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Apple is a traditional business

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Re: Apple is a traditional business

#201

Post by pier25 »

wmeredith wrote: post #113
pier25 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it really points to how rarely an innovation like the iPhone really occurs Yeah, but don't forget that the pieces to be able to create the iPhone had to be there first.

The innovation of the iPhone was in the execution. The ideas were around, along with a ton of failed attempts at it. A computer in your pocket had been an idea for decades. Apple made one that a critical mass of people could/would actually use.

Yes, but Apple couldn't have made the iPhone without a touch screen, ARM, Wifi, etc, hence claiming that Apple is the sole responsible of past and future innovation in their product line is naive.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#202

Post by pier25 »

IncRnd wrote: post #97
pier25 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it really points to how rarely an innovation like the iPhone really occurs Yeah, but don't forget that the pieces to be able to create the iPhone had to be there first.

> Yeah, but don't forget that the pieces to be able to create the iPhone had to be there first. Like the LG Prada?

No, like touch screens, ARM, Wifi, etc.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#203

Post by dreamcompiler »

MBCook wrote: post #172
dreamcompiler wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't the first smartphone, but it was the first phone of any kind that wasn't bundled with crapware from the cellular companies and locked into their ecosystems. That was a huge win for consumers, and it was solely due to the persuasive power of Steve Jobs.

It doesn’t exactly fit the article or my original comment but what Apple did to carriers is just as big, possibly bigger, than the hardware/software of the iPhone. The carriers dictated the phones you could buy (in the US). They dictated the siftware on them. They dictated the interfaces. If they didn’t like a feature hey turned it off. I remember a camera phone that had Bluetooth support for sending files but Verizo…

Yep. Jobs originally went to Verizon, which balked when he said they would have no control over the phone. That's why the original iPhone carrier was AT&T and only AT&T.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#204

Post by PopePompous »

MBCook wrote: post #74
beamatronic wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of us who were PDA users in the late 90s and Treo users in the early 2000s, the iPhone is an incremental improvement on those ideas. The presence of ubiquitous wireless networking (I am lumping cellular wireless and WiFi in together) was the real game changer. If you are not convinced, try this thought experiment: Imagine yourself in 1998 standing on the street in a major city holding a Palm pilot. It has a…

It was not an incremental leap. It was MASSIVE. Yes, all the technology was there. We had smartphones and they would have continued without the iPhone. The value of the internet in your pocket is too big for the smart phone not to become a huge thing. Eventually. But Apple NAILED the UI. They made it so simple that 3 year olds can use the UI and are confused when other computers don’t work through such great touch co…

I agree with everything you said. But just as important as the technical leap was the business model improvement. Before the iPhone, at least in the US, carriers dictated what functions could and could not be present in the phones. The video offerings were nothing but short snippets of content offered at steep prices from the carriers. Phone manufacturers considered the carriers to be their real customers, and the carriers wanted to make sure that every phone feature was a money stream for them. Apple was the first manufacturer with enough clout to get a carrier (Cingular) to offer a smartphone that was not crippled by the carrier. Once the iPhone became popular, it was no longer possible for carriers to hobble the smartphones they sold, in order to nickle-and-dime their customers.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#205

Post by victor106 »

MBCook wrote: post #173
srslack wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you accessibility and decent touch controls in a pretty package. But I can't let this slide: >How long would it have taken to get the App Store? That single innovation (making it trivial for people to find/buy software) Package management was not an Apple innovation, and before iOS 2.0 there were no officially supported native third party applications at all, and the only way power users accomplished this w…

I know it was in iOS 2.0. And I don’t believe Jobs EVER thought that, that was his spin. Everything that has come out since seems to indicate that he knew web apps sucked but that was what they could get out the door fast. The internal APIs didn’t seem to be in a releasable state. Normal people have never used APT. I remember how you got software for Palm or WinCE. It was a pain, you had to search the web or buy it b…

>And I don’t believe Jobs EVER thought that, that was his spin

If you read his biography he had to be convinced to have users create their own apps and install them on the iPhone. He vehemently shot down the idea before he had to be convinced of the idea by Bill Campbell (the coach) when Steve was vacationing in Hawaii.

