this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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I might be missing a lot but I feel the iPhone was a complete market segment they created themselves. Android followed a year later.
They also created the tablet market a year or two later.
They also set the trend of earbuds we have nowadays.
Removed headphone jacks.
Removed power adaptors.
There maybe something else that I might have missed.
I remember the first keynote. Jobs kept repeating phrases like music player, web browser, and phone together like that. And then boom, he whipped out the first iPhone that was in his pocket the whole time. While there were similar devices at the time, nothing (to my knowledge) was all one package especially in an all touch device that small.
Yeah, people seem to forget just how groundbreaking the form factor, all the swipe and pinch (and multitouch) interface stuff, having one giant touchscreen, the user friendliness if pretty much everything (versus other phones at the time), etc was. Soon everyone was trying to copy it, which is fine. But saying all they innovated was rounded corners and everything else already existed and was just as good is dumb.
There were a lot of little things that aren't relevant today but were a big deal at the time. For example it had a web browser that actually worked to view the real internet, even though 99% of webpages were designed for screens the size of 30 iPhones.
Today all webpages are designed to work well on small screens - but that never would have happened without Apple. Or at least it would have taken a lot longer to happen. They got enough people using the internet on a phone to force web developers to support small screens. That was a big achievement - even today it's a massive amount of work to design a webpage that works well with a mouse and with your thumbs. The tools we have now didn't exist back then, and before Mobile Safari there weren't any users of small screens anyway so why would anyone put in all that work?
Phones with web browsers predated the iPhone. They were completely unusable.
In the 2007 tech press lull between announcement and launch, there was briefly a made up scandal of accusing Apple of using models with really large hands in promotional photos/videos to make the iPhone look smaller than it was. It's wild to think about now.
Blackberry did all of that years before Apple. Sure, they didn’t have a touchscreen, but all of the capability was there.
I had a Blackberry Curve and I don't recall it having a music player. It was also so clunky compared to the iPhone is that it's almost unfair to say it had the same capabilities. I'm not an Apple fan but I have to grant that their UI was a huge advancement over anything that came before it.
The user interface itself was the innovation. Hell, even Microsoft and Intel had the portable Windows Mobile things. Compared to an iPhone they liked like they were from the Stone Age. I had one and swapping it felt like going to another dimension.
I had two WinMob devices, and while they were pretty cool to show off, they were awful, clunky pieces of shit to actually use. I was forever glad they had a slide out QWERTY keyboard, because having to ‘type’ messages on a resistive screen with a stylus was hell.
When people found out they ran on ‘Windows’ they’d ask if they could run x or y software, and I’d have to say no, the OS is really just Windows branded and doesn’t actually really work like Windows.
I guess it would be better to say they innovated the slate style phone. Android didn’t come out until 2008 and all other top phones used physical buttons. The iPhone technically only had 5 for general functions.
The LG Prada did that before iPhone too. More accurate to say Apple popularised it and made it a more cohesive package
Haha I had to look it up, but that’s the definition of “innovation”. Literally taking something existing and making it better.
My ex-wife had the non-Prada version of that handset, and it was actually pretty cool. Didn’t really do much more than any normal phone of the time, mind, but was at least technically a smart phone.
Well, there existed phones that were kind of what smartphones became. Blackberries and Palms get a lot of the attention as they were what executives used, but there were also PocketPC devices that were usually white label manufactured HTC devices that were branded after carriers or some other company like HP. They generally were much larger screened devices with a few buttons at the bottom. They were resistive touchscreens so using your fingers was pretty meh for responsiveness, and the UI was just not designed in a way that was pleasant to navigate. Picture a shrunk down desktop interface. I'd say the UI was the biggest shakeup that they did in the product category, followed by steadily raising the bar for hardware in a space that often would have cheap plastic components. Don't get me wrong, I think too much glass and aluminum is actually poorer than something like kevlar especially for dents and dings, but it doesn't look nearly as sexy.
I'd say the biggest shakeup was the features Jobs pushed hard in the keynote.
It was an iPod. Everyone (who could afford one) owned an iPod and it sucked having two gadgets in their pocket all day and keeping two gadgets charged. That was the feature that made the iPhone a "must have" product. Combining your phone and music device was a massive improvement and an obvious one even if you weren't sure about the other stuff. Other phones could play music by then, but they were all still really terrible. I could only fit a single album on my Symbian phone and it took hours of stuffing around and reading manuals and installing buggy software to figure out how to load MP3s onto the device. Yuck.
