What do you mean? There were MP3 players before the iPod, Blackberries and PDAs before the iPhone, and tablet computers and lightweight laptops before Apple popularized them, and people did expect the somewhat clunky early versions of these technologies to improve. For instance, there were a lot of jokes and commentary about the rapid evolution of cellphones in the 1995-2005 era as they went from horrible bricks to trendy gadgets with cameras, software, multimedia, and e-mail -- all before the iPhone had even started development. People were not totally blindsided when Apple offered their streamlined version of already-existing ideas.
Jobs should get credit for the leap in quality, functionality, and mass appeal his products represented, but lately I've noticed the history is getting exaggerated to the point where we were all using rotary phones and beige boxes like cavemen before Steve Jobs singlehandedly invented the laptop, tablet, and smartphone. But the truth is far more nuanced than that.
In my opinion, the biggest innovation by Apple with the iPhone was that the touch screen is glass and works with skin instead of with the finger nail / stylus. I understand apple didn't invent this but it made multi touch capacitive touchscreen popular.
Especially on tablet computers, which existed long before the iPad, but never caught on. They also had terrible battery life, ugly TFT screens and backlights, unreliable wireless connectivity, laggy UI (Apple seems to be the only company that cared about a consistent 60Hz response), and I think a lot of them ran Windows CE? I'm not sure about that last one, I don't remember, but I'm sure the software sucked.
(I'm excluding the Palm-Pilot-ish devices with low-powered CPUs and monochrome LCDs here; those started popping up in the 80's, and of course there was the failed Apple Newton. The devices I'm talking about were basically x86 laptops without keyboards.)
Edit: looked it up. I was wrong. The original demo was plastic. All production iPhones have all had a glass as opposed to a plastic display.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/9/20687299/plastic-iphone-go...
There were mp3 players, tablets and phones prior to Apple. The main innovation they really provided out kf the gate out of all of those 3 was a touch screen input for the phone. The rest were just incremental improvement / polish on existing product design.
Not that that isn't important (as the sales showed), but we should be clear about what was truly new to market and what was just cleaned up.
Ericsson had touch screen phones for many years but they where a single touch, stylus driven UI that was clunky.
I had Nokia phones with web browsing, media and a camera but it was WAP not full web and the UI was so bad.
Listening to media required proprietary headphones and data was extremely expensive.
Jobs changed all of that in one product without adding bloatware.