Read the book and you’ll understand more of the backstory

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#206

Post by MBCook »

PopePompous wrote: post #204
MBCook wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was not an incremental leap. It was MASSIVE. Yes, all the technology was there. We had smartphones and they would have continued without the iPhone. The value of the internet in your pocket is too big for the smart phone not to become a huge thing. Eventually. But Apple NAILED the UI. They made it so simple that 3 year olds can use the UI and are confused when other computers don’t work through such great touch co…

I agree with everything you said. But just as important as the technical leap was the business model improvement. Before the iPhone, at least in the US, carriers dictated what functions could and could not be present in the phones. The video offerings were nothing but short snippets of content offered at steep prices from the carriers. Phone manufacturers considered the carriers to be their real customers, and the ca…

Totally agree. I thought of that later (and I wasn’t sure how well it fit into the narrative of my original comment/the article) and wrote about what they did to the carriers here [1].

I remember when I got my RAZR, it was the first phone I had that could play video. I was able to watch a 3m cartoon from Boomerang (Tom and Jerry or something like that). The quality was surprisingly good.

It used up 60-70% of my battery and the little phone got very hot.

And that was a $15/month service.

And let’s not formget the mapping ‘services’ that Google and Apple completely killed.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16979353

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#207

Post by sizzle »

beamatronic wrote: post #58
emodendroket wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs did not single-handedly invent the iPhone.

For those of us who were PDA users in the late 90s and Treo users in the early 2000s, the iPhone is an incremental improvement on those ideas. The presence of ubiquitous wireless networking (I am lumping cellular wireless and WiFi in together) was the real game changer. If you are not convinced, try this thought experiment: Imagine yourself in 1998 standing on the street in a major city holding a Palm pilot. It has a…

I thought my Sony Clié was ahead of it's time ~2002

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sony-CLIE-PEG-NZ90.jpg

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#208

Post by dang »

kgwgk wrote: post #141
hungerstrike wrote: post #123

Original title: "I'm sorry I criticized you Apple. You win"

One of these days I'm going to write a bot to keep track of title changes. "Apple is a traditional business" is the current title, for the record. I expect (I hope!) it will be changed again soon, because it doesn't make much sense.

We changed the title because the original one was arguably linkbait, and the site guidelines call for changing those (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

When we do that, we try to find a phrase in the article itself that represents what the author is saying. That's what we did here. If there's a better, more representative phrase, we can change it again.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#209

Post by gonehome »

noxToken wrote: post #40
fhood wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I occasionally loose sleep, wondering what products were lost due to Jobs' early death. Edit: Ok, fine. I loose sleep wondering what ideas were out there that languished because Jobs wasn't around to see their potential and capitalize on them. The argument "he wasn't that important because he didn't actually invent X" is played out, and it fundamentally misses the point.

> ...like smart speakers, with their threat of big brother-style surveillance in exchange for a minimal increase in convenience It seems like everyone in this thread is forgetting that the HomePod[0] is a thing. Apple's privacy practices are better than the other listed companies, but they do have a smart speaker just as capable as the others. [0]: https://www.apple.com/homepod/

As someone who owns a Homepod, Google Home, and an Echo - the Homepod is hardly as capable as either of the others.

It can consistently tell me the weather and set alarms, but it's bad at everything else.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#210

Post by Spivak »

scarface74 wrote: post #126
simsla wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither are the other two.

Bezos specifically said that the entire purpose of their hardware is to get people to buy more stuff from Amazon. You really don't think both Amazon and Google are collecting data to improve their real money makers - targeted ad revenue and marketing?

And the iPhone exists to get people to use more Apple products and services. Vendor lock-in isn't the same thing as data harvesting. Those companies may very well be collecting your data but your statement doesn't prove it.
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