Oh yeah ? Apple has always skimped out on ram on every single device and made you pay a premium to get more. That wasn't a real problem on macs in the past because it wasn't difficult to add ram yourself, but now with tablets and the new macbook air and macbook pro retina.. that's kind of a problem.

I bought one of the first macbook air that had the ram soldered to the board without thinking. If I had known that Mac OS Lion and Mountain Lion would've become so bloated I wouldn't have bought the 2gb model that I sold for a measly 200 euros recently. This piece of shit couldn't browse the web with multiple tabs open without swapping even though the same task was okay in the past with Windows XP and 512mb of ram. (I probably could have gotten more but I didn't WANT to sell it for more because I would have felt like I'd be robbing someone by selling them a defective device for a premium) By the way, there wasn't a single PC vendor selling laptops with less than 4gb of ram, when I bought my MBA, even el cheapo laptops that sold for $400 had 4gb of ram (what does it says about Apple ?). I was kind of retarded to buy the 2gb MBA, and I should've spent a little more for the 4gb, but I don't really regret it either since I opened my eyes and sold all my Apple devices, and will never buy anything from apple again.

It was obvious to a LOT of people that the first iPad was way too lacking in power and would be prone to something akin to planned obsolescence. Even me, who got fucked by the Macbook air, knew that the first iPad was indecent (I waited for the iPad 2 before I got my first tablet.)

Look at the top of the line in the android world : the (tablet) Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, which has a much lower resolution than the iPad Retina (and thus less hefty memory needs for the apps), has 2gb of ram inside, future proofing it a bit against future applications. The (phone) Galaxy Note 2 also has 2gb of ram, as do some of the variants of the Galaxy S3, now that's a real top of the line phone. When I saw the retina iPad for the first time, my first impressions, after the initial "wow" you get for the screen, was, the specs are underwhelming for this kind of device.

Apple is all about the shiny. The 13" Macbook Pro still has 4gb of ram as a standard in the entry level, even though it sells for 1249 euros. I've seen PC laptops under 999 euros sold with 8gb of ram, 1TB hard drives, core i7 and a nvidia chip inside (rather than the shitty intel graphic chip that's included in the entry MBP).

I'm done getting ripped off by Apple.

Firstly as for your MacBook Air. OSX runs fine with 2GB and shouldn't be swapping constantly for browsing. And not sure why you are complaining that you got 200 euros for a 4 year old machine.

Secondly you seem to be really bitter about not buying the cheaper and arguably nastier laptops. Why not buy them ? Clearly the only thing that concerns you is specs so why not buy an Apple ?

Thirdly a LOT of people thought the iPad was an incredibly feat of engineering to get all that it did into such a small form factor. Seems to be a lot of revisionist history there.

It became as slow as hell. I am a developer.. I need at least one VM with IE open, I need to have Chrome open, photoshop open, xcode, etc. Luckily I was able to upgrade it with 16GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM, and it's now a pleasure to work with.

Apple only offers an 8GB increase on their online store at 100$ for my macbook pro.. and at a 100$ increase.. In my opinion, 8GB should be standard.

I love my Macbook, wouldn't give it up, I like using OSX, but I really do believe that Apple tends to rip us off when it comes to specs. And FYI, I can't imagine using OSX with 2GB.. my mac mini had 2 GB of RAM and it ran like a pig until I got 4GB of RAM into it.

We all know Apple has outrageous margins on their products.. fine, I am not against them making money. However, I do wish they invested more into their products.

On the other hand, on my 4GB (Ivy Bridge, 11-inch) MacBook Air, I regularly run Visual Studio on Windows (8, 32-bit) under VMware, with IE, IIS, and MS SQL Server running in the VM, along with a number of OS X apps (Terminal, Activity Monitor, Console, Safari, Mail, Preview, Emacs, X11, Script Debugger, and several resident utilities like Alfred and SizeUp), and have no problem dipping in and out of larger apps like Illustrator and Photoshop as needed with few performance problems beyond short (no more than a second or two) delays when switching to a long-inactive app. Do my 8GB MBP work more smoothly? Undoubtedly. But I'm running a much larger Windows (Server 2012, 64-bit) VM on this, and often another Windows, FreeBSD, or Linux VM, and I rarely quit anything unless I'm updating it or rebooting, so I generally have all of the above open plus iTunes, Xcode, Transmit, Excel, QuickBooks, and half of CS6. The only time I see even minor delays is when I nearly overcommit RAM or CPU cores in VMware, open insanely large files (in Photoshop, say), concurrently run several large, parallel compilations that manage to peg nearly an entire core in kernel mode, or go to town with live output from frequently fired dtrace probes.

