I'm not so surprised, because if you followed the market at that time closely, the iPhone was much less of an obvious innovation than it is in retrospect.
For starters, we'd had PDAs with touch screens for years, and they were hot in the business market for a while, but remained a niche product. Even when they got built in phones.
We'd had tablets since at least '99 (I worked on the software for one in '99 and we were certainly not first), and they'd remained a niche - either underpowered or overpriced (the latter typically being pretty much laptops with a swivel display).
When we tried to build interest from partners in our tablet in '99, it quickly became clear the market was not at all ready. People didn't understand why they'd need or want a product like that. Ericssons "Screen Phone" suffered the same fate, and quietly disappeared. (Though both the tablet I worked on, and the Ericsson Screen Phone were limited severely by being tied to ISDN base stations rather than truly mobile).
And it stayed like that for several years.
If you'd played with that stuff, the iPhone looked like an evolutionary step of a niche product.
If you were intimately involved with these markets at the time, it'd be easy to assume that the tepid response was still going to be the case when the iPhone arrived, and that at least you'd have plenty of time to see how the market was maturing before needing to respond. Let someone else make the expensive market lessons for you.
It's one of those cases where being too close to the technology was a disadvantage for many, because it meant not so easily seeing that this was the evolutionary step that finally would tip things over into creating excitement amongst regular people.
Consider that in 2007, the iPhone was already effectively the result of years of waiting. In '99/2000, there was already touch screen PDAs with apps and various limited networking functionality, and phone functionality at least as early as 2002 (possibly earlier, I don't remember), and a few tablets had started making their appearance (both laptops + touch, as well as "proper" tablets). But they were all massively hamstrung by hardware (the first generation Palm's had less than 1/1000th the memory of many current smartphones; monochrome low res displays, and resistive touch)
Arguably, even in '99, the idea itself was old - those of us working on stuff like that then, were looking back at Star Trek and other SF, and it was just the feeling that it was an idea whose time had finally come.
Apple's genius with the iPhone and iPad, was realising its time had not come, and waiting and refining their design until the basic underlying hardware "caught up" and they could provide a product suitable for "normal users". Everyone else got to make the expensive mistakes; most of the companies involved are no longer around, or pulled out of that market before Apple made its entry.
Sometimes ideas are just not right yet, and spending time trying to force the issue is likely to fail because the end result will be massively compromised.
But sometimes the ideas are just not right yet also because the public has not "caught up". It's not just that software developers must figure this out, but end users must have caught up enough that the new ideas fit into their world view.
I worked on a tablet computer ca. '99. We were not first, nor did we have any illusions we were. There were novel parts about our business plan, but a tablet was "obvious".
But it's an illustration of what you describe: When the iPhone and later iPad were launched, a lot of people thought they were new.
Even though there had been a whole fad of touch devices in phone and tablet form that had come and gone before the iPhone came.
A lot of us dismissed them at first because we'd seen that fad come and go, without realising that the genius of Apple with respect to those devices was not in the technical innovation, but in recognising when enough percent-point improvements had been made to unlock something that'd actually appeal to the general public.
"Our" tablet was tethered to a custom DECT base station (wifi wasn't widespread yet), had about 2 hours of battery. The resistive touch was awful, the screen resolution was small, and I had to cram Linux and the GUI, with space left over for a port of Opera, in to 16MB of flash and 16MB RAM in the original prototype...
In retrospect it had no chance in hell. But to a geek like me it was amazingly cool.
Other tablets and pda's with or without network and phone of that era were either attempts at slimming down laptops (e.g. I had a laptop with a touch screen on a swivel back then) that were still way too big, or they were devices like ours, with all sorts of limitations that geeks were fine with, and regular people weren't.
So when these devices disappeared one after the other, many of us dismissed the concept as a whole as tried and failed, rather than realise that the problem was one of enough percent-point improvements and not the concept.
