Why the iPhone won

We are living in the age of the iPhone or, if you will, in the age of the computerphone, which – in just a handful of years – has supplanted all previous concepts of what a portable phone could and should look like and do.

To paraphrase Steve Wozniak’s “virtually every [computer] machine is a ‘Macintosh’ now”, virtually every smartphone is an ‘iPhone’ now.

How did this happen? What really did Apple do differently from other mobile companies?

The most important thing is that although the iPhone as built upon the Newton, Palm and General Magic vision, Apple mostly started from scratch and didn’t limit itself to just improving an already existing and established set of specs currently available on the market. It chose a revolutionary approach instead of an evolutionary one.

In a 2017 Computer History Museum event, iPhone engineers remembered how much they were disappointed by the incremental updates strategy of the existing players.

In the video of the event, at 19:56 (to 24:16) you can hear Apple iPhone hardware engineer Hugo Fiennes stating: 

“I’ve been a big phone owner […]. I used to buy the latest release [thinking] ‘This is the one! This is the one! It’s gonna be… oh, it’s awful!’ [And I’ll] Sell it on eBay and buy another one. And I’ve been through many different ones. No one was really pushing the boat out (?) to what was really possibile. […] There was a lot of stuff there which… you looked at that stuff and it’s obvious that everyone else was just… they had to make some different variants of phones. It was just incremental. They were holding stuff back. And Apple had nothing to hold back. It was just ‘Go for it’. What’s the best stuff we can get? Let’s add a bit to that and push and push all of the chip vendors a bit harder. And the screen vendors and everyone a bit harder. And get this amazin thing. Nokia was just being incremental. Everyone was being incremental.”

Apple iPhone Software engineer Nitin Ganatra adds: 

“Every single time a new phone came out, for me anyway, I had this hope that ‘OK, this is actually gonna be the phone that I want to use. And they never were. It was because they _were_ very incremental. It’s a brand new year and Sony Ericsson now has this brand new phone… Last year’s was OK but, boy, they’ve done an year of learning! Let’s see what they’ve come up with now!’ And one year later it’s about like what they had released a year before.” 

Apple iPhone Software engineer Scott Herz (not so jokingly) quips: 

“Except that it had like a special key on the side that did somehting stupid!”

And Ganatra sums it up: 

“And it was slower than last year’s [model]. It probably had slightly worse battery life. And had this fuzzy screen that allegedly was color. You know, it was just bad in all this ways…”

The real secret wasn’t that Apple was working on the iPhone. It was its approach. They worked in secret and managed to surprise competitors and >pundits alike.

As iPhone engineer Nitin Ganatra remembers: 

“[The secrecy] was an impediment. Of course it was an impediment. But at the same time there was so much value there as well by having this secret and having it be. ‘Let the rest of the world think that in order to develop a phone you have to this incremental thing, right?’ And that’s what the industry looks like. Everybody’s gonna have effectively a dot one and they’re gonna take a whole year to come out with that. I think that that all served us very well in the end. Nobody knew what was coming. Nobody knew what we were working on. And if anybody had to guess they would think that it looks probably a lot like the Blackberries did at that time, or the Treos did at thet time. If you asked anybody, based on what had already happening in the phone industry before, they would think that we would have a very minor increment on top of the best phone that was there in 2006. Right? Because that was the pattern that everybody else was following. Why would we have anything better? I think those years of slow development in the phone industry also helped us too. In addition to keeping it secret, it helped us really make a big splash!”

Apple rethought the rules and wasn’t afraid to make bold choices, sometimes even taking steps back.

An example of this is how they took the keyboard away, making space for whichever UI was needed at any moment. 

Nowadays 99% of mobile “smart” phones have no keyboard/keypad.

Eventually Google, Motorola, Samsung or Nokia – which were and are also full of smart engineers – would have got a similar result, but they would have done it much, much later.

Apple’s advantage, which allowed them to leapfrog the competition, was in coming from a different market, thinking outside of the box and having executives who pushed a precise vision, free of market shares, needs, investors or other baggage.

Remember that in 2007, even tough Apple was riding on the gigantic success of the iPod, it was definitely an upstart in the mobile market, not an incumbent. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laughed at Apple’s strategy, while Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, co-chief executives and co-chairmen of Research In Motion (RIM), dismissed [Apple and the iPhone] as

“kind of one more entrant into an already very busy space with lots of choice for consumers”, adding that “in terms of a sort of a sea-change for BlackBerry, I would think that’s overstating it.”

Palm CEO Ed Colligan, answering to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff commented that it wasn’t easy succeed mobile business:

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone” adding that “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

And yet Apple succeeded. An important factor in Apple’ approach was exactly that it wasn’t part of that mobile market and that it was coming from a computer business mindset, not just a mobile one. Apple treated the iPhone like a computer, not like a phone: they even adapted their personal computer operating system, not the iPod OS or any mobile “firmware”. 

This later proved as a big asset, e.g. making native apps possible, or adapting the OS to other form factors, such as the iPad.

Lastly, Apple didn’t cater to telcos. Since day one the iPhone was sold both by mobile operators and by the Infinite Loop business, and it’s Apple that decides features, and provides and controls the software the device runs on and its updates. In 2018 this, unfortunately, is still one of iPhone (and iPad’s) strenghts and one of Android’s biggest problems.

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1 Comment

  1. You mean that Android, givin’ its users the “freedom” put also in danger the evolution of its product… slowing it down by a thousand drifts?

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