Re:Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing?
by lmm on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @08:46PM
(#21987418)
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.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing?
by Fnoord on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @08:53PM
(#21987461)
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.
Re:Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing?
by lmm on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @09:18PM
(#21987629)
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.