"...and [the iPhone] doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine." - Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft Thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring this video! The first 1000 people who click this link will get 2 free months of Skillshare Premium: skl.sh/tech0820
rrobertt13 with or without iPhone it was going to head this direction so I don’t se it revolutionary also i live in Norway and remember one of my classmates had the originally iPhone and wasn’t impressed seeing it lagged but can be du to being in Norway either way let’s say it was revolutionary seeing we don’t have a time machine ✌️
Ballmer was more than a ceo. He was one of the 3 founders. He’s to nice of a guy to run Microsoft but Paul Allen was on bad terms with Bill so we got Ballmer.
I think that's my favorite take honestly, most had some kind of reasoning behind it, but really? The iPhone is going to fail because Apple is launching it on a Friday? Alrighty bud 😂
Harald Karugaba LG Prada was terrible and pretty much unknown in the mainstream market. Being the first hardly matter in the business. Being better or the best is the most important and iPhone nailed that.
Idk, I was skeptical of Apple in recent years, but they aren’t stupid. They’re leaning slowly but surely into something big rn and I just don’t know what yet, obviously a wireless future and ar, but it feels like there’s more to that :T
Since I work in product development my favorite was: "The device was released before the engineers wanted it to be" This describes every product, ever.
Time = money in anything technology related....Moore's Law... by their standards, competition would eat them out of business. Ontop, mathematically, esp in software development is Agile/Scrum based and actual quality products are from customer feedback.... so please , stay off comments sections . thanks you
I'm pretty old, so I remember most of these negative reactions to the iPhone pretty well. Microsoft and Blackberry are the most infamous, since they spectacularly failed to read the room and paid the price dearly; Microsoft left the phone business with their tail between their legs, and we all know how Blackberry ended up. Of all of these comments, however, the one that sticks the most in my memory is Dvorak's. Dvorak was very well known at the time, and had been a prominent columnist dating back to the 1980s. He wrote a pretty hyperbolic editorial for PC World (or was it PC Magazine?) with a scathing criticism of the iPhone that really made the rounds. In particular, he was absolutely baffled by the concept of the touch keyboard. He just couldn't wrap his head around it. Even back in the day it was easy to see this as the last dying breath of an old guard that refused tooth and nail to accept change.
The keyboards really did suck on those early phones. It was a deal-breaker for many of us. That said, it did seem obvious that it was only a matter of time before they got better
Honestly Microsoft just didn't receive the support he needed. The OS was amazing, snap fast for the price and decent hardware on any price point. I had many windows phones and I loved them all, more than I loved my iPhone 5.
Grant Cai Because people take selfies in public places? Or for video calling? I’d understand why people didn’t want it in 2010 with the iPhone 4 but cmon it’s an essential now
@@grantcai5971 The difference is, where smartphone cameras actually got better over time, many laptop webcams literally haven't progressed at all since 2008.
2:04 It wasnt that they couldnt understand the logic of being able to have more screen real estate. The reason people thought you needed a physical keyboard for typing and didn't just want to use an on screen keyboard was because all the phones before the iphone used resistive touchscreens - apple introducing capacitive touchscreens was a game changer when it came to the responsiveness, and so people couldnt understand how a touchscreen keyboard would be good enough until they actually tried it for themselves on the iphone.
Yass. Plus idk about you but it took me a good while to adjust to using a touch keyboard full time. I had one of those Bluetooth keyboard sliding cases for my iPhone when I eventually ended up getting one lol ah such fun memories
The whole keyboard problem was addressed by Apple in a very smart way! To make it simple: one of the engineer tasked with creating a functional keyboard came out with the idea of making the keys “preemptive” by analyzing the word and dynamically enlarge the next possible letters. For example, if you’re writing “he” it is possible that you’re writing “hello”, se the system would have scaled up the key representing “l” and “o”. At the time this made Apple software keyboards way better than the competition
Also to add to your criticism of Steve Balmer's review, a physical keyboard is mechanical and is susceptible to breaking. Moving parts vs no moving part, no moving parts wins. I had a lot of phones with buttons that stopped working and I don't miss it.
