You're looking back at this with rose colored glasses. Early iPhones had plenty of issues. Remember "you're holding it wrong"? It took them a few generations to get the nuts and bolts of making a phone right.

Yes, I remember that "you're holding it wrong was" a) actually several years into the product, not at the beginning, and b) was hilariously overblown and not a real issue for about 99% of users, including all users who had a case on their phone and almost all users who didn't, and c) a reliable identifier of cranks that don't really know much about the iPhone.

This is starting to get off topic, but the "holding it wrong" issue It was definitely not overblown; if anything it was understated by the media still infatuated with Apple's latest shiny new thing.

The issue affected nearly every iPhone owner I knew at the time, including a number of individuals who worked for Apple, and almost all of these people got their phones replaced by Apple under warranty as a result.

That antenna was a misstep, sure. And they had others. But for the most part over that period, they were defining the product category, and competitors were reacting to it.

The iPhone did not even have 3G on launch. 3G was a pretty basic feature for an expensive smartphone by that time already.