Were you, by chance, swapping to a mechanical hard drive? If so, and for anyone else whose Mac "crawls" with lots of apps loaded, the single best way to make your machine usable is to replace the hard drive with an SSD. All recent MacBooks that don't come with "built-in flash storage" have user-replaceable hard drives (as in, "easy directions in the manual and doesn't void AppleCare"); the Sandy and Ivy Bridge models even support 6Gbps drives at full speed.

As for the iPad 1, I thought it was slow even on iOS 3.2. It was still quite usable and useful, however.

I also use utilities like Alfred, etc... I can see how a fast SSD makes your system smoother.

An SSD is my next desirable upgrade.. but a considerable expense seeing as I need at least 512GB (I dualboot OSX and Windows)

This wasn't true for me on my 2GB 2006 Macbook running Snow Leopard in 2009, so I don't see how it could be true now.

Thirdly a LOT of people thought the iPad was an incredibly feat of engineering to get all that it did into such a small form factor.

Marco is spot-on here, though: many reviewers commented on the frequent page reloading in Safari, claiming (correctly) that the RAM would be an issue in the future. This was the main issue preventing me from getting an iPad 1.

What the hell are you smoking. Safari with multiple tabs will eat all the remaining memory. The whole system itself took 1,4 gb, there was only 700 mb left after startup on a CLEAN system, formatted and reinstalled without a single program running in the background (Mountain Lion).

> And not sure why you are complaining that you got 200 euros for a 4 year old machine.

Two years old actually. It's a late 2010 MBA. And I'm not complaining, I'm actually saying that I could have sold it for more but didn't bother and sold it myself for 200 euros to get rid of it faster AND to avoid the feeling of ripping off someone (which I would have felt if I had sold it for more, because I consider it a DEAD machine. A useless machine. You can't add ram and the base system is already overloaded with its 2gb. Selling it for what I could have gotten from it (you should look up what people can actually get from selling Apple devices even when they suck) would have been ripping off someone else.)

>Secondly you seem to be really bitter about not buying the cheaper and arguably nastier laptops. Why not buy them ? Clearly the only thing that concerns you is specs so why not buy an Apple ?

I just did that, right now. Am I not free to speak my mind on Apple just like you did when you called those laptops "nasty" ?

> Thirdly a LOT of people thought the iPad was an incredibly feat of engineering to get all that it did into such a small form factor. Seems to be a lot of revisionist history there.

Putting mobile phone hardware inside an iPad's case is not a great "feat of engineering". I would have agreed with you if you called iOS a great feat of (software) engineering, and its user interface revolutionary for the time. But there is nothing special about the iPad's hardware. We got mobile phones today that are far more powerful than the first iPad and many mobile phone at the time had hardware similar to the iPad, it's not like Apple did anything special there, they just put a big screen and battery inside an aluminum case, where in the flying fuck do you see a great feat of engineering ? the bullshit, it hurts.

Ultimately, what's attractive about apple is what their software engineers do. And what's pushing me off is their business practice, closedness, cheapening out on specs to create planned obscolescence.

iOS was what made the iPad great and possible, as it did for the iPhone. And OS X used to be a great OS, until they added so much bloat it couldn't run on 2gb of ram. No apple fanboy here is going to admit it, but the iPad had 256mb of ram to ensure that people would upgrade to the next iPad, end of the line. Just like the first iPhone didn't have 3g even when top of the line phones from competitors had 3g, to make the early adopters spend even more money the year after.

