Not an iPhone user, but Apple entering the smartphone market was a great thing for consumers I believe. Even if the first iPhone was just a very polished iteration of all the other smartphones on the market, it brought Apple's relentless focus on polish as well as business savvy to the market, it also catalyzed Google and a bunch of other companies to jump into the fray once Apple cleared the way with telecom providers.

Before the iPhone, carriers billed on individual metrics like bytes transferred or connections to servers, the first few months of iPhone bills were sometimes hundreds of pages long. The real revolution that Apple brought was in forcing carriers to become one step closer to being dumb pipes. It's an agreement that even today no other maker of Smartphone has really quite gotten to with the same companies. Google phones still ship with crapware on them.

At the same time, Apple showed structural weaknesses in competitors and exploited them, Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry, Palm, etc. all couldn't build offerings as good as the iPhone and if it weren't for Google we'd very much be using a monoculture of devices these days.

At the same time Android devices took a "try it first, try it every which way" approach that has also forced the iPhone to come along kicking and screaming, then putting Apple in a position to integrate some new innovative feature that Android devices don't have, putting them both into a state of perpetual innovation.

Consumers win in this and I find it remarkable how many things the little device in my pocket has simply and entirely replaced.