Steve Ballmer's take was very interesting. Not only was his initial reaction completely wrong but he didn't see Apple and even Google as serious competition until it was far too late and by the time he took them seriously, Windows Mobile just crashed and burned and then Steve just straight up left the company out of embarrassment. I guess there's a lesson there to not brush off the competition. Look at where things are headed. And you either move with the times or get left in the dust.
500 back in 2007 was top end, 1000+ is top end today... Inflation buddy! If you just went by dollar worth, 500 in '07 is about 640 now, but it's taxes, incomes and everything in the financial system that changes.
Love Apple or hate them, you gotta give credit where it's due. Whatever phone you're using right now would not exist or would be significantly worse if not for the iPhone.
It's astonishing to me that the majority of the tech journalism world in 2007 sincerely thought that owning multiple single-purpose devices was the future. What an incredibly myopic take, even considering the market at the time.
That article about failed “convergence devices“ also had a fascinating paragraph about other supposed failed ideas in it... like combining a TV with a computer to watch digital media on it. Wait, every TV is like that now, you say? Clearly you must be wrong, because these experts said it would never work.
David Harrison I’m saying it in the way you would say it if you went on a trip and see someone you know in the same hotel as you. As in the friendly and positive way. Maybe it didn’t come off like that.
A lot of people, including you, really don’t understand that price tag and try to downplay it. That’s not $500 unlocked which is how Apple sells and advertises their phones now. That’s $500 on a contract. That would be pretty hefty even today. That’s why they massively cut it down to $200 on a contract the following year. And also, they only sold it on an AT&T contract and only in the U.S., so yeah I can see why people at the time thought it wasn’t gonna make any waves. If they had officially sold unlocked iPhones, it could have easily been double the original price.
To be fair, before the first iPhone touchscreen devices used to suck a lot and required a stylus to be even remotely precise so it’s understandable why a lot of people assumed that an on-screen keyboard that you press with your fingers is not going to work.
@@YISTECH Did my comment seem agitated? I merely pointed out google buds do the same thing. Maybe you should relax and not get triggered when android is brought up.
Hey 91Tech, great video!. Do you think you could do a review of the first generation iPad Pro and see how it stacks up today? It kind of seems to have fallen into obscurity, but there are plenty of sale on eBay, and I'm not sure if they are a good value or not.
Well I mean the iPad 8 is jut the old pro and the design of current pro is going to be the standard. The iPad Air 4 sets the precedent for iPads moving forward. If anything just get the air 4 or the 8 because they are going to be supported for longer than the first gen pro
same stuff happens these days too iPhone11 gets released iPhone haters : boo the worst uninnovative smartphones ever, it will get no sales q2 2020 sales report : "the most sold phone is the iPhone 11"
Back in it's time it's not hard to imagine possible reasons why it would fail. Years before the first iPhone there was the iTunes phone by Motorola, which was a clunky phone with a clunky version of iTunes (I did like the design of the phone at the time tho). My high school computers teacher did bring up the whole tactile feel or lack thereof on the iPhone, which I understood. But at the same time, I wanted one. The original had aged pretty well finished to other platforms. I'm an Android guy but I can recognize without iPhone, Android would be a whole different platform from what it is now.
Android: oh no, apple copied us, they have our widgets and we must sue them!!! Also android when they took the first iPhone's design: haha phone go *b r r r r r*
There were a LOT of people talking about the downsides of the iPhone being a “convergence device” here, which in hindsight sounds pretty goofy since everything we own is essentially a convergence device, but I can understand the concern they might have had at the time. A lot of the consumer electronics industry in 2007 was still trying to ape the market strategy of the iPod, but trying to be competitive by implementing a “killer feature” somewhere that the iPod didn’t have one (I.e. making your mp3 player also a portable gaming device, photo gallery or digital camera). They largely failed because 1.) the iPod was just too ubiquitous to be shown up by some random product, and 2.) there was a lack of quality and thought out into these features, leading them to be pretty cheap, confusing or downright torturous to use. What people often ignored at the time was that the iPod was *also* becoming a convergence device - it started playing videos and allowing photo storage after a few years, the Shuffle doubled as a flash drive, the Nano had a bit of homebrew “smartwatch” adoption, etc. The iPod started as a divergence device not because it needed to separate the features of previous, less-successful music players, but simply because previous divergence-native music players were garbage. After it solidified itself as a tentpole in digital media consumption, THEN Apple gave it new features to snuff out the copycats.
