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Comment by mtdewcmu | Hacker News Reader

Apple did a great job engineering the iPhone. They really killed it, no doubt. That being said, I think that Apple was the only company that could have invented the iPhone in the mid-2000s, because of their high degree of vertical integration. They were the only company that had a completely proprietary computer system for which they developed the hardware and software. Also, I think that the basic interface for the iPhone was fairly inevitable. Cell phones were becoming little computers and giving them little keyboards was a problem, because there wasn't enough space. If you figure that little keyboards were a dead end, then about the only remaining option was to use a touch screen. Other companies could have started working on the touch screen, but they didn't have an operating system. I believe Apple was in a unique position to create the iPhone.

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> I think that the basic interface for the iPhone was fairly inevitable

I hear that a lot, and I'm not convinced.

I think people needed to have a strong motivation to get used to software keyboards. I think most companies implementing one would have screwed it up (see: RIM).

So you'd need a compelling use case and compelling software to force that sea change. I find it plausible that, absent Apple's existence, we'd be using clunky GUIs on desktop computers and even clunkier GUIs with physical keyboards on smartphones.

I also think it required a manufacturer to completely sell out to the concept. If there are 5 similar phones by the same company, only one of which has a software-only keyboard, you won't get sales, development, and engineering support you need to drive a successful change.

Much like laptops still being shipped with floppy drives and VGA ports years after those technologies were effectively dead.

Laptops ship with VGA ports because the business world is full of conference rooms where the projector only has a VGA cable.

And if PC manufacturers forced the issue they'd sell more dongles and/or drag businesses into the 21st century.

Yeah, I'm not convinced either.

Android was still getting built with a Blackberry-style physical keyboard at that point.

It feels like if it wasn't for a few researchers in the interaction lab we wouldn't have gotten software keyboards for a while.

I think that the basic interface for the iPhone was fairly inevitable.

We could have had a long detour through Blackberry-like devices with keyboards. But comprehensive smartphones in some form were to be expected as the electronics got cheap enough.

I find it plausible that, absent Apple's existence, we'd be using clunky GUIs on desktop computers

Without Apple, we probably would have had something like lower-priced Sun or Apollo workstations on the desktop. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, people at well-funded companies did have Sun workstations on the desktop. With, though, crappy GUIs. XWindows is from that era. It would never have occurred to Sun to hire Susan Kare.

Sun didn't have the volume to support software companies. Interleaf had something better than Microsoft Word by 1983, before the Mac had even shipped. But their business model was to bundle a few Sun workstations and a laser printer with the software, for about $60K. Software for Sun machines tended to cost a few thousand dollars per seat.

Just because the hardware would improve doesn't mean the UI would improve.

Digital cameras have killer hardware, but they still have the same crappy menu systems they had when they were first introduced in the 90's.

You absolutely need extremely rare talent to produce original & creative ideas like what was used in the iPhone, and the digital camera makers have absolutely none of that talent.

Yes, the world would continue to use clunky desktop-oriented WindowsCE/Blackberry/Treo phones today without Apple. They really were original and unique to the industry in how they completely changed its course.

Also, never take advice from Phil Schiller.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but what in your opinion makes the menu systems in digital cameras so crappy?

I have an older Canon digital SLR, and while the rear LCD isn't as big, bright, or high res as newer cameras, and it lacks touch support, I generally find the menu system pretty nice. It's fairly information dense and has dedicated buttons for a whole host of features so that you don't have to go digging through a bunch of hamburger menus.

Digital cameras already have a great interface for most users. It's single button click.

The menus and dials are for expert users who don't want a more simplified interface because it's more efficient for them to learn the dense interface that novices find confusing.

None of that disagrees with my point, I don't think.

>>I think most companies implementing one would have screwed it up (see: RIM).

Little keyboards were a dead end (I think I remember reading contemporaneous articles noting the fundamental problem of "little keyboard -> little screen" and the little screen being just too small. The real issue wasn't the little keyboard per se, it was the little screen). I think Apple had the advantage in creating software keyboards, because they had the ability to tightly coordinate the hardware and software development. They also the capital to take the risk.

I suppose RIM also did hardware and software, but their software was less sophisticated than Apple's.

>>I find it plausible that, absent Apple's existence, we'd be using clunky GUIs on desktop computers and even clunkier GUIs with physical keyboards on smartphones.

