This is just such a fun read, “claim chowder” (to borrow from John Gruber) at its best:
The geeks have all bought one and many have got theirs unlocked. The Nike wearing Soho crowd have splurged the cash. The wannabes and the I-must-have-that crowd have weighed in, swapped networks and got their devices. But that’s it. There’s a ton of people all sitting staring at the iPhone and — SADLY — (this is the bit that’s winding me up), turning their backs and walking away. I could name you 20 people, right now, that I know personally, who WOULD have an iPhone if they were marketed at a more reasonable price — 100 pounds maximum — and were unlocked to work on any network. But those 20 people won’t. They’re staying exactly where they are, back in the old world. Or, actually, back in the real world.
Nokia, Samsung, LG, Sony and HTC (and, er, the Google offering) are safe. The iPhone, on the current trajectory, will only ever be a number 4 or number 5 device.
To be fair, Ewan MacLeod was not alone in that opinion. Steve Jobs saw what no one else could see. He knew. And he made it happen.
And Ewan clearly got on board, as evidenced by this tweet from last week:
https://twitter.com/Ew4n/status/993920014150447106
[Via Eric Jackson via Aaron Block]
In fairness to Ewan and the other doubters of the time, Apple made two major changes after the iPhone launched that anyone familiar with Jobs at the time would have had a hard time predicting:
1. Dropped the price by $200 just a few weeks after launch.
2. Opened the phone up for outside development after Jobs all but swore this wouldn’t happen (paraphrase – apps could take down the entire western AT&T network!).
If those two things don’t happen, Ewan and the others are probably right. Kudos to Jobs for pivoting so quickly and unexpectedly.
I don’t know that Steve Jobs saw the future as clearly as people claim. In this case even being a bit player in the phone market was going to be hugely profitable for Apple (that’s how it was couched at the launch). Taking that revenue and iterating on the product in a way that created its current dominance is more a testament to Apple’s process than its vision.
In a way, the iPhone is still a bit player. After all, Android smartphones make up about 88% of the smartphone market, leaving Apple with a tiny, yet profitable segment of the market. I wonder how long Apple will be able to hold on to even that much of the smartphone market with Google constantly coming out with OSes that require less powerful and less expensive hardware. All Apple keeps doing is raising iPhone prices which may continue to net Apple profits but continue to shrink iPhone market share percentage. So, it seems that Apple’s iPhone will continue to be a bit player in the global smartphone market. Apple is barely trying to break into the mid-range smartphone market with the iPhone SE while Google supports Android smartphones to go wherever they can gain a foothold.
I’d really be happy if Apple could grab at least 15% of the smartphone market but I know that won’t ever happen. Android hardware simply can’t be beaten in price. Apple has most of the cream of the smartphone market and it’s unlikely to squeeze anymore out of it.
It costs about $20 a month to own a purchased-new iPhone. Less to buy used, which gets you in the ecosystem. A modest amount for what becomes most peoples’ most important possession. I don’t think many people are going to switch to a lesser platform to save so little on something so important, and over time the tendency seems to be that people switch the other way – to the iPhone.
“after Jobs all but swore this wouldn’t happen”
There was no pivot. The SDK was planned but was not ready at launch time, and Apple being Apple, nothing whatsoever was said about it until it was ready. If you listen to Jobs’s 2007
re/codeinterview about the Iphone, with the benefit of hindsight you can tell that that’s what was going on.edit, all things D interview, sorry.
Oh, please. Does that 88% you mentioned include the cheap burner BOGO Android phones that essentially took over the Symbian-run candybar market? Are those genuinely considered “smart”, or are we just grading everything Android on a curve, just as we did for Windows boxes in previous decades?
Bragging about Google’s “support” for Android phones is a bit weak, don’t you think?
As Glenn said here, the cost of entry for an iPhone is only as high as an individual wants to set it. Apple’s market share is far greater than that of a “bit player.” Apple’s profit share turns your argument into a stale joke.
“BUT BUT BUT MARKET SHARE!!”
sorry, but we’ve all heard this nonsense before. in real life, market share plays second fiddle to profit, which is the air corporations breathe. iPhone is the single best-selling smartphone brand, and best-selling CE good in history. it raked in the profit and has made Apple the most successful public company in human history.
so save your silly MARKET SHARE! nonsense. most of them are random chinese junk brands anyway. yawn.
nonsense. next.
What?
If Steve Jobs saw everything so clearly he wouldn’t have had the numerous failures he did. His genius wasn’t a mystical foresight, it was having core values and creating companies that could consistently deliver on them.
he didn’t swear apps wouldn’t happen. please quote him on that. rather he felt v1 wasn’t ready and went conservative. he’d been in the computing biz for decades, of course he knew apps were coming.
nice try rewriting history tho.
It’s kind of nice that people mythologize Steve Jobs so much that it’s all but impossible for people to accept he was wrong sometimes. However, I’m not the one rewriting history in this case.
Read up on some oral histories of the iPhone and its early development. Read the Jobs bio or other written accounts from others at the time. Jobs was solidly against outside app development on the iPhone beyond web apps. He was pressured heavily by board members, other execs, and interested devs to change his mind, which to his credit, he finally did.
To say he knew it all along is incorrect, and further, it does a disservice to his memory. What made Jobs great wasn’t that he was always right, it was that he could pivot instantly when he knew he was wrong and completely embrace the new path. Few at his level have egos that allow that and insist there way is the only way. This willingness to flip when wrong (you had to prove it to him, but you could if you were truly in the right) made him great in an industry that is known for rapid change as much as anything else.