I would have said 6 or 7 if asked. It seems like a lot has happened in that 5 years.

The thing that strikes me about the iPhone, and everyone has their own thing, is this contradiction. For me upon it's release it was so revolutionary. It was such a massive monumental change from its closest rival (Blackberry) in the way it looked, felt and worked. Since that time though, it really has done some small iterations and changed very little. Maybe the two are directly related.

Now to those that will go bananas on (it hasn't changed that much) imagine someone who has never seen any of these phones. Put a 1st gen iPhone next to the comparable blackberry at the time. Then put a 1st gen next to the most recent release. Think of how different each of those two experiences would feel.

For me, it has everything to do with avoiding pain points on the consumers end. Keeping a consistant design/feel means Apple doesn't have to teach consumers new skills. Other platforms have to differentiate with size, shape, and OS. Each one requeres a transitional learning period.

Take siri for example. Apple is running a ton of celebrity ads just to show people how to use it, because siri is too different for the average person. Luckily for Apple, its just a feature, not the core product. Just like a new Android device, people will get used to siri eventually. The difference is the iPhone consistency makes the essential phone experience seamless.

One of the big things that Apple got amazingly right was the App Store install process. From a Linux perspective it's mostly an evolution, but for the mainstream customer that has had to deal with Windows installers it's unreal how easy it is.

I saw this link in one of the comments in the microsoft.com design preview post:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-...

Contrast that to how easy it is to install something on iOS. It's little wonder that people don't mind paying for iOS apps - they're easy and cheap.

It's worth pointing out that the app store is one of the things apple didn't get right 5 years ago. It came later, after they'd spent almost a year claiming that the proper software extension mechanism was web apps. Obviously that doesn't detract from its success, but I think it's an important part of history. The app ecosystem that we all associate with "iOS" beat Android to market by only about 6 months.

Yet 6 months was apparently enough - Apple's Appstore is still ahead.

Cell phone operators had "java stores" that were just as easy to operate (and would even just show up on your monthly bill, so no credit card needed). It's just the iPhone was the first platform good enough that people wanted to buy apps for.

You could say the same if you were to compare an MS-DOS computer with the original Mac OS and OS X. But I do agree with your point, the biggest advance in usability for iOS has been faster hardware and more memory, rather that more advanced software. My old iPhone 3G seems unusably slow to me now.

I don't think that should be a surprise though. OS software and development frameworks are hard to get right and easy to spoil with badly thought out changes. Apple have been there and done that, so they have a very measured approach to evolving both iOS and OS X.

Google were unbelievably lucky that they had a modern, flexible platform in Android that they were able to very rapidly re-engineer so that it could be competitive with iOS. If it hadn't been for that, Apple would have had the whole smartphone market entirely to themselves for the first 3-4 years, and they'd have deserved it. No wonder Steve Jobs was so pissed at Google.

Well, they have almost all the profit now, which is what matters most to a company (not so much to its fans though).

Isn't that typical with innovation? One big jump, then a whole lot of refining small steps before someone makes another big jump.

Or are you expecting big jump after big jump?

Why mess with perfection?

Terrible charts. In the line charts you should be comparing height, but the way they're rendered suggests that area should be compared. This is the most egregious: http://8.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/iphone-5-year... The iPhone revenue has less than half the area but the value is actually bigger.

Waited in line for it the day it was released and still carry a first-gen in my pocket everyday. An amazingly solid piece of hardware. I know I'm missing out on new features, but I can't help wondering just how long it will go for.

I wish they'd do a new aluminium-based design. My mom's still using my old ('08?) Nokia E71 that also has a metal body, and it barely looks a day old (not just wrt wear, if it weren't for the keyboard you'd never know it was made four years ago). My Nexus doesn't feel anywhere near as solid, and I've seen way too many iPhone 4s with cracked glass (and the 3G design gets messed up _way_ too easily). A new Al-based iPhone 5 might tempt me over (doubting it, thanks to the NFC rumors)

it is still hard to believe now the man behind it is gone.

I can assure you that Jonathan Ive is still alive and well.

And it basically still looks exactly the same. I suppose you can decide if that's a positive or negative.