Steve jobs the iphone

Apple sells its 2-billionth iPhone, with Steve Jobs legacy still evident

— Sep. 22nd 2021 4:40 am PT

Apple recently sold its two-billionth iPhone, according to a new analyst report, which argues that the Steve Jobs legacy is still evident in the iPhone 13.

In one way, Apple has greatly departed from a principle Steve demanded when he returned to the company in 1997: simplification of the product lineup. But an analyst argues that it’s another of Steve’s beliefs that is still driving Apple’s success today …

No Steve-like simplicity in the iPhone lineup

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he famously trashed the complex lineup of Macs sold at that time, and said he wanted a simple quadrant: a consumer desktop, a consumer laptop, a pro desktop, a pro laptop. Looking at the company’s current iPhone lineup, however, it’s more like the “before” than the “after.”

At the bottom end, you can buy an iPhone SE with 64GB storage for $400. At the top end, you can pay $1,600 for an iPhone 13 Pro Max with 1TB storage. All in, there are a total of 24 different iPhone SKUs at 18 different prices.

What’s particularly stark in Horace Dediu’s impressive pricing chart above is that, 14 years after the original iPhone sold for $400, you can still buy a brand-new iPhone from Apple for that same $400 – but you can also pay up to four times that.

Things are even more complex than that, says Dediu, when you also factor in carrier promos, trade-in deals, and the secondary market.

Just recently, the 2 billionth iPhone was sold. Unlike the 1 billionth, there was no announcement, no celebration. Partly this is because Apple stopped reporting unit shipments, but partly it’s because it’s not as interesting to talk about 2 billion as it is about 1 billion. There is a desensitizing when numbers get that big […]

The spread of phone price points is wider than ever. Reaching $1600, the range still starts at $399 in the US (excluding taxes.) The total range (number of lines in each year) is increasing also, now 24 mainly due to the addition of a 1TB storage option. NB: There are now two iPhone minis (12 and 13) and one SE bringing up the rear.

Carrier incentives are picking up again. There are tremendous trade-ins and incentives for financing new iPhones which is bound to create retail traffic. Also with the opening of more economies, there is likely to be a surge in shopping. Bear in mind that around 400 million users have iPhones older than 3 years. Trade-in values are as high as $1000. Which leads to…

A thriving secondary market. The used smartphone market is dominated by iPhones and this drops the floor for entry into the iPhone ecosystem to essentially $0.

But Steve Jobs’s legacy lives on when it comes to features

Dediu argues that Apple’s greatest enemy is the fact that all modern smartphones are good enough these days. It would be very easy for owners to hold onto their phones for years, without feeling like they are missing out on much when it comes to the latest models.

But how the iPhone maker fights back is doing exactly what Steve talked about back in the day: giving consumers things they didn’t know they wanted, but now must have. That, he says, is evident in the iPhone 13.

If you don’t shift the definition of performance eventually you run out of demand at the top of the performance curve. That opens you up to “good enough” competition from below. Instead you need to re-define the notion of performance: compete on a new basis, reset expectations. That the iPhone can find new dimensions of performance and hence demand is effectively a solution to the innovator’s dilemma […]

We did not ask for rack focus, post-production focus (!), night mode, macro photography and portrait bokeh. But once we have these features we begin, ever so slowly, to use them and then we start demanding them […]

What makes the iPhone and perhaps Apple special is that it seems to deliver things that nobody asks for but then everybody wants.

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Источник

Steve Jobs unveiling the iPhone in 2007, which was less than half-inch thick, had Internet capability, an MP3 player and a two megapixel digital camera.

Tony Avelar/AFP/Getty Images

As Apple’s iPhones and other smartphones feature increasingly sophisticated cameras, processors and touch screens, the rise of the super-stocked device shows that even the inimitable Steve Jobs couldn’t predict the future.

The popular mythology around Jobs was that he was always thinking 10 years ahead of the rest of the computing and electronics world. Under Jobs’ leadership, Apple produced some of the most revolutionary and iconic pieces of consumer technology ever: the Apple IIc, the original Macintosh, the iMac G4, the iPod, the iPhone and iPad.

But the origin story of the first iPhone reveals that Jobs, while undeniably brilliant, was not a technological soothsayer who predicted our digital future. He was just trying to make a really cool phone.