Apple has been ripping off its customers since forever, it's just the last straw. Do you remember the days of the cd-writer/dvd reader combo you could find on many Macs even when the cheapeast PCs had DVD writers ? I do. Apple is a cheap company, that sells cheap hardware with an expensive case. It's hard not to think so, I can recall so many examples of them behaving that way. Do you know the price difference there was even back in the days of the combo drives in the mac between a combo and a dvd writer ? Nothing, it was practically nothing, a matter of a few euros. But to get a mac with a dvd writer inside you had to buy the one that cost much more in the lineup with a better processor and so on. Ridiculous. I can't believe we, as in the collective of Apple customers around the world, put up with so much shit for so long.

The only thing that saves Apple is the software, and it won't last for long, because the competition is getting much better at this. Windows 7 is stable and really nice to use, Android Jelly Bean runs as smooth on my Nexus 7 as iOS did on my iPad 2. Goodbye Apple, it was fun while it lasted.

http://blog.iphone-dev.org/

That's the cost of being inside a walled garden. You don't even have the freedom to install previous firmwares on your device.

But since the browser is part of a firmware upgrade it would be a terrible idea anyway, a new security bug has been found on mobile safari recently, you don't want to stay on older fimrwares if you can help it. Google maps, or a secure browser ? Pick one.

The iPad mini would only kill the nexus for the apple fanboys.

Clearly the iOS/iPad/etc. was far superior at one point (especially when it was the only device!); it's likely it changes over time, but that for anyone familiar with one or the other, switching costs predominate.

Android used to be inferior to iOS, but I feel that it has not only reached feature parity now, it has actually gotten much better. I used to feel the wow-factor a lot the first few times I handled my iPad, and none of the iOS update ever made me feel that again, on the other hand, Android Jelly Bean on the Nexus 7 has quite a few things that really surprised me, in a good way.

An example : when browsing places like Slashdot, I often had to zoom in to click comments and show those that are hidden because the links are often close together and too tiny to hit with the finger (which means that without zooming in I often hit the wrong one), and then zoom out to read the page at the correct size. It felt like a chore. But when I got my Nexus 7 and browsed places like Slashdot and Reddit (I don't use custom apps for websites), and tried to hit a link without zooming in, I had the pleasant surprise of seeing a zoom popping up with the cluster of links that were on the place where my finger hit, I tap the link I want in the pop up and it automatically disappear and I don't have to manually adjust the zoom of the page. It was the "Link Preview" feature of Google Chrome. Amazing. I will never be able to use another device again, if only because of that one feature, unless someone else copies it (the irony).

I haven't found a single thing I missed from iOS on the Nexus 7 - Jelly Bean, on the other hand, I discovered things I will miss if I were to leave Android (something that will probably never happen).

Feature wise, Android has left iOS in the dust. You may have a subjective preference to iOS's UI but there is no denying that iOS has less features than Android.

That's fine for you but not a non-geek no matter how easy it is. It doesn't matter if it's stock Android or not, their experience is tainted in a heartbeat. Having a bad experience with any form of Android will put someone off unless they know the difference, which most don't and don't care about.

That might've been true during the first few versions of Android but I don't think that's the case nowadays. I sold my iPad 2 and bought a Nexus 7 and I don't really miss anything. I certainly do NOT miss not being able to sideload software outside of an app store, or the lack of customization.

In fact I feel that the interface in Jelly Bean is an improvement over iOS in many ways. And it has stronger cloud support, I particularly like how it sync with my online, public Picasa galleries and the like.

The GIMP doesn't even support something like Adjustment Layers and that's a feature that was added to Photoshop 4.0 in 1996. Get real. Those who make that kind of argument for the GIMP, even pretending it could be used as a professional tool, have no idea what they're talking about.

Even the all-public, cheap edition of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, that you can get for $60, has features like Adjustment Layers.

The GIMP has been working on that stuff for a long time and they're still not done yet. They put off all features related to non-destructive editing until they finally fully switch to the GEGL engine.

In fact, I don't really see Photoshop (despite its name) as a tool for working with photos, either.

I admit adjustment layers are nice, but I don't see lacking them as a fatal flaw when there are a few workarounds and, depending on the task you're trying to accomplish, might not even be an important feature.

