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The iPhone. It wasn't terrible to begin with (a fancy phone with a decent web browser), but it became a whole different product after the SDK was released.
by TillE 14y ago
The iPhone. It wasn't terrible to begin with (a fancy phone with a decent web browser), but it became a whole different product after the SDK was released.
- hollerith 14y agoNot the same: the iPhone was the first mobile phone with a good web browser. (A year or two after it went on sale, there was an article that made it to the front page of HN in which Google revealed that a full 99% of visits from smartphones to Google were coming from iPhones.) The iPhone was very compelling to large numbers of people as soon as it went on sale.
- czr80 14y agoYou're kidding, right? You're offering the iPhone as your example of a product where the public was underwhelmed at its launch?
- CamperBob2 14y agoPeople don't seem to remember that the iPhone really was a pretty crappy phone on launch day, in a lot of ways. It crashed constantly, didn't do a lot of things that other phones already did, and had audio-quality problems. In the parlance of the times, it wasn't a smartphone, it was an expensive feature phone. What turned the iPhone into a serious product, from my own point of view, was the regular stream of updates and bug fixes that Apple provided. I didn't like my iPhone very much at first, but it just kept getting better, through no effort or expense on my part. I wasn't accustomed to buying electronic devices that magically got better over time. They won at least one loyal customer with that approach, and influenced the way I do business today.
- w33ble 14y agoWhile that's all true, people still lined up a few days in advance to get one. Kind of difficult to make the point that the public was underwhelmed by it at release.