“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