[drewcrawford]

> Well, first of all, in 2008 there _was_ no way to make a $500 computer that wasn't a piece of junk.

In the very tautological sense that it wasn't "possible" until Apple did it, yes. In the sense that we've made some great discovery which has somehow encheapened the silicon, no. It's hard to do because design is hard, not because the tech wasn't there (although there have certainly been tech improvements).

> cell phone screens were mostly something like 240x360 at most

The iPhone just about doubles the pixels for (on many devices) approximately the same screen area. Is it better? Yes. Is it revolutionary? Hardly. And anyway, Jobs' purported objection was not to the resolution but to the physical size.

[CamperBob]

Remember how badly touchscreens sucked before the advent of capacitive multitouch. Until it became practical to build tablet-sized iPhone screens, it simply was not practical to build a decent tablet, period.