I was hoping for some key engineers or product managers. I had a similar peak into the iPod, a key stepping stone to the iPhone.
There was a time when digital music players like the Creative Nomad were gaining adoption, but people were still absorbing the shift to digital music.
I worked at RealNetworks/Rhapsody music and there was a mysterious meeting where a guy pitched what would eventually come to market as the iPod. The deal didn't go through and he was latter employed by Apple.
I understand that sometimes inventions will be invented nearly simultaneously by several distinct groups... and Apple may have already had a prototype device for years in their labs waiting for the BOM to hit the right size, price, and capabilities... But who were these visionaries that Apple organized, packaged their visions, and helped delivered their wares?
Apple does an amazing job of marketing their myths and we've got the well known brands of Woz, Jobs, Ive... It's hard to pierce that veil.
It's a hard problem to solve. Currently, I still haven't found product market fit yet - with TheyMadeThat's most apparent weakness being the lack of data, but I still can't fully let go because making people aware of who made their stuff matters. People know it's a problem and they like the idea of solving it. Unfortunately, people do not love my solution. Not enough people loved other higher profile solutions like Makerbase from Anil Dash and Gina Trapani either. I don't know to fix it.
Interesting features aside from associating people with contributing to the "iPhones" of the world:
* Seeing the relationships between different things i.e.
-- evolution (predecessors/successors),
1. Seeing a list of people associated with a product is kind of useful, but I specifically want to know what their role was / what they did, vs. just a generic quote.
2. I like the idea of having versions under a larger high-level product (like Mac → Apple Macintosh 128K) but this doesn't seem to be expressed in the navigation anywhere when you're on a specific version. There should be some form of breadcrumbing / indicating the parent.
3. I'd reconsider the tabs as distinct pages vs. a single page, Wikipedia style where the tabs just act as anchors. Possibly use an accordion pattern with a preview for each section. Right now I have to click through 8 different tabs to see if there's possibly content which is usually pretty sparse.
4. Product pages should look distinct from the homepage. The hero section with the tagline / search field is really prominent (and autofocused) when you're looking at a specific product / version. The main focus should be the product title, and the header should be secondary.
5. Not crazy about the quotes as the lead-in for the product pages. It feels like it should be a succinct summary of what the product was. Information like release date, size of team, etc... should be above the fold. I think Wikipedia is again instructive.
6. As a more meta comment, lack of data is definitely an issue and at the same it seems tough to encourage people to contribute data to a (sorry) unknown entity. I tried to edit an article to see how the data's being captured but didn't want to create an account — are you familiar with Wikidata, RDF, Linked Data, etc...? If you can't find this data already in a structured way, I've spent some time parsing wikitext somewhat successfully and if you look at e.g. the Credits section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K#Credits you might be able to bootstrap some data (or at least provide draft pages that someone can then vet / fill out).
7. From what I understand, scraping LinkedIn is pretty challenging, but could you gather data from there / cross-reference to infer who worked on what products? LinkedIn specifically has "Projects" and "Creators", but I don't know what its adoption is like. Basically vs. just expecting me (the general user) to crowdsource this for you, what initial work have you put in.
> Seeing a list of people associated with a product is kind of useful, but I specifically want to know what their role was / what they did, vs. just a generic quote
Yeah this is one of the changes that's on my todo list. The data is there for most people but you have to dig-in. I'll hopefully fix this soon.
> I like the idea of having versions under a larger high-level product (like Mac → Apple Macintosh 128K) but this doesn't seem to be expressed in the navigation anywhere
The reason that there currently isn't a breadcrumb is because things can be versions of more than one thing. Unfortunately I don't have an example on the top of my head. Not sure how to form navigation based on that yet.
> Right now I have to click through 8 different tabs to see if there's possibly content which is usually pretty sparse
Yeah this is another known problem. I'll experiment with your suggestion.
> Not crazy about the quotes as the lead-in for the product pages. It feels like it should be a succinct summary of what the product was. Information like release date, size of team
This is up to creator of the entry. I only chose quotes since it's a product description by the creator and it's easier to find and less generic
> I tried to edit an article to see how the data's being captured but didn't want to create an account — are you familiar with Wikidata, RDF, Linked Data, etc...?
I have versioning integrated but I did not expose it to the UI yet, until this changes or somehow a community forms I don't see myself removing the signup requirement anytime soon.
> but could you gather data from there / cross-reference to infer who worked on what products?