In any case I don't really claim the open programs are currently 'better' per se (though in one or two cases it may be true or close true), just that they're more than good enough to get decent results from.

Gimp definitely has some hidden surprises.

http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-concepts-layer-modes.html

When you can get something that good for $60 there is absolutely no reason whatsoever as to why you'd put up with something like The GIMP. None. Photoshop had things like Adjustments Layers since 1996 with Photoshop 4.0, the same version that introduced an easy method to make your own automation (macro recording). 1996. The GIMP can't beat something that was made in 1996. I'd rather put up with a VERY old version of photoshop running under a PC emulator with an old OS than use the GIMP. That's how different the two software package are, and how useless The GIMP is.

For the record, The GIMP doesn't even have what we call "Non-Destructive editing" which allows to make a change to some of the filters and transformations you did on the image much later even when the image has been touched by other editions. It has been supported by Photoshop for way more than a decade, already. After all of this time, the Gimp still works like a toy and has zero productivity.

Zero. There is nothing productive about The GIMP. Anything you can do in The GIMP will be done faster with a competitor, Photoshop being the best in the category.

And before anyone comes to tell me that "THE GIMP IS FREE!!!11!ELEVEN!", Photoshop isn't expensive for a Photographer either, so price does not enter the game here. If you're a photographer with one or more DSLR bodies, lots of lenses, travel equipment and so on, spending some money on one measly Photoshop license is not going to kill you. The gain in productivity will more than make up for the money spent anyway, the Gimp truly is an awful tool compared to Photoshop. If you can't afford something like Photoshop it means that you can't afford being in that business in the first place.

I've tried Gimp numerous times, and the lack of smart objects/filters makes it a complete non starter. Generally I found I could do most of the things I wanted to in Gimp, but they required many, many more steps.

Also, I've used Gimp a bunch and I've read the Gimp book from Apress and as far as I can tell there really is no such thing in Gimp as the non-destructive editing Nicole060 describes (assuming I understood the description correctly--that you can say first apply levels, then sharpen the image with unsharp mask, then go back and adjust the levels some more without the need to re-apply the unsharp mask--I don't think you can do this in Gimp.) So it's really a shame that the comment you replied to, which is truthful and presents a valid point of view, got downvoted into gray. And I'm saying this as a fan of Gimp who never used Photoshop.

edit: found US price is $699 (before tax, Aus is post-tax). That's still not 'measly' in any context other than professional.

Of course, this essentially puts one more barrier for people who can't afford formal studies. And especially with the DRM becoming more and more effective, I've actually seen this being a significant obstacle for designers-in-spe from e.g. Poland (where even the discounted price is quite a lot of money). They deal with it, one way or another, but it's always a huge strain.

As for the established professionals for whom the price isn't terrible -- well, good for you, pat yourself on the back for being rich. Less competition that way, or something.

The LG Prada was a complete failure, because your old, classic feature phones like those in clamshell form were MORE usable with their keyboards than the Prada and its really bad touchscreen and bad software. I wanted to go back to a regular phone real fast when I made the mistake of buying a Prada. Not quite the same experience that people have when they buy an iPhone.

Nokia couldn't do it. RIM couldn't do it. Samsung couldn't do it. LG couldn't do it. (LG did make a touchscreen, and I owned one before I bought an iPhone, and it sucked hardcore)

And they were on that market way before Apple.

Cry me a river if it hurts your feelings that Apple goes to defend their innovation.

No-one really thought to patent the obvious design decisions that would come with the viability of a large capacitive touchscreen - rectangular, large screen, few physical buttons, multitouch gestures such as pinch to zoom (that already existed elsewhere).

Apple are absolute masters at combining existing technology into an attractive package. They also have excellent timing at bringing products to market (just before the market is ready for them - see original iPod, iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air).

But to say that these "innovations" wouldn't have happened anyway is disingenuous - no competent observer seriously believes that the market would not have moved on to large capacitive touchscreen devices over the last 5 years.

Apple deserve plenty of credit for their OS animations, smoothness of UI and (either praise or damnation depending on your point of view) the curated app store. They don't deserve credit for "inventing the capacitive touchscreen phone".

