[coldtea]

>This wasn't supposed to be read as a bash against apple or the iphone, just an observation. When the original design was done, the world was a very different place where apple was very clearly ahead. With this UI it seems to me that the differences between ios android and windows phone are pretty minor.

Well, as Jobs said, the iPhone was ahead of the industry by about 5 years. Those 5 years have passed.

Did anyone think the competitors would never catch up? It's not like Windows for the desktop is like XP anymore. It has also seen much more refinement and maturity, and could be compared far more favourably to OS X.

That said, Apple / iOS retains the benefits of the 5 year head-start: iOS is more coherent and mature, the whole ecosystem is bigger (from apps, to accounts on file, to third party peripherals, etc), etc etc.