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Comment by John23832 | Hacker News Reader

> And Apple usually doesn’t do MVPs

> The big Apple hits have been the perfected version of products that already had massive markets

Uh...

Did you own the first iPhone? It had no apps and no horizontal typing. It didn't even have 3g. Few if any mobile sites. Small screen. Bad battery life.

Did you own the first iPod? 5gb. Firewire connection (which were hard to come by). The scroll wheel was an ACTUAL wheel. You needed a mac to use. Again, bad battery life.

I won't even go into the early mac desktops and laptops.

Those were MVP's on the market. Where we are now with those products didn't dictate where were were then. The did the bare minimum to be considered products.

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Sounds like there might be some ambiguity around "minimum". These products were quite a bit "extra" in the cohorts of devices they were competing against.

They were arguably minimal for what Apple intended to do. They obviously wanted to carve out new categories and create products that would not be fungible with the competition in the minds of consumers, which from their perspective would raise the bar on what the minimum is.

But, in terms of the market, the iPod was not a minimum viable music player, and the iPhone was not a minimum viable phone.

Notes on iPod, 5GB was a very large capacity at the time, and the iPod was smaller than competitors with similar capacity. The wheel was very extra as a concept, however implemented. It had 10 hours of playtime on a single charge. It was built well from steel and polycarbonate. This was a premium product.

By that logic the Vision pro isn't an MVP for AR... so then what are we talking about as MVP's?

Uh, dude, the first iPod was amazing. Lots of storage and firewire made transfers ridiculously fast, but yeah the target market was probably people who already had a modern Mac.

Also the physical wheel was amazingly good UX, and very responsive.

Exactly

Those might have been MVPs in terms of what Apple can do

But the markets were already there

Millions/billions of people who already owned a personal music player or a cellphone

Compare the size and maturity of those markets to the current VR/AR market

The cell phone market at the time did not fit the iPhone. There was no attempt at internet connectivity. The biggest seller at the time was the razor, a flip phone. Not comparable. There was the palm pilot, but the market was minuscule compare to the iPhone market today

There is an argument to be made for iPhone vs. media players. The Irivers and the like were comparable functionally. The iPhone just had a killer app… the iTunes Store.

Or look at the Apple Watch which dominates wearables and sells more than all mechanical watches combined. Series 0 was terrible hardware wise, and their premium marketing strategy was a flop.

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