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> If you did have an iTunes account, you were prime for an iPhone purchase. That demographic had a clean experience of buying a mobile device that was super-capable (someone could pretty much out-of-the-box sell you things, without having ask for information - like a cc #). None of the existing devices had this, and it would be a long time until anyone was even close. I don't think this is a point of disconnect, I was highlighting one of the sometimes overlooked (imo) aspects of Apple's longer-term execution that I think made an impact.

I'm not sure I see this as a significant factor. When the iPhone launched, there was no app store. There was no iCloud, no iBooks. The only thing you could buy with the CC# Apple had for you was music, which you were already buying with iTunes.

Maybe having a CC# associated with your account helped Apple later when they launched an app store, but by that time their competitors were doing the same.

> Fair point on the competitors. It's hard to ignore Android as a competitor, and I might disagree with saying that Android wasn't an "original" competitor. But if you mean original as "existing at launch time", I'll happily agree.

Well, the first Android device to ship was the HTC Dream, and that was over a year after the iPhone shipped, so by definition it was not an original competitor. Also, if you had tried a Dream, you'd likely not have thought it was very competitive with the iPhone 3G that was out by that time. (I tried one and was utterly unimpressed.)

> But by that definition, iPhone isn't a competitor to Nokia/Blackberry/Windows, it just happened to destroy them

In the same way that Google wasn't a competitor with Excite and Infoseek and Yahoo Search but just happened to utterly destroy them? I think if your product destroys the market for another product, that other product is the (obviously losing) competition.