I would love to know if Ives was truly foundation to the iPhone, or if he was more given the overall idea and polished it with the final look/feel (which is also important).
Who was the exact individual that had the vision for glass multi-touch screens and sick gesture like effects (scroll).
Perhaps the team just sat around a table and came up with the vision. Or maybe it was Jobs, but clearly there were some good visionaries in the company.
I think the proof of Ive's excellence will come out of this next OpenAI project. If it's something lame, then I will assume his impact at Apple was overrated. If it's a jaw-dropper, then maybe he really is the cat's meow.
> Who was the exact individual that had the vision for glass multi-touch screens and sick gesture like effects (scroll).
Like almost all new products later thought of as 'visionary' innovations, the first iPhone built on pre-existing ideas but integrated them particularly well and added some excellent new refinements. It's easy to forget that the prior five years had been a crucible of in-market experimentation between companies like Nokia, Palm, HP, Sony, Ericsson and Blackberry with platforms like Pocket PC, Palm OS, Windows CE and Windows Mobile.
The iPhone was announced in Jan 2007 at MacWorld (and shipped in July), I was there and played with it extensively in the Apple booth. I remember thinking it had some especially clever ideas and was a very nice implementation. It advanced the "premium pocket phone" bar up to a new level but I didn't see it as unusually visionary. It was definitely significant but still a (large) step in an ongoing progression of refinement, integration and search for product/market fit. There were already large color touchscreen devices which integrated a phone, messaging, camera, music player, Wifi, Bluetooth and GPS. Here's an article looking at a few pre-iPhone devices: https://www.phonearena.com/news/6-great-smartphones-from-10-....
The iPhone 1's design was uniquely simple and svelte but I was immediately concerned about it having enough battery to support that screen. The choice to go with just "One Big Button" and no physical keyboard or navigation keys was bold, weird and also a bit concerning. The on-screen keyboard-only and gesture nav-only choices did feel a bit like two steps forward, one back in iOS 1. It felt like they made a 'purist' design decision and had to make it work as well as it could. That worked out to be "well enough" but sometimes similarly bold but risky choices can fail when they sacrifice too much. However, the battery life did become a very serious issue for active users when the first iPhone shipped and limited the success of the device. It's also worth remembering the usability of iOS 1 was pretty clunky. I played with most of these early phone devices and owned several but didn't adopt an iPhone as my primary device until the iPhone 3G shipped 18 months after the iPhone launch. The 3G was significantly better, different and more refined than the iPhone 1.
The iPhone was the first really well done general purpose computing phone. It had a real web browser, a real music player, apps that didn't suck. Adoption was huge because the design was great, but we would have just seen the same thing transpire over a number of years if iPhone hadn't been created.
I know a lot of people basically who were basically saying "finally"
> but we would have just seen the same thing transpire over a number of years if iPhone hadn't been created.
Maybe, but I’m not certain we would have converged on a single form factor. Only Apple had the retail, marketing, software, hardware capabilities, discipline, and incentives to throw everything behind the minimalistic design and single form factor and turn it into a hit.
Everyone else was splitting their efforts across multiple form factors and relying on carrier stores to sell their phones, and I don’t think that was going to revolutionize anything.
Advanced capabilities were truly depressing. Better hardware would have helped a lot, but given how poor Android trundled(s?) along, I'm inclined to agree that only someone with a strong vision was going to execute it as well as Steve did.
It's strange to think it was only 4 years after the initial release that he died.
Nokia had a touch-screen based phone, with a real browser and a real music player in 2005. They didn't make an effort to sell it around here, though, but I don't think it's that either.
I remember the first application that people were hyped about was Google Maps. The Nokia phone couldn't run that, and any map available there was much harder to use. But the iPhone only really took off after people could install any kind of application there.
Yeah, not totally surprised. As in the other thread, this feature set was a pretty obvious outcome. But you have to implement it well. It doesn't look particularly well done. Probably slow, no pinch, etc...
I'm not sure what model you are talking about, maybe the S60, third edition. It is hard to get any background on it.
