[diebeforei485]

The first gen iPhone had a much better UX than other phones, so missing a few features like copy and paste was palatable.

I do think future generations of AVP will do well. Iterating and applying learnings and customer feedback will make this a good product.

[enos_feedler]

You could say that about literally any product. The most important factor that will determine success is the starting point. Initial conditions matter. I actually believe this a developer tool from start to finish. It will end of life a lot quicker than we expect. The real product is going to be lightweight glasses we wear all day. But when? How many iterations of the AVP to meet the developer needs for seeding this future product that might be 10+ years away?

[diebeforei485]

> The most important factor that will determine success is the starting point. Initial conditions matter.

So, I don't know if I agree with this considering Apple has such a large cash cushion. They can easily make missteps the first few generations until they figure it out.

Early Apple Watches focused on luxury and personal communication with loved ones. But later iterations de-emphasized all that and pivoted to being a health and fitness band and some subset of iPhone features like cellular phone calls and texts (instead of the weird heartbeat sharing stuff we saw at launch of the 1st gen device)

[8note]

The iPhone also came with a great data deal for the time, as I recall.

[vel0city]

Not really. I had a cheaper unlimited AT&T unlimited data plan than the original iPhone data plan, and that included 3G data!

The trick was to just buy the smartphone outside of the plan. Then you get unlimited data at half the price. I'd pull gigs of data a month on my "dumbphone".

[ActorNightly]

iphone by far did not have a better UX. It looked nice, but it had no more functionality than other devices at the time.

In general, UX design is the argument people used to (and still do sometimes) run to "prove" that the device was better when it was clearly not. Fancy icons dont make a good UX, functionality does. You dont say copy and paste is good UX, you say its a feature.

[aniforprez]

Functionality does not make good UX. Good UX makes good UX

Not sure how people don't remember what a revelation the capacitive screen was. It was miles better than most Nokia phones that mostly used resistive screens (not saying that Apple invented capacitive screens but they most certainly made it popular) and the navigation with the simple home button and everything else being instant feedback with the buttons on the screen was better than anything else on the market from what I remember. The keyboard especially was incredible with that light tapping sound and instant keystrokes appearing. While it wasn't functionally better than most phones (famously less functional than a Blackberry), it was very much the leader of the pack in details that ACTUALLY contribute to good UX. Just as the iPod and the clicker wheel was ahead with the instant feedback and usability of rotating the wheel to scroll at high speeds through hundreds of songs

[ActorNightly]

I honestly think that people like you experienced smartphones in mid 2010s and just extrapolating back to what they think they were in late 2000s,

When iPhone came out, the mobile internet was so shit and screen was very low res, so the benefit of having a full touchscreen was minimal (mostly being able to select things directly, but that was a very small advantage). Mobile web wasn't a thing. You had to have wifi for any real speed. And if you had wifi, you were likely in a building where you could sit down, and there were things like netbooks and mobile pcs that were just better than the iPhone for doing web stuff. Even people with iPhones still mainly used them as iPods and phones before 3g cellular.

The keyboard on Blackberries was in fact better UX because it was easier to use and faster to type on, without any delay in appearance. The on screen keyboards were all shit until swipe typing became defacto standard.

And then you look at the drawbacks, like no removable battery, no microsd expansion, no shit proprietary cables that would break, no copy/paste, e.t.c, all of them absolutely make the UX horrible.