Jobs/Apple was never about bundling tons of irrelevant features together (wireless charging? Please...), and winning by ticking feature checkboxes.
Jobs used to introduce a new iPod model every year or so. And he also got to introduce 4 iPhone models. Lots of times the changes were incremental (3G -> 3GS for example).
Heck, back in the day, a new color or some more storage was considered a huge improvement over the previous iPod model. People literally went bezerk in the possibility that the next iPod could also play video (imagine that!).
And now you have a mature phone, in it's 6th version, fast as hell, with a GPU that you would have killed for to have in your laptop half a decade ago, camera, gyro, retina, bigger screen, thin, new extremely featured iOS, some 500.000+ apps etc. What exactly do you want with that? Magic sprinkle dust?
I would be satisfied even if Apple had only sticked to making computers/OS. They have far surpassed that. Nobody even asked them to make mp3 players, phones, or tablets in the first place. Since we will be using all of the above for the next 20 years, I think they will be fine, even if they dont pull another market/device out of their hats...
The same could be said about the first gen ipod, when compared against the current lineup of mp3 players at the time. The ipod didn't even have wifi or a color display!
>I wanted something that would be qualitatively better than current Android phones. It didn't deliver. At all.
IMHO, it's better than any Android phone out there, bar none. From the construction, to the display, to the weight and size, to the cpu/gpu combo, and more importantly to the huge app ecosystem that makes use of standard gizmos inside it, and ties it all together. Plus the media ecosystem. Plus the third-party peripheral ecosystem.
>It's trivial for the phone to be better than 5+ year old tech. But that's a completely irrelevant comparison.
Yes, completely irrelevant, since it's also better than any 1 month old tech, or the previous iPhone itself.
What's the competition? Some Android phone that will be left without an update to the next Android version and which has the subpar Android app ecosystem and subpar construction/design? Or the Lumia that doesn't even have an OS out of beta yet and is "due to arrive later this year"?
As if anyone except history books and nerds care who DID invent them.
What matters is who made them popular and got them in our collective hands en masse.
That's when the revolution starts, when people start buying them so you have improvements and cheaper price due to economies of scale, and you also get an ecosystem of apps, etc.
Tablets pre-iPad might as well have been non-existing. Same for smartphones pre iPhone. I had several (Nokia, Sony Erricson etc. After the iPhone you couldn't stand this crap for a moment).
I also had 2-3 mp3 players pre iPod. Including some bizarro Sony's own format players. Not even close to what we expect post-iPod.
Apple created the modern smartphone; they did definitely not invent all the necessary technologies but they were absolutely the first ones to come up with a package that people actually loved and bought. Before that, such a package did definitely NOT exist. Together with the "Apps" and AppStore, that is a market that Apple created.
And they did the same with the tablet, they created a market that did not exist before - from existing technologies.
I know. That's why I said: the modern smartphone. I have used a couple of those you mentioned and they just weren't the same. I doubt they even remotely pushed the kind of crazy numbers Apple and Androids are seeing each year now.
Yes, but that's also why I said that they didn't "create" the modern smartphone. Everything that they "created" already existed before they came along.
There's no doubt that they packaged things very nicely and have been very successful, but it's not as if they created this market out of thin air. They surely did not invent the general concept that they've been so successful implementing.
The market for smartphones you see now? Teens, kids, moms and everyone else? Yes, they created that. And they created the package, granted out of existing technologies but the package does matter.
