The Amiga was '85. It did take a while for PC-compatibles, of course.
I was thinking of MS world. Windows 3 wasn’t until 1990. You could argue it took until Windows 95 for most everyone to go GUI.
About the only major thing iPhone brought was direct carrier deals from AT&T and Verizon for big data plans.
Also lost the keyboard. (Not the first device to do so either.)
"Chris DeSalvo, who worked alongside Andy Rubin at Danger before joining Google to build its mobile OS, says that the iPhone's announcement forced everyone on his team to realize that they 'are going to have to start over.'
Already in intensive development for two years by 2007, Android was Google's vision for a mobile operating system of the future. Still, in spite of all the work that had already gone into it, the Mountain View company was sure it couldn't carry on along the trajectory it'd been following — the earliest Android devices looked very much like Googlified BlackBerrys — and had to alter its plans to compete with the iPhone's new touch-centric interface. A book excerpt in The Atlantic cites Andy Rubin, who led the early development of Android, as saying "I guess we’re not going to ship that phone," in reference to the Sooner project Google was initially planning to reveal to the world."
https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5229618/android-started-...
RIM had no incentive, they were trying to lock you into the BB server product and tried to get consumers on it to. The phone was a means to an end.
MS wanted to push Windows. They’d been trying since CE first appeared and it still didn’t take off. As long as Balmer was there why would they do something different? They KEPT DOING IT even with Apple to follow.
Palm was the closest. I guess they might have been my bet. But they were having trouble and had tr legacy of thinking about things the way PalmOS had done things. That might have slowed them down.
Google was just copying RIM. They’d have gone somewhere, but I don’t know it would look anything like today’s smartphones. That may not be a bad thing.
Apple did not move us up just 2 or 3 years. I don’t know how to come up with an exact number, and obviously it’s not something crazy like 20 or 50. But I could see a decade.
How long did it take the rest of the industry to catch up to the Mac from ‘84? How long would it have taken if they didn’t have the Mac to look at?
Paradigm shifts in UIs are hard to predict. Even if you make a good one it can be really hard to break in when something else is successful (even if only adequate).
Apple defined the modern smartphone, and it wasn’t an IBM PC like thing of taking existing parts and just putting them together. It took a ton more work outside the existing molds.