[Brendinooo]

I spent too long tracking down a figure and didn't come up with anything definitive, but

> smart phones / camera phones were a valid market

feels revisionist. Something like 70% of Americans had a feature phone in 2007 but smartphone market share was probably in the single digits before the iPhone launched. I had a Palm m100 back in the day; PDAs and early smartphones weren't all that great, and it wasn't obvious to laymen that the hardware and software would scale down enough and be combined with a compelling enough interaction model to create something useful for the masses.

You're right that the iPhone demo had some killer features apparent. Jobs had three tentpoles: better iPod, a phone, a good internet machine. Cook mimicked this for the Watch keynote: a timepiece, a new way to communicate, a health and fitness device. But for the latter, it wasn't apparent just how much the health and fitness stuff would become a part of the story, nor was it apparent that people ended up liking the Watch for keeping their phone out of their hands or being able to accessorize.

I don't think the Vision Pro reveal was as effective, but the tentpoles seem to be immersive media consumption (with movies and photos as a 1a and 1b), monitor replacement, and better FaceTime meetings. The last one seems particularly suspect, but the first two are pretty strong.

[chrisco255]

>> smart phones / camera phones were a valid market

> feels revisionist.

Not revisionist. I worked in mobile phone retail from 2002-2007. There were popular, successful camera phones and smart phones even then. However, in the early 2000s, the U.S. wireless market was much slower to deploy 3G than Japan and many European markets.

There were a number of powerful handsets that couldn't even be practically offered in the U.S. as a result of the splintered TDMA/CDMA/GSM protocols and the dizzying array of licensing deals between regional carriers who owned significant amounts of spectrum at the time, making data and roaming plans very expensive and impractical for most retail users. Smart phone adoption was much broader in markets that had full 3G support earlier on.

In 2004, NBC covered the Japanese mobile market, mentioning: "The Japanese use cell phones to surf the net, watch TV, navigate city streets with built-in GPS, download music, take and transmit home movies, get e-coupons, pay bills, play games, and even program karaoke machines." By 2004, 70 million Japanese had internet access on their phones, a threefold increase from 2000 [3].

[1] https://gizmodo.com/i-miss-my-japanese-flip-phone-1843733494 [2] http://wirelesswatch.jp/2006/12/29/japans-mobile-year-in-rev... [3] "In Japan, a wireless vision of future for U.S" (2004) https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna4306834

[Brendinooo]

Okay, you're making a good enough case that the phone was a more proven segment in 2007 than VR is in 2023. I could nitpick some details (most notably that "[t]here were popular, successful camera phones and smart phones even then" would probably have been on a scale similar to what Apple is hoping to accomplish with the Vision launch) but that NBC News article is a great citation.

My interest in this vein of discussion is to make sure people realize just how game-changing the iPhone was; so much of what it accomplished looks obvious and inevitable in hindsight but really was new and magical in that keynote.

Anyways, I think that if the Vision succeeds it'll take a path more like the Watch:

- Expectations were sky high. People talked about how the iPhone cannibalized the iPod and were speculating how a watch might do the same, while noting that the iPhone was one of the most successful products of all time (in terms of revenue) and it was going to be a tough act to follow, particularly as the first big Tim Cook launch.

- There wasn't a super obvious smartwatch market either. Everyone knew that health and fitness was a reason to get a Fitbit or Garmin but they were either specialized for limited use or cheap-looking.

Apple shipped, figured out how people were using it, and iterated. The biggest difference is that their first-gen price was pretty reasonable, so it was easier to buy one impulsively. That won't be the case with Vision.

[chrisco255]

Yeah, I will reserve judgment for something like the 3rd edition. Just commenting that yeah, the killer use case is much less obvious.