Apple initially entered the market with ROKR phones.
Yup, the ROKR and the RAZR V3i. I remember them both well. In fact, I still have a pair of V3i's in my desk drawer.
Of course, that was arguably Apple just barely dipping its toes into the market. These things were glorified iPod shuffles that really did far more for Motorola than they did for Apple, and there was no way any one of them would have been a replacement for even an iPod nano.
Because, according to prevailing wisdom, mobile phones was a “solved” problem, so the only way you were going to be able to enter that market (that Apple thought might one day make the iPod irrelevant) is through the established companies who knew how the business worked.
I don't know if I'd go so far as to say they were a solved problem, but it was clear that market was stagnant and ripe for disruption. It's just that nobody really knew how to do it. Basically, on one side you had companies like Motorola and Nokia making "feature phones" and then you had the Palm, iPad, Treo, Symbian, and Blackberry devices which were made entirely for techie power users.
Only Apple could have have come up with the idea of making a smartphone for everyone.
I’m pretty sure we could find a LOT of articles from 2007 that say “Apple’s unwise to enter the phone market”. Still, they tried and they were wildly successful.
Many, many, many articles. I was in the press gallery at MWSF 2007 when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. I remember being floored by the device, but I also remember asking myself lots of pointed questions after the legendary Reality Distortion Field wore off. I had been a user of smartphones, and I really pondered how well an on-screen keyboard would work, and how the device would function without the ability to use real apps, and so forth. I was skeptical, but I was happy to be proven wrong, and I quickly came to the realization that the first iPhone wasn't designed to compete with the smartphones of that era (which only made up 5% of the market anyway, and was filled with demanding power users), but rather as an answer to the "feature phones" of the day — the 95% of the cell phone users who were intimidated by iPaqs and BlackBerries.
Many other tech pundits, however, didn't get it at all, and repeatedly compared the iPhone to the other smartphones of the era, focusing on what it couldn't do in comparison to those, rather than on what it could do compared to a Motorola RAZR.
I just don’t believe that “no one can beat the iPhone” (especially when, day after day, Android outsells them).
Exactly. There's always room for market disruption, and Apple has lost much of the vision that created the iPhone in the first place. That doesn't mean it's not still a great product, but it's become evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The problem is, however, that most of us won't recognize the next big thing until it's already happened. Certainly very few of us would have predicted the iPhone back in 2006 — even those who suspected Apple was working on an iPhone had a lot of crazy ideas of what it would look like (and I have a gallery of concept artwork that shows just how wild some of those ideas were).
