Replies like this miss the point completely. The iPod wasn't aimed at people like you who know what Ogg Vorbis is/was. It was aimed at the average, non-techy person and it absolutely crushed it.

Same with the iPhone. The major innovation of the iPhone was that it was simple to use and anyone could pick it up and use it without knowing anything about it.

> and anyone could pick it up and use it without knowing anything about it.

I wouldn't say that's accurate. Like the iPod before it, the iPhone relied on experimentation and peer demonstration for UI comprehension. It wasn't discoverable.

My single instance of using an iPhone resulted in total failure in determining how to switch between two running apps. I kept ending up on the home screen and having to click the app's icon again.

Apples clever hack around that was to let customers get hands-on with the devices before purchase in controlled Apple Store environments where they could be nudged into thinking that they had mastered the UI themselves.

>My single instance of using an iPhone resulted in total failure in determining how to switch between two running apps. I kept ending up on the home screen and having to click the app's icon again.

Except this was exactly how the original iPhone handled app-switching. It was only by getting people used to that paradigm that modern smartphones were even able to introduce mobile multi-tasking. At the time of the iPhone's release, Blackberry was king and switching apps was a matter of hitting the "Back" button over and over again until you got back to the main menu of the Blackberry OS. On some models, you could click on a scroll wheel/ball and click "Go back to App Launcher" (or something similar). Precisely what the iPhone did was give people a home button.

Except the first iPhone was not simple to use. It didn't even have 3G. You couldn't use MMS. It lacked a ton of other basic features, such as custom software. Then there was the need for jailbreaking to get some basic features back.

Ever since Web 2.0 it was clear to me that a touch-based UI would win if you used a web browser; it was Apple's capacitive touch UI which was the killer feature. Nobody had such even though Mozilla was experimenting already with a mobile browser (Fennec). (For some use-cases, a keyboard is still desirable though. E.g. a Pebble during sports is better usable than a touch-based smartwatch.)

You don't need to know what Ogg Vorbis is; I knew because I ripped my CDs to Ogg Vorbis. I already paid for these. It allowed me to save even more space compared to MP3 and AAC.

>It didn't even have 3G. You couldn't use MMS. It lacked a ton of other basic features, such as custom software.

None of these things, in any way, take away from how simple the first iPhone was to use. Once again, you missed the point completely.

What really cemented the iPhone for me was that, compared to early Android touchscreens, the iPhone's touchscreen was actually pleasant to use.

It was limited in its usage (terrible speed while 3G was widely available, limited applications while Symbian had these, could not update via repositories which my Nokia N-series could, could not even use a comm feature like MMS). Apple got away with it because of their iPod fame, and that the UI was a decent capacitive touch-based one which nobody else managed to do.

Did you ever actually _use_ a Symbian device of the era you are referring to? I returned two different ones as they would freeze just sat in standby.

The only thing that came close to the usability and reliability of an iPhone in 2007 was the Blackberry.

Oh yes, Nokia E71. Brilliant device (obviously, with quirks). Keyboard did break eventually; got it repaired though. Before that a friend's Nokia Communicator.

Again, nothing you've mentioned made the original iPhone complex. They were missing features. But them being missing didn't make using the phone complicated to comprehend.

I love that you continue to double down on your responses that keep, repeatedly, missing the point.

I love that you keep saying I miss the point, without providing substance why I do. We clearly disagree, repeatedly, as you'd put it. What you do is, repeatedly, waving away my arguments as irrelevant, by ignoring them and saying I "miss the point". Like that is going to convince me?

FWIW, I never used the original iPhone for a long period of time, but I did use the iPod Touch, and I did have usability issues with it (not in hindsight). Something simple as blocking ads, for example, it could not do without jailbreaking. I call that a design issue. That Google does such, is to be expected as it is their main source of income. Apple? Not so much. Multitasking was also something to forget about.

Because nothing that you've offered as a counter-argument has anything to do with how simple it was to use the device. The vast majority of users, at the time the iPhone came out, didn't care about "App Stores" or ad-blocking or anything else and none of those things detracted from the simplicity of the device.

Unless you have some kind of argument that actually addresses the premise that the iPhone was successful because it was the easiest smartphone on the market to use and had high discoverability, you're going to keep missing the point by responding with features that you wish it had when it launched.

The vast majority of users of Apple products don't care about feature X, until the Apple product gets such feature. Then, suddenly, due to some magic miracle, these features do matter. We're talking about basic functionality the current devices had such as capability-based security, App Store, ad blocking, cut and paste.

The only major innovation the iPhone was using, was a capacitive touch UI. iOS wasn't polished, as it lacked many basic features. Yet the UI was good enough and simple to use. Nothing I wrote here above is in contradiction with each other. The only thing you appear to disagree on is the importance of these missing features. If they had these features from the beginning, perhaps Apple would've released too late, and the market would be saturated already (as touchscreen devices were coming to the masses regardless).

We were already done 4 days ago.

Please avoid flamewars and petty spats on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Some of us don't sit on HN all day every day talking straw men and actually have things to do on the weekends.

Please avoid flamewars and petty spats on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Except the first iPhone was not simple to use. It didn't even have 3G. You couldn't use MMS. It lacked a ton of other basic features, such as custom software.

