Jonathan
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2013–2023
51:19 · 9.2M views · May 14, 2013
The full January 2007 Macworld keynote where Steve Jobs unveils the first iPhone. It covers the touch interface, multitouch gestures, the browser, maps and the pitch as an iPod, phone and internet communicator.
HN points to it as a landmark product presentation and as primary-source evidence of what the original iPhone was meant to do and how people reacted.
10 comments from Hacker News
Top of my head, here are some books on specific histories I enjoyed. All old, but there are timeless nuggets in them. Soul of a new machine, previously mentioned. Where I first learned about mushroom management. Just for Fun: the story of an accidental revolutionary [0] was fun bio on Torvalds from 2001 The Mythical Man Month [1] offers some insight into the management and thinking that went into OS/360 Masters of Doom [2]: offers an enjoyable history of the shareware years and the rise of id software The multicians site [3]: is a collaborative history of Multics, one the most influential operating systems. The Mother of All Demos [4]: even better than Steve Jobs keynotes Steve Jobs iPhone introduction [5]: I’m not a huge fan of Mr Jobs, but this is one of the best presentations ever. It’s not history, per se, but very interesting through our eyes. 0: [LINK] 1: [LINK] 2: [LINK] 3: [LINK] 4: [LINK] 5: this video
If you have the chance, it really is worth going back and watching the original iPhone release video. It's pretty amazing to see some of the things that were so new and exciting a few years ago now so much a part of the phone landscape that we can't even imagine a phone without them. It's almost more amazing to see how basic it seems compared to what we have now, just 6 years later. this video
Steve Jobs answered this question back in 2007[0] > Now, why do we need a revolutionary user interface. Here’s four smartphones, right? Motorola Q, the BlackBerry, Palm Treo, Nokia E62 — the usual suspects. And, what’s wrong with their user interfaces? Well, the problem with them is really sort of in the bottom 40 there. It’s this stuff right there. They all have these keyboards that are there whether or not you need them to be there. And they all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic and are the same for every application. Well, every application wants a slightly different user interface, a slightly optimized set of buttons, just for it. > And what happens if you think of a great idea six months from now? You can’t run around and add a button to these things. They’re already shipped. So what do you do? It doesn’t work because the buttons and the controls can’t change. They can’t change for each application, and they can’t change down the road if you think of another great idea you want to add to this product. > Well, how do you solve this? Hmm. It turns out, we have solved it. We solved in computers 20 years ago. We solved it with a bit-mapped screen that could display anything we want. Put any user interface up. And a pointing device. We solved it with the mouse. We solved this problem. So how are we going to take this to a mobile device? What we’re going to do is get rid of all these buttons and just make a giant screen. [0] this video
The first iPhone not only had GPS, it had Google Maps built in. Here's the timestamp of Jobs's 2007 presentation, showing the feature: this video Selfie camera was out by the following year. Flashlight was implemented as an app very early on after app store came out. The original version most definitely had gyroscope and compass. Mass appeal was very much already there when iPhone launched. But it was hamstrung a bit by 2.5G and the exclusive deal with AT&T. Remember, mobile phones used to come with 2 year contracts with heavy cancellation penalties, and 3G took a while to roll out to the U.S. market. Still, it was a smashing success in its first year with 10 million units sold. Remember, back then the mobile market was very fragmented. Devices not only varied dramatically by manufacturer, but some devices could only be found with certain carriers (ie T-Mobile Sidekick). Any model that sold more than 1 million units in a year was considered to be a smashing success. It was already very obvious what the killer features were or would be on the iPhone at launch.
Legacy reasons. When the iPhone came out, "mobile only" sites were a wasteland of terrible UI and restricted features. iPhone OS wanted to serve full websites, and sometimes had to do weird things to beat the kind of stuff that sniffed for mobile devices, or to overcome the lack of a mouse on a desktop website. If you look at the original iPhone demo in 2007[0], the original intent was to render full web pages on the screen and rely on the double-tap-to-zoom to read content. The article that's generally credited with naming and mainstreaming Responsive Web Design[1] didn't come until 2010. [0]: this video [1]: [LINK]