“The iPhone is not and never was a phone,” John Gruber writes for Daring Fireball. “It is a pocket-sized computer that obviates the phone. The iPhone is to cell phones what the Mac was to typewriters.”
“The iPod’s success fooled almost everyone (including me) into thinking that Apple’s entry into the phone market would be similar. The iPod was the world’s best portable media player; the ‘iPhone,’ thus, would likely be the world’s best cell phone,” Gruber writes. “But that’s not what it was. It was the world’s best portable computer. Best not in the sense of being the most powerful, or the fastest, or the most-efficient to use. The thing couldn’t even do copy-and-paste. It was the best because it was always there, always on, always just a button-push away. The disruption was not that we now finally had a nice phone; it was that, for better or for worse, we would now never again be without a computer or the Internet. It was the Mac side of Apple, not the iPod side, that set the engineering foundation for the iPhone.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Here’s how our own SteveJack immediately reacted to the iPhone’s January 9, 2007 unveiling, six and a half months before it first went on sale on June 29, 2007:
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
I read a lot of Gruber but I know I had read someone else that pointed out at the time that the iPhone was much more than a phone. Thanks for the reminder.
I remember when Steve Jobs was introducing the iPhone, he said it was going to be a “breakthrough Internet communication device,” the cheers were not as enthusiastic as when he talked about the phone and “wide-screen iPod with touch controls”. I remember feeling much more excited about the Internet communicator function.
One of these days, MDN, you will have to ask SteveJack to post his thoughts on where he sees Apple in five years. He definitely has a talent for predicting trends for the company.
LOL!!! SteveJack is MDN. 😉
Oh man, shhh… Some don’t know that, and we all are aware what Spoilers do…. 😉
And that’s Today’s trivia Q&A: MDN is Steve Jack.
I’ve never thought of my iPhone as a phone, because I owned an iPod touch for two years. When you come to the iPhone from that direction, it’s impossible to think of it as anything other than a really advanced iPod touch that makes phone calls and always has access to the Internet.
Of all the functions of my iPhone that I do use, I actually use the phone function the least. I’m more likely to iMessage my friends and family than call them.
——RM
Using an iPhone to call inevitably leads to more wasting of time having a long conversation (sometimes necessary, usually not) when the essential mission is just to convey a brief idea or thought. It shows to go you that most communication is in short bursts so it’s no wonder the iPhone, which makes that possible, would have its phone function used least. It saves our energies and time for things that truly matter – like surfing the web. 🙂
Technically, the Steve Jack comment came 5 and 2/3 months before it went on sale.
Bill Gates “The Road Ahead” didn’t mention anything about roadkill which is kind of funny as that’s pretty much how Microsoft’s effort ended up after the great mobile wars of 2012-13.