I've seen potential sources, however both the quality and quantity of data is lacking. After I fix the UI issues that you've mentioned, I may do more work on this area again one day. As for Linkedin and similar sources like Crunchbase, even if there weren't any issues related to data scraping; they still wouldn't be good enough to use. At best you just get a person's employment history and not what they actually worked on.
The UI, especially for mobile, is a mess. Thanks for helping me fix it.
For the ipod, I don't consider the device to be the invention.
There were many music players around at the time.
The invention was itunes -- an easy way to buy music. And that invention required cutting deals with all the music studios to put their catalog online.
That was new.
Of course it had to link up with a nice ecosystem, sound, software etc.
iTunes made the iPod huge, but the iPod itself was pretty remarkable. The UI was entirely new and more intuitive than similar devices, and it was the smallest large-capacity device thanks to Steve seizing on the idea of using the new tiny hard drives Toshiba(?) had created.
Firewire also made it much faster to upload music.
ipod hardware and software was such a level up compared to the competition (zune by comparison was a joke) and the range of choices from 160gb to a shuffle or nano
I expect better from Scientific American, yes technology these days stands on the shoulders of many smaller innovations, but it is the sum of all these small components and the software that makes a tech product innovative.
Also, the article refers to lithium-ion/lithium polymer batteries as lithium batteries. This is wrong, as lithium batteries are what you call primary cells with lithium anodes (e.g. button cells), not secondary cells like are used in a cellphone.
I was searching through the comments for this one. 100%. I would even go further and say that an invention is more than the sum of the parts. There is a specific mixture that makes something cohesive and ring true. Early PDAs had versions of many of these technologies in various combinations. But Apple got it right as a product. The devil is, as they say, in the details.
It's distressing that Scientific American's editors think pointing out that the iPhone was built of extant technologies is relevant, especially with respect to the topic of invention.
Along the same lines, they're talking about the touch-screen as if that's what they were credited for. There were lots of okay touch-screens widespread before; the iPhone had afaik the first good quality widely available multi-touch screen. There's a classic TED talk from 2004 where a guy introduces the technology and it seemed so amazing, the iPhones made direct use of that. (Albeit not being as amazing as the 2004 demo!)
The important distinction of the first iPhone is that the touchscreen was designed to be used with fingers and not with some kind of stylus as was then common for mobile devices. The fact that the screen was multi-touch capable is not that important and mostly an inherent feature of used capacitive technology.
The article came across to me like an attempt to talk up British inventions (and claim precedence) by the author, who is also British. It read like some Wikipedia technology articles which also have this bias.
Innovation happens in small steps, building on work of others and adding a few new things and experiences. The iPhone is no different but this article is not really worth the read.
I'm surprised that the premise that the iPhone is an "invention" is so quickly accepted. It wasn't like nobody was making any similar devices, and then this new idea came along. I know that invention can be as simple as gluing two existing things together, but the meaningful aspect has to be that there is an original idea there.
No doubt it popularised a lot of existing technology, and arguably combined some of that technology in a way that hadn't been done before. All the same, that reasoning could apply to the second version of the iPhone. Was that an "invention" too?
I followed PDAs pretty closely back then, and I'm unaware of any device where the OS was built around multi-touch, like the iPhone.[1] The iPhone was one of the few devices back then to render the "real web" and being able to swipe and pinch to navigate pages was a game-changer on the order of the first mouse-based UIs. It dramatically changes how much content you can easily access on a small screen (which is why even devices with styluses today have multi-touch screens to facilitate scroll/zoom). It also improves the quality of the on-screen keyboard, enabling you to ditch the physical one (or reliance on something like Graffiti).
It’s easy to forget how crazy the world was before the iPhone. Let me list the ways in which Apple blew the doors off of the industry with the iPhone:
1) battery: the iPhone was basically a giant battery strapped to a logic board. No one had designed a phone like this, ever.
2) capacitive multi-touch with inertia: capacitive touch screens existed, but the software for using them was really bad (see windows mobile 5 as the leading example).
3) non-WAP browser: all phones prior to the iPhone had a wap browser. The consensus knowledge in the industry was that doing full web on mobile was still years, maybe decades away. Apple came in and rendered the full New York Times on mobile and it changed the world.
4) App Store: before Apple, carriers had an App Store that was garbage or you sideloaded software. That was it. The App Store changed the world, not technically but politically. Finally users could get good software from their phones over the air.
I could go on for days. This doesn’t even touch carrier distribution, call quality, or any part of the OS stack which was basically black magic at the time. The iPhone really changed the world.
