[edit]
Looks like I pissed in someone’s cereal. Didn’t mean to, but different strokes, and all that…
I was just recounting actual personal experience, which, I suppose, isn’t popular, hereabouts.
Just for context, I have been writing Apple programs, since 1986. I am totally committed to their products, and their vision (although I have no opinion, –yet– on their Vision), and have every right to be critical. Those of us that have been on the ride for that long, have seen a very bumpy road.
Not a great first impression. Also while I can view Apple Maps via a third party like DuckDuckGo, you can only report a map issue through an Apple device, so I guess it's staying wrong.
Still weird either way.
In smaller countries though, it's total rubbish. Samoa, travel guidance is nearly non-existent. Tahiti, very patchy. In those countries, Google Maps was perfect.
However, one bug that is a showstopper in AM is the dreaded “can’t reach the server now”, which I get probably more than half the time I try to use it, and with apparently no solution other than wait.
As a result, I just removed it from my phone.
But it gave me a route where I need to turn left right after taking a right-turn ramp, except that the left turning line are separated by road dividers before the exit of the ramp. So I would need to either go wrong direction and do a 180, or bulldoze the dividers. As a comparison, Google Map never gave me that route in the past.
This happened in a moderately sized town so I guess I will still stick to Google Map for now.
Ridiculous.
Gmaps also helped by enshittifying itself.
I don’t see the VisionOS play here and wonder if it’ll be Tim Apple’s first major fail at the helm. There’s no clear set of competitors or established industry for Apple to just polish like they have with most products. There’s not an obvious large tam for VR headsets and I’m skeptical optical ar is close. I don’t get it but I’m sure the internal Apple and board view it as a strong thesis.
Still glad it’s this and not a car.
Looking forward to how it plays out.
* A pub that doesn't exist - there is one about 15 miles with that name, but there's never been one called that here.
* The local church is in the wrong place
* The opening hours of the local cafe are wrong (11:30-3:30 instead of 10:00-3:00)
* Business names aren't correct
Generally, if you are in a city it is fine, but don't use it if you are rural.
The first Watch was awful. I love my Series 8.
Don't get me started on the first Mac...
You have to put it in context with what passed for a smart phone back then. No web browser (they sort of existed but were extremely cut down and not really usable), small screens with limited software, very limited connectivity that was very expensive.
A valid criticism was the lack of physical keyboard, which phone-jockies found a deal breaker, but in all other ways a phone with decent apps, a large screen, a real web browser designed around and provided with unlimited internet connectivity was always going to be a hit.
It wasn't even that expensive compared to other phones.
I am sure someone with quibble that some other product technically had something similar first, and they are probably right. But the iPhone demo was the first time I had seen anything quite like it.
Turning on a light bulb, ordinary light in the house, meh, ok, then swipe your hands out over the counter and the recipe pulls up. That's the 'oh wow' moment. Then grab and throw a song to a Homepod connection. You know what I mean...
There's a gap someone can shoot, maybe 3 years tops. Honestly though, the developer ecosystem is just so tight, continuity so powerful, doing this solo requires more than what the whole MFi program offers.
At the time my feature phone had much better MMS, video calling, and J2ME apps. The first iPhone was a joke by comparison looked at through that lens, and detractors generally were looking at the fact it was this hobbled 2G device missing features that were common in other, cheaper phones. Oh, and the camera was absolute garbage, too.
MMS worked well enough but was/is pretty limited. Video calling existed but postage stamp video at 8 frames per second was not something that anyone wanted to actually use. And don't get me started on J2ME, an ecosystem so vast that Google didn't even bother to include it in Android even though they are both based on Java. Although other phones had better cameras, none took what we would call an acceptable photos today.
What people did use all the time was the browser and only the iPhone had a decent one. That was the only thing that mattered. Heck, the iPhone wasn't even a very good _phone_ and even that didn't matter.
I based my purchase of phones in the early to mid 00s on whether they came with the full Opera Mobile browser.
I could use just about everything online the same as desktop, that didn't rely on flash of course. The screen size was small but surprisingly wasn't a big issue as everything else was a massive improvement.
Oh Nokia 3660, how I loved thee. I actually chose the 3650 and then 3660 because they seemed to be the best smartphones at a standard sized. I just couldn't justify qwerty.
I definitely do not think that opinion was widespread. If anything I think that the biggest discussed shortcoming of the first iPhone was that it was only available on AT&T.
It didn't multitask, even though other pocket computers for a Long Time had at least the appearance of multitasking. It didn't have the ability to install any additional software, even though other pocket computers for a Long Time handled third-party software just fine. It didn't even have a copy/paste function, even though [WTF? Srsly, Apple?].
All of these things were eventually corrected by Apple, but it was pretty awful until they were corrected: For quite some time, the iPhone was just a rather fancy touchscreen music player with telephone and SMS programs tacked on.