And for all of the many issues I have with Apple, while they were not first, they still deserve plenty of credit for simply being smart enough to recognise when the time was right for this category of devices. Because a whole lot of companies got that timing extremely wrong.
The market was waiting for capacitive touchscreens to become viable. You can't use multitouch properly on resistive screens (or non-touchscreen devices). Apple pounced as soon as capacitive screens became viable - albeit extremely expensive at the time. The first iPhone was "ahead of its time" in the sense that the market wasn't really ready for it. The first iPhone was an expensive PoS - it wasn't until the app store came along and the price came down that it turned into a good phone.
No-one really thought to patent the obvious design decisions that would come with the viability of a large capacitive touchscreen - rectangular, large screen, few physical buttons, multitouch gestures such as pinch to zoom (that already existed elsewhere).
Apple are absolute masters at combining existing technology into an attractive package. They also have excellent timing at bringing products to market (just before the market is ready for them - see original iPod, iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air).
But to say that these "innovations" wouldn't have happened anyway is disingenuous - no competent observer seriously believes that the market would not have moved on to large capacitive touchscreen devices over the last 5 years.
Apple deserve plenty of credit for their OS animations, smoothness of UI and (either praise or damnation depending on your point of view) the curated app store. They don't deserve credit for "inventing the capacitive touchscreen phone".
The tablet that they show sending a fax from the beach is essentially a smartphone. The thing is that smartphones weren't popular until Apple even though they had existed.
Palm, Nokia/Symbian, Danger, and Microsoft had been pushing smartphones before the iPhone came out. BlackBerry was pushing non-touch smartphones as well. The issue is that none of them really had a compelling user experience before Apple came along. You can say that the iPhone was obvious, but no one else saw to use capacitive touchscreens at the time. Even after the iPhone came out, everyone thought that the lack of a physical keyboard was Apple's hubris and would be their downfall. Windows Mobile, Symbian, and PalmOS didn't integrate a first-class web browsing experience. Heck, I remember Windows Mobile emphasizing scroll bars rather than the natural movement that Apple introduced with the iPhone, never mind pinch to zoom.
Apple came along and showed everyone what the point of having a smartphone in your pocket was. You'd have the best music experience. You'd have the full internet for any question you'd ever have. You'd have maps. You'd have a great photos experience. Part of that is that they recognized that the capacitive technology they'd been using in iPods and trackpads for years could be used as part of a fuller operating system. Part of it is that they really spent a lot of time figuring out how people could use a touchscreen well. Others had just tried to take desktop UI concepts and put them on a touch device.
AT&T saw the emergence of the smartphone. Heck, Microsoft, Palm, Nokia/Symbian, BlackBerry, Danger, and even Google tried to build it before Apple (Google was targeting Symbian and had to "go back to the drawing board" when the iPhone was introduced). They all missed the key affordances that would drive consumer adoption. Google's pre-iPhone prototypes were basically BlackBerry/Symbian competitors. Microsoft wanted scroll bars, a start menu, and windows. Even after the iPhone, many tried pushing devices with keyboards: Moto Droid, HTC's first Android device, the Palm Pre, etc. It's not about saying "we'll have X in the future!" People saw smartphones/tablets. Heck, Star Trek had tablets in late 80s, but they didn't need them to be usable, just props. People just never figured out how to make them compelling for users before Apple did.
Except I'm not talking about tablet/slabphone form, but talking generally.
iPhone was operating in a market where touchscreens were already the norm, it just had a better touchscreen.
It was a general lowering of costs, coupled with better networks and the ability to use more modern web pages that truly revolutionized the market. Capacitive touchscreens were nice, but not end-all.
In fact, my first experience with iPhone 3G was that it was clunkier than the smartphones we used. (and definitely felt cheap).
At least some phones, for a time, used to integrate both touch screen and buttons, which had significant benefits when it came to UX (as buttons can be navigated by tactile feedback only)
I don't think so. I was starting to see Palm and Windows smartphones in the hands of consumers without especially advanced tech backgrounds a decade ago as well as the occasional Sidekick. Android was in development at the time as well, and while early prototypes don't seem nearly as consumer-friendly as iPhones, many early production models were similarly unimpressive.
