[bornhuetter]

The market was waiting for capacitive touchscreens to become viable. You can't use multitouch properly on resistive screens (or non-touchscreen devices). Apple pounced as soon as capacitive screens became viable - albeit extremely expensive at the time. The first iPhone was "ahead of its time" in the sense that the market wasn't really ready for it. The first iPhone was an expensive PoS - it wasn't until the app store came along and the price came down that it turned into a good phone.

No-one really thought to patent the obvious design decisions that would come with the viability of a large capacitive touchscreen - rectangular, large screen, few physical buttons, multitouch gestures such as pinch to zoom (that already existed elsewhere).

Apple are absolute masters at combining existing technology into an attractive package. They also have excellent timing at bringing products to market (just before the market is ready for them - see original iPod, iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air).

But to say that these "innovations" wouldn't have happened anyway is disingenuous - no competent observer seriously believes that the market would not have moved on to large capacitive touchscreen devices over the last 5 years.

Apple deserve plenty of credit for their OS animations, smoothness of UI and (either praise or damnation depending on your point of view) the curated app store. They don't deserve credit for "inventing the capacitive touchscreen phone".

[gnaffle]

If the market was just waiting for capacitive touchscreens to become available, why did it take all the others years to come up with anything competitive after the iPhone launched?

Why didn't they all have capacitive iPhone look-alikes ready in the lab then?

Isn't it more reasonable to assume that the mobile market would have stayed roughly as it had the previous 10 years, with incremental improvements in screens, displays etc?

Apple isn't credited with the first capacitive touchscreen phone, but I think they should be credited with making the first usable, mass market touchscreen smartphone.

[bornhuetter]

> Why didn't they all have capacitive iPhone look-alikes ready in the lab then?

The Samsung evidence showed that they did. Not as good as the iPhone, certainly, but they were obviously all thinking about it.

> Apple ... should be credited with making the first usable, mass market touchscreen smartphone.

I completely agree with this. But they don't deserve a monopoly on it.

> Isn't it more reasonable to assume that the mobile market would have stayed roughly as it had the previous 10 years, with incremental improvements in screens, displays etc?

No. Not at all. The technology had been rapidly improving, and we would have seen phones with large capacitive touch screens, and features such as "pinch to zoom on a phone" anyway. Sure the implementation may have been different, but the idea that the market would not have moved on in 10 years is absurd.

[gnaffle]

What evidence was presented that Samsung had a similar phone in the works in 2007? One with a capacitive touchscreen and a user interface optimized for finger touch?

For all I know they might have been "thinking" about it, but why didn't they do more than think about it if it was that obvious at the time that capacitive touchscreen phones would dominate the future?

I didn't say the market wouldn't move. Of course it would, but probably with incremental improvements. Why? Because mobile user interfaces changed very little before the iPhone arrived.

All the biggest competitors in the mobile space had their own operating systems that were optimized for navigation buttons/softkeys moving a cursor around, and optionally a stylus. Even new contenders like Maemo and Android were initially designed this way. Something like the iPhone would probably have evolved eventually, but I think it's odd to think that the transition to all-display touchscreen phones would have happened at the exact same pace if the iPhone had not been introduced, and that Apple only was "lucky" to have a shipping product available at exactly the right time.

[bornhuetter]

> Why didn't they do more than think about it if it was that obvious at the time that capacitive touchscreen phones would dominate the future?

Because, as I said, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens.

> All the biggest competitors in the mobile space had their own operating systems that were optimized for navigation buttons/softkeys moving a cursor around, and optionally a stylus.

Because, as I said, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens.

> Something like the iPhone would probably have evolved eventually

So we basically agree.

When I first saw the iPhone I thought it was the way of the future. But I thought the current form was awful. When the G1 came out it was even worse than the iPhone. The market simply wasn't ready yet; but Apple got in there with something barely usable for a price that a few early movers could afford.

Over time, both Apple and Google refined their systems into amazing, world changing devices.

There were two obvious ways of building these phones - 1. with menus 2. with icons. That is the way all feature phones that I know of worked. Google added widgets to this, and eventually Microsoft came up with the completely new idea of tiles.

> I think it's odd to think that ... Apple only was "lucky" to have a shipping product available at exactly the right time.

