> That sounds quite mediocre! Except where were all these non-geniuses with their just-as-not-new phones putting Microsoft, Palm, Sony, Blackberry, etc., to shame? Most of that was crap in comparison. And despite many (many) revamped product lines (Microsoft!) trying to take smart phones mainstream. (I give the Blackberry kudos for being very good at what it did.)
They had built phones with the same kind of interfaces 4-5 years earlier, and then moved on because the hardware wasn't ready then. You keep comparing to products that appears because of the market rejection of the first tablet/touch device fad, and use that to argue that it was timing, while ignoring the many devices that were conceptually far more similar a few years before that.
As I've said: Apple's genius was paying attention to when the hardware was ready for another try at the "pure" devices that "everyone" else tried too early.
And bringing up the Blackberry is comical to me, because even at the time it was an aberrant offshoot used by people who scoffed at the touch-focused devices, and not a relevant comparison. They were an entirely different device category.
> You are vastly underestimating the value and work of getting lots of details right (so many, and so "unimportant", most people never notice what holds products back), and finding a way to fit it all together in a way that works well.
No, I'm aware of the products that were actually built over the preceding years and which design decisions were driven purely by what was actually available vs. were intentional choices, and so don't give credit for simply having better, cheaper components available. Apple does great at polishing things, and they deserve credit for that, but what the 1st gen iPhone and iPad brought was not that.
The also did great at timing it right, and I do give them a lot of credit for that, and that is important - a whole lot of smart people got that very wrong, and frankly it's a lesson the tech industry needs hammered in over and over because we have a tendency to rush ahead without asking ourselves if the market is ready and/or if a product is wrong or just not right yet, and ending up making stupid decisions. I'm not trying to downplay what Apple achieved. I'm trying to drive home the point that Apple achieved this by vastly outperforming their competitors in deploying their resources in a more efficient way, by not rushing into something that was doomed (in the 2000 timeframe). That was, and is, impressive.
"Just" building a smartphone and tablet at the level of the original iPhone and iPad was good, but nothing special, nor visionary in terms of engineering. They had one or two features that were unusual (gestures was), and lots of missing features, and great industrial design, but very little technical innovation. Overall they did amazingly well in hitting the right balance for a first version, and that outweighs pushing the envelope on the technical side by a huge margin - it's irrelevant if you make technical advances if your company folds and/or the product disappears of the face of the earth.
> You know what is true of every breakthrough theorem in math? If you break down the proof, its just made of steps of already known relations. It wouldn't be a proof if it was otherwise. Nothing new.
Great, but this again implies that there were lots of elements that were put together in some completely novel way, but there were not, and suggesting there were is just pure revisionism that just shows that you're unaware of what that field was like in those years.
Nobody went around wondering if capacitative touch would be better or not - we all knew it was. Nobody wanted as little RAM or flash as in the early devices. Nobody wanted big bezels. Nobody wanted slow CPUs. Nobody wanted low capacity batteries. All of the steps to go from ~2000-era tablets and full-screen touch devices to an iPhone and iPad level device were cost-reduction and component improvements.
Heck, the original iPhone didn't even have installable apps, which was a huge step back compared to earlier devices that was only rectified later when Apple realised they'd made a huge misstep (remember Steve Jobs pushing web apps as sufficient? I do).
Apple got the timing right, and then they did an amazing job at iterating to fix the many defects in their original product before their competitors realised they'd gotten the timing right. Getting the timing right was genius. That's impressive enough that there's no reason to push unsupportable ideas about things that weren't new. Most of the things I've mentioned weren't new when I worked on them in 2000 either - we invented next to nothing, and we knew we didn't.