Wasn't that sort of my point? My point was that only Apple was positioned to do the iPhone in the mid-2000s.

Given the difficulty of entering the mobile handset market, and the inertia of most players, I'm just not sure we would have broken out of the rut.

I think the player who might have made the leap was Google, who was experimenting with touchscreen devices, but they aren't the boldest company when it comes to hardware.

>>Given the difficulty of entering the mobile handset market, and the inertia of most players, I'm just not sure we would have broken out of the rut.

I think we might agree on that?

I guess my main thesis rests on the idea that an iPhone is more like a tiny computer than it's like a circa-2007 cell phone. It was easier for Apple to make a tiny Mac with phone capabilities than it would have been for a handset manufacturer to retrofit PC-like functionality onto their handsets. Apple was already the master of the Mac ecosystem, which they could leverage however they wanted. Handset manufacturers would have had to acquire a computer platform or partner with a computer company (which, I guess, is the story of Android).

http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_p800-326.php

the "keyboard" were simply a bunch of pins that prodded the screen in the appropriate places. If you wanted to you could simply remove the cover and just poke the screen directly.

> If you figure that little keyboards were a dead end, then about the only remaining option was to use a touch screen.

Actually, the Palm Pilot from the 2000's was an alternative to both - sort of a touch screen, but used a stylus and its own script for writing characters.

I still have a Handspring in my desk!

Other phone vendors also felt tantalizingly close, but they were all busy optimizing their local maxima without making that final "finger-controlled" breakthrough.

I remember using a Sony Ericsson Symbian UIQ phone in 2006 (the M600i IIRC, Jobs was rumored use an earlier phone in the same OS series, the P800), where they had put the action buttons at the bottom of the screen at a finger-friendly size. I remember often quickly using my fingers to do common tasks, but it was a resistive screen and they still used scroll bars and tiny checkboxes. In hindsight it shouldn't have been that difficult to make the leap to finger-first, but it was Apple who did it.

it was Apple who did it

I think you mean LG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

Apple made the first successful one. Which seems to be their knack, after all.

Have you seen the UI of the Prada? Check out the browser for instance, its keyboard or the scroll bars: https://youtu.be/rQnVOrQMjOc?t=274

Exactly, the iPhone was second but has a much better UI. Much like the iPod.

Pretty sure Prada didn't have a proximity sensor or multitouch.

Of course it didn't have multitouch; Apple had bought the patent beforehand.

And that is perhaps the one thing everyone glosses over.

Multitouch was being developed by a startup that Apple gobbled up.

The M600i was my all time favourite phone, only to be surpassed by the Nokia N9. That rocker QWERTY keyboard was god-damned fantastic.

It's also at least arguable that Apple earned (past successes, devoted following, etc.) something of a license to break with existing patterns. Even if the new patterns/techs weren't quite baked yet and people weren't fully ready for them.

This applied to dropping the hardware keyboard on the iPhone.

It also applied to something like the lack of printing on the original iPad. This was a big critique that a lot of people had when the iPad first came out. Now, even though there are printing options, most people don't really care any longer.

Johnny actually talks a little about that (skeuomorphism) in this article from 2013. : https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/09/19/apple-jony-iv...

> I think that the basic interface for the iPhone was fairly inevitable

Yeah, in 2000 I assumed that phones would end up like that, because keys took too much space for something that fits in your pocket. I was an enthusiastic fan of Windows Mobile when it came out, and I've been on iOS since the first iPod Touch.

Handspring could have left the keyboard off the Treo, their earlier PDAs were much closer in style to the iPhone.

This makes no sense at all.

All the cell phone companies had their own proprietary OS.

Android was getting built at literally the same time.

> All the cell phone companies had their own proprietary OS.

Symbian was used by dozens of manufacturers and came in different flavors. S60 for standard smartphones, S80/90 for communicators, UIQ for touchscreens.

Windows Mobile was also widely used and had an edition for phones using a touchscreen and one without them.

Hundreds of millions were sold before the iPhone even came out.

And the S90 UI would continue on into Maemo.

And i swear i could finger type on the 770 before iPhone showed up, even though it was a resistive screen.

Android looked more like a Blackberry competitor prior to the iPhone.

https://www.technobuffalo.com/2011/10/27/android-before-and-...

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