It's worth noting re: #4 that the iPhone did not debut with an App Store. It had the pre-installed apps and that was it for the 1st year. The App Store arrived in year 2.
I'd say that "apps as first-class objects" was the real innovation. My first thought on seeing the iPhone demo was that having Phone as an app made so much sense! Every other device at the time seemed to treat apps almost like plugins running on top of a phone/productivity-centered OS. In iPhone OS, practically everything you did was neatly encapsulated by the round-rect of a friendly app on your home screen. The App Store naturally followed from this approach.
While I'm not implying that the iPhone "sucked" or some other meaningless fanboyism, when it came out, I was intrigued by the things it had that my Palm and WinMobile phones didn't. Those were always missing gpu drivers (poor responsiveness) or had resistive screens (no multitouch) or some other minor annoyance.
But the list of things I'd have to give up for a first gen iPhone (not even counting the mandatory AT&T bill in the US) made it a no-go:
No copy/paste. No third party apps (I regularly used mine to stream Shoutcast stations in the car on my cheap unlimited 3G data before it became a cash cow to be milked by the carriers). No 3G radio at all actually. No GPS. No multitasking/backgrounding apps. No MMS (which was doubly important if you didn't have 3rd party IM apps).
I was in a geek dilemma. Apple fixed the UI but lacked most of what made my smartphone "smart" at the time. Likewise, all of the ones with more capabilities lacked the smooth UI and usability improvements of the iPhone.
I'm just glad that in subsequent years Apple slowly added in functionality while their competitors got the message that usability was important as well.
IMHO that is Apples secret to success. Ignore the geeks/nerds/fanboys, first try to reach the 'real' market. Then you can fix your product up for 'niche interests' later.
The biggest one, IMHO, was a business model shift. Apple treated the end-user (not the carrier) as their customer, and used their clout to put their boot on the carrier's neck in enforcement of this. No longer were you buying the carrier's phone offering. You were buying Apple's phone (even if from the carrier).
Because of this, Apple was able to develop products the end-user wanted to buy, rather than the products the carriers wanted to sell.
> 3) non-WAP browser: all phones prior to the iPhone had a wap browser.
That's incorrect. Opera Mobile launched in 2000 and was a full HTML renderer. I had it on a succession of Nokia E-series smartphones in that era. Yes, you could run apps before appstores existed...
Then in 2005 Opera Mini was released which used server-side rendering for feature-phones that couldn't run Mobile.
Integrated browser on probably every Nokia phone of 2000's (ie. "Services") was perfectly capable of displaying HTML 4/XHTML, with one important caveat that it really truly demanded valid markup on input.
>3) non-WAP browser: all phones prior to the iPhone had a wap browser. The consensus knowledge in the industry was that doing full web on mobile was still years, maybe decades away. Apple came in and rendered the full New York Times on mobile and it changed the world.
Well, almost all. There were non-WAP browsers (Nokia, Windows phones, etc), but still crappy and limited at their html rendering.
> Apple came in and rendered the full New York Times on mobile and it changed the world
At least until websites started redirecting iPhones to their m.domain.com. There was so much initial promise for mobile devices to offer a desktop-equivalent experience that was ruined by site operators insisting on treating iPhone (and later Android) browsers as less capable.
1) I'm thinking by this you mean where the battery is non-removeable and where there is no keyboard. This was definitely something new.
3) WAP ... heck that was irrelevant since phones started having color screens. Browsers in the older Blackberries and Windows Mobile phones of the time were not WAP, but pre-WebKit applications that only implemented a subset of HTML.
4) Microsoft wanted to treat phones like it treated PCs - it would collect on software licenses. Hence it didn't see the device as something it controlled beyond selling an OS license for it. This made sense before Internet was cheap and fast on mobile devices.
iPhone was definitely a start of a major new era. I think the most significant thing is that iPhone was able to more or less end up as the boss of its own platform in the manufactuer-carrier relationship. Before iPhone, the OS was seen as something that would have to be approved by the carrier and device manufacturer.
Multi-touch deserves too much credit. It was inertia. You could flick the screen to scroll. It calculated your intent, and applied a duration. That momentum made all the difference in the world. No longer are you sitting there flick flick flicking your screen.
I used to argue the same - that an iPhone is not an invention - after all Nokia, Samsung and HTC had phones that are just as capable with applications as the iPhone was and some had good music applications and others had good productivity apps. Then I saw my mom - someone who has never used a computer before - learn to use a tablet. Everything was intuitive for her. TBC, that was an android but everything that makes it intuitive came from the iPhone. The whole interface introduced by iOS - touch is a major factor but not the only one - is just intuitive for a lot of people.
