I remember the UMPC! That was a whole category of portable computers that didn't stand the test of time. Apple got a lot of things right, but I think it was less about timing and more about being usable, and affordable by the masses. Blackberry was great but it cost too much and didn't have a big enough battery.
None of the choices that compromised our device - or those of most of our competitors - were choices we made because we thought they were right, or best, but because we were forced to by timing and what was available at what cost, and failed to realize that the result was too compromised to stand a chance.
Put another way: Had Apple launched an iPad in 2000, it would've had exactly the same hardware usability issues. There were no good, cheap enough touch screens, or displays, or cheap enough RAM, or cheap enough flash, to deliver what they did later at that time at any price, much less affordable enough.
Timing it when the available components were good enough and cheap enough was how they got it usable and affordable.
Trying too early and drawing the wrong conclusions was also why a lot of their competitors had moved onto a very different track in terms of design.
If you e.g. look at Palm devices that started to get network connectivity etc., from ~2000, you'll see the grid of (user-installable) apps w/touch and no keyboard, and Blackberry-like devices w/keyboard "won" for a while because people took users rejection of crappy, limited resistive touch as a rejection of touch. (I walked around with a Palm device for several years from '98 or so, and couldn't understand why "normal people" rejected them - it felt like scifi)
[EDIT: UMPC was from 2006; and not the type of devices I'm talking about - they're a couple of generations of hardware later; the UMPC if anything were part of that bastardization of the earlier touch focused devices as manufacturers declared the "cleaner" devices dead and buried in the market place without understanding why]
Most breakthrough inventions, in areas where people fumbled for years or decades, could have been released long before with earlier insight. Maybe not as advanced, but if the right things were done right they still would have been a win.
Many of those "right things" were more practicality, psychological, or fit for market, not just waiting around to jump the moment the "right" tech component arrived.
Breakthrough products also tend to take competitors by surprise. If the breakthrough product didn't happen, it could be years before any other team comes together with the same focus and insights.
So timing a little bit. The vision is important, but often was a common dream. The real rare resources are a very clear vision, stable highly supportive management, a densely talented team, and an intensely iterative focus, and a willingness to go deep and get previously unavailable specialized components made.
Somehow "timing" always follows those last resources.
You really underestimate timing here, and I feel overestimate how great the first iPhone and iPad was.
They didn't take technical genius. All the elements preceded them. Most of the design preceded thrm. They didn't engineer anything particularly new. The only previously unavailable component they got made was better glass, which was great, but not where the deal breaker was for previous iterations.
I find it funny when people want to declare Apple as visionary geniuses over the tech, when the path from earlier devices to the iPhone and iPad was so clear, and given what I know about design discussions etc. in that space.
There would have been multiple devices very similar to the iPad had the components existed. The vision was there, the supportive management was there, the talent was there because frankly none of it is complicated, and people iterated for years. None of that means anything when the components just do not exist yet.
> They didn't take technical genius. All the elements preceded them. Most of the design preceded thrm. They didn't engineer anything particularly new.
That sounds quite mediocre! Except where were all these non-geniuses with their just-as-not-new phones putting Microsoft, Palm, Sony, Blackberry, etc., to shame? Most of that was crap in comparison. And despite many (many) revamped product lines (Microsoft!) trying to take smart phones mainstream. (I give the Blackberry kudos for being very good at what it did.)
You are vastly underestimating the value and work of getting lots of details right (so many, and so "unimportant", most people never notice what holds products back), and finding a way to fit it all together in a way that works well.
You know what is true of every breakthrough theorem in math? If you break down the proof, its just made of steps of already known relations. It wouldn't be a proof if it was otherwise. Nothing new.
> That sounds quite mediocre! Except where were all these non-geniuses with their just-as-not-new phones putting Microsoft, Palm, Sony, Blackberry, etc., to shame? Most of that was crap in comparison. And despite many (many) revamped product lines (Microsoft!) trying to take smart phones mainstream. (I give the Blackberry kudos for being very good at what it did.)
They had built phones with the same kind of interfaces 4-5 years earlier, and then moved on because the hardware wasn't ready then. You keep comparing to products that appears because of the market rejection of the first tablet/touch device fad, and use that to argue that it was timing, while ignoring the many devices that were conceptually far more similar a few years before that.
As I've said: Apple's genius was paying attention to when the hardware was ready for another try at the "pure" devices that "everyone" else tried too early.
And bringing up the Blackberry is comical to me, because even at the time it was an aberrant offshoot used by people who scoffed at the touch-focused devices, and not a relevant comparison. They were an entirely different device category.
