it also wasn't the company defining success it turned into until the following gens, it made much less revenue than Macs at the time, and the Mac was pretty niche. My point was that it took a bit to really dial it in, and Apples first gen products don’t usually reflect their eventual success very well.
I don’t think Vision Pro is at 1M sold yet, and Apple products definitely have more sales reach now, but again, I wouldn’t count it out. I was pretty impressed when I tried it, they really nailed a lot of the hard technical problems, especially around text rendering, and if it was 1/3 the cost, I’d definitely have one now, maybe at 1/2. Which means that unless they really dilute the capabilities or drop the cost less than I expect, I’ll probably have one within the next couple of iterations (I'm also assuming they'll sub out the metal for cheaper/lighter materials to improve long-term comfort). But yeah, maybe it’ll end up being a modern day Newton, we’ll see.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoI don't think so. You are confusing the absolute and the relative. The iPhone when it launched had die hard fans. The sheer excitement was palpable. The Vision Pro has nothing like it.