Brian Merchant, author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, says that for all of the original iPhone’s game-changing innovations—the multitouch screen, the high-quality camera, the built-in accelerometers and gyroscopic sensors—Jobs conceived of the device as a cellphone, first and foremost.

And central to the concept of a cellphone back in 2005 and 2006 when the iPhone was being developed, was that it fit comfortably in your hand and in your pocket. “If the iPhone was uncomfortable to hold, that would have been a non-starter for Jobs,” says Merchant.

If you watch the 2007 Apple keynote when the iPhone debuted, the first thing Jobs says when he unveils the device is that “It fits beautifully in the palm of your hand.” Its size was perfectly suited for what Jobs believed was the original iPhone’s crowning achievement, making phone calls.

The original Apple iPhone in 2007.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

“We want to reinvent the phone,” said Jobs at the 2007 keynote. “What’s the killer app? The killer app is making calls. It’s amazing how hard it is to make calls on most phones.”

Merchant says that Jobs’ number one pet peeve, according to developers who worked on the original iPhone, was that his regular cellphone would drop calls. No doubt Jobs was jazzed about the iPhone’s groundbreaking touchscreen and Apple’s first-ever apps for music, photos, and SMS texting, but none of that could get in the way of making phone calls. The first iPhone shipped without the App Store, in fact, because Jobs didn’t trust third-party developers to prevent dropped calls.

“Which is insane to think now,” says Merchant. “Because the iPhone became famous for being kind of a crappy phone. The phone was the last thing anybody used it for.”

The iPhone took two-and-a-half years to develop and wasn’t even Jobs’ brainchild. In 2001, Apple released the iPod, a sleek, handheld digital music player that sold millions and catapulted Apple into the device market. Apple executives worried that the iPod would lose market share once cellphone manufacturers figured out how to put MP3 players on their phones. But not if Apple beat them to it.

Recommended for you

Multi-sport star Jim Thorpe signs MLB contract with Giants

NCAA suspends SMU football program for 1987 season

In epic Super Bowl upset, Jets make good on Namath guarantee

The first prototype of an Apple phone shows just how stuck Jobs and his team were in existing technologies. According to Tony Fadell, one of the original designers of the iPod and the first three iPhones, the first concept was literally an “iPod phone.”

“It was an iPod with a phone module inside it,” Fadell told Venturebeat. “It looked like an iPod, but it had a phone, and you would select numbers through the same interface and so on. But if you wanted to dial a number it was like using a rotary dial. It sucked.»

The iPod cell phone, made by Motorola, in 2005. The iTunes-enabled cell phone held up to 100 songs.

David Paul Morris/Getty Images

Jobs scrapped the design and started from scratch. At the time, there was a team of Apple engineers who had been playing with a device called the Fingerworks iGesture Pad invented by a man with hand injuries who couldn’t use a conventional mouse. Members of the team had worked on the Newton, Apple’s infamous flop of a PDA, but still believed touchscreens held promise.

“It was more of a ‘blue sky, future of computing’ kind of thing,” says Merchant. “The touchscreen research had gone through several iterations. It was briefly tied to a tablet, put aside, and had just kind of sat in the dark. Then Steve Jobs showed up and said, maybe this is the phone. Out of that mutation was how the iPhone was born inside Apple.”

With the touchscreen technology in place, Merchant says that many of the designers and engineers on the iPhone development team absolutely saw it as an opportunity to build an entirely new kind of mobile computer, exactly what the iPhone would become for its millions of loyal users.

“Steve Jobs didn’t,” says Merchant. “He thought it was cool, but the evidence suggests that Steve Jobs wanted to use Apple’s technology to build the best phone possible. And a phone fits in your hand.”

Subsequent generations of the iPhone stuck to the small design, incrementally increasing screen size, but nothing beyond 4 inches. Samsung was the first to release a truly huge phone in 2011. The Samsung Galaxy Note featured an almost comically huge (at the time) 5.3-inch screen and single-handedly popularized the term “phablet,” a cross between a phone and a tablet.

