To be fair, it was a bit of a snarky question. You knew whether phones existed before the iPhone, so it's not like you could have been asking that in good faith. Similar with touchscreen tablets.

So, what general product do you think the iPhone was based on? The Blackberry, or perhaps the Treo, since that had a touch screen?

In order to say that Apple didn't come up with the idea behind the iPod or the iPhone, you have to generalize the category to the point that it was painfully obvious to anybody even remotely aware of what's going on in the industry. MP3 players are an obvious idea to anybody who has heard of the Walkman and knows that computers can store and play music. The idea of using a tiny hard drive in one is similarly obvious. So is the idea of making a phone that can surf the web and also be an MP3 player.

When people praise Apple's ingenuity with the iPhone and iPod, they are referring to the fact that almost everything other than the most fundamental idea was revolutionary or at least clever. In other words, every aspect of the product that actually affects its success in the marketplace was invented or re-invented.