Blackberries were huge and growing. iPhone definitely expanded the market faster than anyone dreamed. But it was easy to see where the market would go before iPhone.
I just want to point out that global iPhone market share has been hovering between 15% and 20% for years. Android has almost all of the rest. Iphones are not dominant.
Easy to see at a high level--phones with web, multimedia support, and app support. Near impossible to guess what exactly what would look like and when.
The pieces where there already, just good enough product with good enough connectivity was missing. In the end iPhone is nothing more than refined PDA...
A lot of people had smartphones before iPhones. Basically all the 3G phones sold in Europe since 2003. I was working for an operator that got 3 M customers in its first year back then.
Had they a touchscreen as good as iPhone's? Definitely not. Did they had an internet connecting better than iPhone's? Definitely yes because the original iPhone was only 2G.
Anyway, this is only an analogy so let's don't get too much into it.
People don't care about jetpacks because they are crazy dangerous and expensive. This makes them less practical than jumping from a plane with a parachute instead of waiting for it to land.
Sure, I meant it in context, obviously some people did care, otherwise they simply wouldn't exist at all, what I meant is nobody = niche = not mainstream by any means.
I still think that's an understatement. Not that it matters really, but did you forget about the ubiquity of Blackberry's for nearly a decade prior to the iPhone?
Hmmm... Not sure that Jetpack 2.0 will ever be a thing like the iPhone was.
Helicopters autogyro, planes glide, balloons (usually) lose their lift slowly.
A jetpack, like a rocket, is a thing that has no business flying. Only a large, heavy-handed impulse of energy allow them to oppose gravity. Without altitude and a parachute, there is no Plan B for a jetpack engine failure, loss of fuel, etc.
I think a parachute would be pretty easy to accommodate, at least an emergency one. Maybe it'll still hurt, but cut the pack loose and hopefully you would survive. Not everyone survives helicopter or plane engine failures either.
I certainly don't think jetpacks are a relevant tool for society outside of really niche use cases. If we don't even trust people to fly small drones around the public safely and without FAA regulation and licensing, in what dreamland would we all be able to fly personal jetpacks to the shops, or even recreationally? There are way cheaper, way safer ways to get airbourne as a private aviation enthusiast, so I can see why jetpacks really don't scratch enough itches to have gained popularity.
Parachutes have a minimum altitude, and jetpacks really do not push people into flying high. (What is a problem in more ways than that, because most of the things that can make your flight safer need altitude.)