It was able to browse the internet. The real, full internet. Everyone working a desk job was used to doing that all day every day, but now it was possible to do it away from your desk. That was a huge deal and I think by far the most meaningful feature of the iPhone... except it was a product nobody had ever used before, so it couldn't be the only headline feature.
Ah, that makes sense.
Apple was famous for its innovations in market segments and feature removals.
Maybe modern Apple, but the GUI wouldn't be where it is today without Apple and specifically Jobs's Macintosh team, especially those who followed him to NeXT and what they accomplished there then brought with them when Jobs was brought back to Apple.
The first Android was made about 1999/2000, I'd read about it in a trade mag just before I was laid off from one company (they provided that trade mag, which is why I know the date). The idea of running Linux for a phone OS was intriguiging at the tomr, as we were doing some Linux testing ourselves.
At that same time (late 90's), we were already deploying full-color Palm Pilots with wifi, and eagerly waiting for the integrated phone models whi were projected to be released about 2000.
I was using a Treo with a touch screen before iPhones existed, and I was a late adopter in about 2003 because I don't do early versions, I wanted CDMA, and didn't want the Palm-like flip cover thing. The Treo was kind of the first bar-type smart phone, just rounded. I used to watch movies on that thing on flights. I kept multiple SD cards so I could swap them out (they ejected from the top, no opening the case, no power cycle).
I (well, my deployment team) had deployed thousands of Palm Pilots with wifi access, and then Treos, which synced to a desktop app, in the early 2000s, probably 5 years before iPhone existed.
It could send/receive emails, SMS, calendar, load all sorts of apps from simple games like checkers to Monopoly. It did GPS and mapping with a third party SD card.
It had a third party office app that is now available on Android. I used a shopping app that could sync to an account online. It could browse the web (though the web browsing was pretty awful at the time). It could send data wirelessly to people nearby using infrared.
It had a camera (a shitty one) that could also do video. It used a data connection with the cell provider. It had Bluetooth, and could send Palm apps to other devices with it.
There were versions that had Windows Mobile on them, they were pretty good.
I moved to Android from Treo in 2009.
Smartphones weren't a new idea, Palm had been on it since the mid 90's, just waiting for the phone tech to be small enough to pack into a Palm Pilot.
Apple never leads, despite what their PR is so good at promulgating.
What they are excellent at is watching the market and timing their entry perfectly, with a product people want, giving the impression that they lead the market. And I don't say this as a criticism, what they do is brilliant, and the products they release are usually good at what they're intended to do.
I really like their design at times. The iPhone, from a physicality stand point, is brilliantly balanced, shaped, sized. Unfortunately iOS just doesn't meet my personal needs.
Android as a company was created in 2003 with no product at all. They started working on a phone operating system in 2005, were acquired by Google, and then had an early prototype Blackberry knockoff in 2006. The iPhone was announced in 2007 so they abandoned the original plans and started making an iPhone knockoff. The first Android phone was released in 2008.
Apple shipped the Newton in 1993. Well before Palm. And long, long, before shipping the Newton they were talking about hand held computers. The idea that they copied Palm is ridiculous.
Like Palm, the Newton wasn't good enough to achieve widespread market adoption (and Apple recognised that - killing it in 1998).
Sure - iPhone wasn't the first pocket computer and it was a very obvious invention that companies all over the world had failed to pull off for decades. I think Microsoft was the closest - their Pocket PC that was pretty good and they had a massive decade long version almost rebuilt from scratch about to ship when the iPhone came out... But Apple beat them to it and Google followed close behind - reportedly Google's early hardware partners were planning to ship Windows on those devices but Microsoft lost out on the contract negotiations, Satya Nadela said they were just too slow - their hardware partners want to wait for them.
Apple was first to ship a good pocket computer. That was real innovation. Real innovators are the ones that get it right, and being first (to get it right) matters because once it's done once everyone else can just copy your idea instead of wasting time developing and testing dead end solutions to hard problems. The early Android devices for example, looked more like the old Pocket PC or a Blackberry. They probably weren't good enough to be successful. They quickly copied ideas like the software keyboard from Apple, and quickly adopted Apple's open source technology like the WebKit rendering engine.