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Steve Jobs Once Tossed the Original iPhone Across a Room to Impress Journalists
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Steve was a visionary, but all visionaries have their era.. If Steve was still here you probably wouldn't have the Watch, the Apple pencil, mouse feature in iPads, thicker phones with a decent battery etc..
At the time I had no interest in Apple products at all. Owned zero. Had no idea about this event. Only knew about it through some websites I frequented like Tom's Hardware etc and I remember reading comments under the news 99.9% was negative. Extremely.
- There's no 3G
- There's no keyboard
- There's no apps
So this piqued my interest so I searched and found the Macworld video just to had a laugh.. and I was blown away! I was thinking.. what kind of idiots I was associated with? They couldn't see the potential of THIS PHONE!
Little by little I sold or got rid of my PC, Palm, and Windows phone to get Apple products.
- There's no 3G
- There's no keyboard
- There's no apps
So this piqued my interest so I searched and found the Macworld video just to had a laugh.. and I was blown away! I was thinking.. what kind of idiots I was associated with? They couldn't see the potential of THIS PHONE!
Little by little I sold or got rid of my PC, Palm, and Windows phone to get Apple products.
It’s the same reason why people get ceramic coating on their cars. It doesn’t stop everything but for the abuse a phone would receive it does quite a bit.
I figure it’s a good time to re-watch the 2005 Stanford commencement speech. It’s one of the most remarkable and inspirational speeches I’ve ever heard. “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” RIP Steve.
Actually, yeah. I mean if someone is composing a main page post, it should at least be as accurate as possible. It's like when I see an article about the latest Tesla Model S updates, and they show a stock pic of a pre-2016 Tesla with the black oval bumper insert. I think "really?" It's not like a pic of the actual item of interest is hard to find.Does it really matter?
Wrong URL
Apple Leadership - Tim Cook
Tim Cook is Apple’s CEO and a member of Apple’s executive leadership team. Learn more about Tim.
www.apple.com
Remember how often it was proclaimed that the iPhone needed a TV tuner because so many Japanese phones had them? Or at minimum a radio tuner? And how without them the Japanese just would never buy it…
Did you mean the original iPhone? It has glass. It was a last minute change when Jobs was annoyed that the plastic screen got scratches from his keys. Foxconn had to wakeup their workers at night to replace the already produced iPhones' screens.
It's not about the capabilities, it's about the human interface. Same reason iPhones have also always been better than technically more capable Android competitors.
Cause most of us don't care about Apple maximizing profits, we care about them making great new products.
Yea it did and in the 6 months in between launch they changed it to glass
This doesn’t require conjecture. There are numerous drop tests you can go find for the new iPhones 13. Pretty sure they have the one of the best durability and drop performance of any previous iPhone design. They have come a LONG way since the original iPhone. The original iPhone, even with a plastic screen, was not invincible and does seem like a pretty ballsy move by Jobs to chuck it in a room full of skeptical journalists wondering about its durability.
Funny that I never owned a smart phone. Although I do own an iPad Pro. It does everything an iphone does, except making a real phone call.
For the phone, I just got a flip phone. Really cheap. 20 bucks for the device and 20 bucks every 3 months to keep the service running. Yeach, it can’t do YouTube, web browsing, facetime or GPS. But for just making phone calls and texting, it’s is good enough for me.
I still watch every keynote but the sheer excitement for the Jobs presentations just show how great a salesman he was.
Stay hungry, stay foolish
Like I said, the multi-touch put it incrementally above its peers, but that only set it up to have better pan and zoom on the web and gave it more screen real estate than a physical keyboard would allow.
Opening it up to devs as a platform made it what it is.
I was going to make a different point, but THIS is actually the way more interesting story. It's actually hard not to understate just how far behind Japan not only the US but the entire WORLD was when it came to mobile phones/communications when the iPhone was introduced in 2007. Phones that were more mobile personal computers with advanced email & messaging? Check. 3G (which the iPhone wouldn't get for another year)? Check. Mobile music player, rudimentary video playback and even TV tuning, check. Competent (for a phone) Cameras (3MP+)? Check. Mobile Payments (which wouldn't come to iPhone/see widespread US adoption until 2014!)? Check. Mobile gaming? Check. Push notifications for email/messaging? Check. Coming to Japan (from the US) in the early - mid aughts was literally like being transported into an alternate future of mobile phone technology.
What's even more astonishing is that Apple, initially missing so many features these phones had, managed to absolutely crush the domestic phone market in Japan after just a few short years, and to this day holds majority marketshare here (52.6% in 2020 according to IDC), while most Japanese phone manufacturers now don't even crack double digits in their home market.
The magnitude of the failure by Japanese companies to translate their technological leadership into marketshare overseas, or even the ability to maintain market supremacy at home was and still a striking/colossal failure of imagination/business management on their part, and a testament to just how amazing Apple truly was under Steve.
While I don't completely disagree with this, I think it disregards the importance of just how revolutionary the software stack/multitouch interface were at the time. Looking at the Japanese market, Apple demonstrated that you can have all the features in the world, but if you're UI/software stack is poor, you're likely to have the rug pulled out by a competitor that can create a device people actually want to use. Steve may have initially been wrong about a few things (the App Store most prominently,) but he got the most important parts of the initial release right and was willing to have his mind changed on the rest. Oh, and he was also a master salesman, the reality distortion field was real.
I miss Steve's Apple. It wasn't perfect but the vision, passion, simplicity, and salesmanship Steve brought to/enabled at Apple (along with his ability to balance conflicting personalities and not let any of them dominate too heavily) is something I really hope Apple can regain/refocus on at some point. The Apple of today may be profitable, but I doubt it could pull off the kind of coup Steve's Apple did on the Japanese phone manufacturers...[/QUOTE]
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I rewatched the iPhone 2G announcement from 2007 which in my opinion is the most iconic moment in tech history, when you consider how we have changed from conventional laptops and PCs to being able to carry a computer around with us in our pocket. That announcement was the beginning of that era. When I rewatched it, Steve convinced me to change the ringtone on my iPhone to Marimba, such an iconic ringtone. RIP Steve, you are greatly missed.