[phmqk76]

I love how people compare products like this or Apple Vision Pro to the original iPhone to make the point that products with limited appeal can flourish into something incredibly useful. The comparison is bad. The iPhone promised to be three things: a phone, an iPod, and a web browser. And it performed these tasks well! It didn’t oversell what it was, and it was a revelation. I owned the first gen shortly after it came out, and I fell in love.

None of these products fit that bill. Hell, Apple Watch still doesn’t, nearly a decade later.

[ninth_ant]

The Apple Watch is a useful device. It integrates seamlessly with my phone, has various fitness tracking features including water activities, delivers important notifications without making noise, and gives me access to use voice commands on my phone. Its overnight charging gives me a nightstand alarm clock.

It's not a world-changing device, but it's a very useful accessory.

[cjk2]

50/50. I wore one for nearly 4 years. Then one day I took it off because I was travelling somewhere really dangerous. And I never put it back on again. Turned out it was more ritual than utility for me.

[phmqk76]

More or less same with me. I wore mine for years, and upgraded a couple of times. But interacting with it is awkward, and my Apple Watches have easily been the most glitchy Apple products I’ve ever owned. I stopped wearing mine about 6 months ago and I don’t miss it. In fact, I starting buying watches I like - vintage digital watches and mechanical watches, and I’m much happier.

[water-data-dude]

This probably isn’t true for everyone, but being able to pause and rewind audio (podcasts or books on tape) without pulling out my phone is a big quality of life improvement for me.

[Apocryphon]

Feels like they’ll probably have more gestures built into AirPods sooner or later.

[brandall10]

That's a bit too charitable to the first iPhone. I had one too, and it was heavily lambasted for being virtually unusable with an Edge connection as well as being attached to AT&T... and unsubsidised. Even on wifi it was fairly stuttery, but yes, it had a real web browser which was remarkable.

It was a great product though if you wanted to be future-shocked and to draw a ton of attention in public. But the 3g is where it took off as a consumer device.

Of course something like this product is on the verge of snake oil in comparison.

[Gazoche]

Also, by the time the iPhone came out, mobile phones had already been ubiquitous for a while. People were already used to carry a slab of electronics in their pocket, so it was easy to rationalize the purchase of an iPhone as a replacement. At the very least, it was still a phone, with a sleek design and a futuristic touchscreen.

Plus Apple had already been very successful with the iPod line, so they weren't new in portable electronics and people were willing to trust them.

[godelski]

This is why I don't understand LLM sales pitches. Why isn't it

  We built a system that (lossy) compresses all text on the internet and is able to be (fuzzy) searched with a human language interface. Storage size: under a few hundred gigs (depending on precision).

I have to say, it is a pretty impressive feat. Why upsell to AGI when that's only going to leave a bad taste in peoples' mouths when they find out it doesn't have basic reasoning abilities? I mean really, does everyone not realize they are drawing the same exact ascii unicorn?