(More damning: All of these things were corrected very quickly by third parties via jailbreaks. Some of us were having a ball with first-gen IOS devices very early on in the game, but Apple wasn't any help in getting that accomplished.)
And to take two of your examples, multitasking and 3rd party software, yeah, other pocket computers had them, and they generally sucked hard (see, Windows Mobile). Even the lack of copy/paste - other phones had them, but there was (and honestly still is) considerable debate over how it should be implemented given multitouch was new.
It seems like the Vision Pro 1 has the M2 so that when the Vision, or Vision Air comes out, it will be at least as powerful as the first Pro. And the Pro 2 can have the M3.
But from various PalmOS devices to whatever Android device is in my pocket right now, carrying wired headphones has never been a thing for me for whatever reason.
So as a Google Voice user since it was still called GrandCentral, having Google Voice available on a Wifi-connected touchscreen pocket music player called an iPod Touch was simply never very useful to me: The OG iPod Touch was lousy as a telephone, since it lacked all of the basic parts (like a microphone or an earpiece) that made telephones useful, and SMS was not yet in its heyday back then either.
I got much better use of the service with my dumb phone with T9 text input and transcription of voicemails to SMS, and my dumb phone worked anywhere instead of just where I could find a Wifi network.
Jailbroken, the iPod was an amazing pocket computer with a brilliant display, thin profile, and exceptional responsiveness to touch input, especially with third-party apps and improvements installed. It was fun having a real *nix userland installed on it, and it sure seemed novel to SSH from it.
By default, though? Almost useless except as a music player -- a task that previous iPods did better.
(I mostly used my OG iPod Touch to take offline notes. It did OK at this, but previously-used PalmOS devices did better in terms of input speed and portability of those notes.
Even relatively high-end aftermarket car stereos at the time were afraid of it: "Oh, why sure I can play music with your iPod!
Except.. is that an iPod Touch?"
"shun shun shun")
It had the only truly usable mobile web browser. Windows Mobile's IE was trash, and the browsers on Palm OS, Blackberry and Symbian were laughable. This was the killer app (especially on Wifi, EDGE was not great).
When trying to use the iPhone seriously, at some point it wouldn't receive calls anymore (just silently crash the deamon receiving it, you'd never know if not told by the caller afterwards), drop active calls when battery was too low (single digit), call quality could be horrible, stuff would crash from time to time.
Memory would leak like a sueve from everywhere so rebooting the phone every now and then was good hygiene. It's only after the 3GS that it stabilized, otherwise antennagate would have been just another tuesday IMO.
It was still a stellar device, but not a fully reliable device in any way shape or form.
Compared to all the smartphones of the time, it was a slow toy with no apps and a 2G connection that was completely worthless
It looked nice though, and eventually it got an app store (unnoficially first), and the overall UX was a clear winner (nobody believed touch screens would ever replace blackberry style devices!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_iPhone
> When Apple announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007,[38] it was sold only with AT&T (formerly Cingular) contracts in the United States.[32] After 18 months of negotiations, Steve Jobs reached an agreement with the wireless division of AT&T[39] to be the iPhone's exclusive carrier. Consumers were unable to use any other carrier without unlocking their device.
I don't know how they did it, but "life finds a way" ?
> I didn’t even use my iPhone in the US
So you can't really describe the experience for the several different US carriers which it didn't work on, and thus can't really say it worked on any other network. Verizon was a network it didn't work on, and thus fails the "any other network" standard you set earlier.
It worked on any GSM network. Tmobile for instance. Verizon and Sprint were the exceptions in the US, since they weren’t GSM.
It is not being pedantic to point out someone is saying something massively untrue.
Your comment makes it sound like anyone could just easily take an OG iPhone and run it on any network, but in reality, to US consumers it was only a few smaller networks and only after breaking an expensive contract. See how that's more than just a pedantic difference?
Albeit not from the computer nerds who knew what they were getting, but the general public who thought they were buying a phone on par with the Motorola, Nokia or Panasonic phones in term of reliability.
It was incredible and obviously a game changer.
Also, it took over a year to be able to write apps for it.
JS Web apps were not “apps.”
Before Steve stood on that stage in 2007 and demoed the first iPhone, most people had never even seen 'swipe to scroll'. The first iPhone absolutely kicked the arse of everything else. So what if it was 2G that was how most phones were back then. The only objection anyone could think off (e.g. Ballmer) was that it was expensive.
The first two iPhones weren't as innovative as they make them,just more polished than other symbians with cameras and internet, it took off with apps really in third iteration.
I think visionpro has lots of opportunities in the next iterations, early users will provide feedback this gen.
Yes they were. Multi-touch in particular was a revelation. Making a big screen with one physical button is a simple idea, but making it work well was the hard part that nobody else had figured out.
Those first iPhones were dog slow, sure, but they absolutely defined how smartphones work ever since.