You are describing missing functionality, but you are not refuting the claim of iPhone's simplicity of use.

There were plenty of things the iPhone couldn't do. Among these that it could, the experience was years ahead of the competition.

> [...] but you are not refuting the claim of iPhone's simplicity of use.

I already addressed that in my first post in this subthread:

"[...]

The major innovation of the iPhone was that it had a capacitive touch UI (which allows finger use, gestures, etc). The iPhone did not have an App Store during release. It was missing a lot of features. It was Nokia who was the market leader around that point. I wish they fully bet on Maemo and capacitive touch instead of Windows Phone (they went the right way with the N9, but the predecessors were still too much on pen and resistive touch, or hybrid).

[...]"

HTC had touch UI few years before Apple, Apple just happened to be very good with marketing.

Apple spent around 40-50m on the initial rollout, a sum completely unheard of in the industry. And they bested themselves every iphone release since.

Even today, closest contenders are far from that mark.

Someday I need to turn this into a blog post.

HTC may have had a touch UI, but they didn’t have a capacitive touch screen (did the XDA use a stylus? I’d wager it did).

More importantly, Apple was the only company willing to:

* commit all their resources to a single UI and single phone

* write their own operating system for said phone to have control over its fate and optimize for that UI

* offer a sales experience where people could discover the phone, see how it worked, and get expert help, with sales people who actually knew about the phone and weren’t offering users the choice of three dozen competitors at the same time

This "Apple is only good at marketing" idea is vastly off the mark.

Apple could put a capacitive touch screen in because they were willing to sell a phone for $600, carrier-locked on a 2-year, $40/month contract, at a time when phones sold for about 1/3 of that, and they could run a single well-optimized UI because they were somehow able to get Verizon (I think?) to agree to let a phone run a third party's UI untouched. It may not be "marketing" per se, but their success was very much business rather than technical.

In the USA it was AT&T. Other than that, agreed; it was an expensive smartphone. They've always been expensive smartphones, with ridiculous prices for storage (compare with Iriver H340 series). The cheapest iPhone was an iPod Touch.

It wasn't just "an expensive smartphone". It redefined how much the category cost. These days we shrug off a $1000 price tag so it's difficult to remember how extreme it was by the standards of the time, but "expensive smartphone"s in those days were $300 unlocked.

Are you sure? Wikipedia says CNET’s pick for 2007 was $300 with a contract.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Voyager

HTC had capacitive touch screens, with Touch being the flagship model

Not 5 years before the iPhone.

People don't spend $700 on a phone because they were hoodwinked by good marketing. And they certainly don't continue to spend $700 every several years because they were hoodwinked by good marketing.

People don't "need" to spend $700 on a phone a moto g is good enough

People also don’t need automatic transmissions, or heated car seats, or rib eye steaks, or remodeled kitchens. But most people happily spend extra money for nice things and experiences. The world will make a lot more sense once you internalize this.

But a 1000$ iPhone is not that much better than a < $200 Motorola G , this is from some one who is considering a single port USB hub just to isolate a USB DAC from the.

The processor is way faster. And the camera is probably way better (and still not anywhere near good enough, FWIW). Maybe you just don’t care about those features?

> And the camera is probably way better (and still not anywhere near good enough, FWIW)

The camera on a $1000 iPhone is not good enough? For what? For whom? The cameras on mid range smartphones are amazing, these days. A $150 China phone or $250 West phone is great these days. It is basically adequate for a whole lot of use cases, including normal day to day usage.

The camera on the new phones are amazing, but nowhere near good enough. I think the bar for good enough is that every photo a regular person takes is an objectively great photo. People use these cameras to capture important moments in their lives. Important moments deserve great photos. Computational photography has gotten us much closer to that, but there is still a long way to go.

To capture important moments in their life, people have used worse quality in the past. The quality is going only up and up. When is good good enough? It has been good enough for me for quite a few years already (although always JPEG being compressed, so loss of details from get go).

Also, smartphones with multiple cameras are, in a way, unrealistic. There's quite some lack of realism in today's cameras, akin to autotune.

It is also not possible to take an objectively great photo. Everyone has different biases, interests, quality thresholds, etc. See e.g. [1] for a (result of a) blind test.

[1] https://tweakers.net/reviews/7566/blinde-test-smartphonecame...

What does a faster processor give me ? and I have an entry level cannon DSLR if I want a better camera

Your preferences != other people's preferences. Most people prefer things to be faster. And most people do not own or (if they do) carry a DSLR. Phone cameras are important.

> Your preferences != other people's preferences.

OK.

> [...] Phone cameras are important.

Your preferences != other people's preferences.

The iRiver H340 came out in 2004, the iPod came out in 2001. Apple basically had the world's entire supply of tiny hard drives on lock for a year or two, after that other players could finally compete in that form factor (contemporary MP3 players either had little storage or were almost walkman sized).

I had a Nokia N95 when I first used an iPhone. It was clear within 5 minutes of using the iPhone that regardless of specs the iPhone was a vastly better experience. That’s how Apple defines “best” and the market has demonstrated that a huge chunk of the market agrees with them and will pay the price for it.

Why was this downvoted? The first thing I thought of was the iRiver. It was incredible at the time.

Because on HN it is allowed to downvote based on disagreement, and it is a thread about how well Apple is currently doing.