| HN Mirror

The original iPod was a pretty flawed product as well. The price point was very high and the storage was a bit less than it really needed and the scrollwheel was fragile. I'd say Apple didn't get it right until the third generation.

It's hard to overstate just how flawed the original iPhone was. You were locked into AT&T, you had to effectively buy the phone outright AND pay the subsidy (which never went away, no matter how long you owned the phone). The radio in the phone was obsolete before it was even announced (no 3G support at all). There were zero apps nor any mechanism to add apps to the phone, Jobs tried to sell the "just use webapps!" but the phone was really not powerful enough nor were web technologies well baked enough to make that a reality. The battery life was less than amazing and the entire phone was somewhat slow.

However, at the same time the iPhone completely disrupted the phone OS market. It focused heavily on the web browser just as the technology was finally there to put a mostly full featured web browser in a phone. Turns out that going to a webpage and having it render mostly correct was more important than shitty castrated apps hamstrung by artificial limitations on Symbian phones. The built-in apps covered most of the bases too, so the lack of apps wasn't a disaster. Mostly however it was the interface. People were sick and tired of godawful phone UIs and nobody else in the market was the least bit interested in improving it. The world revolutionary gets tossed around a lot in tech circles, but the iPhone UI was truly revolutionary. It was a bloody coup that left Symbian buried in a shallow grave out back and flat glass bricks sitting on the throne.

Apple's strategic advantage is that they have the cash and corporate willpower to iterate the design until it meets the market need.