It is worth mentioning that the iPhone had the best multitouching system in the industry for at least 3 years. I remember the android devices struggling to register gestures when more than one finger was touching the screen.
For practical application, the one that invented it is the one that first offered it to me for sale. Kind of like battery technology, as the industry iterates over various chemistries. Yeah, yeah, your new tech is going to blow storage wide open...just like the last folks whose names I now forget. But until I can buy one for my phone, my RV house battery, or a pack for my electric car, you might as well have invented unicorns.
Who invented the car? We had engines, we had wheels, we had drive trains. But Benz was the first to glue them all together into a mode of transportation. But wait, Copeland put a steam engine on a bicycle two years before Benz got his patent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copeland_steam_bicycle). And, frankly, all Benz did was glue an engine to an early tricycle design. So "invented" sometimes strikes me as not the best word to describe "who invented...?"
That definition of invention as marketed product is so demotivating to anyone who would put in the decades of personal focus and study necessary to advance a particular area of engineering or science.
Didn't really read my last sentence, eh? Who invented the iPhone? Apple. No, not even an individual (even if a name is on some patent), a corporation. Not all of the ideas that make an iPhone an iPhone came from one individual. Who invented the multitude of little parts that comprise an iPhone? People like you.
I had a Windows phone. The UI sucked, of course, but they all did because of the tiny form factor. They had to, right? Then my buddy and I went to lunch one day, and he showed me his new "I-phone".
The heavens opened up and the truth was shown to me. I immediately realized, they didn't have to suck, after all. What a revelation.
Windows phone or Windows mobile? I agree that Windows mobile was in a different class to the iPhone, but I disagree that the UI of Windows phone sucked. I think parts are/were better than iPhones'.
The real invention is taking technology and packaging it in a human way that takes a baby seconds to learn. I didn’t have to teach my one year old how to swipe photos.
Touch screens existed and confounded people for decades. Just watch the average person use a touch screen ATM. Still not great.
It all seems so obvious in retrospect because iPhones have defined so much of how everything works now.
The original iPhone was a product no one else had the vision or balls to build.
I hear people argue that someone would have invented it without Apple, but my counter-argument is that it would have still had a hardware keyboard tucked away, whoever built it wouldn't know how to market it, it would have been just one among dozens of devices at the carrier's stores, and it would have vanished after a few months of languishing there.
Apple moved the world to make it succeed. No one else would have.
This is a silly article. Most inventions come about when a person or group of people recognize an opportunity based on many things that are already known, or exist. The original iPhone of course relied on touch-screens, feasible batteries, wifi chips and a many, many other existing technologies. But remember that, at the time of its design, mobile phones all used keypads: either the standard telephone type, or the full (but small) keyboard of the Blackberry. Apple's big innovations (among many) were to eliminate the keypad, and to embed a full-fledged OS on a small device. The lack of keyboard was a huge risk, and it was mocked at the time. History proved Apple was right. Steve Jobs (or at least his team, with his input) did indeed invent the iPhone.
Maybe Im in the minority here, but I never attributed credit to Steve Jobs as the "inventor" of any of apples products. I saw him akin to a music producer. The team builds, and he guides their efforts according to his vision. This is very different than sitting down and "inventing" anything.
Lame analysis. The iPhone wasn't great because it had a good touchscreen, battery and the web. I had "smart phones" before that with those. The real innovation was the software UI, pinch zoom and wall of all icons with high resolution pixels.
The article doesn't argue that the iphone was great because any of those things.
The article is arguing that technology is iterative, and that great inventions are often built on many other great inventions.
The article is focusing on the iphone as an example of breakthrough technology.. but the question implied by the article is whether or not it's great because of the inventors ability to build on a larger than average amount of previous work.. and ends with the conclusion that greater freedom of information allows for breakthroughs, not "genius" lone-wolf inventors.
But the fact remains that the iPhone is used as the example, and so the myth of Jobs as a lone-wolf who did it remains. Had to have that hook to focus the article, but still feeds into that narrative for all the people who read the title but not the article.
Still, the article is weak. Based on the same argument, very few people invented anything. The article missed electricity, cables, wires, electronic components... see? The article is rubbish.
It wasn't that high resolution. The iPhone 1.0 had a 320x240 screen. Pinch zoom was Fingerworks around 1999 (albeit Fingerworks was then acquired by Apple in 2005).
