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I guess I was referring to the 6 months between unveiling and release in 2007 and the several months of speculation beforehand in 2006. It was pretty frothy, and I was amazed at what they did produce.

Edit: does hype have to be first-party? Apple is king of the rumors-as-marketing hype machine.

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This situation seems very different to me. Apple didn't publicly raise a billion and a half dollars of funding on the promise of the phone during the time you mention, and it's been nearly 3 years since the hype started around the Google investments with almost nothing to show. Apple had already made the iPod and was well established. Smartphones already existed, just not as well executed. Magic Leap is promising a vast advancement of the state of the art in multiple fields.

I'd say the big difference is that Apple weren't "inventing" the whole thing. It would have been perfectly possible for Nokia to have built something similar, but they didn't for what seemed to them solid commercial reasons.

Apple's big contribution was smashing into a broken market that didn't serve its consumers.

Better than Google's never-delivers-on-its-hype machine. E.g. Google Fiber, Google Loon, Google Self-driving car....

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