Comment by braythwayt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by braythwayt | Hacker News Reader

A little perpendicular to the subject, but this kind of thing always brings my mind back to iPhone. Apple had AT LEAST four kicks at the can with mobile devices.

They had the "Knowledge Navigator" vaporware in 1987, twenty years before iPhone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_navigator

They started working on realizing the KN concept in 1987, and shipped Newton in 1993, fourteen years before iPhone. Alas, the state of tech was not up to their ambition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton

They shipped iPod in 2001, six years before iPhone. In conjunction with iMacs that could rip CDs, they had a massive hit!

https://www.apple.com/ipod/

Then they shipped iPhone in 2007. The greatest hit in product history.

What made it possible to have so many kicks at the can was, of course, having a successful(ish) business selling Macs.

With VC funding, you strip all the legacy/cash cow business out of the equation. In exchange, you get tremendous financial leverage for founders, but you also have a very limited window in which to ship a hit.

Yeah, I've heard a few people (more common around the debut) say "the iPad is Jony Ive's Apple Newton"

I always reply "As it happens, the Apple Newton was Jony Ive's Apple Newton..."

It was his first product for Apple, the Bondi Blue iMac was just his first successful product.

Strange statement to make about the iPad regardless. The iPad is an incredible success; the only way it doesn't seem like one is in comparison to the iPhone.

Easily one of the most successful consumer products in history. Nearly half a billion iPads have been sold since 2010, with around $300 billion in sales in those ten years.

In electronics & tech, the good scale comparisons are few, things like the iPhone, Mac, Windows, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox.

To put that $300b into better context, that's equivalent to the total sales of Windows throughout its entire 30 year history up to about 2014. The iPad will probably end up being the second best selling consumer technology product of all-time behind the iPhone. It has already well passed the iPod in units and dollar sales.

For me what makes the iPad such a hit is that it can’t be copied apparently. There are phones that are in some ways more successful than iPhone but for tablets there is more or less just the iPad.

That's because for some reason nobody is putting a nice screen on their tablets! Even Samsung tablets, who sells high-end tablets and I think makes their own screens, look worse when placed next to an iPad. The iPad is the only device that truly makes me think "wow" when I look at the screen.

Newton existed well before Ive joined Apple. Larry Tesler (who just passed away) was the driving force behind it. Jony Ive was brought in later to help design the smaller form factor.

Most people don't know this, but Nokia had hit upon a lot of these ideas before the iPhone, but didn't act on it : https://venturebeat.com/2010/09/27/nokia-had-iphone-like-pro...

They were an innovative company, till internal culture or complacency killed it (conjecture).

I still fondly remember some Nokia exec's rebuttal of capacitive-sensing touchscreen technology in favor of resistive, which allows pressure sensing [1] but not multitouch. It was exemplary of Nokia being out-of-touch (heh).

[1] lol iPhone "3D Touch"

Same thing happened with Microsoft. Theirs got killed supposedly because it didn't run Windows (which of course is a bad idea for a handheld device).

I had (I think 2 different) windows phones-- something like the XV6600 [0] that actually ran some flavor of Windows Mobile OS.

I liked it. It was the first phone I had that could actually browse real websites. Badly, but it worked.

Apple succeeded not because they had features never before seen (though the capacitive touch screen was critical) but a far superior UI. The windows phone worked, but it was a pain to use.

[0] http://pocketpccentral.net/audv_xv6600.htm

> Apple had AT LEAST four kicks at the can with mobile devices.

Another interesting Apple mobile device "kick": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Rokr

Oh Gawd, I remember that. I believe that Apple never had any intention of making that successful, and were planning on backstabbing Motorola no matter how the Rokr turned out.

"Planning"? Apple released the iPod Nano the same day the Rockr was announced. Mid-level candy bar phone with not much capacity to store said "tunes", or a cute little music player with 2-4 times what the Rockr would hold? The Rockr seemed to me to be one of those products that was only released because of inertia. Or released because Apple blind-sided Motorola with that announcement and, "well, the ad spend is already spent, so..."

I'm pretty sure the Rokr had an artificial cap of 100 songs for whatever reason.

If you go back and see the original launch of the ROKR, though, you can see Steve Jobs barely masking his disgust at what Motorola was able to come up with. IIRC the iPhone was well underway from a product dev perspective when the ROKR shipped, and he knew it was going to kill anything the phone makers could envision.

I had a ROKR. I also had several windows mobile phones. I'd find it hard to believe that Jobs thought the ROKR was what he had to compete with; from a usability perspective, the iPhone didn't come close to windows mobile; it lacked even basic MMS functionality for quite a while.

There were shortcomings, but being able to browse the web and view full sites allowed you to do things with the iPhone in 2007 that were extremely useful. There was no other product like it in terms of usefulness for travel, shopping and general productivity.

Rokr had nothing to do with Apple. Motorola just licensed iTunes compatibility. That was not Apple's device.

I always saw it testing a business relationship with the cellular industry rather than any serious effort. The iPhone wasn't successful in a vacuum; Apple Stores, relationship to a carrier, deployment of iTunes all contributed to getting traction. I'm sure Rokr had more influence than Knowledge navigator did.

Very insightful!

> Rokr had nothing to do with Apple.

Incorrect. The Rokr E1 was how Apple built the relationship with AT&T, a test which ultimately resulted in the iPhone launch happening on AT&T.

Except that Apple wouldn't have survived if their primary business was mobile devices ... VC cash or otherwise.

That is my exact point, perhaps we agree?

If Magic Leap had a cash cow business, they could be relentless about their vision (heh) for VR, whether it takes five years, ten, or even twenty(!) to realize.

>That is my exact point, perhaps we agree?

Ah. Then yes!

There were 100s of PDAs before iPhone. Palm Pilot, Sony Clie, Dell Axim, Compaq iPaq. Yes, it all finally came together with iPhone but you can clearly see the progression if you back and look at those devices.

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