It coalesced a bunch of tech that nobody had put into a single device before, and added a few things that no one had seen before. The tap zoom and the accelerometer are IMO what sold people. When the 3g came out with substantial battery life improvements it was off to the races.

At this point I’m surprised the Apple Watch never had its 3g version. Better battery, slightly thinner. I still believe a mm or two would make a difference in sales, more than adding a glucose meter.

If haters talked about chefs the way they do about Apple we’d think they were nuts. “Everyone’s had eggs and sugar in food before, so boring.”

Yeah I think iPhone is a very apt analogy: certainly not the first product of its kind, but definitely the first wildly successful one, and definitely the one people will point to as the beginning of the smartphone era. I suspect we'll look back on ChatGPT in a similar light ten years from now.