Yes Apple has "copied" or brought out its own version of particular products before, usually in a much better state.
I wouldn't say that at all. Correct me if I misremember, but the original iPhone didn't even have an ecosystem of apps outside a few Apple-sanctioned ones. I was thoroughly unimpressed when it came out, at the missed (in retrospect, deferred) opportunity.
My older Palm device felt superior in nearly every way I cared about.
Lowest cost of production is what that formfactor provides.
Palm's devices, by contrast, felt like a polished river stone in the pocket. I know which I prefer.
The Palm as it was in 2007 was made of plastic, the screen was resistive touch and also made of plastic. The iPhone was made of aluminum, the screen was capacitive and was made of glass.
The iPhone in your pocket should've felt more like a polished stone than the palm.
And yet, due to the shape Apple chose, it did not.
"You're feeling it wrong" from the same folks as "you're holding it wrong". Yeesh.
Given that depending on the Palm you're talking about it had 90 degree angles on the chassis and the iPhone was completely rounded. Not only was it rounded everywhere but it was also Aluminum with a glass screen.
Maybe, but to compete with the iPhone everything else that goes into the production of a smartphone would have been way more expensive. More compute requirements, better screens, way more software engineering headcount.
The apps part was rectified pretty quickly but even the kind of halfway decent web apps available after iPhone launch beat treo apps.
They were by no means the first smartphone nor were they the first touch phone but the "iphone moment" was coined because they figured out how to make frontier tech mainstream.
They also weren't the first to make an MP3 player but it sure felt that way with the ipod. I don't know how people have rewritten this history in their minds
So the Android polish wasn't quite there on release either.
but this discussion always has the tendency to go completely off teh rails because there are so many people unable to talk rationally about apple products.
innovation basically never happens in a vacuum, and especially apple products have historically "come second" into a product category -- and just nail the implementation so well that they just felt great to use. (and yes, smartphones were well established by the time the iphone was released. thats what i'd call the product category there. dialing in to ever narrower definitions to make it into a "new" category is exactly the reason why this can never be settled - because you can call _every_ product a new product category like that)
So now we got endless discussions about "who was first" even though its completely meaningless to ask this question -- because that "previous product" also took inspiration from other products, and if you squinted enough, could also be called "just an iteration" vs a "innovation".
You’re right that Apple isn’t usually a first mover within a product segment. But that have a tendency to nail what they consider to be a better execution of that product.
That full package of capacitive touch, a UI and UX optimised for touch, inertial scrolling with pinch and zoom came together to form something much greater than the sum of the individual parts: an experience that could convince you to part with physical buttons
Also I think it took me almost a decade to find a touch keyboard (fleksy) I liked as much as the iOS keyboard. I think people also take for granted how far ahead their quiet innovations in the touch keyboard were without fanfare.
The ones in 2007 were unusable, the original android ones were terrible and I didn't much like swiftkey. Google Keyboard came much later but lacked some of the smoothing and tappiness of the Apple one
The biggest thing that drove iPhones success was that it truly felt different. The interface, the touch screen.
I remember it just feeling so different, it was easy to use no complicated jammed in UI.
It felt like the next generation of mobile UI's was born as it didn't feel clunky like the others.
To be fair here, you're replying to a thread where people were discussing mechanical engineering, and hardware. Not software.
Held to that metric, the software layer isn't part of the original discussion.
Not saying that discussing other things is wrong, but the comment you replied to seems to be "The hardware was an enormous cut above".
The touch screen was shocking on the Palm and the UI was an absolute mess.