I was skeptical because it was expensive as hell and didn't have many features, no app market, couldn't change the wallpaper, no 3G, couldn't record video. All alot to out up with for something that just looked futuristic
I admit that in 2007 I was not thrilled with the iPhone. All I thought I needed was my Nokia that only called and text. Now I can't live without my smartphone.
The Car Phone and the Cell Phone are two entirely different technologies too. The car phone has been around since the 60s, so their comparison falls flat in that regard too
Great funny video, young Jedi. Futurists almost always get it wrong! In William Gibson's "Mona Lisa Overdrive," +40-50 years ahead, they're still using FAX paper!
Touch screen keyboards were horrible at the time. It’s like someone telling you they were getting McDonald’s and coming back with a gourmet meal. It’s why ballmer reacted the way he did.
I remember digital keyboards in the beginning, they were terrible, always because the screen was resistive. The first time i used an iphone, i was so impressed, it was smooth as silk.
I'm not an iPhone fan these days, and I think its clear they don't innovate much in terms of hardware for their iPhone, but theres no denying their greatness in the beginning and the innovation they brought to the industry
To be honest, I don't think they underestimated the iPhone as much as they underestimated how much technology could improve in a short amount of time. If the iPhone improved at the same rate phone technology used to improve when it came out, then it'd have died off. But instead, it improved so quickly that it was magical. It went from a device that did everything badly to a piece of tech that people wanted for actually being good. You need to understand, at the time, we didn't think that we'd use our phones as much as we actually did. We had laptops and computers to take everywhere... so a phone was supposed to just be an accessory. But as the smartphone took up more of our lives, the bigger screen's value grew a lot. Hell, back when I first got a smartphone, it was mostly useless and a waste of money since I was one of the few kids with a laptop... for me, it was pointless to have a smartphone and the dumb phone was better (buttons felt nice, longer battery without having to worry about charging the phone all day). The thing is, in hindsight, after seeing how influential touch screen smartphones became makes things look way more obvious. Also, back then, having an mp3 and a regular phone just made more sense. One held a sh*t ton more music and the other had a much larger battery life and better connectivity. But there were a few things to note. 1st, iPhone was a novelty and a cool idea, so people wanted it. 2nd, iPhone and other touch smartphones improved SIGNIFICANTLY in a short amount of time. In a mere 3 years, it went from a difficult to use piece of sh*t that was novelty to an amazing product people had very little complaint about. And a few years after that, it became something we couldn't live without. 3rd, iPhone used to be a device that could do everything, but badly. But because it was a cool gadget, people ate it up. Then, Apple and other smartphone manufacturers turned it into a device that could do everything reasonably well...
To be fair, the first iphone was horribly slow and sooo limited. I tested it in a t-mobile shop and...no. The 3g and even more the 3gs were the ones, which were kind of revolutionary. The 2g was, like the first ipad, nothing more than a beta.
In hindsight these seem awful, but at the time it wasn't an odd opinion to have about the iPhone. Also, back then touch screens on most devices sucked bad.
People didn’t get that the touch keyboard made sense because people LOVED their physical keyboards . People would buy a blackberry and pay 30$/ month for the blackberry data plan just because the blackberry keyboard was that good . The transition from that to touch felt wrong until we could forget what the physical keyboard felt like .
F and J buttons have someway to feel them, a line, a dot. That's how you know where your fingers are in a real keyboard. Still a bad point for assuming that the iPhone will fail for not having a real physical keyboard lmao
The Xbox One to PS5 comparison is kinda out of context. Carriers back then had total control over the industry. Carriers could make or break a product, and unlike Apple, Microsoft had their history of phone sales as leverage over carriers.
Some of the criticisms you brushed off are legitimate. I mean, the first touch keyboards were really awful. Those early iphone keyboards had bad key detection, bad haptic feedback, and no predictive text. Plus, nobody was used to them yet.