You're ignoring the pixel density, though. Half the resolution, but a screen many times smaller in physical dimensions than the monitor that you are comparing it to.
Plenty of Windows Mobile devices had full on 640x480 screens years before the release of the iPhone. Nothing about the iPhone's resolution was revolutionary at the time. Hell, for a long time the apple cult was touting how their low resolution was really a benefit, saying that because it was easier on the GPU it led to better graphics albeit at a lower resolution.
This article ties well to the excellent book "The Entrepreneurial State" by Mariana Mazzucato.
Apple did an excellent job of bringing together a lot of existing technology into a viable consumer product, but it is still important to note that much of that tech was powered by state-funded initiatives, instead of Silicon Valley, VC-funded projects.
I find it interesting that I know more about the team that developed the Mac in the early 1980s than I know about the iPhone team.
The iPhone was a watershed moment in tech that propelled Apple to be a trillion dollar company, yet the iPhone team is obscure to me. The Mac team has had how many books and articles about them?
You can also try my user-editable site (https://theymadethat.com/things/k4z/iphone) where I aim for the same goal but with a different approach. The iPhone entry still needs a lot of work.
As a long time palm user, nothing about the iPhone seemed particularly new to me. The interface was almost identical, the form factor was almost identical.
The only real upgrades were a cellular modem and a little bit prettier case.
Saying apple "invented" modern smartphones is a bit like saying Tesla invented electric cars. No they didn't, they just made a really good one that is very popular.
honestly i think that was the biggest reason for its success. Blackberry was already a thing, but that big honking, clunky keyboard was just silly on a phone, and meant you had an exceptionally little amount of screen real estate. The developments in capacitive touch made a lot of room for other improvements to handheld devices.
I agree. I liked Palm OS back in the day and used to have two generations of Sony Clié PDAs with resistive touchscreens. The first one (an SL10) had a grayscale square touchscreen and a little "Graffiti" area below it where you could jot down simplified characters and some gestures. The second one (TG50) was really neat. It had a color screen (I remember watching videos and playing ScummVM Lucas Arts adventures on this in 2003 or 2004!) and it replaced the Graffiti area with an actual hardware keyboard. Text entry worked so much better than it used to with that pseudo-handwriting recognition.
Much later, when I saw Apple and Android smartphones, I could not understand how anybody could stand the onscreen keyboards. But the truth is that the multitouch hardware allowed to progress these systems far enough that they would surpass earlier tiny physical keyboards.
I had a Treo before my iPhone. The iPhone added a far superior user experience, and with the iPhone 3G, a cellular network arrived that was fast enough to be actually useful. Most of all Apple's App Store and iTunes' licensing offered expandability, media, and services that Palm could only dream of.
Apple's chief invention wasn't hardware. It was Apple's digital infrastructure that made the iPhone intoxicatingly can't-live-without-it. (Unfortunately the SciAm article missed this completely.)
I doubt the idea of such a phone was ever very unique. I got laughed at in high school (2004) for saying something along the lines of "in 10 years all our phones will be one big screen and they will be powerful enough to fulfil most of our personal computing needs". I also believed they would be docked to become full featured PCs, but I guess that niche has been filled for many with the rise of tablets. (which I appalling, but I guess thats just because I don't understand their appeal at all).
TFA article claims something similar: it was apple that took a bunch of ideas and made it into something people wanted to actually use. I, and I doubt many people here, would have a good enough vision and understanding of what people actually wanted.
Don't forget, the lot of ideas that Apple took to make the iPhone where mostly built off a bunch of other ideas them self.
I find us in a strange new era of people using the past as a way to diminish the now. I grow tired of people pushing the notion that we today must pay for the sins and attribute success to past generations.
If we go far enough back I am sure if the wheel had never been invented we would have none of what we have today and would still be smashing rocks around in a cave.
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There was a time when digital music players like the Creative Nomad were gaining adoption, but people were still absorbing the shift to digital music.
I worked at RealNetworks/Rhapsody music and there was a mysterious meeting where a guy pitched what would eventually come to market as the iPod. The deal didn't go through and he was latter employed by Apple.
I understand that sometimes inventions will be invented nearly simultaneously by several distinct groups... and Apple may have already had a prototype device for years in their labs waiting for the BOM to hit the right size, price, and capabilities... But who were these visionaries that Apple organized, packaged their visions, and helped delivered their wares?
Apple does an amazing job of marketing their myths and we've got the well known brands of Woz, Jobs, Ive... It's hard to pierce that veil.