The iPhone was an incredibly obvious idea to follow the iPod. It’s crazy to me that people try to pretend otherwise.
Comment on Apple users bash new iPhone 15: ‘Innovation died with Steve Jobs’
BorgDrone@lemmy.one 1 year agoDoesn’t mean the iPhone wasn’t revolutionary.
I was (and still am) a mobile app developer at the time. We had every major phone on the market in our office for testing purposes. Literally hundreds of different phones. You name any popular (and less popular) phone on the market at that time and I can guarantee you I’ve used it extensively.
The iPhone was absolutely revolutionary. However, it wasn’t because of a specific piece of technology, it was execution.
Symbian touch-screen phones existed, they were slow and laggy. The UI was nothing like the iPhone, which is built around directly manipulating UI elements with your finger. It seems obvious now, but back then it wasn’t. You could use the touch screen to manipulate a tiny scrollbar.
The closest thing to the iPhone was the LG Prada (KE850), which had a capacitive touch screen and the same scrolling mechanism as iPhone. However, it was small, had a tiny screen and was relatively slow. The software was also very limited, it was basically a feature phone, not a smartphone.
The iPhone was basically the first phone that got all of it right.
rambaroo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
BorgDrone@lemmy.one 1 year ago
LOL no it wasn’t.
Sure, the idea of an apple phone had been out there for a while, but the actual device wasn’t obvious at all. Just look at all the speculation before the event, people making mockups of what they thought the iPhone would look like. Just look at the industry reactions afterwards.
For example, the reaction of blackberry founder Mike Lazaridis
Or the reaction from the people at Google working on Android
It was absolutely revolutionary at the time. The fact that the way it works seems obvious after the fact is testament to how good and revolutionary it actually was. We can’t even imagine things working differently anymore, but it was only obvious after it was revealed.
rambaroo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Wow bro you think I’m going to read all that bullshit? Lol. I’m not done e genius and even I saw the iPhone coming back then. It was totally obvious if you spent any time thinking about the iPod at all.
BorgDrone@lemmy.one 1 year ago
Yeah no. The iPhone looks nothing like an iPod, and no one else predicted anything like the iPhone. But hey, you obviously thought of it.
BobKerman3999@feddit.it 1 year ago
So what you’re saying is that it was an evolution of stuff already on the market. I mean the iPhone didn’t even have apps when it came out
BorgDrone@lemmy.one 1 year ago
It was absolutely a revolution.
The relevant definition of revolution: “a dramatic and wide-reaching change in conditions, attitudes, or operation.”
It didn’t matter if the technology already existed, hardly anyone was using it. Capacitive touchscreens existed, but there was no dramatic change, they were just used in the same way as resistive touchscreens. It was a different way of building a touchscreen, but very much an evolutionary change.
The iPhone was a revolution because it caused a dramatic and almost overnight change in the industry. What techies usually fail to see it that technology doesn’t matter. What matters is how it is used and what it allows people to do.
nxdefiant@startrek.website 1 year ago
Apple coined the term App with the introduction of the App Store. They weren’t called that before the iPhone. That’s how influential the iPhone and its ecosystem were.
I can’t stand Apple’s ecosystem, but pretending like it wasn’t a major shift is just weird.
BobKerman3999@feddit.it 1 year ago
They were called applications or programs… the big innovation was the walled garden store only from which you can install programs. Before that you went to the software developer 's website and downloaded the package