> You are vastly underestimating the value and work of getting lots of details right (so many, and so "unimportant", most people never notice what holds products back), and finding a way to fit it all together in a way that works well.
No, I'm aware of the products that were actually built over the preceding years and which design decisions were driven purely by what was actually available vs. were intentional choices, and so don't give credit for simply having better, cheaper components available. Apple does great at polishing things, and they deserve credit for that, but what the 1st gen iPhone and iPad brought was not that.
The also did great at timing it right, and I do give them a lot of credit for that, and that is important - a whole lot of smart people got that very wrong, and frankly it's a lesson the tech industry needs hammered in over and over because we have a tendency to rush ahead without asking ourselves if the market is ready and/or if a product is wrong or just not right yet, and ending up making stupid decisions. I'm not trying to downplay what Apple achieved. I'm trying to drive home the point that Apple achieved this by vastly outperforming their competitors in deploying their resources in a more efficient way, by not rushing into something that was doomed (in the 2000 timeframe). That was, and is, impressive.
"Just" building a smartphone and tablet at the level of the original iPhone and iPad was good, but nothing special, nor visionary in terms of engineering. They had one or two features that were unusual (gestures was), and lots of missing features, and great industrial design, but very little technical innovation. Overall they did amazingly well in hitting the right balance for a first version, and that outweighs pushing the envelope on the technical side by a huge margin - it's irrelevant if you make technical advances if your company folds and/or the product disappears of the face of the earth.
> You know what is true of every breakthrough theorem in math? If you break down the proof, its just made of steps of already known relations. It wouldn't be a proof if it was otherwise. Nothing new.
Great, but this again implies that there were lots of elements that were put together in some completely novel way, but there were not, and suggesting there were is just pure revisionism that just shows that you're unaware of what that field was like in those years.
Nobody went around wondering if capacitative touch would be better or not - we all knew it was. Nobody wanted as little RAM or flash as in the early devices. Nobody wanted big bezels. Nobody wanted slow CPUs. Nobody wanted low capacity batteries. All of the steps to go from ~2000-era tablets and full-screen touch devices to an iPhone and iPad level device were cost-reduction and component improvements.
Heck, the original iPhone didn't even have installable apps, which was a huge step back compared to earlier devices that was only rectified later when Apple realised they'd made a huge misstep (remember Steve Jobs pushing web apps as sufficient? I do).
Apple got the timing right, and then they did an amazing job at iterating to fix the many defects in their original product before their competitors realised they'd gotten the timing right. Getting the timing right was genius. That's impressive enough that there's no reason to push unsupportable ideas about things that weren't new. Most of the things I've mentioned weren't new when I worked on them in 2000 either - we invented next to nothing, and we knew we didn't.
The business end of things is not to be forgotten. The real trick was that the iPhone debuted on AT&T with an affordable data plan. that was the key. Blackberries had all the same capabilities, but they were so expensive that only business people could afford them through work.
I worked on devices that didn't need styluses 6 years before the iPhone. They were not unusual at all. What kept people using styluses was that resistive touch is shit and imprecise, and on small screens they were awful to use.
So this boils down to capacitative touch of sufficient quality having gotten cheap enough.
Not gestures, but pulling on scroll bars was certainly a thing. Gestures were definitely an improvement, but pretty much not something you want to try on a bad quality small resistive screen unless you want the user to throw their device at the wall in frustration.
The funny thing is with number of those kinds of early devices I had for use or testing, they all seemed awesome at the time, but I know I probably shouldn't ever pick any of them up again, because I know logically that the experience would be awful given what I know about the tech and compared to current iterations of the same tech... It's funny how memory works.
I still wish for the reality where having a pure-unadulterated Linux installation on a tablet that early remained a thing, though - the current locked-down tablet ecosystems in many ways (but not the hardware!) still feels like a big step back in many respects.
> Had Apple launched an iPad in 2000, it would've had exactly the same hardware usability issues
and thats what excites me the most about the vision pro. when Apple steps in, its generally a signal that the tech has achieved a certain critial mass.
vision pro is going to incentivise a lot of hardware manufacturers to start building components for the VR market and increase the ecoomies of scale for other vr systems.
Put another way, android wouldn't exist or be relevant if iphone didnt show us what a smart phone could be. now I can go to any store and buy a cheap andrpid for $200. is it as good as a modern flagship iphone? of course not. but it holds up well against any 4 year old iphone.
