[ender89]

It's more like Steve Jobs was such an uncompromising asshole that he would rather throw a substandard product in the garbage than put out something he considered lesser. He didn't have vision, nothing he "made" was revolutionary at all, and he didn't make anything after the NeXT. Steve Jobs was amazing at two things: getting in on the ground floor (the iphone came out so quickly after the first all touch screen smartphone that no one even remembers the original) and making sure that what they did put out either worked or didn't see the light of day. I remember the early android competitors (notably Motorola's droid) suffering from touchscreens that failed to track accurately (https://www.wired.com/2010/03/touchscreens-smartphones/) compared to the near perfect performance of the iPhone, its the sort of thing that Steve Jobs would have insisted on.

[konart]

>and making sure that what they did put out either worked or didn't see the light of day

Regardless Job's issues, this was the best and most importand part.

Your toaster should work! If the user has to push the trigger twice (only to have it overcooked) - you should either work on your mistakes and release when you are finished, or throw a it in the garbage.

[sanderjd]

What was the original?

My memory of the time was seeing a bunch of cool Microsoft Surface demos, thinking "someone is gonna make a killing putting this on a phone", and the iPhone coming out a few months later. I'll go so far as to say that I think it was the first touch screen phone that was actually manufactured and sold.

But I'll be very curious to be proven wrong!

[Joeri]

The LG prada phone was 6 months earlier than the iphone demo and was all-touch with a capacitive screen. LG claimed apple ripped off their design, but I think it’s more a case of hardware evolving to the point this became possible and both companies implementing, but LG releasing a less ambitious product sooner.

[sanderjd]

I see now that we've been talking about "touch screens" in this thread, but I've been thinking of that as meaning the multi-touch screens we're all so familiar with now (and of which the Microsoft Surface was the first demo I saw). It looks like the Prada had a capacitive screen, but not multi-touch. Maybe multi-touch was the thing, which is why the Prada was forgotten? Maybe not, maybe the iPhone just won by marketing and deals with carriers. Beats me.

In any case, I'm quibbling, I didn't know about the Prada before you mentioned it, which makes your point. Thanks for the pointer!

[sah2ed]

> What was the original?

Here's a wikipedia link for the curious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

[cptskippy]

> He didn't have vision, nothing he "made" was revolutionary at all, and he didn't make anything after the NeXT.

Maybe vision is the wrong word. You're right that he wasn't imagining the future most of the time. What he did have was a degree of objectivity and restraint. He wasn't blinded by the "wow" factor of a new technology and could objectively weight it's merits. Where as most tech companies try to cram the latest and greatest technology into their products to have an impressive bullet list to show around, he held back until he felt the technology was ready.

[Brian_K_White]

I had a full touch screen, color, icon grid of 3rd party apps, internet enabled, smart phone in 2001.

Samsung SPH-i300

I had multiple web browsers, email, irc client, telnet and ssh clients, and an open marketplace of thousands of 3rd party apps for every oddball purpose, like I had a resistor color decoder, netmask calculator, etc.

2001.

iphone came out in 2007, and had no 3rd party apps.

[thinkythought]

I'm with popsiclepete. I had a long string of "smart" devices before the iphone and they were, unilaterally, garbage. Even the ones with great hardware(looking at the treo 600 series here especially) had awful software and bad battery life.

I bought the very first color palm pilot and was first-in a lot of tech. All this stuff was really, really clunky to use and just generally bad. I couldn't hand it to someone else and expect them to figure out how to use it without being shown.

Also, styluses were terrible except for corner-case inputs. The fact that there's essentially only one mainstream brand making a main-line phone with them goes to show this was true.

I agree it was a flub the iphone didn't launch with apps, but i honestly think people needed a year to get used to the interface concept and a lot of complete garbage would have come out of people trying to get first mover on the market(and it DID, even a year later, absolute shovelware)

People really shouldn't be romanticizing pocketpc, or even palmOS. The first truly good mobile OS palm put out was WebOS, and it took microsoft until windows mobile 7... both after the iphone.

[PopsiclePete]

I also was a "power user" with some Nokia/Symbian bullshit that had "thousands of apps" and it was absolute garbage compared to my first iPhone. For a normal person.

Let's stop romanticizing the cell phone market pre-Apple/Android - there's a reason the rest of them folded and effectively died or went into obscurity within a few years.

[EpicEng]

You forget to mention that it was utter garbage in comparison.

[cptskippy]

It was also 6 years old when the iPhone came out. Most 6 year old devices are utter garbage compared to their contemporaries.

[muddi900]

Steve Jobs was responsible for the original Macintosh, the device that constantly over-heated and had the same repairability problems then as these Mac Book Pros.

I know Jobs is Silicon Valley Jesus, but he did not walk on water.