I know it was a long time ago, but the announcement of the iPhone wasn't terribly significant at the time. We already had smartphones with apps. The iPhone didn't have apps. It had a large screen using a touchscreen technology that worked better than the competitors, but it had no keyboard -- something seen as a disadvantage by many.
The most important thing the iPhone brought imho was low, fixed-priced data plans that were affordable by regular folks. This was a true innovation by Jobs and perhaps his single most important achievement, although obviously someone else would eventually have pulled it off.
The 360 was not a single device at a moment in time, but a platform and an architecture. The 360 is not judged by the first machine you could buy, but by how the machine did in the market over the long term.
The iPhone line of products came to blow the doors off the “smart phone” market, like the 360 did with mainframes. You can’t seriously claim that the touch screen was “seen as a disadvantage by many” when the new line sold orders of magnitude more units than any smart phone before it, and became the dominant form factor for all mobile phones within a few years. Like the 360 did with mainframes.
“obviously someone else would eventually have pulled it off” can be said about any innovation, including the 360. What IBM did, like what Apple did decades later, appears obvious in hindsight. But like IBM’s 360 and mainframe computers, Apple is the one that did it with smart phones.
Low price data plans, an app ecosystem several orders of magnitude bigger than anything before it, portable computing in the pocket of billions of people. Nobody achieved that before the iPhone.
Like the impact of the 360, the creation of iPhone eventually enabled a vast number of new businesses and products (for good or ill) including Uber, Snap, and countless others. Pre-existing businesses like Facebook grew significantly after the iPhone was released.
Sure, lots of earlier devices had some of the features that iPhone released with, just like computers existed long before the System/360. But Apple packaged it up in a way that worked, proceeded to own the market for a decade (especially in terms of revenue), and became one of the largest companies in the world on the back of its success.
The app ecosystem on the iPhone (and then Android) certainly became much more significant over time. But the 2007 iPhone announcement didn't upend things over night. I had a Treo at the time and didn't get around to switching over to an iPhone until the 3GS in 2010 or thereabouts--which was probably the model when the iPhone really started taking off.
(The iPod was similar. A lot of people viewed the initial models as just another and not very compelling MP3 player.)
And you're right that the iPhone also hit the market at a time when data plans were becoming more affordable for people not expensing them. My Treo's plan was fairly reasonable as a recall but then you couldn't really use a huge amount of data anyway.
I totally agree. The iPhone was cool, but not really as useful as a Blackberry at the time. It took two-hands to use the iphone (kinda still does unless you use voice, which is noisy). The Blackberry thumb-wheel was ridiculously effective at getting around on the phone.
In fact, iPhones weren't even used by many large businesses until later.
The cool factor won, though. When it came out it reminded me of the first LED watches; it you had to push a button on the watch (so now it took two hands to tell time). The red LEDS glowed for a few seconds then vanished. I first saw one in a James Bond movie.
Android phones toyed with the navigation ball for a little while, but it took a lot of rolls of the thumb to get a small movement on the screen -- it should have felt like a trackball, but ended up being useless compared to flicking the touch screen. The last Android phone I owned that had one was the HTC Magic.
I'm hoping physical controls will make a comeback, but they're often incompatible with water resistance. Maybe some day a touchscreen will emerge with good haptic feedback? I can dream.
The announcement of the iPhone was big because it really defined what a smartphone is. Also with the phones we have it’s easy to think that it was a small announcement which is a testament to the influence it has.
The competition focused on prioritizing phone features and then adding apps that worked on a small screen. The purpose of a screen on a phone wasn’t emphasized at all.
Also having a camera with a large screen eventually made the iPhone take the most pictures of any device.
But the iPhone did have its price slashed by around $200. Also it took til the iPhone 5 to have a great deal of people to adopt the iPhone.
So the announcement and the iPhone itself made it influential and then a few revisions later the iPhone really became dominant.
What a smartphone should do was pretty solidified by then. I used a Sony Ericsson one back then and we had Palm and Windows CE devices as well. What the iPhone has shown was a UX that didn't try to mimic a computer - it was its own thing, with animated transitions and multi-touch. This made all other smartphones look clunky in comparison. The second revolution Apple introduced (later) was the app store. It extended the zero-pain experience of iTunes to applications - no more downloading .prc files and opening them with a custom tool. With the iPhone it was easy.
Also, the integration with OSX apps didn't hurt either - it made the Mac and the iPhone a mostly seamless continuum.
In retrospect, it defined what smartphones were in terms of market. Before 2007, smartphones were business devices. They weren't marketed to the general consumer, and if you walked into a phone store, they were mostly ignored unless you were a "business person". The high end of consumer phones were "multimedia phones", like the Razr, which was the best seller at that time.
This is partially a result of smartphone design at the time. They were, in design (and sometimes literally), PDAs with phone functionality added. It was assumed that this paradigm was the correct one. Consumers were asking for 'iPod-like' phones at the time, and manufacturers responded by making mp3 player hybrid phones like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Chocolate_(VX8500) We now know that this approach was too literal -- too feature based. What consumers actually wanted wasn't an mp3 player glued to a phone, it was smartphone that was designed for non-business use cases first -- one that wasn't a PDA.
At the time, there was actually a lot of commentary that the iPhone was destined to fail: it ignored what was then seen as the most important parts of building a smartphone at the time, being able to integrate into business communication systems: e.g. Blackberry Enterprise Server or Exchange ActiveSync.
The most important thing the iPhone brought imho was low, fixed-priced data plans that were affordable by regular folks. This was a true innovation by Jobs and perhaps his single most important achievement, although obviously someone else would eventually have pulled it off.