I'd like to say that companies missed out on the fact that a web browser would be really sellable, but it's clearly all about tying everyone to their platform, and more importantly their store.
> It advanced the "premium pocket phone" bar up to a new level but I didn't see it as unusually visionary.
Have you ever encountered a product you saw as "unusually visionary"?
I'm not comfortable with the word 'visionary' because it's ill-defined and unscoped. So I don't use that word because I don't think in those terms. This may be because most of my later career was spent leading teams conceiving and shipping cutting-edge tech products in new categories - sometimes launching those categories - occasionally with historically notable success, usually with middling success and sometimes with abject failure. After a couple decades this track-record resulted in several years leading innovation globally at a top ten valley tech giant.
So I've thought a lot about new tech product innovation including speaking, writing and teaching about it. When people have been kind enough to use 'visionary' in relation to a product I led, I thank them but reject the term and then try to turn it into a teachable moment about the thought processes, systems and relentless execution necessary to create results someone might someday describe as 'visionary'. I'm generally opposed to the trend in media and pop-biz-lit to deify outstanding new product development as somehow ineffably mystical. At best, it helps no one get better at doing this hard thing, and at worst, it's pulling up the ladder after we've climbed it.
The novel insights and intuitions which some people call 'visionary', in my experience, always seem to come after intensive research, deep study of prior work in the field and constant hands-on, practical experimentation. So I credit them as the indirect (but expected) result of the rigorous process of making and shipping cool new stuff. That said, I do think of Steve Jobs himself as one of the best natural tech product innovators I've ever met. Another example I cite as a significantly notable step change was SpaceX's understanding that the way to engineer exponentially more mass to orbit per dollar was pioneering a substantially different process of rocket development. That's more a process than a product - but that's kind of my whole meta-point.
If your question was basically to try to call out "guy who didn't think iPhone 1 was unusually visionary at the 2007 launch, doesn't think anything is visionary". Well... you win. But it's more because I think most new products in new categories are 'visionary' in some ways. It's just that the majority of new visions fail commercially. Semantically, 'visionary' probably best parses to a synonym for novelty and 'newly different' doesn't necessarily equate to good, so it's not useful as a threshold metric for product success. However, I do think the iPhone business overall is certainly one of the ten most innovative and successful new product businesses our industry has ever seen. But that doesn't change the fact that many knowledgeable observers at the original launch didn't see it that way - because it wasn't that yet. Twenty years of incredible success and constant iteration tends to obscure that the original product - as innovative as it was - wasn't what its descendants became. And the victors tend to rewrite history and our collective memories obscuring the context the 1.0 was created in. Standing there in the Apple booth, I DID think it was really good, bold and different. I told someone that night I expected it would probably be my personal "product of the year" - and recall this was in early January. My comment above was because just being a fanboy exclaiming how visionary a product is informs nothing and helps no one.
I had been working with similar hardware and software at the time.
The visionary bit for me was Jobs getting a US phone company to agree to a data plan that made financial sense to potential users.
Although not many people use the word 'visionary' for business model innovation, I agree it was a crucial element in the iPhone's viability. It's clear the earlier 2005 collaboration with Motorola on the ROKR (aka the "iTunes Phone") is where Apple learned a lot about the broader ecosystem gaps which would need to be addressed for a phone to succeed.
So you just don’t like the word “visionary”. Got it.
I think he could have been instrumental to the iphone (not saying he was or wasn't) and whatever he tries next is a complete flop. The ability to be successful is contextual, and great artists can produce mediocre art.
> The ability to be successful is contextual
Excellent point. I think most great creative work is due to a uniquely 'right' combination of people, problem, experience and environment being together at an opportune moment.
Yes, he could be a one-hit-wonder artist.
Jobs and Ive were at the core of all the product design.
There were multiple articles about Jobs spending most of his day with Jony looking at prototypes Jony's team had devised and giving critiques and feedback. Then they would iterate on what Jobs said.
Of course the engineering team had to figure out how to make Jobs suggestions real within the physical and technological constraints they were working with.
> I think the proof of Ive's excellence will come out of this next OpenAI project.
