Sixteen years ago this week, Steve Jobs introduced Apple’s iPhone to a very mixed reception. Yet, in retrospect, that day in January 2007 can be seen as a defining moment in the history of technology.
The smartphone is now so ubiquitous, so “normal” yet so indispensable, that it is difficult to imagine life without it. In one small device, the smartphone incorporates all the many gadgets, from “personal digital assistants” to scanners, to cameras, to fax machines, to landline telephones, to music players, radios, video players that filled our houses and our offices prior to 2007.
Naysayers — how wrong can they be?
Apple’s iPhone was a remarkable achievement by any standards. But it didn’t show its true potential from the beginning. The usual naysayers offered their reasons why it would never succeed. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer was in the vanguard:
There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share,” Ballmer said in the wake of the iPhone’s unveiling. “No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get
But the best and most misguided putdown rests with one-time PC guru, John C. Dvorak:
Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone… The problem here is that while Apple can play the fashion game as well as any company, there is no evidence that it can play it fast enough. These phones go in and out of style so fast that unless Apple has half a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately successful, will be passé within 3 months…What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it’s smart it will call the iPhone a ‘reference design’ and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures.
If you want a belly laugh, read a full review of the misjudgements of the iPhone here at BGR.
Not all pundits were as wrong as this. Even five years before the launch of the iPhone, one writer predicted almost everything. Writing for MacDailyNews in December 2002, Steve Jack made the case for what he called “The Device”:
This device, able to be made today with current technology, would easily be “The Device.” Running Mac OS X or a mobile variant, it would allow the user to communicate via text, audio, and video. It would snap digital photos and organize them, do email, and browse the web. It would sync automatically with your desktop or portable Mac. It would run Sherlock for web services. With its large hard drive inside, and its included FireWire port, it would absorb the iPod by playing AAC / MP3 audio and interface with iTunes, but it would also play feature-length MPEG-4 movies, too, in full color. It would have the AM/FM tuner that iPod lacks, too. It would incorporate Inkwell for jotting down notes, interfacing with the device or sketching ideas. It would have built-in Bluetooth, which would allow for, among other things, short-range personal broadcasts; your own radio/TV station and any number of websites in your pocket. McDonald’s Drive Thru’s would accept payments via Bluetooth from “The Device.” And, of course, it would have the basics like any PDA; your date book, to do list, calculator, etc. I figure a form factor about the size or a Newton or a bit smaller would do the trick.
— Steve Jack
He went on to wonder if Apple was close to building such a paragon:
I’ll tell you one thing, if Apple can produce it, they’ll really change everything this time, and they’ll never be able to make enough. Nearly everyone would have an Apple device in their pocket that worked best (or only) with a Macintosh computer. Would you buy one for, say, $799? I would.
Steve’s prescient comments accurately predicted the revolutionary effect of the iPhone on Apple’s fortunes. If it was the iPod that turned the geeky, nerdy Mac into a mainstream device, it was the iPhone that made Apple as we know it today. Without that one stroke of genius, it is quite possible that Apple would no longer exist as a company.
Here is Apple’s press release from January 9, 2007:
What do you say? Is the world a better place for the invention of the iPhone and its non-Apple siblings? Were we better off with all those dedicated devices on our desks?
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I like the product, but not the company. But they would be in good company with all of the other IT majors on the latter score. Make friends with Mammon etc. It is bemusing to read people here saying ” I never touch the stuff” while posting their online comments here. These phones are just like here, but they are in your pocket. There are plus and minus points about the phones just like in the Mammon parable, of course. We have had paradigm shift without the necessary teaching and the learning and must suffer the consequences of that, but we can also reap the advantages. By now we have had time to adapt to a changed world and to learn how to control the technology and not to let it control us. As with everything else, a sense of proportion helps.
William
We cannot control technology when we don’t even know what it is doing. Much of the spying and selling information Big Tech does routinely, we only know about because of whistleblowers.
But your post has reached me and that is all we need to know, not how it got to me. I agree that regulation of the tech majors has been poor and belated, but maybe they would not be tech majors if the regulation had been in place at the time they started. I’m speaking now as a former communications regulator. There are too many other details that I could go into, so I will leave it at that.
William
Well, when I said “we don’t even know what it is doing”, I was not referring to the nuts and bolts (figuratively) of how technology operates. Maybe I should have said What it is doing to us.
“It is difficult to imagine life without it”
For me, it’s easy though, to remember life without it! In all honesty, I liked it better. People were not staring at screens all day and everyday, and you could actually make eye contact and (gasp) start up a conversation.
I can also well remember life without the iPhone and, did that matter, without a mobile communications device of any sort. Having to find a parking spot on the way home to call in and say you’d be late is something no one considers three days. On balance, I prefer to be connected, whatever the disadvantages, which I understand as do you.
Nowadays perhaps the conversation starter for the like of us, is someone wondering why we are still using those “antiquated” actual cameras.
I can remember getting onto a flight from San Francisco back home to Chicago and being perfectly happy with my BlackBerry.
I sat next to someone who had just bought an iPhone that day and we talked about what made it different from the Blackberry. The next day I ordered an iPhone.
Didnt Blackberry die off the back of the IPhone’s rise to success, purely because it took them to long to remove the physical keyboard strapped to the bottom of the device.
Indeed. And lack of a keyboard was one of the major objections to the iPhone when it was launched. Up to then, almost all devices had relied on a physical keyboard and it was difficult to imagine not having one. I delayed buying the iPhone until the following 3G model largely for that reason.
Rightly said: it certainly has changed life, and along wit that, opened new opportunities — Twitter, Facebook, TikTok would’t exist without these devices. A very mixed blessing (I don’t actually consider these mixed, or even a blessing).
In my case, “Your 3G phone is no longer supported. You must buy a new phone that supports 4G”
“This offer is for those who have a digital coupon on their smartphone.”
“ Two-factor authorization requires a smart phone. You can no longer sell on this auction site”
My failure: I didn’t include an expensive smartphone in my retirement budget.
I remember my son and I queuing up to get one on the day they arrived in the UK. . . .
Among so many prophets, no one predicted the arrival of the “rectangles”, wherever you go whatever you do. People is happy now to be connected all time. With friends, with google. I think 🤔 that’s rather good. Just in case I used it as less as possible all this time
Good in some ways. Connections with family and friends, for sure.
Spied on by governments and Big Tech, not so much.
The point is today it seems there’s no technology in it. It’s like having a lighter or a torch in your pocket; as if working by itself. And all you mention seems forgotten by the enthusiasm of having “everything” in your pocket, while they are the ones having you “everything” into theirs
Bringing too a perhaps also controversial revolution of image culture
Yes, smart phones are wonderful.
No, I don’t want one.
When they finally stop making basic “flip” phones, I will hopefully be retired and will go back to a land line. Anyone wanting to speak to me will have to wait until I am home.
I’m right with you there. I bought one five years ago and I keep hoping it will die.