The entire phone market is unrecognizable. Blackberry, Nokia and Palm are gone. Microsoft is irrelevant. Multi-touch is everywhere. Pens and styluses are relegated to art accessory status. Finally, the modern Apple inspired smartphone has become the dominant computing platform on the planet. It's the primary way most people interact with computers and networks.

By value the Apple computing ecosystem is utterly and completely dominant. Their annual revenue is $215 Bn. That's about the same as Microsoft, Intel and Google put together. By a recent estimate they make 104% of the profits in the mobile industry (taking into account other company's losses) and for along time made more profit in the PC market than all the Windows OEMs put together (edited - not sure if that's still true).

I worked in telecoms back in 2006. Nobody knew what a smartphone should look like. There were all kinds of crazy ideas that the mobile handset form factor could come in various different shapes with curved screens, circular screens, voice interfaces with no screen. Apple showed us what the future would look like and why. They figured it all out and got it right first time not just in terms of physical design but multi-touch interface, app store, open internet connectivity (remember WAP?). It was a slow-burn revolution though. It took time for them to scale up production and perfect the product, and for the market itself to catch up to what was happening so a lot of people just didn't realize what was happening or why.

edit - ok, sorry if I misunderstood your point. Fortunately I didn't down vote you, but I usually don't when I reply to people. I think the above stands on it's own though.

I'm not sure what you would classify as a revolution - in Apple's case, they pretty much set the standard for what smartphone design would be after the release of the first, were the subject of countless imitations, and IIRC, Google pretty much restarted the Android project once they saw the original iPhone [1].

I'd say they made some pretty major strides and set the standard for what a smartphone would look like for the years to come, and by and large all phones still follow the iPhones original path. Sure, different phones and different Android releases now do stuff different and sometimes better than iOS, but for the most part, it's all just following the iPhone.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-da...

I would never argue that is wasn't a revolution when it first came out a decade ago. There is little doubt that it changed the landscape for smartphones and spurred plenty of competitive efforts etc.

Its just that now it has had about 7 major iterations (not counting 'S' models etc.), it is really in the 'consolidation' stage of the battle. The storming of the castle is done, now the army is battening down for the long siege and the door to door skirmishing, slowly moving the front forward.

The only way Apple (or any manufacturer) can claim another 'revolutionary' step is if they come out with a foldable display screen, or a 30 day battery life or similar.

A better metaphor might be that of the battle, and the war, long since won, and the victorious army having spent most of the last ten years getting lazy and soft as it forgets why it won in the first place, still reveling in the fading glow of glories past - while, somewhere, an upstart as yet unknown to the world makes ready to dethrone it in its turn.

It's a shame. The only smartphones I've ever had have been iPhones, and I don't want that to change. But I'm not seeing much reason lately to believe that Apple can continue going from strength to strength.

Ah, okay, I understand your point and see my misunderstanding. I would still suggest they have more sway in feature pushing than any other manufacturer, insomuch that when Apple sets something in stone, even the very unpopular removal of the headphone jack, others follow suit (not widely copied, but a few manufacturers followed suit with flagship devices)

I would agree that their newest changes aren't revolutionary in my mind and are more iterative, just spec bumps and features added, but everyone is still taking their cues from Apple when it comes to functionality.

but everyone is still taking their cues from Apple when it comes to functionality - isn't apple adding now feature which were common on Android OS.

> it has had about 7 major iterations (not counting 'S' models etc.)

I would argue that some of the S models are more significant iterations than the main numbered ones. Siri shipped with the 4s, the Appstore shipped with the 3G (IMO it's fair to call the 3G and 3GS "S models" of the original).

You don't remember the crappy screens, overall build quality, user interfaces, apps (mobile java lol), performance of phones in the pre-iPhone era? All those problems went away when the iPhone set the bar in these fields.

Some of us were using Symbian phones, and even got to play with Nokia's 7710, released in 2004, 3 years before the iPhone.

So no, not really a revolution.

I loved my Symbian phones, but the iPhone was indeed a revolution. There's a reason Nokia and Blackberry are suffering losses.

The only ones I can relate to Nokia was internal wars between Symbian and Maemo units, and the fact that Symbian C++ tooling and C++ dialect were a pain to use.

Nothing to do with the device itself.

Virtually every new phone released today looks like the iPhone. That's your revolution right there. There are many technological advantages the iPhone brought. First and foremost the capacitative touchscreen. Nokia didn't go with the times and that was there end. Wether it was caused by internal wars or a stubborn leadership is irrelevant.

The point made in the comment you are responding to is that we will also still remember those phones 40 years from now: when do you decide the revolution is over?

Exactly. A revolution places a new king on the throne. Once the king is installed, it is no longer a revolution, but simply a reigning monarchy... until the next revolution comes along.

As an aside - I wonder what the average time span of a revolutionary war is? I tried Googling, but there doesn't seem to be a definitive answer to this - possibly because a 'revolution' isn't measured as a span in time, but rather as a momentary event (usually marked by the start date of the revolution). Anything after that seems to be considered a 'war' or a 'rebellion'.