The innovation of the iPhone was in the execution. The ideas were around, along with a ton of failed attempts at it. A computer in your pocket had been an idea for decades. Apple made one that a critical mass of people could/would actually use.

This is so dead-on. Having the idea is often the easy part—it's the execution that makes or breaks it. Yes a great idea can be valuable but it's nothing without the execution to bring it into reality.

Conversely, ideas which appear shitty or idiotic in their failure (Juicero, for eg.) might have thrived with sensible, correct execution.

This is why having the right team matters more than having the right idea and one should take a hard look at oneself as much as the product when facing failure.

Yes, but Apple couldn't have made the iPhone without a touch screen, ARM, Wifi, etc, hence claiming that Apple is the sole responsible of past and future innovation in their product line is naive.

Nokia had all those things, and still lost out to a company who upgraded their popular MP3 player to support cellular.

Not really. The main innovation was business one that allowed Apple to steal US markets. They convinced two major carriers to offer expensive big data plans.

I am still not convinced. I had Windows CE pocket computer in 1998 and several others after. They all start up just like an iPhone with a grid of icons to tap on. The only thing missing from them vs iPhone for me at the time was a good data connection. They didn't exist except for more than I was willing to pay.

I'm not saying the iPhone wasn't amazingly better in execution and had great design. What I'm rather saying is if Apple hadn't released when they did with in a year or two the existing PDAs would have gotten cellular added and it would have been far clearer to everyone the progression was from PDA -> iPhone, an incremental step, rather than the more common mis-conception of feature phone -> iPhone that everyone mis-interprets as coming out of nowhere. There's a long history of PDAs before iPhone and if you take any one of them the jump to iPhone is not nearly as big a jump as people make out.

> Yeah, but don't forget that the pieces to be able to create the iPhone had to be there first.

Like the LG Prada?

Like Palm's existing smartphone with existing smartphone apps, or blackberry.

I migrated from a Palm Treo 650 to an OG iPhone. Superficially they're similar in functionality (I didn't really need a stylus for most Palm apps) but there was so much you could do with an iPhone that the Palm just couldn't touch.

Execution details like Apple contracting with Cingular/ATT to provide unlimited 2G for $20/mo was a huge substantive usability difference. I had to pay $40-$45/mo for similar ubiquitous signal on my Palm - needless to say I didn't - so Palm apps weren't built on that assumption.

Or General Magic's work in the early 90s.

Thank you. Yes - that is my exact point!

No, like touch screens, ARM, Wifi, etc.

:) That was my point. All of those were on the LG Prada.

My list of the enabling technologies for the iPhone is:

- USB 2.0 - developed by others, Apple's first use was in computers.

- Flash memory - developed by others, Apple's first use was in iPods.

- LCD screens - developed by others, Apple's first use was in laptops.

- ARM chips - developed by others, Apple's first use was in... iPods? iPhone? Not sure.

- Lithium ion batteries - developed by others, Apple's first use was in laptops.

- High-speed cellular data networks and chips - developed by others, Apple's first use was in iPhone.

- Multi-touch sensor and software - developed by Fingerworks, acquired and further developed by Apple. First use was in iPhone.

- Mac OS X - developed by NeXT, acquired and further developed by Apple.

- iTunes - developed by Soundjam, acquired and further developed by Apple.

You can see why Steve Jobs used to say that Apple is really a software company, and only designs hardware so it can do the software it wants. Most enabling technologies for the iPhone were provided by other companies; the only ones Apple acquired for exclusive use and development were the software and UI.

I'm thinking of the first iPhone here--Apple has obviously since moved a lot of chip technologies in-house too. Again, though, that seems to be tightly coupled to their focus on software.

Yvon Chouinard has a definition of innovation that I really like, which is (paraphrasing) that innovation is the application of technologies in novel ways to create new products. Thus the iPhone was an innovative product, even though Apple themselves did not originally invent any of the enabling technologies, and only owned a few.

> ARM chips - developed by others, Apple's first use was in... iPods? iPhone? Not sure.

ARM was created by Apple and Acorn to create low power chips for mobile devices like the Newton. You remember the Newton right? One of the first PDA's. Didn't make it but they did help shape the wave of PDA's that led to the iPhone.

I forgot Apple played a role in ARM development.

The product wasn't even new. It was just popular due to Microsoft-class backroom negotiations with carriers to sell data plans and the fact that the launch perfectly coincided with launch of 3G networks in the USA.