For better or worse the iPhone hit the market today 16 years ago changing the world forever.
I have mixed feelings about the iPhone. On one hand, the device itself was very sleek for the time and its touch-driven, easy-to-use interface was a revelation for 2007. On the other hand, it was the harbinger of the locked-down, walled-garden hellscape that is the modern tech industry, and its success paved the way for horrors like Windows 8/10/11 and the modern Mac OS which gets very testy if you try running app that hasn’t been notarised by Apple.
On this day in 2007 smartphones took a nosedive in functionality that they took years to recover from. The first iPhone was especially bad, by modern standards it wasn’t even a smartphone, it was a feature phone with a touchscreen. I had a Nokia E70 in 2007, a time when the culture around using Apple products was even more elitist than it is today, and it was beyond annoying to be told shit like “well you don’t really need to be able to copy and paste text, or record video, or record voice notes, or install third-party apps, that’s all just bloat” by brand loyalists who really needed me to know why my phone was actually worse than an iPhone for being able to do those things. If we’re going to celebrate the iPhone for innovating and being a decent product, I agree, but that didn’t happen till the 3GS came out.
I’m going to disagree with basically everything you just said. It reads like someone who simply doesn’t like Apple. Brand standing if you will.
You need to sharpen your reading comprehension skills, I don’t have any problem with Apple and their products are fine. The 1st and 2nd get iPhones were less functional than the devices they purported to supplant by a wide margin, and the 3GS was the first actually good device they made. That’s all right there in the text, you just have to look with your eyeballs and put the words through the critical thinking part of your brain instead of the emotional reaction part. Even in 2007 it was laughable that you couldn’t connect to WiFi with a purported smart device. Its feature base sucked ass till the 3GS, and now they’re fine; the only reason I don’t use an iPhone is because I prefer auditable FOSS, hence I use an Android device with an AOSP-based ROM and no Gplay Services. If it wasn’t for that, the iPhone would be a fine alternative.
You claimed the iPhone didn’t change the market, but it did.
I don’t think any competitors would have eaten Apple’s lunch if the iPhone launched 6 months later. They may have had more features out of the box, but it took years for anyone else to catch up to the iPhone’s UX and build quality. Features like copy+paste didn’t matter as much as having YouTube anywhere you go on a 3.5" screen and a mobile web browsing experience that wasn’t cancer.
All one needs to do is look at the rapid u-turn Android took in design after the iPhone launched to see how much of an impact it had. Before the iPhone, Android phones were going to look like Blackberries.
I stopped reading at
You need to sharpen your reading comprehension skills
No need for insulting others.
The release of the iPhone and iPod touch was such a special time for me. The jailbreaking scene was just getting started and it started my life long fascination with tinkering with technology.
Same. Cydia app store was a special kind of source of wonder
Refreshing sources will always be permanently engrained in my vision as if I was looking directly into the sun.
The smartphone was a disaster. We shouldn’t be connected to the Internet constantly.
Written from my smartphone.
And not necessarily in good ways. Hardware keyboards, replaceable batteries, extensible memory, analog audio interface, function/multimedia keys, better battery lifespan (not traded away chasing always thinner designs), customizability and diversity in general were important as features and traits sacrificed for no good reason.
Some of us remember one of the first smartphones, the VisorPhone introduced in late 2000. Consisted of a Visor (basically a Palm Pilot knockoff by Handspring) that had a Springboard slot that you could slide a phone attachment into. I have fond memories of using it to bid on an AOL auction while driving down the highway with my ex-wife yelling at me that we were going to be killed…
Truly a product ahead of its time.
Huge props for all the UX improvements they kickstarted. reminisces in Windows Mobile 5
I still miss Windows Mobile 5
And it, thankfully, changed the trajectory of the entire industry. Phones were TERRIBLE before the competition picked up.
The industry was terrible but there were lots of good phones out there. The Samsung BlackJack was a pretty awesome device, and HTC was making some pretty compelling devices for Windows Mobile. Then the BlackBerry, of course, was a great device in a lot of ways too; very functional given the limitations of a hardware keyboard.
