51–60 of 93 posts
So how did Apple manage with the issues mentioned in the article? Namely the subsidies to operators.
I think they just demonstrated that buyers would easily drop hundreds of dollars on an Apple product. Steve Ballmer also famously scoffed at the price of the iPhone.[1] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
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I once read an interview with Anssi Vanjoki, who was one of the top executives at Nokia. He said indeed that when he first held an iPhone he knew it was over for Nokia. If I remember correctly, Nokia had good tech for smart phones, but no vision or courage to drive the market in that direction. It was not a well-managed company.
People have often indicated we would have consolidated on iPhone-like devices in Apple’s absence, but I’m not convinced. Apple was unique: they were willing to bet the company on a single form factor, they had a small but loyal and vocal fan base, and they had their own retail stores to give people the opportunity to experience the phone. Anyone else would have made it just one of a half dozen phones and it would hav…
Yeah, android was busy developing a platform, and they even had some vision (unusual for that industry) because of the Danger team. Yet they were shocked by the iPhone and basically restarted — luckily before having demoed anything publicly.
Read the article before jumping into roasting. The author is NOT criticizing iPhone - he's skeptical simply because, at the time, network operators dictated which manufacturers enter the mobile phone market or not. It was a highly controlled market, and Apple not only had to build a great phone, but also had to punch through that stupid business barrier. In the end, Apple did make it.
Handspring built a modern smartphone and got roasted by the telcos. All jobs had to do was ask "do you want access to our millions of ipod and imusic subscribers?" and he got his way.
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I once read an interview with Anssi Vanjoki, who was one of the top executives at Nokia. He said indeed that when he first held an iPhone he knew it was over for Nokia. If I remember correctly, Nokia had good tech for smart phones, but no vision or courage to drive the market in that direction. It was not a well-managed company.
That's the problem with being an established market leader. You're so terrified of blowing up your own market that you're afraid to disrupt with innovation.
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It was a lot less of a paradigm shift at the time than it seems like in hindsight, actually. In fact there were competing phones with Windows Mobile or Symbian that did have similar hardware specs. (Really if you have to pick the single defining hardware innovation of the iPhone, it was the full slate capacitative touchscreen.) And in some areas the iPhone was clearly behind, shipping with a EDGE-only radio at a time…
The iPhone was a software innovation that was years ahead of the industry at the time, enabled by that one hardware innovation that you’re sounding rather dismissive of.
Again, there were existing app ecosystems on Symbian/Nokia and Windows, and none of that stuff, or anything like it, ran on an iPhone. You couldn't even get your email on the device outside of a handful of open source web clients (its inability to run the gmail client was a big hole, heavily reported at the time).
Personally, I don't like iPhones very much but all I needed to know was observe other people. And many they were truly awed at the time. Even nvidia's APX 2500 looked like something wrapped in a hurry.
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It was a lot less of a paradigm shift at the time than it seems like in hindsight, actually. In fact there were competing phones with Windows Mobile or Symbian that did have similar hardware specs. (Really if you have to pick the single defining hardware innovation of the iPhone, it was the full slate capacitative touchscreen.) And in some areas the iPhone was clearly behind, shipping with a EDGE-only radio at a time…
Jobs was ahead of his time, and he pushed the vision of HTML5 and offline apps. He was resistant to app stores, I suspect, because he wanted maximum freedom for users in the future rather than the corporatized, schlock-filled, freedom restricting, walled garden the post-Jobs Apple brought. You see his vision as a big miss. I see his vision as evidence of good taste and also an eventuality.
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It's hard to overstate just how big of a leap the iPhone was. Critics only focused on the shortcomings but neglected to see what it really was. Steve Jobs Introducing at Macworld in 2007 is a classic for the ages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQKMoT-6XSg
I remember a lot of tech reporters were quick to mock the iPhone for not supporting a feature they all took for granted: copy and paste.
Point being, it's fine to say "sure, it's missing cut-and-paste, but not hard to see how that's a really insignificant nit for most people that will easily be addressed in a subsequent software update," but all too often I see tech reporters latch on to some relatively small detail that they try to make a huge brouhaha over because they have nothing better to say.
The second Apple debuted that smooth as fucking butter interface it was clear as day how badly behind people were at the time. Pre-iPhone the form of phones was incredible but the function was dogshit garbage. Small displays rendering everything in software and failing to hit 15fps on a good day because these poor little ARM chips were being abused to within an inch of their lives. If you were seriously lucky you mig…
It's hard to overstate just how big of a leap the iPhone was. Critics only focused on the shortcomings but neglected to see what it really was. Steve Jobs Introducing at Macworld in 2007 is a classic for the ages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQKMoT-6XSg
To date, the biggest single advancement in the mobile web has been Apple porting their open-source WebKit to iPhoneOS (as Jobs put it: “a desktop-class browser”). Nothing else even comes close. Before the iPhone came out, the mobile web was virtually synonymous with shitty m.example.com WAP sites nobody wanted. In the space of about a year, everybody commissioning a website was asking for real, responsive mobile websites that worked on an iPhone.
> Critics only focused on the shortcomings but neglected to see what it really was.
Critics were sure the iPhone wouldn’t be a success until Mobile Safari supported Flash. They were certain Jobs would back down. About five years later, Adobe gave up on Flash on mobile.
So how did Apple manage with the issues mentioned in the article? Namely the subsidies to operators.