[dntrkv]

What was so revolutionary about the original iPhone? I don't think anyone could point at any single feature throughout the whole smartphone revolution and claim it was "revolutionary." It was always a combination of features and design decisions that made the phones so easy and pleasant to use. There were many phones before the iPhone that were way more capable, yet nobody talked about them.

Siri, TouchID, FaceID, capacitive touch screen, great cameras, app store, full fledged browser, LTE, etc...

Any of these features by themselves aren't "revolutionary" until you combine it all into a cohesive experience where you look at your phone to unlock it, take a photo that until very recently could only be produced by a DSLR, upload it nearly instantly to a social network within 5 taps, and then receive real time notifications when other people comment on it, all on a device you can hold in one hand.

Sure, you could say this is more evolutionary than revolutionary, but again, I don't believe there was this time where it was revolutionary to the extent you claim. It's always been a slow iterative process.

[ggg9990]

I've always upgraded my iPhone only for the camera and I've never regretted that. There are so many photos I have from a long time ago that I wish were higher quality, so I'm always willing to spend $ to make sure that today's photos are as good as they can be. 90% of the time I don't have my proper camera with me, so the phone is what it is.

Tangentially, after seeing some NFL replay highlights this weekend, I really wish HD high-frame rate cameras had been invented when Barry Sanders (perhaps the most electrifying football player of all time) played.

[photojosh]

Yep, I'm more excited about the 56mm-e camera getting a wider aperture and image stabilisation than I am FaceID in the immediate sense.

But I am interested in what app developers will be able to do with a miniature 3D scanner!

[jochung]

It's as simple as it is overlooked: by building off of OSX, Apple delivered a phone that could actually work with all the files and protocols that people used on desktop. PDF, HTML, MP3/AAC, MP4/H264, ... Not to mention frameworks and APIs that were battle hardened.

It took competitors years to catch up, everyone's forgotten how much of a joke Android was until v4, and how Black Berry only caught up just as they were about to die. Things like low latency audio, large image support, GL, crypto, battery life, ...

[dingoonline]

Very very notable comment.

One of the first remarks from Blackberry's CEO when he first saw an iPhone was; “They’ve put a Mac in this thing,”. https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/excerpt-...

[ASalazarMX]

Before the iPhone, the best smartphones were Symbian or Blackberries. The iPhone was ridiculously better in every aspect.

The market was ripe as people realized they wanted to trade battery life for more powerful devices, after the success of the iPod and the iPaq (not a typo, the PDAs from Compaq/HP).

It was a revolution then, and it happened so fast Nokia and RIM were left in the dust.

[irrational]

The original iPhone? You know, it's been so long I can't really remember. What I do remember is before the iPhone my boss had been trying to get me to get a mobile phone (on the company dime), but I wasn't interested. Then the iPhone was announced. I don't remember what the competition was at that time (probably Blackberry, I don't recall hearing about Android until sometime after the original iPhone came out), but I do recall being excited by a phone for the first time. Mainly it was that it came across as not just a phone, but an actual pocket computer. I did end up letting the company buy me one, and I did feel like it lived up to the hype. For the first time a browser actually worked, and worked well, on a mobile device (the first time I tried zooming in and out on a web page - this was in the days before mobile/responsive websites - blew my mind). Apps started coming out that were actually useful. Google maps actually worked the way I would expect it to work. And so on. I still feel like there was nothing else like it at the time (I'd looked around at other phones at the time, but was very underwhelmed - they mainly seemed to target business/sales/manager type people).

[rhino369]

iPhone was revolutionary because it went full touch screen and went full browser.

The phone as a mini-tablet changed smartphones significantly.

[philsnow]

it wasn't just that it was full touch screen. palm pilots were full "touch" screen (or stylus) long before. it was that the things on the screen behaved fluidly when you manipulated them, without lag, allowing you to use the interface _while forgetting that there was an interface there in the first place_.

all you have to do to remember what interacting with a device before apple provided a good example is to find a fairly shitty, poorly-specced android device [0] and interact with it and get frustrated at the ever-present-and-yet-inconsistent lag.

[0] tablets are a good place to look, partly because they usually have more pixels to push than phones

[ASalazarMX]

"it was that the things on the screen behaved fluidly when you manipulated them, without lag, allowing you to use the interface _while forgetting that there was an interface there in the first place_."

This. Playing solitaire by easily flicking the cards away was magic back then.

[jack6e]

I am not saying the phone is revolutionary, I am saying that Apple and some supporters/reviewers call it revolutionary. See Apple's own page for the X[1]. The use the slogan, "Say hello to the future", and for the FaceID section, literally call it "A revolution in recognition" (emphasis mine). The point that I was drawing out from the review was that all the hoped-for fulfillment of Apple's marketing seems to rely on 3rd-party developers making this new hardware useful, but Apple itself has not really delivered to the hype. It is as if the English colonists in America had written the Declaration and then the Constitution and said, "Hopefully in the future some nations out there will know what to do with democracy and can make it successful, but we'll stick with being slightly more-autonomous subjects of King George for now." Some "revolution" that would have been.

[1] https://www.apple.com/iphone-x/

[samfisher83]

It had multi-touch. Pinch to zoom was pretty awesome the first time I tried it. When you compared the original iphone to Win-Mobile it was night and day. You didn't need a stylus. It was pretty fluid. Its web browser was a full browser. The whole feel was pretty revolutionary compared to the windows ce.