I never said anything remotely like that. It was entirely intentional that they put together the iPhone and brought it to market at the exact point in time that it became viable. That's why they are the most valuable company in the world. They deserve the huge success they have had, but, again, they don't deserve a monopoly.

[gnaffle]

So Apple brought it to market at the exact point in time that it became viable. The other companies were "waiting" as you say, so why did they wait so long? Didn't they see that the technology was about to become viable?

I don't buy that theory. By the sales of the first iPhone, the market was obviously ready. Had it been "barely usable" it would have flopped completely.

Capacitive touch screens use the same technology as touchpads, and I haven't seen any proof that those screens were too expensive before 2006 and that technological advancements broght the price down after that.

What I do think is that Apple was willing to bet on touchscreens and place bulk orders that made the price come down, whereas other companies happy with the status quo and unwilling to redesign their mobile operating systems to fit a new technology.

[bornhuetter]

> why did they wait so long? Didn't they see that the technology was about to become viable?

As I've said ad nausium, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens. The technology was too expensive.

The market currently isn't ready for "wearable technology", like Project Glass. Every competent observer knows that some form of augmented reality/wearable technology is going to become important in the next few years, but it's currently shit.

If Google or some other company gets granted patents to the obvious design decisions that come with it, it will be a disaster for the consumer in the same way as granting "pinch to zoom on a mobile device" is a disaster for current consumers.

> What I do think is that Apple was willing to bet on touchscreens and place bulk orders that made the price come down, whereas other companies happy with the status quo and unwilling to redesign their mobile operating systems to fit a new technology.

They made a good bet, and they literally made billions of dollars from it. What they don't deserve is a monopoly on basic design ideas, like "pinch to zoom" and "rounded rectangles".

[catch23]

> Because, as I said, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens.

Hm, I don't think the reason competitors had their own operating system and stylus-based touch screens had anything to do with the market being ready for touch screens or not -- nobody created something that was usable, so of course the market didn't adapt to it. Bear with me on my small straw-man argument here: It's kind of like couchsurfing.com existed before airbnb.com, but few people let random strangers stay at their home before airbnb existed. You could say that "the market wasn't ready" or you could say that airbnb executed in a way that transformed the market. If Apple did not create the intuitive interfaces for the iPhone, we might still say "the market isn't ready for large touch screens".

[stanleydrew]

    For all I know they might have been "thinking" about it,
    but why didn't they do more than think about it if it was
    that obvious at the time that capacitive touchscreen
    phones would dominate the future?

Note that obviousness of an idea and obviousness of the quality of that idea are two entirely different things. It is possible for two companies to have an obvious idea at the same time, but one doesn't think it's quite obvious that it's a good idea while the other does.

For example, many of us here on HN would agree that tv/movie video content streamed over the internet was an obvious idea even in the late 90s. But it wasn't necessarily an obviously good idea at the time.

Maybe you would agree (or not, doesn't matter, the point stands, just pick a different company) that Netflix was the company that made watching videos online enjoyable. Should they enjoy a monopoly on streaming video content over the internet simply because they had the vision to decide that the idea was obviously good enough to pursue at the time that they did?

If they had patented streaming video, or something smaller, like auto-detecting your available bandwidth to optimize delivery quality, would we be so accepting of them trying to destroy Hulu or Amazon VOD in order to protect that "innovation"?

[seabee]

Revisionist, much? The G1 came out a few months after the iPhone 3G, the first iPhone to support third-party apps.

[gnaffle]

So? The G1 launched in October 2008, over 1,5 years after the first iPhone, and it didn't even have multi-touch enabled.

So my question is still, why weren't competitors further along in utilizing capacitive touchscreens if these advancements were so obvious in 2006?

[regularfry]

Because while it may have been obvious that it would happen eventually, nobody wanted to bet on when. It was safer to build the next iteration on known tech rather than gamble on being able to force the market.

[tjoff]

If the market was just waiting for capacitive touchscreens to become available, why did it take all the others years to come up with anything competitive after the iPhone launched?

Because apple was the only one that hadn't invested in anything else. Simple as that.

[gnaffle]

My point exactly. :)

[tjoff]

Your point seem to imply that innovation was required, mine that it was trivial.

[gnaffle]

If it was that trivial, I would at least expect Google or Nokias Maemo to have come up with such an interface before 2007.

