Apple did a lot to start to bring the US up to speed with the rest of the world in terms of mobile technology, yes, and it certainly deserves praise for the success that the iPhone has been, but what Apple provided was a usable platform. "Smartphones" before then had been slow, ugly, generally not that sexy, and it's hard to excite people about your mobile software when they aren't even excited about their hardware. The iPhone did do a lot to help bring mobile software to the average consumer, but the notion that it did it in a vacuum is silly. There were lots of technologies that paved the way for the iPhone to be a success before it. Apple did not singlehandedly invent the concept of the smartphone, nor was it the first to introduce usable mobile computing platforms to consumers. RIM was doing that long before Apple ever had a thought of entering the mobile game.

The author simultaneously praises Apple for the single-handed creation/salvation of an entire industry, and then turns around and says "Android's only great because it's stood on the shoulders of giants". Boy, that's a convenient bit of selective application of history.

> Yes, Apple has rejected some apps for seemingly arbtrary or selfish reasons and imposed aggressive controls on developers. But the iPhone also paved the way for Android and a new wave of handset development. The people griping about Apple’s "closed system" are generally people who are new to the industry and didn’t realize how bad it was before.

Now this is just silly. The people that gripe about Apple's "closed system" are people who know how bad it was, and are frustrated that Apple is repeating many of the "closed system" problems that made mobile software so terrible in the first place. The iPhone is a marvelous device, but it's completely disingenuous to praise the iPhone for bringing accessibility to a "closed market" and then in the same breath to hand-wave its own closed nature away. It's better than the previous iterations; that doesn't make its iteration "best". The people who are frustrated with the closed nature of the platform are people who have tasted how good an accessible platform can be, and who are frustrated at the roadblocks that Apple has placed in their way.

I love the iPhone - it's a marvelous piece of hardware, and I absolutely acknowledge that it thoroughly changed the landscape of mobile consumer computing in the US, but I own an Android phone because Apple's policies make me hesitate to buy into a platform that is locked down and guarded by one man's whims, or to financially support a company that is so xenophobic and who actively and aggressively stifles competition. I own an Android phone not because I forget how bad older-school mobile software was (to write, distribute, obtain, run, the whole pipeline), but because I remember clearly how bad the old system was, and to have a phone in my hand that I can do just nearly anything I want with is a very welcome relief and advancement from the mobile platforms of yore.

> In the US, before the iPhone, the carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile) had an ironclad grip on the rest of the value chain – particularly, handset makers and app makers.

This is like one of those myths where if you say it enough time, people start to believe it. There were tons of smartphones available before the iPhone that let you install any software that you wanted. My first smartphone was the Sony Ericsson P800 and it was released in 2002! I had to change carriers to use to, too.

The original iPhone was a great device with a wonderful interface, but it wasn't the invention of the smartphone. It did, however, sell the mainstream consumer market on smartphones. (The business market was long sold on the Blackberry).

The author isn't completely wrong -- the explosive growth of smartphones (and not just iPhones) has completely changed the equation. Before, everyone was trying to get on the carriers dumb phones but even if they succeeded it would mostly be a waste of time -- the phones were just too dumb and nobody cared about the crappy experience they provided.

There is way too much credit to Apple and Steve Jobs here.

I doubt I'm smart enough to work for Apple, but I doubt I'd ever want to. Why?

Everything the company does is something done "single-handedly" by Steve Jobs. Steve may be the driving force of the company and have great insight into what people want/need/etc. But he has a great team to actually implement what he wants, and Apple as a company are the ones who restructured an industry.

Wasn't this already happening with the Blackberry? If you needed a Blackberry for business, then you picked the carrier who let you use one.

Before the iPhone, smartphones i used were not locked down. They were open like the desktop. You could download and install anything you want on them. But very often some app will drain your battery or crash your phone. Apple had to lock down their phone to improve user experience. Pre-iPhone you install apps at your own risk. That was my experience with Windows Mobile.

I'm sorry, the iPhone is a neat phone, but it is far from revolutionary.

Hello...palm pilots? I had a palm m100, then m105, then m500, then zire 71 in the early 2000s and there were thousands and thousands of apps for them. Installing them meant connecting it to my PC and transfering them (love that twee del DEE......TWEE del do sound it would make).

Putting a cell phone into a PDA was an obvious move. Apple didn't invent it, they were just the first to gain mainstream popularity.

Generalizations suck, I don't think the main reason for the iPhone success was because they had a "closed system".

"The people griping about Apple’s “closed system” are generally people who are new to the industry and didn’t realize how bad it was before."

Steve Jobs single-handedly restructured the mobile industry as thousands of Apple employees watched in awe wondering what have they been doing all this time.

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