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Comment by interlocutor | Hacker News Reader

"Now, if the market isn’t growing fast enough anymore that means that there are generally only two ways to continue to grow — either increase your market share by drawing the customers away from competitors, or raise prices."

Incorrect. There is a third way: reinvent the smart phone.

Back in 1899 the Commissioner of US patent office stated that "everything that can be invented has been invented." No doubt there are plenty of people thinking the same thing about the smart phones we have today. i.e., every feature that can be added has already been added. They are wrong.

Keep in mind that right before Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone people thought the same thing about the mobile phones we had then. Then Jobs reinvented the phone. Can Apple do it again?

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> Incorrect. There is a third way: reinvent the smart phone.

The name "phone" is mostly an accident of history at this point. Its primary use for most people is not as a telephone. Starting from a classic telephone, via incremental improvements, you would never have gotten to the iPhone.

(It's also a compass, a pedometer, a camera, and a dictionary, and you never would have arrived at iPhone by incrementally improving any of those objects, either.)

It's a handheld computer. Telephony just happens to be one of its dozens of features. So what you're really saying is "reinvent computing". Apple has several products in other areas (Watch, AirPods, HomePod, etc) which may or may not be successful in the long run but they're definitely trying to take their computing platforms beyond "Mac" and "iPhone".

The "smart phone" is done. I've seen people trying to "reinvent" that since 2007, and I haven't seen anything promising. We're already at a local maximum.

In the early 2000s I was excited about the potential of networked handheld computers. It was disappointing when it became clear they'd be phones, basically owned by the app stores instead of the user.

This depresses me too. I think we got off into walled gardens where it's easy to use time wasting things we don't need like candy crush and Facebook.

A computer on my wrist that ran something like Linux and gave the user control and had peripherals would be geeky but nice. You can do a lot of this with various droids, but it is a bit of a shallow experience and not too many enhancements can be made.

I think the main problem is that hacker news is an echo chamber and few others could even use such devices. Smart phones are simply made for the least common denominator.

I’d like that as a next step. Instead of buying an iPhone I’d prefer a mobile computer with always on data and a way to make calls. (Bonus points if the telephone functionality can be completely disabled similar to unplugging the phone line but keeping data.) it could even have wireless peripherals added to it, like a secondary display/touchscreen, camera, storage, etc.

"Back in 1899 the Commissioner of US patent office stated that "everything that can be invented has been invented."

I doubt someone at the patent office would say that given they'd be witness to all the applications coming in. Google seems to agree that this attribution was made up and has no prior record before 1981. The rest of what you say seems appropriate.

> everything that can be invented has been invented.

Emphasis mine. In 1899 an iPhone could not have been invented. Technological progress allowed the iPhone to be invented. So the question is, has technology progressed enough to allow a reinvention?

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