I don’t think this was my experience at all. The first iPhone was always snappy until they started adding random crap everywhere (e.g. by the release of the iPhone 4 the original was near worthless without really old firmware)
Yet we're supposed to give to consider the iphone a revelation because of multi touch. I had the iphone 3g. It was a more polished experience than other phones but that revelation part was just not there. Apps made it big, later.
I swear people treat iPhones like a cult.
It was a full unix OS, not some mobile-specific trash like the others (Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry). Capacitive touch wasn't an invention, but a premium form of touchscreens (most were resistive).
Having nearly 60fps high quality 3d accelerated animations on a phone also contributed to a heavily premium feeling for the software. It enabled things like Inertial Scrolling, which among other things (like first class typography afforded by using OS X, and a fully standards compliant web browser), none of which were "innovations" in the sense of "we came up with this first", but more exceptionally good engineering in service of a great experience.
In almost every way (apart from the "traditional phone metrics" like 2G ironically), the iPhone was a huuuuuge leap forward from the status quo.
It might be true that anyone else could've done it. But nobody else did. It wasn't just luck that Apple did.
The iPhone was the first one that I actually used to take pictures and play music. It wasn’t the first to have those features (and the edge network was super slow), but that polished experience is what made it work. And made it clear to everyone how we would interact with phones for decades to come.
It was a technological inflection point. That’s why it is looked back on the was it is.
There was a "cult," all right. It consisted of people like Steve Ballmer plugging their ears, shutting their eyes, and denying the obvious.
Clunky and sorta useless, but “a new class of device”… eventually
Apart from that, yesterday I just played Pickleball with a guy who used his apple watch to keep score. It was a little odd at times but seemed like a cool use.
All of them! The first version of the iPhone, iPad, iPod, watch, AirPods...
They all had similar reviews. "Seems like a tech preview, not really ready for general use, too expensive", etc.
The idea of 'spatial computing' or a heads up display that augments your vision and gives you eye tracking input to manipulate UIs in your visual field seems clearer superior to looking at little glass displays (meta agrees). If you can project out a future where that hardware becomes better and better it's a pretty powerful interface paradigm.
Eye tracking as an interface for this can get pretty close to telepathy if done well.
I ordered one - it's the sort of thing you really have to play with yourself imo.
The first iPad was ok only because it truly was "just a bigger iPhone". But they didn't really make features that were unique to the iPad and took advantage of its bigger screen for a few versions afterwards.
I would say the main function of an iPod OS is finding what you want to play, not actually playing it.
It was extremely easy if you tagged your mp3s properly.
The first iPad was similarly expensive, thick and underpowered. It wasn't until a couple generations in that it was good.
Btw, don’t forget visionOS 2.0 is just 18 weeks away. (Source: WWDC is every June and every platform gets a version bump, as we saw with watchOS launching in April then getting a 2.0 immediately after at WWDC.)
I've been wondering how much this is part of the context here. He may feel some pressure that he hasn't really launched a new major product category from scratch in all his time as CEO and if this has been running 10 years as a project now, that it would be a blemish on his legacy to not get it out the door before he leaves. Perhaps without him there it would even be binned which would be even more pressure to deliver it.
Contrary to all that he really seems a bit ambivalent about the device himself, having never allowed himself to be seen publicly using it.
As far as I can tell Tim Cook has never pretended to be a product guy. He seems perfectly comfortable being what he is: a ruthless operations guru bent on efficiency. In every profile I’ve ever read he’s not really the one making hard product decisions, and seems content to leave that to others better suited for it.
And I would argue the M-series CPU are pretty major as well.
Wikipedia's citation that the Watch began in 2011 after Steve's death is incorrect. It began in 2010 under Steve's direction after the acquisition of Bob Messerschmidt's Rare Light, which brought hearth rate monitoring tech to Apple. Messerschmidt was assigned a team by Steve. Don't blindly trust Wikipedia, folks...
As for the others I just meant platform products, none of those have their own OS until homeOS later this year. None of them defined new product categories for Apple - for instance the AirPods were an iteration on EarPods, not a new product category. Apple was already shipping a home speaker product before HomePod, which was an iterative product without its own software platform for developers. M-series is iterative tech, not a new product category. The Motorola ROKR wasn't an Apple product. But sure HomePod is perhaps Tim Apple's one original new product category before Vision if the 2006 Apple Hi-Fi counts as a distinct product category.
No one would call the iPhone an existing product just because Apple shipped the iTunes collaboration phone with Motorola.
> Ive began dreaming about an Apple watch just after CEO Steve Jobs’ death in October 2011. He soon brought the idea to Dye and a small group of others in the design studio.
Source?
Edit: But since it is still so new, it could not be until WWDC 2025 that visionOS 2.0 gets announced.
it'll be a beta
Most of Apple offerings are good:
Watch
iPad
Mac
iPhone
services
Are they really expecting this to just be a hard problem initially that they get better at over time? When is the last time they launched a "so so" product?