[saagarjha]

Surely you remember the original iPhone announcement: being able to call people was only a very minor point in that presentation even then. I would bet money that the iPhone 12 announcement will not have anybody demonstrating the phone capabilities at all.

[verisimilidude]

You should go back and rewatch that original iPhone announcement. Phone calls were a major highlight. They did a live, on-stage conference call between Jobs, Ive, and Schiller. Jobs phoned in the infamous thousand latte order to Starbucks. Features like Visual Voicemail were heavily promoted.

[saagarjha]

I brought it up precisely for that phone call. You must remember what prompted it, right? Jobs didn’t go into his phone book and dial the number–he looked it up from maps. And that is precisely how people use iPhone today: they do a bunch of other things and also call sometimes. To be honest, I take more phone calls from my Mac than my iPhone.

[verisimilidude]

Well, yeah. The presentation showed emergent new ways to place calls. Not sure how this contradicts the original point that iPhone was an evolution of the cell phone.

[sjwright]

And the second-most important feature was that it played music stored locally on device.

[czzr]

It’s a phone. An iPod. A revolutionary internet communicator.

A phone. An iPod. A revolutionary internet communicator.

Are you getting it?

[saagarjha]

I am. You can see that the phone part must be at least less than a third of the device ;)