31–40 of 71 posts
They hadn’t even fired it up. The review was, as far as we could tell, entirely fabricated. We brought this to the editorial team’s attention. They responded by adding a few points to our scores.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple might have genuinely murdered the entire market if they hadn’t insisted on their ridiculous exclusivity plan with AT&T. Whichever Apple exec greenlit that must surely have been an industrial saboteur because it saved 5+ other companies from ruin.
Was Apple insisting on exclusivity with Cingular/AT&T, or was that just the only carrier that would cede control over the phone's software to Apple?
All these “iPhone is doomed” folks had good arguments, the original iPhone was a flawed device. On paper, the incumbent mega corporations should have been able to come up with an iPhone killer quickly, considering the resources available to them. What they missed was the inertia and the lack of agility in these big companies. They kept insisting on their current plans until it was too late. Only Google was capable of…
Apple might have genuinely murdered the entire market if they hadn’t insisted on their ridiculous exclusivity plan with AT&T. Whichever Apple exec greenlit that must surely have been an industrial saboteur because it saved 5+ other companies from ruin.
Apple simply didn’t have an option to do it by itself. Back then Apple wasn’t that powerful, they had a firm grip on music player and music store market but nothing else.
So the story goes, Steve Jobs meets with the CEO of AT&T(called something else back then) in a hotel room and show him the device. Apparently the guy was sold the moment he scrolled the setting and see the rubber effect and accepted to let Apple do the phone in Apple way in exchange of exclusivity.
Even to this day this makes no sense. How could a camera, which could be obscured by a case or finger, possibly determine the user's motion? How would this work in the dark? To say nothing of the battery this would consume.
All these “iPhone is doomed” folks had good arguments, the original iPhone was a flawed device. On paper, the incumbent mega corporations should have been able to come up with an iPhone killer quickly, considering the resources available to them. What they missed was the inertia and the lack of agility in these big companies. They kept insisting on their current plans until it was too late. Only Google was capable of…
Danger, Inc made Android, not Google. Google bought them. Android didn’t exist (publicly) until after the iPhone was released. It took until Android 2 (2010?) for it to feel anything like the iPhone (the HTC Dream had a physical keyboard and a trackball).
They didn’t really throw anything out. They added stuff like auto-rotation due to gyro and touch-first APIs with swipe gesture callbacks and what-not. Brian Swetland (from Danger) is a genius and wrote a mobile OS initially for the T-Mobile Sidekick form factor that could have all the touch-first stuff added on without breaking everything. Google’s most genius move of the era was buying the company employing Brian.
By 2008, Apple had built some really nice computers that had brought them back from the edge of death, and the iPod was obviously a big hit, but neither of those would necessarily lead one to believe that they could make such a big splash in the cell phone industry. Most people who believed that the iPhone would be huge at the time were Apple true-believers.
All these “iPhone is doomed” folks had good arguments, the original iPhone was a flawed device. On paper, the incumbent mega corporations should have been able to come up with an iPhone killer quickly, considering the resources available to them. What they missed was the inertia and the lack of agility in these big companies. They kept insisting on their current plans until it was too late. Only Google was capable of…
Apple might have genuinely murdered the entire market if they hadn’t insisted on their ridiculous exclusivity plan with AT&T. Whichever Apple exec greenlit that must surely have been an industrial saboteur because it saved 5+ other companies from ruin.
1. It put the marketing might of one of the largest corporations behind its brand-new, niche product. The deal created an incentive for this corporation to market the product on Apple's behalf.
2. It created a forced scarcity. Only /some/ people (those on AT&T) could get the iPhone, which immediately created a brand distinction necessary for a luxury product. On day 1, there were haves and have-nots.
3. It provided an out for Apple not ramping up production too fast (whether they could or not). If the iPhone failed, they wouldn't have product everywhere. If Apple couldn't make iPhones fast enough, they would only be affecting a subset of the market.
4. It limited Apple's engineering requirements. They only had to support AT&T's network on day 1, and not the network technologies of the other carriers. Limiting exclusivity to AT&T meant that they could focus on the product while delaying the technical challenges of supporting multiple cellular networks.
So I called their tech support asking when the Windows 95 version is coming. They told me they didn't think Windows 95 will be popular. Instead they were working on a version for OS/2 Warp. I tried to tell them otherwise, but they were 110% sure.
It was patently obvious to me, after one day spent using it, that Windows 95 would be hugely successful. I had the same feeling after Steve Jobs' presentation of the iPhone.
I am always stunned how things that are obvious to most people completely escape others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple might have genuinely murdered the entire market if they hadn’t insisted on their ridiculous exclusivity plan with AT&T. Whichever Apple exec greenlit that must surely have been an industrial saboteur because it saved 5+ other companies from ruin.
Back then the network operators had full control over the devices on their network. They even dictated what features these phones will have. They wanted to sell services like ringtones, so the device manufacturers were almost like their subcontractors. Apple simply didn’t have an option to do it by itself. Back then Apple wasn’t that powerful, they had a firm grip on music player and music store market but nothing el…