[simonh]

>When you say that, you conventiently forget that Apple re-invented the smartphone. It was an proven thing...

That's what it looks like from the outside, but listening to interviews with current and former Apple people that's not at all how it looked from the inside.

When they initially developed the OSX derived core OS, System architecture and UI libraries they weren't thinking about phones at all. It was intended to be a tablet computer OS. It's only fairly late on in development that Jobs pivoted the team to adapt the technology to a phone form factor and tacked on a phone app and cellular radio. It was not at all developed from the starting point of looking at existing phones and going from there. Things like touch swipe to scroll and pinch to zoom were taken straight from contemporary touch UI research, not Palm or any other existing commercial products.

[usrusr]

Interesting what-if: would the iPod touch have been significantly less irrelevant in absence of the iPhone? Could the iPad have been a success without the iPhone paving the way for apps?

I remember the last generations of high end feature phones as quite capable media consumption devices, who knows what could have come from that strain of development had they stayed in the limelight a few years longer.

[simonh]

iPod Touch sales were about one quarter as many as iPhone sales. That came to 100 million units in the first 6 years. Given their lower ASP that's a bit less in revenue but it's still pretty significant.

Sure, without the iPhone they'd probably have sold a lot more, but it's not a very compelling counterfactual. Palm started off selling PDAs, but a smartphone is really just a PDA with a cellular radio and a phone app. By the time the iPhone came out standalone PDAs were already dead.

I don't think it would have made a lot of difference to the iPad. It is what it is. It might have had more of a 'wow' factor rather than the 'just a big iPhone' jibes, but even so it sold, and is still selling in very large numbers. Sure sales are down, but they're still selling about 40 million a year. That's more than Dell's annual PC sales and twice as many as Apple's Mac sales, it's also one sixth of global PC sales. So bear that mind when people say it's a declining business. It's slowly declining from spectacular success.