Источник

Зачем Стив Джобс с силой швырнул iPhone об пол

Все, кто хоть сколь-нибудь интересовался продукцией Apple и историей самой компании, знают, насколько неординарной личностью был Стив Джобс . Он лично принимал участие в проектировании новых продуктов, решал, что нужно потребителю, а что не нужно и вёл себя так, что сегодня — в эпоху новой этики — его смело назвали бы токсичным абьюзером. Тем не менее, бывший глава Apple чётко знал своё дело и на все 100% угадывал, какая новинка выстрелит, а какая — нет. Но ведь это только малая часть из того, что известно о Джобсе. А ведь он творил такое, о чём многие даже не помышляли.

Интересный факт об iPhone

Самый первый iPhone, который Apple представила в январе 2007 года, был довольно проблемным смартфоном. Именно поэтому Apple начала его продажи только спустя полгода после официального анонса. Компании предстояло исправить все баги и недоработки, из-за которых страдала новинка. Ведь вся презентация первого iPhone была заранее чётко спланирована, а все действия Стива Джобса тщательно выверены, потому что выполнение других действий или не в том порядке могло спровоцировать выход аппарата из строя. Но это было не самым страшным.

Оказывается, незадолго до официальной презентации Джобс решил провести закрытое мероприятие для журналистов. Он хотел оценить их реакцию перед тем, как показывать смартфон общественности. На тот момент iPhone работал довольно посредственно, но, поскольку это был один из первых аппаратов с полностью сенсорным управлением, журналистов в первую очередь интересовала его надёжность. Ведь все боялись, что падение такого устройства на твёрдую поверхность может привести к тому, что оно выйдет из строя и больше не заработает.

Об этом один из журналистов, присутствовавших на презентации, и спросил Джобса. Стив мог ответить ему на словах, что смартфон имеет высокую прочность, а его экран прикрыт закалённым стеклом Gorilla Glass, а значит, ему не страшны царапины. Но он поступил более радикально — абсолютно в своём стиле. Джобс со всего маху бросил iPhone на пол, чтобы продемонстрировать, насколько он надёжен. Как ни странно, смартфон не только не разбился, но даже сохранил свою работоспособность, и Стив как ни в чём не бывало продолжил презентацию.

В чём уникальность Стива Джобса

Очевидно, что Джобс не мог заранее предугадать, что ему зададут такой вопрос. Поэтому вряд ли он имел при себе усиленный прототип будущего смартфона. Так что то, что он сделал, было явной импровизацией, причём очень рискованной. Только представьте себе, что было бы, если бы iPhone разбился. А ведь это вполне вероятный исход, особенно, если учесть, что Джобс бросил его на пол со всего размаху. Он явно не был уверен, что аппарат выдержит, но и действовать настолько опрометчиво, не имея реального представления о прочности новинки, скорее всего тоже не стал бы.

Джобс был очень рисковым человеком, но в то же время он лично контролировал процесс создания iPhone. Значит, он был осведомлён о его реальной прочности, потому что Apple наверняка тестировала его на падения и удары, чтобы удостовериться, что аппарат выдержит ежедневную эксплуатацию в руках не очень аккуратных пользователей. Но вряд ли в Купертино с самого начала рассчитывали, что Айфон будут бросать о твёрдую поверхность, прикладывая к этому усилие. Так что Джобс прошёлся по краю пропасти.

Я сомневаюсь, что Тим Кук или кто-то другой из руководства Apple мог бы себе позволить подобную выходку. Не потому, что они недостаточно эксцентричны. Вовсе нет. Они бы не сделали ничего такого, потому что вряд ли могут быть уверены в высокой прочности и надёжности продукции, которую выпускает их компания. Они не принимают участия в разработке новинок и скорее всего даже не видят их до презентации. Так что рассчитывать на то, что они будут вести себя как Джобс, для которого это было делом всей жизни, точно не стоит.

Источник

Steve Jobs iPhone 2007 Presentation (Full Transcript)

On January 9, 2007, then Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone for the first time and the world of mobile devices changed forever. Here is the full keynote presentation by Steve Jobs….

TRANSCRIPT:

Steve Jobs- Apple CEO

This is the day I’ve been looking forward to for two and a half years.

Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything and Apple has been – well, first of all, one’s very fortunate if you get to work on just one of these in your career. Apple has been very fortunate. It’s been able to introduce a few of these into the world.

1984 – we introduced the Macintosh. It didn’t just change Apple. It changed the whole computer industry.