Why didn't they all have capacitive iPhone look-alikes ready in the lab then?

Isn't it more reasonable to assume that the mobile market would have stayed roughly as it had the previous 10 years, with incremental improvements in screens, displays etc?

Apple isn't credited with the first capacitive touchscreen phone, but I think they should be credited with making the first usable, mass market touchscreen smartphone.

The Samsung evidence showed that they did. Not as good as the iPhone, certainly, but they were obviously all thinking about it.

> Apple ... should be credited with making the first usable, mass market touchscreen smartphone.

I completely agree with this. But they don't deserve a monopoly on it.

> Isn't it more reasonable to assume that the mobile market would have stayed roughly as it had the previous 10 years, with incremental improvements in screens, displays etc?

No. Not at all. The technology had been rapidly improving, and we would have seen phones with large capacitive touch screens, and features such as "pinch to zoom on a phone" anyway. Sure the implementation may have been different, but the idea that the market would not have moved on in 10 years is absurd.

For all I know they might have been "thinking" about it, but why didn't they do more than think about it if it was that obvious at the time that capacitive touchscreen phones would dominate the future?

I didn't say the market wouldn't move. Of course it would, but probably with incremental improvements. Why? Because mobile user interfaces changed very little before the iPhone arrived.

All the biggest competitors in the mobile space had their own operating systems that were optimized for navigation buttons/softkeys moving a cursor around, and optionally a stylus. Even new contenders like Maemo and Android were initially designed this way. Something like the iPhone would probably have evolved eventually, but I think it's odd to think that the transition to all-display touchscreen phones would have happened at the exact same pace if the iPhone had not been introduced, and that Apple only was "lucky" to have a shipping product available at exactly the right time.

Because, as I said, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens.

> All the biggest competitors in the mobile space had their own operating systems that were optimized for navigation buttons/softkeys moving a cursor around, and optionally a stylus.

Because, as I said, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens.

> Something like the iPhone would probably have evolved eventually

So we basically agree.

When I first saw the iPhone I thought it was the way of the future. But I thought the current form was awful. When the G1 came out it was even worse than the iPhone. The market simply wasn't ready yet; but Apple got in there with something barely usable for a price that a few early movers could afford.

Over time, both Apple and Google refined their systems into amazing, world changing devices.

There were two obvious ways of building these phones - 1. with menus 2. with icons. That is the way all feature phones that I know of worked. Google added widgets to this, and eventually Microsoft came up with the completely new idea of tiles.

> I think it's odd to think that ... Apple only was "lucky" to have a shipping product available at exactly the right time.

I never said anything remotely like that. It was entirely intentional that they put together the iPhone and brought it to market at the exact point in time that it became viable. That's why they are the most valuable company in the world. They deserve the huge success they have had, but, again, they don't deserve a monopoly.

I don't buy that theory. By the sales of the first iPhone, the market was obviously ready. Had it been "barely usable" it would have flopped completely.

Capacitive touch screens use the same technology as touchpads, and I haven't seen any proof that those screens were too expensive before 2006 and that technological advancements broght the price down after that.

What I do think is that Apple was willing to bet on touchscreens and place bulk orders that made the price come down, whereas other companies happy with the status quo and unwilling to redesign their mobile operating systems to fit a new technology.

As I've said ad nausium, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens. The technology was too expensive.

The market currently isn't ready for "wearable technology", like Project Glass. Every competent observer knows that some form of augmented reality/wearable technology is going to become important in the next few years, but it's currently shit.

If Google or some other company gets granted patents to the obvious design decisions that come with it, it will be a disaster for the consumer in the same way as granting "pinch to zoom on a mobile device" is a disaster for current consumers.

> What I do think is that Apple was willing to bet on touchscreens and place bulk orders that made the price come down, whereas other companies happy with the status quo and unwilling to redesign their mobile operating systems to fit a new technology.

They made a good bet, and they literally made billions of dollars from it. What they don't deserve is a monopoly on basic design ideas, like "pinch to zoom" and "rounded rectangles".

