> iPhone didn't become this massive product til 2010 when the 4 was released

If we ignore the iPhone 3G, which was the top-selling mobile phone of 2008. Revisionist history indeed.

The original 2007 iPhone was hugely successful out of the gate within the smartphone category, which it shaped and then dominated for the next few years.

2010 was a tipping point for people abandoning feature phones for smartphones, and there wasn't yet a comparable Android competitor. But the seeds were sown years earlier.

>> "If we ignore the iPhone 3G, which was the top-selling mobile phone of 2008. Revisionist history indeed."

>> "The original 2007 iPhone was hugely successful out of the gate within the smartphone category"

And the Apple Watch is by far the best selling smartwatch. The market just isn't that big.

I think the 3GS was when I started seeing iPhone's everywhere in the UK at least and that was definitely the first really solid device where there weren't glaring feature omissions and performance problems. The market had also come to accept the high phone prices smartphones ushered in by that point too. Everyone I knew had a great PAYG deal back then so convincing them to go to a contract and pay 3-5x what they were used to took a few versions. I think with watchOS 3.0 the software is now at that point and we're just waiting on the hardware to offer something really compelling (which I think will be health related).

> And the Apple Watch is by far the best selling smartwatch. The market just isn't that big.

Right. The fact that the smartwatch market is currently small doesn't exclude the possibility that it will grow huge, as happened with the smartphone market.

But if we want to continue with the analogy, there are other key differences between the Apple Watch and the early iPhone. I'll point out two.

First, even with the first-gen iPhone's feature omissions (its most commonly cited feature omission? No physical keyboard), the iPhone made the immense utility of the smartphone immediately obvious to most people who used it. Many people loved it. By contrast, the reaction to smartwatches from early adopters ranges mostly from cool to lukewarm.

Second, the first iPhone differentiated itself by nailing features that mattered most to most people. Compared to its leading competitors, the iPhone has 8 hours talk time vs 5 hours, 4+ GB memory vs 64 MB, 2 MP camera vs 1.3 MP, Wi-Fi vs no Wi-Fi, twice the screen size, built-in iPod functionality, etc. Nothing really came close in terms of its core features. The glaring feature omissions people complained about (no memory card slot, no physical keyboard (!), no third-party apps, no copy & paste) either turned out to be inconsequential or were obvious ways to make a great product even better. By contrast, the Apple Watch failed to identify key features that make it categorically better than the competition, and people are scratching their heads trying to think of "glaring omissions" that could make the smartwatch more essential.

The Apple Watch might have a future yet, but comparing it to the iPhone really doesn't work out in the Watch's favor.

Agreed. I think they will be able to make it more and more standalone as the technology for that becomes available (battery life is probably the main reason they can't now). I see it as similar to the iPod being Mac only at the start.

Nah, the iPod thing was managerial, not technical.

It was both. You could only manage it using a Mac and developing iTunes for Windows was a technical roadblock. With the Watch you can only manage it using iOS and opening it up to other phones or making it work standalone is technical.

i would say it was always a massive success from the beginning. maybe that's arguable. but to say iphone finally hit its mark with the iphone 4 is calling it a bit late.

But MSM was hyping it all the way.