Apple Thoughts: The Curious Case of the iPhone

When the iPhone launched on June 29, 2007, the lines to get one were tremendous. I waited on line for about 8-10 hours to get mine. A lot of people waited a lot longer, and in New York City if you didn't get yours before the weekend was over, you had at least a one-week wait to get your hands on your own. No sooner did people get them in their hands than a disgruntled group of non-buyers began explaining to anyone who would listen that the only thing selling the iPhone was hype. Accompanying that argument was the repetitive pointing out that there was "nothing new" about the iPhone and that everything we were seeing in it had been done before.

In essence, those arguments are at least partially true. Apple isn't the first company to have used a touch screen. For years, companies like HP, Dell, Toshiba, and HTC have been cranking out device after device with touch screens. I'll even ignore the fact that Apple was one of the first to ever use a capacitive touchscreen on a mobile device, and is definitely the first to cover their touch surface with glass instead of plastic.

Many people who never bought one bemoaned the interface. It was too simplistic. It didn't offer "skins." You couldn't customize anything. it was just "there." According to the so-called experts, this was Steve Jobs' way of ramming a user interface down people's throats that was his vision for how a phone should work and people had two options: take it or leave it. Others bemoaned the lack of third party applications, a to-do list app, note synchronizing, Exchange support, a physical keyboard, video recording, cut and paste, the fact that it wasn't a 3G phone, and the fact that it couldn't make a cup of coffee merely by dialing it in the middle of the night.

Oh yeah, and it was "too expensive" for the average consumer.

By rights, the iPhone should have fell flat on its face from minute one, and if any of these objections that were raised were serious, we'd be reading about how Apple shareholders voted out Steve Jobs and cancelled the iPhone project altogether. Of course, that didn't happen.

What did happen, however, was a minor revolution in the phone market. Despite their lumbering nature, many phone companies were slapped in the face with the fact that their objections simply didn't matter to Joe Consumer (a distant relative of Joe the Plumber). Companies responded, as they usually do, with poor knockoffs of the iPhone that completely missed the point. Toward Christmas of last year, Verizon was touting its Voyager as the best touchscreen phone on the market. "Touch does more when it's on 'The Network,'" the ads reminded us. In the end? The Voyager flopped. You couldn't get one at all around Christmas, but you could easily get one now. Verizon then launched the Samsung Glyde, the LG Dare, the Venus, and so on. Again and again touting that "touch" does more on their network. Again and again, these competitors fell flat on their face, enjoying minor success on day one and complete nothingness thereafter.

Sprint tried to go after Apple, also. They launched a gigantic ad campaign for their Instinct, the phone that was going to knock Apple off its pedestal. It had everything. Turn by turn directions, mobile TV, picture messaging, and so on. The hype machine was in full force. If you got this phone on the "Now Network," you'd be the envy of the neighborhood, and yet today, a mere few months after its launch, I've barely seen one on the NYC Subway. Despite the number of competitors, I still see way more iPhones; first generation ones as well as 3G ones.

How can this be? How can all these competitors show up with more features on better networks and yet people are still buying the iPhone?