By saying the market wasn't ready for capacitive touchscreens due to price, you're implying that this was the main thing keeping an iPhone-like device from reaching the market. Looking at the response from the competition after the iPhone launched, I don't think that's realistic at all.

I haven't seen any evidence that large capacitive touch screens were too expensive before 2007 and suddenly became cheap enough after that.

I also have seen zero evidence that any of the competitors were working on pure finger-touch based user interfaces before 2007. Which would be the case if the market was just waiting for capacitive touchscreen prices to come down.

I do agree that Apple shouldn't have a monopoly on touchscreen phones, and they don't, not even after this verdict. I don't like software patents either, but Samsung could have licensed the patents if they wanted to.

Hm, I don't think the reason competitors had their own operating system and stylus-based touch screens had anything to do with the market being ready for touch screens or not -- nobody created something that was usable, so of course the market didn't adapt to it. Bear with me on my small straw-man argument here: It's kind of like couchsurfing.com existed before airbnb.com, but few people let random strangers stay at their home before airbnb existed. You could say that "the market wasn't ready" or you could say that airbnb executed in a way that transformed the market. If Apple did not create the intuitive interfaces for the iPhone, we might still say "the market isn't ready for large touch screens".

    For all I know they might have been "thinking" about it,
    but why didn't they do more than think about it if it was
    that obvious at the time that capacitive touchscreen
    phones would dominate the future?

For example, many of us here on HN would agree that tv/movie video content streamed over the internet was an obvious idea even in the late 90s. But it wasn't necessarily an obviously good idea at the time.

Maybe you would agree (or not, doesn't matter, the point stands, just pick a different company) that Netflix was the company that made watching videos online enjoyable. Should they enjoy a monopoly on streaming video content over the internet simply because they had the vision to decide that the idea was obviously good enough to pursue at the time that they did?

If they had patented streaming video, or something smaller, like auto-detecting your available bandwidth to optimize delivery quality, would we be so accepting of them trying to destroy Hulu or Amazon VOD in order to protect that "innovation"?

So my question is still, why weren't competitors further along in utilizing capacitive touchscreens if these advancements were so obvious in 2006?

Because apple was the only one that hadn't invested in anything else. Simple as that.

I don't think the work put in by FingerWorks, and then the work put in by Apple to create the iOS user interface was trivial at all. It may not have been groundbreaking compared to what came before (ie most had been demonstrated by researchers), but I think it's obvious that a lot of work and design decisions went into creating it.

"The first iPhone was an expensive PoS" ? it was the first phone with a good web browser, that's already quite something in itself. I can't imagine browsing the web on a phone without double tap to fit a paragraph, pinch to zoom and a good engine like Webkit. That made it a feature phone, more than a smartphone, at the time, with the lack of things like installable software, but it was a damn good feature phone, and for those who use lot of webapps, it was probably better than most smartphones too.

For the record, I hate the app store. I hate not being able to install software outside of the curated app store. But I give credit where it's due, even if there are a lot of things I hate about Apple, they did make the one touch phone that was actually usable, as opposed to POS like LG Prada or Samsung Croix (pre-android touchscreens) interface.

It is really obvious looking at some of the ac adapters and dock connectors that Samsung intended to copy the whole appearance of the earlier iPhones to ride on Apple's coattails. Samsung tried to copy everything from the UI to the trade dress to patented technology. They behaved like shady Chinese companies making cheap knock offs.

Comments like this do not add to the discussion.

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names." - http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You'd have a point if that was the extent of the response.

> "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Huh? Market wasn't ready? This is completely revisionist fantasy. In 2007, it was the best overall phone on the market, period, and the market was ready. People lined up around the block to drop $499 to $599 on a locked phone. They sold over 1 million phones in their first two and a half months. When they dropped the 8GB price to $399, they sold another 3 million phones through the Fall of 2007.

All evidence points to Apple bringing the capacitive touchscreen phone to market years before anyone else would have. That's what innovation is. Not invention, no, but only geeks and historians really care about invention. Innovation in the market is what enables people to actually be able to buy and use things.

Revisionist? No. Personal opinion? Sure.

