The guy made Apple what it is. The most impactful technology company in the history of humanity. You can call him whatever you like and I will cut him a slack.
Most people miss the point. Yes great companies are created by not just the founders but all of its employees. Everyone contributes to a certain extend. But it is really the founders who steer the ship in the right direction. Without Jobs last 10 years would certainly be very very different. Think about a world where your only choices were Windows or a crappy Android phone.
> The guy made Apple what it is. The most impactful technology company in the history of humanity. You can call him whatever you like and I will cut him a slack.
Even if I were to agree to the premise that the ends justify the means (which I don't), that still doesn't address the fact that we don't know if he succeeded because of his brutish personality or in spite of it. For all we know, he could have been even more successful if he treated people decently.
For another perspective, an iPhone looks a lot like a Newton with phone capabilities. Maybe without Jobs returning to Apple, Apple would still be in the phone market.
It reads like PR, you bought too much into their powerpoint presentations. No, the tech world wouldn't be very different without Apple in it, I can certainly imagine a similar tech world without Apple.
Also I'm using Android and I don't see how it's supposed to be crappy, the iPhone was the worst phone I ever owned and I'm glad it broke down by itself, to each their own.
Would Android still exist (in it's current form) without Apple?
It's non inconceivable that modern smartphones would be a further evolution of Windows Mobile and or Symbian. With quite different UX (for better or for worse)
Whether Android would exist in its current form is kind of irrelevant. We'd have had useful devices anyway, because they'd just have been the next step of the evolution of what was possible and what people wanted. I'd argue that many features of Android / iOS aren't actually the best design, they're just what we happened to end up with.
The PalmPilot devices were pretty good and pre-dated the iPod by many years (IIRC even the Treo with a built in phone pre-dated the iPhone). If Apple had never made their leap from iPod to iPhone, I'm sure the Palm line would have continued its market dominance a lot longer, although by then Blackberry was also becoming a larger player in this market too and also might have lead to the complete demise of Palm even without Apple introducing the iPhone.
Not saying Palm didn't have other problems - the PDB format was quite restrictive, and it was clear that early on Palm didn't even have proper documentation on how it worked as they'd just licensed it from someone else (and ironically, it was actually based on Apple Mac's resource forks).
So, yeah, maybe we would have more Windows phones now, maybe Symbian, maybe RIM, maybe Palm. I'm sure the UIs wouldn't have ended up the same as we have now, but whatever I'm sure the feature set would have ended up similar because that's mostly just the intersection of what's possible to do with current technology and what people want to do.
Wasn't the smartphone/PDA market about evenly split between MS, Blackberry, and Palm by the time the iPhone came out (and Palm was losing its market share at a very fast pace over the last few years)? I would've bet that Windows Mobile would become the default option without Android/iOS
> I'm sure the feature set would have ended up similar because that's mostly just the intersection of what's possible to do with current technology and what people want to do.
Considering how much Windows Mobile improved between ~2000 and 2010, I wouldn't be that certain. Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry, and higher-end Symbian/UIQ weren't really that appealing to most consumers, and I'm not sure any of those companies were really that interested in changing that without some external disruption. Of course, this would have come from somewhere eventually, but everything would probably have been a lot slower, and we would have been stuck with keyboards for a few additional years (if not more). On the bright side there we'd probably have more than 2 options now because alternative systems would've had a bit more time to mature.
The UX might have turned out a little bit different but the smartphone would have been pretty much the same thing. My opinion is what permitted the existence of smartphones wasn't Apple but superior mobile hardware & mobile data tech which was emerging.
Those PDAs looked like this because their only business model possible was note taking for business uses because of pricing issues, mobile data issues and processing power issues.
But was anyone else besides Apple seriously considering releasing a device with no keyboard and non-horrible software/UX (admittedly of course the first iPhone was probably closer to a toy than a real "smartphone")?.
Windows Mobile barely changed in the 10 years after Pocket PC was first released. I don't think hardware limitations were the main cause of that. Microsoft (or rather the faceless design committee) simply had no imagination and were more than happy to see their market share grow by 10-30% every year in a fast growing market (well.. who wouldn't?).
Back in 2010 I had a HTC HD2, hardware wise it seemed to be several years a head of iPhone 3GS/4 but for some reason it was still running iPaq software.
Sure and that's why they had a first mover advantage but I wouldn't expect that first mover advantage would have lasted more than 2 years if they did not attempt it.
> I don't think hardware limitations were the main cause of that.
Mobile processing power really sucked and 4G only got released in 2009. Resistive screens were also pretty unusable before that.
Maybe so. I'm not even sure that's a bad thing. The defining trait of iPhone is that it made mobile Internet connectivity (I hesitate to say "computing" since 99% of what people do is just use these devices as dumb terminals, TVs, or cameras) a thing everyone has and takes for granted.
But given what we've actually done with this tool, arguably the world was better when this wasn't true, with the minor (in the grand scheme) exception of a boom in software jobs like my own.
I would rather be a paid shill for Apple than use an Android phone very easy choice :)
Jokes aside if you do not see how Apple is far superior in quality of their products in consumer electronics there is not much to discuss.
It's just opinions, to each their own. I used an iPhone for a year to prevent ewaste of my wife so I know what I'm talking about when I say it's the worst phone I ever owned, I'm not talking randomly, I used it.
Now it's stuck in a software error loop where you can't install or update apps and that was the final nail in the coffin, I was too lazy to reformat it.
