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.