I see the comment about typing on a touch screen making more sense back then because many touch screen keyboards were resistive and near impossible to type on and that's what many people had experience with at the time
Back when the iPad first got revealed I predicted it would fail horribly. Who would ever want to buy what is basically an iPod Touch that doesn’t fit in your pocket is something I said back then. Btw I am typing this on an iPad. It isn’t easy to see success beforehand but very easy with hindsight.
There was definitely a lot of hype around it, but let's be real, reading reviews that got it right isn't quite as entertaining as making fun of people who got it wrong lol
I kept a separate iPod and phone for quite a while because of a) lack of storage space, b) the impact of streaming on my data allowance and c) the cost of subscription. However, now that I have unlimited data and Apple Music, I no longer bother to store media locally, except maybe on an SSD if I'm long-haul flying. Streaming music and video just seem so natural today, as well as using my iPhone as a wireless hotspot for my iPad Pro.
Is there a quick way to recreate a music library through apple music? I keep a library of 3000+ songs, I would hop onto Apple music if it can rebuild my library in Apple Music.
Watch the Steve Jobs iPhone intro. One pocket-size device, or 3 devices, 3 chargers, etc etc etc? I think Jobs might have had something there.....but of course, Microsoft always knows best.....
Actually that lack of tactile feedback in touchscreen keyboards is very important. On android phones you can enable keyboard haptic feedback which significantly increases typing speed (at least for me) and there are studies that show this is true. Iirc iphones make a clicking noise when you type. Not sure if it has the same effect.
To be honest? I've been hugely interested in mobile market even back then and iPhone was for me and a lot of my friends just an "iPod Phone" device completely attached to the Mac ecosystem with no outside functionality whatsoever. Like, it couldn't install any third party apps, it couldn't transfer any files one way or another, it's connection was very slow even for these times. Websites weren't designed yet for a touch screen (look how mbasic version of facebook looks like, everything was designed to use phone's d-pad). Back then, Nokia N95 (a two year old phone) was kicking iPhone's ass in almost every category (at least iPhone had a better screen and more onboard storage). It's easy to judge these old opinions from a perspective of a market actually made by iPhone, it's interface and whole philosophy but back then, mobile market was completely different.
the only thing nokia had over the iPhone was more features the interface on the iPhone was years ahead of Nokia's Symbian os Nokia's Symbian os was complicated and not intuitive i I'm a phone collector so i have a lot old nokia phones
@@lesleyhaan116 the thing is… it was a standard interface. Back then, iPhone’s interface was very limited. First iPhone didn’t even had a multitasking and didn’t keep apps in RAM. Which Nokia in Symbian actually had. It took me iOS 13 to get iPhone as a daily driver. I tried 3GS and 4s before but I didn’t stick long enough to get used to quirks of it’s OS.
@@Shadowcat I know Nokia had multitasking before the iPhone you could multitask on the Nokia 6600 but the easy of use iOS interface one the iPhone and the apps store made the iPhone just better Apple is the one who killed Nokia palm blackberry and Microsoft in the phone business
@@lesleyhaan116 Not really. It was also an Android which ripped off a lot of design cues because google worked on iPhone with Apple and had some insider info. Technology progressed but features became somewhat lacking, sacrificed to the “user friendliness” gods
Up to that point "convergant" devices were compromized in their executions, they did multiple things but all of them in a worse way than specialized devices so The Guardian and the public had only those experiences.
The first iphone did suck for a list of reasons and so i definitely did not want one. I didn't want any full touchscreen phone for years after until they became more responsive and the mobile web got better, but it did seem immediately obvious, with the release of the iphone, that the industry would immediately begin moving in that direction?
I know this comment may be over used but holy f@ck all these articles have big boomer energy like why thank God i was 11 back in 2007 im not necessarily an apple fan but I do appreciate them
John C. Dvorak was a fossil when I was watching him say this on his vidcast in 2007 (appropriately called "Cranky Geeks")...those predictions now look like a guy who thought this 'electricity fad' thing wasn't going to catch on in the 1890s.
