did you expect any competitor to hype up the product of someone else's company in public?
What the iPhone did was give the mobile sector a huge kick up the backside and we as consumers have benefited. Some have learnt from its introduction (google) some havent (Rim, nokia).

Possibly not, but I'd expect them to be at least smart enough to hedge their bets in what they said. And I happen to think the whole 'trash talk the competition' schtick fools no-one anyway. As you say, it's what 'everyone expects them to say' rather than maybe being what they actually think. It's what they now do by reflex, so it betrays no actual thought or consideration and it's another example of how corporate culture has become debased. Having said all that, given the iPhone's actual performance as a brand even compared to the most optimistic predictions (i.e. Apple's), I wonder if every prediction made in this first few months looks stupid now. After all this was a product that had to be significantly discounted two months into it's existence and that didn't happen anywhere near as often then as it does now.

Jon

I look forward to an equivalent thread about stuff that Steve Jobs has said, like "ZOMG I am going to kill Android" or "I am going to re-invent TV".

4 years later, what's the leading mobile platform?

How many people have surrendered their Sky/Cable/Freeview for Apple TV?

Steve was allowed a 'hobby' like everyone else

If the biography's anything to go by, even he must have needed a break from being an emotionally retarded tw@

Seriously though, not even Apple took everything Jobs said as gospel. Especially not when he's near death and juiced out of his head on painkillers. I mean, do we perform the same level of analysis on the stuff Larry Page says? No, we don't. We just assume they're all slightly megalomaniac and let them get on with it.


Rather depends on your definition doesn't it? There's many definitions of success, after all. In sheer numbers of sales, it's whatever weird OS nokia's budget candy bar phones run. In terms of profit made for sellers, it's iOS. In terms of number of online activations, it's Android. In terms of number of available apps, it's probably actually 'webkit', which is available on both (although the last one is just my finger in the air estimation). I guess you take whichever stat you want to, but it doesn't make it any less vague a question.


Given Jobs is supposed to have said the latter quote well after the AppleTV was launched, I think it's logical to assume the AppleTV wasn't the device he was thinking of, nor was it ever it's intention to do as you describe. The AppleTV is merely a facilitator for getting people to buy/rent stuff from the iTunes store - it's Apple's equivalent of a netflix box, not a TV. Maybe there is an 'Apple living room screen' waiting to be shown off somewhere in the bowels of 1 Infinite Loop but I think it's fair to point to history and say that if there is, none of us will have a clue what effect it will have until well after it arrives. If anything, that's exactly what the quotes in the original above teach us, that predicting what will happen is a mug's game.

Jon

As far as I can see there was much truth in the criticism of the iPhone and there still is. There were many (arguably) core features missing and there were (and are) many disadvantages to its fomat.

However, IMO these pundit made the colossal error of assuming that lack of function or quality equates to not selling. Anyone who has been around the tech, automotive or weapons sectors will know that it's very rarely the "best" technology that wins. IME, it's usually the product that has nothing that it's bad at that wins.

The iPhone wasn't particularly excellent at very much, but succeeded because it wasn't particularly bad at very much either.

I am guessing it will be an SSD enabled iMac. Think about those really thin TVs you can get now, and ask why Apple haven't made an iMac that thin yet. Answer: the HD. My truly uneducated guess is that if Apple want a screen in your living room, it will be an iMac like device, not a TV with the AppleTV bit bolted in.

The above is likely to be be pure BS, and will be proven wrong when Apple bumps the iMac's form factor. I think they are feeling how well the sealed unit that is the retinal MBP sells before applying that philosophy to the other "appliance" devices they make.

I would be surprised if we don't see some kind of Apple Home Cinema solution in the next few years. As always with Apple, they wait until the market is ready and the technology is good enough to do the job smoothly. That time is now, iThink.

I was surprised by the iPhone's popularity. I was even more surprised, infact rather gob-smacked, by the way the iPad took off. Again, they waited for the market and technology to both be ready and they only enabled features that could be done properly.

Of course, I have an android phone and a WebOS tablet. That makes me a minority amongst my imediate friends

I think the iPads are the dominating tablet in my area. Though I know more people with Android phones than iPhones, mostly it seems because of the iPhones price.

Droid phone and tablet here too.