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Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

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Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#61

Post by indigoabstract »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #39
Veliladon wrote: post #6

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…

I remember 2 audience reactions really, really clearly from the original iPhone launch: 1. the reactions to "flick to scroll". 2. reaction to pinch-to-zoom. In both cases the audience was just gobsmacked: oohs, ahs and cheers all around. For people saying there were other devices out there at the time with similar or better hardware specs, or even comparable feature sets, I think you are totally missing the point. Th…

Yes, there were already phones with touchscreens before the iPhone, but they were all using a stylus, which seemed a better choice than a finger at the time, since they were more precise. But after the iPhone came out, it quickly became obvious how much better it was to use a screen with a finger with multi-touch than with a stylus. Steve or whoever made the decisions about the iPhone obviously knew very well what they were going for and 100% deserve the success.

Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#62

Post by cjbgkagh »

ayewo wrote: post #42
Seanambers wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Copy and paste was the reason I remember being bandied around inside MS at the time. I made the point that I was sure they could figure out cut and paste before we could figure out everything else. Other phones like O2 had capacitive touch but you couldn’t design a whole interface around it as it was very expensive and hardly anyone had it. Apple went in big and got it to price point people could afford. It saw it as clearly game changing, but being young and nieve I overestimated the ability for other companies to effectively compete even when they could see a model of what works.

Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#63

Post by JimDabell »

foobarian wrote: post #50
karmakurtisaani wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was some fancy 6 inch or so Nokia PDA from around that time that was supposed to be amazing. It had all the good hacker features - it ran Linux, it had driver support, you could ssh from it, etc. I remember turning it on and seeing kernel printk logs scrolling, followed by the plain X cross-thatch, and then some home grown window manager where you had to use a stylus to move the mouse cursor to click on stuff.…

Their S60 phones were based on Symbian and had a web browser based on WebCore and JavaScriptCore at the end of 2005. By all accounts they were good, hackable, general-purpose mobile devices.

Then Steven Elop left Microsoft to become Nokia CEO; decided to move everything to Windows Phone; publicly pointed out everything was on fire; crashed the stock price by 85%; sold Nokia to Microsoft at a massive discount; and then finally rejoined Microsoft. If it wasn’t an act of corporate sabotage designed to obtain Microsoft an established phone vendor subsidiary at a fraction of its cost, then it’s hard to see how he could have done a better job on purpose.

Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#64

Post by jolux »

jakobson14 wrote: post #45
macintux wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Read up on handspring. Their phone was the full modern smartphone years before the iphone. They're the ones who met with Larry Page and got him to make a mobile version of Google.com. Jobs met with handspring back when apple was focused on the mac PC. Jobs stood up at the whiteboard and drew a mac with all the aspects of a person's life around it. Handspring's CEO or CTO stood up and drew a handspring phone and all t…

> When apple went to the telcos all jobs had to do was ask "do you want access to our millions of ipod users?" and he got his way

That's actually not true, all of the telcos rejected the pitch except AT&T. There was considerable risk in it from their perspective, because Apple wanted total control over the user experience: no carrier logos on the handset, no carrier logos in the operating system, no preinstalled carrier software.

Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#65

Post by tzs »

The iPad also had widespread predictions of failure.

Early that year pretty much everyone had introduced tablet PCs and convertible PCs at CES. Apple had announced the iPad but it wasn't going to ship until April.

Most major magazines, reviewers, bloggers, podcasters, and such had high praise for those tablets and convertibles, saying that they were going to change how we all worked with PCs, and said iPad was late to the party and was really just a bigger iPhone without the phone, and was fatally limited compared to the versatility of the PC tablets and especially the PC convertibles, and was sure to bomb.

One of the few major podcasters who said it would succeed was Leo LaPorte. On one of his podcasts he said it would sell about 5 million in its first year, and everyone else on the show told him he was insane.

It actually sold 5 million in around 4 months, and 20 million in its first year.

Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#67

Post by JimDabell »

ajross wrote: post #57
EdSharkey wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Jobs clearly wasn't resistant to app stores. He literally had one in the works when the product shipped. It just wasn't ready, so he spun a yarn about web apps (and yes: he was ahead of his time, and these days you can totally do that, but now that Apple owns that 30% fee, they're decidedly anti web apps).

> Jobs clearly wasn't resistant to app stores. He literally had one in the works when the product shipped.

This is a myth. Jobs was genuinely against a native SDK and made the final decision to go for it on the 2nd of October 2007. Then Apple had to rush out the first version of the iPhoneOS SDK in just over three months. This is documented in contemporaneous emails produced during discovery for the Epic trial.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/04/this-one-email-explains-ap...

> now that Apple owns that 30% fee

It’s been 15% for years. The only people who pay 30% are people who earn more than a million dollars a year through the App Store. Almost everybody pays 15%.

Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#68

Post by dwb »

Seanambers wrote: post #29
Veliladon wrote: post #6

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

I like the bit where Jobs is saying he's introducing three products. The audience reaction is wildest for the phone, then the "widescreen iPod", and then just a smattering of enthusiasm for the "Internet communicator". As it turns out, that last aspect completely eclipsed the other two.

Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#69

Post by lttlrck »

ajross wrote: post #25
Veliladon wrote: post #6

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 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…

How could it not be a paradigm shift if its impact is still very visible in all the top selling smartphones today? Both in form factor and software?

It changed industry's and the public's perception of what a "phone" could be.

Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#70

Post by goalieca »

jolux wrote: post #64
jakobson14 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read up on handspring. Their phone was the full modern smartphone years before the iphone. They're the ones who met with Larry Page and got him to make a mobile version of Google.com. Jobs met with handspring back when apple was focused on the mac PC. Jobs stood up at the whiteboard and drew a mac with all the aspects of a person's life around it. Handspring's CEO or CTO stood up and drew a handspring phone and all t…

> When apple went to the telcos all jobs had to do was ask "do you want access to our millions of ipod users?" and he got his way That's actually not true, all of the telcos rejected the pitch except AT&T. There was considerable risk in it from their perspective, because Apple wanted total control over the user experience: no carrier logos on the handset, no carrier logos in the operating system, no preinstalled carr…

Removing carriers from the phone turned out to be one of the biggest innovations alongside having a real web browser.

Edit: for context, carriers wanted control of revenue and obviously fought against net neutrality. At the time, they made big money with SMS and other services.

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