re: #167 silverdolphin

Here is another look - at Samsung Smartphones before and after the iPhone.
(But my point is really that I think what we call AI may well be very different after the Apple announcements. Maybe not but I am hopeful.)

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And what do the pre-iPhone Samsung products resemble? Blackberries, because they were the most popular phones on the market even if there were more imaginative and colorful products on offer. Or you could say they look like PDAs, which also had a massive market share because a lot of people wanted the convenience but didn’t need cellular reception because the market for “apps” was mostly limited to either whatever the manufacturer sold on physical media or whatever compatible programs you could find on various boards and shops. They’re also “touchscreen” as it was understood before ‘07, i.e. tapping several times with a stylus on a grainy screen until the CPU chose to acknowledge the gesture.

What the Gen 1 iPhone offered was “convenience,” namely it offered bright touchscreen that dispensed with the stylus and could offer whatever interface you needed on-demand rather than cluttering the phone with buttons or knobs that were largely useless outside of certain applications. It came with the App Store which was an expansion of the existing iTunes Store, giving app developers a ready market for their wares that was (at least on launch) not excessively regulated or showing favor only to developers that paid Apple to offer their goods. And the iOS it shipped with was friendly to all of this, rather than either a stripped-down version of a Windows desktop OS or yet another version of fast-aging PalmOS.

The iPhone was no more revolutionary than the Gen 1 iMac had been, it was just a massive bet on Apple’s part that dispensing with all the roadblocks and bottlenecks in other major brand’s cellphones would convince customers of those brands to make the transition. That it worked had more to do with Apple being an established brand with a track record of success rather than some newcomer offering the next “breakthrough.”