Apple is a traditional business

It wasn't the first smartphone. It wasn't the first phone to use a capacitive touch screen. The first iPhone didn't even have the app store - it launched with the 3G a year after the the first iPhone was released, if I remember correctly. At that time, Android and Blackberry both had app stores in the works. They might have released before the iOS App Store - I don't remember.

Anyways, Apple did create a great product that deserves all of the popularity it has but they absolutely did not push us 10 years into the future of computing.

What about Apple gave you the impression they were sinister and what has changed?

I've actually been going the opposite direction with my opinion of them. All of their talk of "you are not the product" and "we respect your privacy" is great but feels opportunistic given the current climate. The foundation of Apple's products that they are touting as privacy focused were actually about controlling the experience. They've cleverly spun happenstance into a platform to promote their products.

None of that really strikes me as sinister though, when I say that they've been going in the opposite direction I'm referring more to the way they support their hardware and their shady tactics when it comes to device repair. For Apple the profit is in selling you a new device, they make no money if you don't upgrade. A repaired device isn't a profit, it's the burden of continued support. So what we're seeing is products that look great but aren't designed with longevity in mind and replacement focused support.

Apple shipped the iPhone 6 with a battery that degraded quickly and by most would be considered faulty. Rather than issue a recall or some other pro-consumer solution, they hid the fact that batteries weren't functioning to specification by throttling the CPU/GPU and degrading performance. This also had the nice benefit of coaxing users to upgrade because their device was slow.

When Apple got called on this, their response was to claim it was a benefit to the user rather than admit the batteries were faulty. They then graciously offered to lower the price on a battery replacement. So instead of a costly recall, they're profiting or breaking even on you having to pay for a replacement. If that wasn't enough, many people are reporting that Apple is refusing to replace batteries on devices without first fixing other faults like cracked screens or "broken" microphones [0].

Apple is also using it's new found position as bastion of your privacy to justify other shady practices like disabling components or bricking hardware entirely if it isn't "genuine" and then claiming it's to protect the consumer's privacy.

Their growth as plateaued and I feel like this is only the beginning of the Comcastic abuses of the customer we typically see from the market leader trying to find new ways to grow. That's why I think they've been becoming more sinister anyways.

[0] https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3031484/apple-dema...

We used smartphones in the labs at Motorola when I started working there in 2001. They ran Linux and had all the capabilities you would consider essential to a smartphone, not just the form factor. They were targeted for public sale in 2002 or 2003, if I remember correctly, but got shelved because the dotcom crash caused the networks to delay upgrading their infrastructure (yes, high-speed data networks had been in the works since the 1990s). A smartphone for sale in 2003 would have been absolutely useless. You'll remember that the phone networks could barely handle (or couldn't depending on your viewpoint) the iPhone for the first few years.

I didn't work in the cell phone division so I can't say for sure, but I think that most of the manufacturers let their smartphone development stagnate or stall from the early 2000s until 2006 or 2007, while Apple kept plugging away at it. When they proved that people would buy a smartphone even when their mobile network couldn't handle the traffic, all the manufacturers put effort back into development but by then they were far behind Apple.

Of course, while Walmart has 30 cash registers, there's only ever 4 staffed at any given time, so you could argue that if they just had more staff they could get people in and out at the same speed.