Apple iPhone History Revisited Ping!
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Posted on 01/10/2015 6:52:10 PM PST by Swordmaker
“Eight years ago, on January 9, 2007 to be exact, the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to introduce the first iPhone.
“Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone,” Jobs proclaimed.
Jobs wasn’t overstating the impact of his announcement. The iPhone, like the Mac and iPod, redefined the category. It was the world’s first modern smartphone and it became the template for wannabes the world over. The smartphone revolution started by the iPhone has put a powerful computer into the hands of billions of people worldwide.
Steve Jobs’ iPhone unveiling in January 2007 is one of the most important milestones in computing history.
MacDailyNews Take: There are a lot of smartphones on the market today, but only one company makes brilliant phones.
Steve Jobs’ iPhone unveiling starts around 21:10:
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One comment on the original article’s thread mentioned how struck he was about how few people in the audience were videoing the presentation as Steve Jobs was speaking or even how few glowing screens there were. . . and how that has changed in just 8 years due to what he was announcing!
The breakthrough wasn’t the gear, which all works and is pretty slick. The genius is the iTunes Store and the App Store. With immediate gratification, who can resist a $1 song or a $5 app?
Back in 2007, much ado was still being made about desktop computer marketshare and how Apple only had a tiny fraction of the personal computer market. Windows-based PCs had about a 96% share of the personal computer market and Apple could never hope to be a major player in that arena again.
But with the iPhone, Apple found a way to put computers in our pockets. Sometimes it's easy to forget that the iPhone makes telephone calls because we are so busy checking our email on it, sending chat and text messages, opening spreadsheets and documents, playing games on it, watching videos, playing music and taking pictures with it, etc.
So basically the iPhone was like a Trojan Horse for the Microsoft-dominated computer industry. Within just a few years, Apple would be on equal terms with Microsoft with respect to computer market share (being that iPhones and later iPads are computers).
It's still a great phone, but now making and receiving phone calls is just another of the thousands of other things you can do with it.
Oh, how I long for those bygone days!
i can agree with that thinking. Steve Jobs was wrong to not allow downloading apps onto the iPhone directly and he admitted as much. However, the multi-touch interface, dropping the keyboard, and must of the buttons on a phone were major changes in thinking on phones. The limiting of the iPhone to WebApps. They worked, somewhat. . . but not as well as native apps on the iPhone 3G and later models would work later. Here is a graphic that really demonstrates the sea change that occurred with Steve's keynote:
Now, if only we can get iPhone users to hold them in landscape mode when shooting videos!
No kidding. I get tired of holding my head sideways to watch Youtube videos shot on one.
The CEO of Palm (of PDA fame) put his foot in big time:
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” Ed Colligan (Palm) apparently laughed about with John Markoff last Thursday morning. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
NAH! We are just going to have to remount our TVs and Movie screens in portrait mode! LOL! I ALWAYS take my videos in landscape mode. Really . . . honest. . . well, almost always. . . most of the time. . . usually. . . except when the cat is doing something really funny and I have to grab it quick. . . or . . . well. . .
Well, I’m a Mac guy, but not a phone guy. I had to have a beeper, then a phone, for my job of 30 years as the operator of a public utility. When J retired last January, I took my phone into the back 40, and shot it with my Redhawk 44 mag. Very satisfying!
The genius was the user interface. When it first came out, I sort of laughed... who is going to browse the web on such a tiny screen.
After a few months I went into an apple store out of curiosity and tried it out. With the touch screen and the intuitive zooms and scrolls you could actually surf the web! I was sold and got a 3G when it came out and loved it.
But I still wished for a larger screen. When Samsung came out with the Galaxies I switched and still have that galaxy and it works great.
But all the credit goes to Steve Jobs - he was a true genius. He understood what people wanted more than the people themselves. His uncompromising stand on aesthetics and ease of use was unsurpassed.
Yes, Steve Jobs knew what the public wanted before they knew they would want it.
the After phones look sooo ordinary compared to the before phones.
It still hasn’t changed my world.
The genius is Apple's SHARE of the money from $1 or $5 purchases for content they did not create.
A direct quote from Steve Jobs...
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
— BusinessWeek, May 25 1998
NAH! We are just going to have to remount our TVs and Movie screens in portrait mode!
This is why arcade video games of the 1980s never looked the same at home on a tv (regardless of pixel resolution).
In the arcades the picture tubes were vertical and at home they were horizontal. Changes the whole playing field.
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