![]() ![]() That the ride in that rarefied territory would soon turn bumpy can be explained by what would happen in 2014.įrom its humble first year sales, iPhone had grown spectacularly, notching nearly 170 million sold in just the 12 months ended with the launch of iPhone 6. But equally as importantly as iPhone 4, iPhone 6 would forever change Apple and catapult the company from stratosphere to outer space. Like iPhone 4, the design was so simple, clean, and functional it would survive mostly intact through multiple generations (iPhone 7 is essentially the third year with little cosmetic change). Two years later all was forgiven with iPhone 6, the game changer of all game changers. It made the phone less usable mostly and critics found fault with where Apple was headed. The iPhone 5, in 2012, barely bumped the 3.5-inch display up to 4 inches, and only by vertically growing it. While the original 2007 model was criticized for being "too big", within 5 years it had become absurdly too small for those craving a larger screen. What I'm referring to, in case it's not clear, is Apple's reluctance to mess around with iPhone's screen size in a meaningful way until iPhone 6 in 2014. But when Apple was aggressively, spectacularly wrong it actually cost the company billions in sales and led to part of the growth paradox the company now faces. It's adoption of NFC (near field communication) technology with the TouchID sensor made ApplePay work beautifully, for example. Typically, when Apple did deliver it got it right, at least in some critical ways. It's still behind the curve on displays, with this fall's iPhone 8 consistency rumored to be the first model with an OLED display. It was late with 4G LTE support, not offering it until 2012's iPhone 5. It was late with Verizon support (that finally came in 2011 with an updated iPhone 4 variant). Apple was "late" with introducing many leading-edge features to iPhone. What should have been clear then was that Apple's incremental approach to iPhone was both a great strength and a great weakness. ![]() By then iPhone 4 was close to launching - arguably the single-most iconic model ever with its vertical slab sides and combination of metal and glass - but it still wouldn't be on Verizon. I went to see the competing products, sold under the Droid name and when I learned they didn't have pinch-to-zoom told my favorite Verizon rep: "Call me when one does." It wouldn't be until early 2010 that the Droid Incredible was out and worth purchasing. Still, iPhone had a powerful impact on me. The phone was gorgeous that it almost never worked in the San Francisco Bay Area was hideous. A few years before iPhone, I made the mistake of switching to Cingular (the bizarre, dead brand name for what is mostly AT&T Wireless today) to get access to another exclusive: the Motorola RAZR. It left the many of us who had become convinced that Verizon was the best carrier out in the cold. The first model ran only on AT&T's network, through an exclusive deal that the late Steve Jobs had cut. Apple has sold another 1.15 billion iPhones since. What Apple had wrought with the mouse/windows/icons user interface of the 1984 Macintosh it had smashed with the multi-touch iPhone, even if the 2007 model would sell fewer than 6 million units in its first year. ![]() Calling this the multi-touch era isn't inaccurate when you consider the same technology is also on the hundreds of millions of tablets out there, not to mention convertible PCs like the Microsoft Surface. ![]()
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