In 2001, we introduced the first iPod. And it didn’t just change the way we all listen to music, it changed the entire music industry.

Well, today we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.

So, three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls; a revolutionary mobile phone; and a breakthrough Internet communications device. An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator. An iPod, a phone… are you getting it? These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone, and here it is.

No, actually here it is, but we’re going to leave it there for now.

So, before we get into it, let me talk about a category of things. The most advanced phones are called smart phones, so they say. And they typically combine a phone plus some e-mail capability, plus they say it’s the Internet. It’s sort of the baby Internet into one device, and they all have these little plastic keyboards on them. And the problem is that they’re not so smart and they’re not so easy to use, and so if you kind of make a Business School 101 graph of the smart axis and the easy-to-use axis, phones, regular cell phones are right there, they’re not so smart, and they’re not so easy to use.

But smartphones are definitely a little smarter, but they actually are harder to use. They’re really complicated. Just for the basic stuff people have a hard time figuring out how to use them. Well, we don’t want to do either one of these things. What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been and super-easy to use. This is what iPhone is.

So, we’re going to reinvent the phone. Now, we’re going to start with a revolutionary user interface. It is the result of years of research and development, and of course, it’s an interplay of hardware and software.

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. A giant screen.

Now, how are we going to communicate this? We don’t want to carry around a mouse, right? So what are we going to do? Oh, a stylus, right? We’re going to use a stylus. No. Who wants a stylus? You have to get them and put them away, and you lose them. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus. So let’s not use a stylus.

We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world. We’re going to use a pointing device that we’re all born with — born with ten of them. We’re going to use our fingers. We’re going to touch this with our fingers. And we have invented a new technology called multi-touch, which is phenomenal. It works like magic. You don’t need a stylus. It’s far more accurate than any touch display that’s ever been shipped. It ignores unintended touches, it’s super-smart. You can do multi-finger gestures on it. And boy, have we patented it.

So we have been very lucky to have brought a few revolutionary user interfaces to the market in our time. First was the mouse. The second was the click wheel. And now, we’re going to bring multi-touch to the market. And each of these revolutionary interfaces has made possible a revolutionary product — the Mac, the iPod and now the iPhone. So, a revolutionary user interface. We’re going to build on top of that with software.

Now, software on mobile phones is like baby software. It’s not so powerful, and today we’re going to show you a software breakthrough. Software that’s at least five years ahead of what’s on any other phone. Now how do we do this? Well, we start with a strong foundation. iPhone runs OSX.

Now, why would we want to run such a sophisticated operating system on a mobile device? Well, because it’s got everything we need. It’s got multi-tasking. It’s got the best networking. It already knows how to power manage. We’ve been doing this on mobile computers for years. It’s got awesome security. And the right apps. It’s got everything from Cocoa and the graphics and it’s got core animation built in and it’s got the audio and video that OSX is famous for. It’s got all the stuff we want. And it’s built right in to iPhone. And that has let us create desktop class applications and networking. Not the crippled stuff that you find on most phones. This is real, desktop-class applications.

Now, you know, one of the pioneers of our industry, Alan Kay, has had a lot of great quotes throughout the years, and I ran across one of them recently that explains how we look at this, explains why we go about doing things the way we do, because we love software.

And here’s the quote: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” Alan said that 30 years ago, and this is how we feel about it. And so we’re bringing breakthrough software to a mobile device for the first time. It’s five years ahead of anything on any other phone.

Synch with iTunes

The second thing we’re doing is we’re learning from the iPod, synching with iTunes. You know, we’re going to ship our 100 millionth iPod this year, and that’s tens of millions of people that know how to synch these devices with their PCs or Mac and synch all of their media right on to their iPod. Right? So you just drop your iPod in, and it automatically synchs. You’re going to do the same thing with iPhone. It automatically syncs to your PC or Mac right through iTunes. And iTunes is going to synch all of your media onto your iPhone. Your music, your audio books, podcasts, movies, TV shows, music videos. But it also synchs a ton of data. Your Contacts, your Calendars and your Photos, which you can get on your iPod today, your Notes, your Bookmarks from your Web browser, your e-mail accounts, your whole e-mail set-up. All that stuff can be moved over to your iPhone completely automatically. It’s really nice. And we do it through iTunes.

Источник