“When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in January 2007, not everyone came away thinking that he held in his hand the future of the mobile phone,” Paul McNamara reports for Network World. “In fact, before the iPhone hit retail stores on June 29 — five years ago Friday — pundits had written scathing assessments that predicted the iPhone would be a failure, a flop, a messy egg on the forehead of Apple and Jobs.”
McNamara reports, “Over the past few days, I’ve reached out to some of these prognosticators via email and asked: “What do you have to say for yourself?” The good sports replied — including a colorful mea-culpa-tinged, Apple-bashing rant from John (‘Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone’) Dvorak.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Dvorak’s excuse primarily blames Apple for forcing him to opine about a device he had not held rings hollow.
Plenty of people in the same situation got it right, including our own SteveJack who wrote the following – without ever having touched an iPhone – on January 9, 2007, the every same day that Jobs unveiled the brand new device:
Apple really only botched one thing with the iPhone – its name… Apple’s “iPhone” isn’t really a phone at all. It’s really a small touchscreen Mac OS X computer, a Mac nano tablet, if you will. Here’s how misnamed the iPhone is: Some people are complaining that Jobs didn’t spend enough time on the Mac in his keynote! Folks, iPhone is not only a Mac, it’s the most radical new Mac in years! What’s to stop Apple from making a 12-inch model (and larger, and smaller) one of these days (use the headset for the phone, please) and calling it a Mac tablet?
Read more: The only thing really wrong with Apple’s iPhone is its name – January 9, 2007
How we reacted to Dvorak’s original piece is here: Dvorak trolls: ‘Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone’” target=”_blank”>Dvorak trolls: ‘Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone’
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]