I don't think the work put in by FingerWorks, and then the work put in by Apple to create the iOS user interface was trivial at all. It may not have been groundbreaking compared to what came before (ie most had been demonstrated by researchers), but I think it's obvious that a lot of work and design decisions went into creating it.

[tjoff]

Of course at lot of work and design decisions went into creating it (just as any UI), but it was a logical next step.

[Nicole060]

Funny, I never said they invented the capacitive touchscreen, but that's apple haters for you. What they did that no one else did before is to put the right gestures, the right UI, environment to make it work. I had a LG Prada, it had a capacitive touchscreen so I obviously know Apple didn't invent it.. except the LG Prada was also behaving the same as Windows XP on a tablet. You use widgets like scrollbars instead of gesture everywhere. That's no iPhone.

"The first iPhone was an expensive PoS" ? it was the first phone with a good web browser, that's already quite something in itself. I can't imagine browsing the web on a phone without double tap to fit a paragraph, pinch to zoom and a good engine like Webkit. That made it a feature phone, more than a smartphone, at the time, with the lack of things like installable software, but it was a damn good feature phone, and for those who use lot of webapps, it was probably better than most smartphones too.

For the record, I hate the app store. I hate not being able to install software outside of the curated app store. But I give credit where it's due, even if there are a lot of things I hate about Apple, they did make the one touch phone that was actually usable, as opposed to POS like LG Prada or Samsung Croix (pre-android touchscreens) interface.

It is really obvious looking at some of the ac adapters and dock connectors that Samsung intended to copy the whole appearance of the earlier iPhones to ride on Apple's coattails. Samsung tried to copy everything from the UI to the trade dress to patented technology. They behaved like shady Chinese companies making cheap knock offs.

[lotharbot]

> "that's apple haters for you"

Comments like this do not add to the discussion.

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names." - http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[jonhendry]

"Comments like this do not add to the discussion."

You'd have a point if that was the extent of the response.

[lotharbot]

The very next line of the guidelines reads:

> "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

[parasubvert]

"The first iPhone was an expensive PoS - it wasn't until the app store came along and the price came down that it turned into a good phone."

Huh? Market wasn't ready? This is completely revisionist fantasy. In 2007, it was the best overall phone on the market, period, and the market was ready. People lined up around the block to drop $499 to $599 on a locked phone. They sold over 1 million phones in their first two and a half months. When they dropped the 8GB price to $399, they sold another 3 million phones through the Fall of 2007.

All evidence points to Apple bringing the capacitive touchscreen phone to market years before anyone else would have. That's what innovation is. Not invention, no, but only geeks and historians really care about invention. Innovation in the market is what enables people to actually be able to buy and use things.

[bornhuetter]

> This is completely revisionist fantasy.

Revisionist? No. Personal opinion? Sure.

I personally remember the iPhone coming out and thinking it was awful. Fucking awful. And so did everyone I knew. When the G1 came out it was even worse. In my opinion, the only people that bought these awful phones were, to put it politely, "early movers".

> That's what innovation is. Not invention, no.

You're not really arguing against me. Apple deserve credit and riches for bringing a phone to market that people wanted. They don't deserve a monopoly. As you said, they didn't really "invent" anything

> only geeks and historians really care about invention

Maybe that's the way things should be. But right now the courts are involved, and the US courts (in contrast to some other courts) are saying that Apple have an exclusive right to features such as "pinch to zoom on a phone" that Apple didn't even invent.

[parasubvert]

> Revisionist? No. Personal opinion? Sure. I personally remember the iPhone coming out and thinking it was awful. Fucking awful. And so did everyone I knew.

I had the opposite experience. So did everyone I knew - they wanted one, badly. So did millions of others.

My point was that it was dubbed the "JesusPhone" in 2007, not 2008. You're entitled to your opinion, of course.

> They don't deserve a monopoly. As you said, they didn't really "invent" anything

If they have valid patents, then yes, they deserve a temporary monopoly on their approach. I don't like the terms of patents, they should be shorter. But I do think they exist for a reason.

> But right now the courts are involved, and the US courts (in contrast to some other courts) are saying that Apple have an exclusive right to features such as "pinch to zoom on a phone" that Apple didn't even invent.

They invent the first implementation of pinch to zoom ever, no. But they invented their approach to it as part of the broader innovation of the iPhone. That's what their patents are about, and they're so far deemed valid.