dysamoria

GeorgeBMac said:

Yes, EVENTUALLY the iPhone was a success that changed the market.    But neither was it, at least at first, was it the best.

Samsung had been making smart phones since the 90's and later the things like the Palm Treo refined the product.  The only thing the iPhone really introduced was the larger screen and replacing the stylus with a finger.

For myself, I didn't switch till the iPhone 5 -- 5 years later -- and even then I was forced to give up features that I had long valued.

As for the iPhone being the computer for the people:  That really didn't happen till much later and even Steve Jobs didn't buy into it.   Instead, he felt that the small, hand sized iPhone 4 was the ideal iPhone because "nobody wanted to hold a brick to their ear to talk".   In short, he saw the iPhone as a phone first and a computer second.   Apple didn't go the computer route (with a large screen) until after Jobs had died when they released the iPhone 6.

iPhones had apps for years before the iPhone 6. iPhone 4 was an acceptable web-consumption, emailing, and note-taking appliance. I even made a silly song on it with GarageBand. Way more than just a phone. I hate large phones. The iPhone 6 (and newer) button placement is garbage ergonomics, and we have to have a kludge to be able to reach the upper quarter of the screen with our thumbs. Apple still hasn’t made the keyboard effective for fast two-thumbed typing (it’s constantly treating two separate taps on two separate letters as a mistake).

As a side note, I still hold on to my iPhone 4. I use it as an iPod because bloated websites made it nearly useless for the internet. Everything else would’ve been fine if not for that, and for Apple’s bloated & buggy iOS 7, which I still refuse to put on it (iOS 6.x forever, if I can help it).

Yes, those were good times for Apple and Apple customers. It was a good time for Mac OS and Mac computers because the development of iOS resulted in the release of a super-optimized Mac OS called Snow Leopard. No version of Mac OS has since been as optimized or as stable as the final Snow Leopard release (yes, there are a few bugs left in it, but I rarely encounter them, and I am constantly encountering bugs in High Sierra).

Yes, iOS and iPhone were excellent products and they served customers well.

That era of Apple kicked the ass of the computer industry and forced actual change. 

It’s too bad that is long over. The intuitiveness, simplicity, and robust reliability is now lost to time. Today’s iOS is a pile of bugs and conflicting functionality. Today’s Apple is no longer challenging the industry. It is merely another part of the problem. Complacency, arrogance, and greed. Apple earned the right to be arrogant, but it has burned it off. It maintains random via its money and legacy, though, because fanatics and capitalists don’t change their views very quickly, if ever.

How many of you take advantage of being able to type long iMessages with paragraph breaks? Does it not bother you that you cannot scroll that text box (you know, to do proofreading; people do proofread, right??) without iOS getting “confused” and “assuming” you want to close the keyboard? Just me, huh? Because that’s what it feels like.

It feels like I’m the only person who uses this device enough to notice the mountain of bugs and conflicting gestures that it has become. It feels like no one at Apple actually uses their own products and that people on these Apple forums cannot see flaws.

Today’s Apple is not the same company as the Apple being showcased in the years of the iPhone’s first few years. I want that Apple back. There is no Steve Jobs to have back, and there’s also a lot of lost vision and attention to detail that seems it’s never coming back as well. It’s depressing.