It may have taken a bit longer, but I think the mainstream popularity of smartphones was inevitable.
People had been trying to make devices very much like the iPhone for decades before Jobs pushed through a mass-market-acceptable iteration. MS had a tablet and natural voice UI projects as major priorities around the turn of the century while Apple was working on the click-wheel of the original iPod.
It takes a lot of iteration before something becomes mass-marketable, and there's almost always a long, multi-competitor heritage in devices that seem to appear overnight, like the iPhone.
Keep in mind that most of those things that were "new and exciting" weren't new; it was just that most people hadn't seen them before, or not done well before.
For example, nobody used capacitive touch screens because they were horribly imprecise. The iPhone included some tricks to make them less precise, but mostly they just embraced the imprecision: all tap targets on the iPhone are thumb size.
Another thing that bothered me was Steve's description of the screen as the highest resolution screen available on a phone, when there were several gadgets available with much higher resolution screens, such as the Nokia N770.
My experience with the N770 definitely made me dismissive of the iPhone. The n770 made me well aware of the value of having a web browser in your pocket. But it had an 800 pixel screen at a time when that was the minimum width that many web sites designed for, along with a highly accurate stylus that you could use to accurately click on tiny links. There was no way the web was going to be usable on a 480 pixel screen without an accurate stylus. Which meant that every web site had to be rewritten to be iPhone friendly.
Who was going to buy an iPhone when virtually all websites were unusable? (remember at that time there were no apps). And who would rewrite their website to support an iPhone that nobody was buying? Classic chicken and egg problem.
Steve told us the answer: an incredibly polished product and incredible salesmanship.
The PDA market was ridiculously small (I owned one and I hardly knew anyone else who did) and was not growing at the time. PDAs were pricey, and while they could do many of the things that the iPhone did later, most people did not see its value back then. Well, it was a very fragmented market focused only on professionals. It was never aimed to consumers (a big mistake).
So Apple brought it to market at the exact point in time that it became viable. The other companies were "waiting" as you say, so why did they wait so long? Didn't they see that the technology was about to become viable?
I don't buy that theory. By the sales of the first iPhone, the market was obviously ready. Had it been "barely usable" it would have flopped completely.
Capacitive touch screens use the same technology as touchpads, and I haven't seen any proof that those screens were too expensive before 2006 and that technological advancements broght the price down after that.
What I do think is that Apple was willing to bet on touchscreens and place bulk orders that made the price come down, whereas other companies happy with the status quo and unwilling to redesign their mobile operating systems to fit a new technology.
There were many not a few touchscreen phones before the iPhone, no multi-touch ones, and many crappy resistive screen phones that needed a sharp pointy thing to be kind of responsive.
Smartphones were just a niche before 2007 made them mainstream. The iPhone did to smartphones what the iPod did to digital music players, turning niche into norm.
Nokia n95 and the iPaq were nominally similar in capability to an early iPhone. But the lack of "polish" and failure to deliver a solution vs. a gadget made those other devices a silly device to most people.
I don't think it's fair to say the iphone form factor wasn't out there. There was a rich variety of full-screen touch or pen phones (palm, pocket pc, some one-off designs like the lg prada), and there were models designed with a capacitive screen. A lot of people were trying to corner the smartphone market by foregoing a physical keyboard. I still think palm's graffiti was a better way of inputing complex text than any smartphone on-screen keyboard.
It's not that nobody was trying to figure out how to build a smartphone with a big touchscreen, just that they were approaching it from the enterprise space. Usability wasn't important because it wasn't an enterprise selling point. Pen input was important because signature input was key for enterprise. Apple ignored enterprise at first and designed for the consumer market, which allowed for blasphemies like throwing out pen support. The big change was making smartphones a consumer product instead of an enterprise product.
