[oblio]

It wasn't behind the first year or so.

It's not about buttons or even copy-paste as weird as that sounds for a techie.

But zooming on a map with your fingers was a game changer. Zooming an imagine with your fingers. Using your fingers to scroll a list, naturally. And lists are probably the most common UI element except for buttons, labels and images. They're for sure the most common complex element.

[zakius]

if it adds some ingenious new features but at the cost of removing some basics it is still behind, that's the whole point of w11 issue

[oblio]

Yeah, but there's a term: "paradigm shift".

It wasn't a "few features" (techie speak), it was a "new way of working" (usually marketing speak, but here it was actually true).

W11 is a few missing features for an existing way of working.

The iPhone had a few missing features for a fundamentally new way of working that was much superior to existing smartphones.

Your complaint was like the handlebars on the new bike being hard to push (which I can workaround by pushing harder, up to a point) while the old bike had square wheels and a chassis meant only for square wheels (which I could not work around).

[zakius]

"new way of working" on iphone is using fork to move soup from your pot to bowl instead of ladle, that simply doesn't work

pinch to zoom doesn't interfere in any way with easy app installation or easy files transfer, they can coexist (and they do, on android), sync simply doesn't work when you want to quickly drop that one specific file and keep moving, sync doesn't work when one device has much bigger storage than the other, sync doesn't work when you want to easily remove files from one device

"paradigm shift" to golden cage is not a good thing, apple intended to take all responsibility from users but at a cost of being unable to do anything efficiently

[oblio]

> "paradigm shift" to golden cage is not a good thing, apple intended to take all responsibility from users but at a cost of being unable to do anything efficiently

The original iPhone didn't have an app store, apps were supposed to be web apps.

If you're going to rewrite history, at least do it well.

I get it, you're a techie, just like me. I use Android, I don't like iOS.

But to deny that for the average person the iPhone was the first usable smartphone is just silly at this point.

[zakius]

how making everything harder made iphone "the first usable smartphone"? that makes no sense

[oblio]

As an example navigating a list directly with my fingers is much, much faster and more convenient than navigating it with arrow keys (physical or on-display ones).

Navigating a 2D space with my fingers, just dragging around or pinching to zoom, is also much, much faster and more convenient faster than than doing the same with arrow keys (again, either physical or on-display ones).

And navigating through the OS and apps, either through lists and 2D spaces (websites, images, maps, videos, etc.) is a lot more common than copying files around on phones. 100:1, probably. Again, some techie/advanced functionality was lost at the start, but the time and frustration savings from those basic yet intuitive features heavily outweighed their loss.

If you don't agree with this, I guess you either haven't tried pre-iPhone smartphones or you just have a very unorthodox opinion and I'm not very keen to continue this conversation.

[8note]

I don't think that's a great description.

It's more like switching from using a spook to move soup to your bowl to eating a sandwich instead