If you’re reading this, you’d probably agree that the iPhone is a pretty great phone. When the device first launched back in 2007, this was an even more popular belief, when Apple’s first iPhone shook up the cell phone landscape significantly.
One former Apple executive would disagree, however, stating that the original iPhone really wasn’t all that fantastic.
If you had the original iPhone I apologise; it was not a great phone, it was an OK phone.
That statement was made by Bob Borchers, who is now Dolby’s Chief Marketing Officer and was formerly Apple’s Senior Director of Product Marketing at the time of the original iPhone’s launch.
Borchers reportedly made the comments at a recent Dolby presentation on the future of mobile entertainment, where he added that Apple had focused too much on the original device’s “phone” aspect and not its Internet capabilities.
There were three value propositions in order of importance: a revolutionary phone, the best iPod ever and the Internet in your pocket but in fact it should have been the reverse. Having the Internet in your pocket was the most important.
He also states that none of the technology found inside the iPhone was really that new or innovative. Apple opted rather to focus on delivering a groundbreaking user experience, while the technology itself wasn’t all that groundbreaking.
It’s easy to be critical in hindsight, but at the time, most people would have said the iPhone was at least a bit better than OK.
Either way, it’s a cold and dark place to imagine what the world might look like had that first iPhone never came along.
