Sorry, I'm forgetting nothing. You just don't know what you're talking about. Comparing processors based on clock speed gets you nothing worthwhile or dispositive. It's meaningless unless you are comparing Apples to Apples, i.e. running the same processor and OS.
However, you are technically wrong. The PPC-6700 Apache was equipped with an Intel 416Mhz processor. The original iPhone came with an ARM processor from Samsung which clocked to 640MHz, but Apple under clocked it to 412MHz for power and video reproduction reasons. The difference is less than 1% but you have to realize the architecture differences to understand the memory access on the iPhone was far faster so apps ran much faster, especially anything that required data retrieval. . . or moving pixels around a screen. . . which the iPhone excelled at because it came not only with a data processor, it also came with a PowerVR MBX Lite 3D GPU to handle those graphics, something your PPC-6700 did not bother to worry about, handling the graphics with the Intel data processor!
You forget to mention that there was an additional 64MBs of SDRAM and 128MBs of user accessible and easily modifiable ROM. The screen was approximately 1/2 inch smaller than the massive 3.5” screen on the iPhone. But you seem to forget that a large portion of the iPhone’s screen was used by the onscreen keypad when actually using it to input data.
So what if there was a measly additional SLOW storage RAM? It wasn't usable for applications except for storage. . . because it was SLOW and had to be paged in and out. It was treated as a drive. So WHAT if the user had to play around with ROMs. Users, for the most part, really don't want to fiddle around with their phones, they want to USE them.
But you seem to forget that a large portion of the iPhone’s screen was used by the onscreen keypad when actually using it to input data.
Your PPC-6700 had an off-the-shelf 3" screen with resolution of 240 X 320 pathetic for displaying photos or videos. . . and very few colors. The iPhone had 320 X 480, twice the resolution and 262 thousand colors.
The iPhone's keyboard only took up half the screen and was quite usable, and it did not REQUIRE the use of a losable stylus as the PPC-6700 did, without which the screen would be useless, which could only input ONE character sequentially. . . and then require the stylus to navigate to the next key before the next character could be slowly input if the on-screen keyboard was invoked. . . and reviews of the PPC-6700 complain that it frequently popped up unwanted even when users were typing on the chiclet keyboard and then had to be dismissed before continuing their typing.
You call the camera in the iPhone "mediocre", but it had a far better camera with 2 megapixels and glass lenses than the plastic lensed 1 Megapixel camera in your vaunted PPC-6700, which lacked the memory to take very many photos at all.
You complain about the price of the iPhone, yet you ignore the fact that your 6700 with its limited features originally retailed for a whopping $629—$30 more than the original $599 the 8GB iPhone sold for and certainly more than the $499 the 4GB iPhone sold for. So much for your specious iPhone pricing arguments. Don't bother to bring them up again. (The PPC-6700 was later discounted to $399 as was the 8GB iPhone.)
But it was no revolutionary development.
If the iPhone was not revolutionary, fireman15, just WHERE are the phone makers that preceded it that are still on the market today? Where are the Nokia, Microsoft, RIM Blackberry, Motorola, Ericsson, and dozens of other competing phones? If they were so entrenched and so successful, where are they now? Why are the phones that are competitive to the iPhone now essentially copies of the iPhone design?
You can't answer any of those questions truthfully because you would have to admit your argument is lost.
You are the one who keeps making meaningless comparisons. I made a meaningful comparison many years ago when I compared the features of my two year old smart phone with a friend’s iPhone soon after it was released. It would not do what I needed a smart phone to do at that time. That is the only kind of comparison that truly matters... will the device do what you need it to do.
Most importantly I needed a phone that gave me a high speed internet connection to tether to my laptop to at a reasonable price when I was at work and away from home. Everything else was actually secondary to that need.
The phone that I had also had far more other functions and features than the original iPhone did. A couple of examples... it would play a wide variety of both video and music files and gave me many choices of available programs. It worked with my Bluetooth GPS and a variety of moving map software was available.
The first iPhone had very limited music and video options and would not work with any GPS devices that I am aware of. 3rd party software for the first iPhone was all but non-existent. There were many thousands of programs and applications available for windows smart phones by the time the iPhone was first released.
The device I owned had plenty of processing power, ram, rom and storage for everything that I used it for. I used to joke that it was more powerful than the IBM Pentium laptop that I had been using for several years when I got the phone. And the specs were actually better... but it was a laptop and the phone was a phone.
When I was in school pursuing an engineering degree I had a work study job working in the computer lab. I helped students mostly with programming, Word Perfect 5.1, Lotus 123 release 2 with its associated macro language, and some other productivity programs on PCs. These were truly revolutionary programs that gave PC users nearly the same capabilities that previously were available only to businesses with very expensive computer systems and personnel. I also maintained the computers and the menu system we had set up in DOS.
The computers had 360K 5 1/4” floppy disc drives and 10 MB hard drives with CGA monitors. They ran at 8 MHZ and had 640 KB of RAM. We were using MSDOS; Windows did not exist at that time. But of course users could still accomplish more productive work with them than with any tiny phone that came along 20 years later.
Software was far more efficient when the hardware was much more limited. Your condescending quoting of specs is almost completely meaningless. It just does not matter... it is what you can accomplish with a tool that matters. The first iPhone was never meant to be a serious productivity tool. It was very limited and users had very few options outside of the applications that Apple included with it.
The first iPhones allowed one to take mediocre digital pictures that the phones of that time period were capable of. It allowed one to listen to the music and video formats that Apple allowed. It of course worked as a phone and could send and receive textual messages and had very limited internet capabilities on the road because of its lack of high speed cellular data.
There was nothing revolutionary about the first iPhone other than Apple’s successful Ad campaign and the number of consumers who wanted a cool toy with very limited potential. How much foresight does it really take to specify a slightly larger screen with a resolution that was higher than phones that came out two years earlier? How much foresight does it take to specify that it be narrower by leaving off a slide out keyboard? How much foresight does it take to specify that it have slightly better specs than the phones that came before it? And this hyping up its use of an input device that others thought of and developed first? It was not revolutionary... it did not even do as much as many other devices that came before it.
Because of its success it did have an effect on cell phone designers from that time period. Just like a successful clothing designer affects women’s fashion. Just like a successful car design affects other car designers.
Apple insisting that everyone else is copying Apple is a game that they have played from the beginning. It is called “projection”... accusing others of doing what you are doing. Look at the Samsung Gear Watch for one of the more recent examples. The Samsung Gear II watch that I own does basically everything that an Apple watch does only it came out years before. Maybe Samsung should be suing Apple for stealing its ideas.
Apple has always been an aggressive and litigious marketing company, not a true technology leader. They have sued the true innovators repeatedly. Apple has an army of lawyers who are even better at rewriting history than you are. They stick to the three C’s... and I am not talking about Compliance, Communication and Compassion. I am talking about “If you can’t convince them, confuse them; If you can’t confuse them, corrupt them”.