It HAD lower price: it disrupted the portable computers which were more expensive at that time.
You already needed to pay for a phone, so the real price compared to a portable was just how much more expensive the iPhone was compared to a standard mobile phone.
Due to the system with 2 year phone contracts in USA, that extra price was low.
This was state of the art around the time the iPhone hit: HTC8525 [0]. That is not a phone, that is a ridiculously small screen welded to a slow computer with terrible battery life; and it was $299 on contract at the time.
The disruption in the iPhone was technical, social, political and economic.
Nah, the old Windows phones were just fine. Did many of the things we now pretend that Apple invented. But they were for nerds. And huge phones sell reasonably well today.
The functionality was really already there. The "disruption" was aesthetics, marketing and ease-of-use.
And in the end, it's a phone, not a cultural revolution.
While I think this is mostly true (Nokia fans love to point out that every possible smartphone feature appeared on at least one Nokia product which may have shipped in the 1800s), there is one way in which this simply is not true, and it's a way which really did change everything.
The browser.
The difference in 2007 between browsing on the iPhone and browsing on any other phone was kind of like, well, comparing desktop Safari in 2007 to trying to browse in 2007 with Netscape 4. Maybe not quite that good. Phones often had only one font available to them, had very limited CSS support, often had no Javascript support. Windows Phone and the Nokia Communicator were the best of what had been out before then, and to say "they were for nerds" is an understatement. Only nerds would tolerate them.
Look at articles after the iPhone's introduction about data usage -- it absolutely skyrocketed, and it was all being driven by the browser. For the first time people actually had a real web browser in their pocket, and it really did make all the difference.
It wasn't just a phone by any stretch -- what made it disruptive was that browser in combination with the touch UI (by far the best way to use a browser on a pocket-sized screen). Revolutionary, or evolutionary? You can make a case either way, but the iPhone didn't upend the smartphone market just because it was pretty and had great advertisements.
Yeah, this is probably the only thing Apple really introduced with the iPhone - a capable browser making it possible to use the internet just like you would on a regular computer, more or less (no flash). But apart from that, all other functions already existed, and while on Windows Phone you had tons of free applications and most people didn't really pay for software, Apple made it a habit to ad-support or sell apps for a fee. I don't see this as a positive trend, but that's just me.
I think the iPhone being first with capacitive multitouch that didn't suck like resistive screens being used in all other phones at the time had something to do with its success also. But feel free to add that and another 10 or so "yeah, this is probably the only other thing introduced with the iPhone...."
The sheer performance of the iPhone blew away Windows Mobile. It was an order of magnitude more responsive than any mobile device before it. The scrolling, the swipe gestures, the pinch to zoom ... it was essentially the first time we had desktop grade performance in your pocket.
I don't really agree with you here. It's not because the interface is made for speed and gestures that you had "desktop performance" in your pocket. It's just a different approach. The first iPhone could not really do any multitask at all (if I remember correctly) so trying to compare a mono-task system versus what the Windows Mobile devices could do at the time is frivolous.
Not at all. It was the technical underpinnings of the iPhone that made the aesthetic and ease of use disruptions possible. If what you are saying were true, all Microsoft had to do was re skin the old Windows Mobile with a fresh user interface and all will be well. They tried that of course and it totally failed.
The old windows mobile was a complete dog. Let's take just one example, individual processes could only be allocated up to 32 megabytes of RAM. Really. That's one reason why it could never have run a decent browser, or really a decent anything else. That alone rendered it fundamentally crippled compared to iOS full 32 bit preemptive multitasking kernel. Yes iOS is fully multitasking, only user apps are restricted in their multitasking privileges by the sand boxing system, but background services have none if those limitations.
It was limitations like this that meant projects like Courier would never have been able to compete with iOS. It's why Microsoft had no choice but to develop an entirely new OS core for their mobile platform, losing crucial years of competitiveness.
Google was lucky. Although Android was never originally intended to use multitouch gestures or an accelerated UI layer, at least it was based on a Linux core so had the fundamental technical underpinnings to support competitive application level services. This gave Android a few years head start on Microsoft, even though they were a few years behind Apple, just enough for them to occupy the low end of the market and eventually mount a credible challenge in the mid and high end.
// The functionality was really already there. The "disruption" was aesthetics, marketing and ease-of-use.
And the fact that the old windows phones crashed daily. Was riddled with bugs (some never got fixed) and from an accessibility point of view was a terrible piece of hardware. Good riddance.
Apple made the smart phone easy to use, and gave it much needed elegance. Over night it turned the smart phone market into a consumer smart phone market.
> The "disruption" was aesthetics, marketing and ease-of-use
The iPhone (and smartphones in general) have disrupted multiple markets:
* Photography and video
* Portable music players
* Email and messaging devices
* Phones
... and many others
The thought I ran into many times with many people during this "disruption" period basically went along the lines of:
"I could buy a new camera, a video camera, a new iPod, a netbook, GPS device, etc - or I could just get an iPhone."
This theory doesn't stroke the egos of iPhone owners enough to be popular on Apple blogs. It also leaves them open to Android taking it further because cheap compromise devices are easier to make than magical high-end disruptors.
You already needed to pay for a phone, so the real price compared to a portable was just how much more expensive the iPhone was compared to a standard mobile phone.
Due to the system with 2 year phone contracts in USA, that extra price was low.