Reflections on being both right and wrong about smartphones, 13 years ago
Thirteen years ago this weekend, Steve Jobs announced the original iPhone, as former Microsofty Steve Sinofsky discusses in a great Twitter thread. The demo was epochal, but very hard to pull off behind the scenes, as the NY Times discussed six years later.
I was already a frustrated smartphone user. I had a Nokia 7710 - the last ever Symbian device with a derivative of the Psion UI, and therefore doubly compromised, as I discussed in what turned out to be a very poorly timed piece on OSnews.
After I saw the demo, I knew that finger-operated touchscreens were clearly the future - but as you can see from the comments on that January 2007 blog post, most of my techie friends were very much not convinced of this.
But it was very clear to me that the iPhone was the future. The comments there make amusing reading now: no, it can't be. It doesn't have the features. It doesn't have 3G. It's not about the UI, people want the features.
I couldn't believe that Apple had ported OS X to the ARM chip, though - and now, it's its native platform and all the new Macs will be ARM-based.
I was already a frustrated smartphone user. I had a Nokia 7710 - the last ever Symbian device with a derivative of the Psion UI, and therefore doubly compromised, as I discussed in what turned out to be a very poorly timed piece on OSnews.
After I saw the demo, I knew that finger-operated touchscreens were clearly the future - but as you can see from the comments on that January 2007 blog post, most of my techie friends were very much not convinced of this.
But it was very clear to me that the iPhone was the future. The comments there make amusing reading now: no, it can't be. It doesn't have the features. It doesn't have 3G. It's not about the UI, people want the features.
I couldn't believe that Apple had ported OS X to the ARM chip, though - and now, it's its native platform and all the new Macs will be ARM-based.