I bought an iPhone on day one in 2007. For me it was more about a nearly-all-screen device with a usable browser and navigation than anything else at that point. Jeez, that’s still mostly what I use it for. Pinch is certainly nice, but I hardly thought about multi touch when looking at the value proposition. The Apple Pencil is what got me to finally buy an iPad (and immediately miss the side-click I’ve been used to with computer pens since circa 2001).

The second-gen pencil can be tapped on the side with a fingertip while holding it, much like the buttons of old.

> multi-touch was what got the the smartphone revolution going

Massive citation needed. When I bought the first iPod touch (at the time it was a gen 1 iPhone without the GSM modem) it was because it had a real web browser and not the BS 'mobile' browsers on my Windows Mobile smartphone. I could actually visit a store's website and find their hours, check if an item was in stock, etc. There wasn't even an app store back then... IIRC multitouch was only used for zooming into photos in the photos app.

Pinch & zoom was the killer app to navigate normal websites (as opposed to dedicated XHTML + handheld-stylesheet). This is now for the most dead with `meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"` as a standard.

What do you mean by that?

> What do you mean by that?

Smartphones had been around for years (e.g. devices like the SE P800 and P900 series) before the iPhone, but these remained niche and required specially skinned websites for full functionality (XHTML and CSS stylesheets with `medium="handheld"`, which is now dead). It was really the iPhone's capability to render normal websites and to navigate them via pinch & zoom, which was considered the killer-app of the iPhone (esp. before there was an App Store with a wide variety of apps available.) The success of the iPhone was built on the much acclaimed multi-touch feature. And this is now, with responsive web-pages set to `meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"` as a standard, practically disabled and dead. (In other words, with a grain of salt, responsive killed multi-touch – or, at least, rendered it disposable.)

(Moreover, I do not see any wide deployment of two or three finger gestures or similar multi-touch interaction on usual web-apps, especially, as these lack any standardization, but this may be just my own observation and anecdotal. That said, there's probably a niche use for virtual controllers for web games. But it's really the Mac trackpad and maybe the Magic Mouse, where multi-touch lives on with any significance.)

Sounds obvious now but pinch to zoom was a big new feature on iPhone that traditional phones, even those with touch capability, did not have muti-touch. Part of this was capacitive touch screen technology that few other devices had at the time, instead having cheaper resistive which pretty much required a stylus to do anything but press in a particular spot on screen. I don't believe android devices had muti-touch originally even though they had capacitive touch screens. Touchpads on laptops and touch screens added multi-touch years later.

I don't think it was so much that resistive touchscreens were cheaper; rather, the dominant mobile interaction model had for a decade been oriented around styluses - handwriting recognition, small UI elements - and resistive touchscreens are simply more precise. Even with a capacitive screen, direct physical interaction such as smooth scrolling and pinch-zooming requires graphical horsepower that just wasn't on the table until around the time the iPhone came along.

Yeah. The T-Mobile G1 lacked multitouch gestures. You could hack them in though as the hardware supported it. I think it was a patent issue or someething which was why it was left out.