On the shoulders of Giants, friend.
The iPhone was actually an offshoot of the internal iPad project, itself a skunkworks project developed under Jobs' very nose. (See: here) They only pivoted because phones were starting to eat into its music player market.
Had the iPod never have taken off and remained a niche collectors item, Apple would have continued to develop the iPad as a tablet. It would likely have enjoyed a direct touchscreen port of MacOS instead of launching as a big iPhone. Apple would have remained as a computer manufacturer and thats it.
Touchscreens on phones were already headed to all-display as evidenced by the siloed development of the LG Prada which launched months before the iPhone. But at the time BBM was king amongst teens and the QWERTY keyboard a necessity for firing them off. The first Android phone prototype aped the Blackberry because it was the leading device in the US at the time and only pivoted because of the iPhone's success.
Had the iPhone never launched on the back of the iPod's success, Android would have kept with the Blackberry chassis and helped to further codify it. We'd likely be looking at a very different phone market, one where RIM and Nokia are probably top of the pile. As services like BBM became more central to the devices, we would likely have a WeChat-like system in the west where everything revolves around IM plugins rather than dedicated Apps.
We can then only speculate as to what the butterfly effects of all this would be. Maybe Silicon Valley slowly dies off as investment pours into Ontario and Helsinki? Maybe Apple remain a niche computer manufacturer whose failing fortunes result in them being acquired by Microsoft? Had IM become the communication standard for teens (and by extension adults) would social media have ever gained a foothold?
We'll never know but its fun to speculate!
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