I personally remember the iPhone coming out and thinking it was awful. Fucking awful. And so did everyone I knew. When the G1 came out it was even worse. In my opinion, the only people that bought these awful phones were, to put it politely, "early movers".

> That's what innovation is. Not invention, no.

You're not really arguing against me. Apple deserve credit and riches for bringing a phone to market that people wanted. They don't deserve a monopoly. As you said, they didn't really "invent" anything

> only geeks and historians really care about invention

Maybe that's the way things should be. But right now the courts are involved, and the US courts (in contrast to some other courts) are saying that Apple have an exclusive right to features such as "pinch to zoom on a phone" that Apple didn't even invent.

I had the opposite experience. So did everyone I knew - they wanted one, badly. So did millions of others.

My point was that it was dubbed the "JesusPhone" in 2007, not 2008. You're entitled to your opinion, of course.

> They don't deserve a monopoly. As you said, they didn't really "invent" anything

If they have valid patents, then yes, they deserve a temporary monopoly on their approach. I don't like the terms of patents, they should be shorter. But I do think they exist for a reason.

> But right now the courts are involved, and the US courts (in contrast to some other courts) are saying that Apple have an exclusive right to features such as "pinch to zoom on a phone" that Apple didn't even invent.

They invent the first implementation of pinch to zoom ever, no. But they invented their approach to it as part of the broader innovation of the iPhone. That's what their patents are about, and they're so far deemed valid.

The iphone wasn't so much a matter of technological inovation as it was one of market building. Apple lept ahead of the incumbents by realizing that a 'smartphone' could be a device every consumer wanted, rather than something that 'business folks' used. It wasn't so much that the incumbents couldn't have thought up something very similar, it was that they were caught up dealing with their current target markets: business people whom needed a blackberry or Wmobile phone with exchange support, whom didn't want change, they wanted a device that did its job and didn't require them to think about it. Its very difficult for a company to have the foresight to produce a product that they know their current customers will hate.

This is classic incumbents vs newcomers leap frogging, if you haven't read "The Innovator's Dilemma" its worth checking out as it speaks directly to this pattern of development.

I disagree. I think the iPhone was the first smartphone that worked. The killer app on the phone was that it was the first phone to have a modern mobile browser.

It was not a browser that "didn't suck", it was a damned good browser. I had an Eee at the time, and I would pick the tiny-by-comparison screen of the iPhone's browser over the Eee any day. Why? Because the smart tap-to-zoom really used the screen real estate effectively. On the Eee, I'd have to use both horizontal and vertical scrolling to read some content.

No mobile browser before the iPhone's version of Safari even came remotely close.

What original iPhone is, was the first 'smartphone' like device that every consumer wanted.

>> it couldn't connect to exchange

>> it couldn't send an MMS

Didn't realize those were "must-haves" for a smartphone (an enterprise smartphone, maybe), because I never did that with any of my Windows Phones prior to getting an iPhone. I used my Windows Phone for my consulting work, by the way.

>> it couldn't multitask or run background apps

That's a double edged sword. That's one thing I hated on my Windows Phone. If you accidentally left the camera running in Windows Phone and sent it to the background, kiss your remaining battery life for the day goodbye.

>> it couldn't copy-paste

On my list of things to have on a smartphone, that's near the bottom. Yes, it was a pain, but far from being at the top of my list of "smartphone criteria"

>> The iPhone was completely incapable of replacing existing smartphones for quite some time

Well, I don't know about other people, but it replaced my Windows phone with no issue.

--edit--

To be clear, my primary business use of a smartphone is to manage my contacts, calendar and e-mail.

The _vast_ majority of the smartphone market at the time was enterprise. The consumer smartphone business didn't exist in any significant way. I had a Wmobile phone and didn't use exchange either, however you and I were an extremely small minority. Apple's inovation was changing that, opening up a real consumer smartphone market.

All the enterprise users I knew had Blackberries. Everyone else I knew bought their own Windows Phones (and some Palm users) and most did not use Exchange. So maybe it could be argued that to some degree, Windows Phones were the only equivalent to a "consumer" smartphone at the time.