That's because they were usually half-baked attempts that got obliterated in the market compared to the Apple product who went on to become the market leader in its category for years on end.
E.g. the sales of any smartphone before the iPhone compared to the sales of the iPhone. Or any mp3 player before the iPod compared to it.
And serious competitors took a while to arrive. It took several versions of BS mp3 players to get something like the decent MS offering.
The first Android phone was released one full year after the iPhone, and it took it several versions to be competitive.
With tablets it was the same. Compared the dreadful, lackluster selling, offerings before the iPad. It took them 2-3 years to even come close.
I hadn't seen even one of these before the iPhone (there were a few people who used them, but i would say their market share would be less than 1% in smartphones)
I think the rapid expansion of the smartphone market (led, in large part, by the iPhone) is tricking your eyes. Touch-screen smartphones were a significant part of the pre-iPhone smartphone market. But unless you were specifically paying attention to them, you wouldn't have seen that because the smartphone market was so much smaller back then.
Mobile browsing had been around for quite a while, and I had used Opera Mobile on various phones for some time. PDAs, when they existed as separate devices, tended to have larger screens than phones, and allowed reasonable browsing too.
The iPhone was a great product, I'm not denying it, but I wonder if the perception that it was revolutionary comes from the state of the US market at the time - generally thought to have been years behind Europe and Asia.
The iPhone is not the relevant comparison point to me. Pretty much as soon as the slab-of-glass smartphone design was technically feasible, slab-of-glass phones took over the market. The iPhone was a very good pass at it, but it was going to happen anyhow. Such predecessors as there were were not that old. It was not an idea that had decades of failure behind it.
The iPad is the more interesting one to me because tablets had been a Next Big Thing for a long time, to the point that the common wisdom was that they weren't going to happen. Phones become slabs-of-glass because of the constraint of fitting into a pocket. Tablets couldn't compete with laptops in the absence of that constraint. The iPhone was the birth of a new industry; the iPad breathed life into an already dead industry.
(Granted, that industry seems to be trending back towards dead, or if you prefer, "a stable niche that isn't going anywhere due to the ease of just making a Phone, but Bigger, but isn't going to take over the world", but if anything that makes Apple's accomplishment even more impressive.)
This seems a much closer comparison to VR. Even before the current push represented by the Oculus and similar gen products, VR headsets had been a Next Big Thing for decades now. I'd still characterize the field as basically dead, at least at an Apple scale. If it hasn't outright plateaued, its first derivative is certainly only marginally positive. If the Apple Vision product succeeds it'll be another breathing life into a dead industry play.
Not sure I agree. There was a lot of innovation on smartphones before the iPhone, they were just not as visionary as the iPhone was. Look up the Nokia N-Gage as an example
For starters, we'd had PDAs with touch screens for years, and they were hot in the business market for a while, but remained a niche product. Even when they got built in phones.
We'd had tablets since at least '99 (I worked on the software for one in '99 and we were certainly not first), and they'd remained a niche - either underpowered or overpriced (the latter typically being pretty much laptops with a swivel display).
When we tried to build interest from partners in our tablet in '99, it quickly became clear the market was not at all ready. People didn't understand why they'd need or want a product like that. Ericssons "Screen Phone" suffered the same fate, and quietly disappeared. (Though both the tablet I worked on, and the Ericsson Screen Phone were limited severely by being tied to ISDN base stations rather than truly mobile).
And it stayed like that for several years.
If you'd played with that stuff, the iPhone looked like an evolutionary step of a niche product.
If you were intimately involved with these markets at the time, it'd be easy to assume that the tepid response was still going to be the case when the iPhone arrived, and that at least you'd have plenty of time to see how the market was maturing before needing to respond. Let someone else make the expensive market lessons for you.
It's one of those cases where being too close to the technology was a disadvantage for many, because it meant not so easily seeing that this was the evolutionary step that finally would tip things over into creating excitement amongst regular people.
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