10 years ago today, on January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, and the world changed. I was at CES when the keynote happened, and if you ever wanted to know what it would look like if you sucked all the oxygen out of the Las Vegas Convention Center, you should have been there.
Here’s a nice history of the iPhone.
That first iPhone model, my god, it was balls slow. Edge “internet” is literally modem speed. Literally. I don’t mean figuratively… I mean literally like going back to dialup 56kbps speeds. Horrendous. Brutal. Unforgivable.
It wasn’t too pokey in terms of CPU / GPU power, but it wasn’t exactly fast either. But just try to Internet on that thing and you’d kill yourself.
By the iPhone 3gs, they fixed all the speed issues (both cellular and otherwise) and the writing was on the wall for the old guard in the phone industry.
(strokes his iPhone 7 lovingly)
I remember thinking “Man, I’d be be all over that if it wasn’t a phone.” I jumped at the iPod Touch with both feet, and arms flailing.
That’s still where I am. I just wish Apple hadn’t left the iPod to die. It could be a great handheld gaming device if they wanted.
LOL if they had any kind of standardized controller API, ever! As much as I wanted to love the iPhone and iPad as general purpose gaming devices, touch is just too … specialized.
The iPod Touch positioned itself as an iPhone for kids whose parents didn’t want them to have a real phone. Today, kids have real phones.
It WAS slow as hell, but still a revelation compared to contemporary smartphones interfaces. Remember this?
Diego
Which is why, if I had my druthers, it would triple in thickness, double the memory, and be a long battery life gaming and music/podcasts machine, like it always should have been.
Personally, I found the iPhone 4 to be the first model that was truly usable for extended web browsing, where you didn’t sit around forever waiting for pages to load. Previous models didn’t have enough CPU juice.
My dad’s used one for the last four years as his “work phone” (a hand-me-down from his manager). He finally upgraded to a 5S recently because AT&T was shutting down the network the old iPhone connected to in his area. Seems like he’s. . . entirely unimpressed! Dad is weird.
I still hanker for proper hard-drive-based iPods to return. I know, I know, they were more vulnerable to damage and all, but $400 for the 128GB Touch is just fuckin’ stupid, and there’s a part of me that’s very interested in a portable music-only device with high battery life, top-notch DAC, and not much else.
Yes. Yes he is.
The iPhone 8 will be the “10th anniversary iPhone” so I expect them to pull out all the stops. What I already know, I like:
Apparently iPhone 7s will be launching alongside, but won’t have the fancy stuff above, just share the SoC and presumably camera.
You’re weird. :P
I was going to go with the more straightforward ‘wrong’, personally.
Bluetooth sucks balls. Every time I buy a new phone with a newer, fancier version of BT, I try it again. . . and every time, I am let down.
And as a guy that listens to music more or less constantly, that shit just ain’t gonna fly.
Works great on my AirPods and Bose noise cancelling headphones.
I’m more partial to the Boise nose-canceling headphones.
So in other words, a Samsung phone?
I have the BeatsX bluetooth headphones (yeah, I know. Beats. But they were on sale and had a $30 iTunes GC too) and really like them. They have the apple W1 chip so they pair every time, no problems. Battery lasts 8 hours or so. They sound fine, I’m no audiophile, and without a cable going to my pocket I find I actually use them more.
I was anti-BT audio all the way until I tried out the AirPods and PB3’s. Both are excellent products. I’m unclear on what the W1 chip is doing besides making pairing easier, but it sure seems like audio quality has improved substantially.
I dunno if it does anything other than pairing. I mean, the BeatsX’s sound good to me, but what do I know?