I think Ive's lack of high profile success since Jobs passed away shows Jobs true talent. He was a taste savant. A genius for figuring out what people would like and building a team capable of building those things at scale.
Ive could take Jobs ideas and come up with a concrete design for making them real. But he doesn't have that instinct for figuring out what kinds of products people want in the first place.
I would love to know what Jobs would have done with AI to make it into something people want to use, instead of being terrified it's just going to put them out of work.
Maybe Altman will serve that taste savant role, and they will be a good combo. I'm optimistic they will produce something that: * doesn't have ads, (we are the customer, not the product) * makes our lives more fluid and easy * delivers on the vision for what computers always could be
Jarvis, please make me a sandwich.
Its too late for that, they're already working on putting ads in ChatGPT. https://www.seo.com/blog/chatgpt-advertising/
This won't only be in the free tier. Altman says they don't even break even on the paid tiers. They will use whatever money is available to fill that gap, and advertising money is available. https://x.com/sama/status/1876104315296968813
Soon we will live in a world where people don't make purchasing decisions for themselves, they ask an AI which will suggest the product that pays the most for ads. Payola World.
> Maybe Altman will serve that taste savant role
Was it the eyeball scanners that gave you this idea?
I don't see the reason for optimism.
I dont think jobs was necessary a taste savant as he was notorious for claiming other peoples ideas as his own. But he was willing to walk over anyone if he thought it would make a better product be they another company, his board, or subordinates. Nothing was sacred.
Ives is not that person he is too nice.
That’s the whole point of being a “taste savant”. Recognizing good ideas when you see them.
Jobs wasn’t the one producing the designs. He was critiquing them and pointing out what he liked.
Back in 2006 I saw this demo video from Jeff Han https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcKqyn-gUbY so when the iPhone came out I really wasn't surprised by the multi-touch part. And, as others have pointed out, scroll inertia wasn't a new concept - I also remember a Flash website (or demo) from yugop (Yugo Nakamura) or Tokyo Flash (I really don't remember whom) that had it in the interface, all very fluid.
Was the iPhone revolutionary? Absolutely!
But, imho, it was built on evolutionary advancements.
Did iOS actually invent the idea of scrolling with a gesture? I could have sworn it already existed at the time. Like panning over a map on a GPS…
The momentum on iOS is nicely tuned though.
Touchscreen scrolling has been in consumer products since at least the early 1980s and inertial scrolling on a touchscreen has been around since at least the early 1990s with Sun's Star7[1].
(And I wouldn't be surprised if there are academic papers that predate the consumer products by a decade or more.)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CsTH9S79qI&t=266s
I love the delightfully 90's/global village icons they used in the UI here. So few pixels but they still incorporated popular aesthetics from the time.
That is a seriously sick demo. I had no idea such capability existed back then. Way ahead of its time.
Practically, though, the UX in that demo was terrible. The frame rate was entirely insufficient. The latency between tapping and action taking place was too long. The idea was absolutely great and way ahead of its time, but it was also way ahead of the hardware's capabilities.
We saw a lot of great ideas in the 90s, but either the hardware performance wasn't ready, or the software effort fell short of the polish needed for mass adoption. We had to wait for the iPhone to be one of those rare products where they used capable hardware AND actually finished the software.
The breakthrough aspect of the iPhone was enabling gestures and a very usable UI without having to use a stylus. This is despite the much lower precision of the capacitive touchscreen tech available in that era.
Other smartphones and PDAs back then used more precise resistive touchscreens that required an annoying pressure stylus because it was a way to get more usability out of the very small screens that devices were limited to.
Not necessarily the first, but the earliest that I can remember: Decades ago (before they were sold/bought/sold), Opera (web browser/suite) used gestures as a navigation tool with your mouse. I never could figure out how to get it to work, but it was a thing.
I know mouse gestures existed previously because I remember someone on /. talking about them circa 2000 and I had to look up what they were. But I don't remember what they were being used for.
Adobe Illustator had a Hand tool already in 1987 that let you pan the canvas by dragging the mouse. Probably it’s older than that.
But adding the physical feel of momentum and inertia was Apple’s invention, AFAIK.