Windows Phone is completely different.

Websites have changed to accomodate mobile browsers now so Safari looks like it works great. Travel back to 2007 and it would suck just like everything else.

The Android default browser (granted, appearing after Apple's) is superior on several points, in particular automatically zooming/scaling to the main body text of most web pages.

Apple is defending market share with lawfare, not innovation.

If another manufacturer had made the iPhone, you would probably unlock it by pressing a sequence of keys. That's the most obvious design.

The conclusion is obvious. You could argue that I am biased, and it would be impossible for me to counter. However, IMHO, sliding something was the obvious answer.

Which begs the question why you wouldn't either go straight to the home screen or show a single continue button. Slide to unlock is not what most people would do in that situation.

Apple is defending market share with lawfare, not innovation.

That's kind of the point of patents. Apple got market share by doing stuff that nobody else in the phone market was doing. There were a lot of similar (but not identical) things that other companies did in bits and pieces, but there simply wasn't anything else like the iPhone before the iPhone. (I'd argue that the most revolutionary thing the iPhone brought to the market had nothing to do with the patents, ironically; it had a web browser that just blew the doors off anything available in a device that size in 2007. The biggest sign that Apple got that right is how dominant WebKit-based browsers are on mobile devices now.)

A lot of the hatred directed against Apple over their "patent wars" seems to me to be misplaced: Apple is not abusing the patent system. They're not an Intellectual Ventures style patent troll. They're actually using the patents that they're fighting over. And it's very hard to make a successful argument that Samsung wasn't intentionally copying a lot of things about the iPhone, if only because they thought Apple got things right that previous Samsung models didn't. (In fact, it's hard to argue that it didn't work: the more Samsung made their phones like iPhones the more successful they got.)

There are very good arguments to be made against software patents, maybe even against trade dress patents, and maybe even against patents, period, as John Siracusa has suggested. Maybe patents just don't do what they were intended to do anymore. But it's not realistic to expect any technology company to take a bold stand against the patent system by refusing to sue over perceived patent violations. And it's not even very honest to keep portraying Apple as uniquely litigious in this area; Nokia and Motorola both initiated suits against Apple, and while Microsoft hasn't been going around suing everyone, they've just been collecting license fees on Android from manufacturers. By some estimates they've made more money on Android than Google has.

If there's a problem here--and I think there is--it's with the patent system. The Apple-Samsung battle is a symptom of the problem. Let's not mistake it for the disease.

Samsung isn't getting sued because Apple owns "pinch to zoom." That's not how you'd read the patent. What Apple owns is "pinch to zoom" in the context of a device containing a combination of all the other features. Samsung copied that device with that combination of features. With a device, I might add, that was changed from the default Android UI to look more like an iPhone.

That's completely incorrect--read the patent. Apple owns pinch to zoom on a touchscreen, so long as that pinch to zoom allows you to pinch multiple times to continue to zoom.

Again apple owns an individual utility patent on what we consider pinch to zoom on touchscreens. If you use just that one feature you are infringing on their patent, and every android phone is infringing on that patent.

That Nokia, RIM and others could not do it does not necessarily imply that Apple had some really unique inventions that enabled it to do so. (That Apple claims to be so is a different thing. That Samsung willfully copied their design elements is also a different thing.)

But Samsung is not the kind of company that would take risks with a market and they'd rather ride on the coattails of those who are willing to push the innovation into the hands of the consumers, and it's not something specific to their mobile division, it's the same for their digital cameras, home appliances.. I've seen during the history of photography most of the big names doing something that may have impacted the market, while Samsung is just saying "hey, me-too!" months laters.

To cite a simple example: the iPod disk drive system was based on exclusive access to Toshiba's then-new hardware. Apple did many, many deals of that nature, including outright acquisitions, to gain a technology advantage. Samsung has done a lot to keep up, but only after watching Apple do it first.

Apple was in NO way comparable to the likes of Nokia, Samsung, Sony, Motorola etc who had decades of pre-existing relationships in the mobile and component industries. Not to mention those companies were competing for lowest cost in some areas so had plenty of optimisation work already built into their supply chains.