Maybe not directly, but there was a demand for “portable computers”, a better input system for phones, better portable cameras, a way to readily access the internet anywhere, among several other things. The smartphone became popular so quickly because it concretized all of those latent demands into a single device.
Exactly this. If a company can show me a phone that can do something new that my current phone can’t-- not just a marginally better camera or invasive AI assistant-- then I would say to them “I still wish you would have spent your resources on dog longevity, but yeah maybe I’d be into that.”
An iPhone isn’t a flip phone but better… It’s a whole different thing.
Maybe not directly, but there was a demand for “portable computers”, a better input system for phones, better portable cameras, a way to readily access the internet anywhere, among several other things. The smartphone became popular so quickly because it concretized all of those latent demands into a single device.
To add to this, pre iPhone phones sucked ass. People were absolutely asking for a better phone directly too
they used to talk about ‘the $100 computer’, but I think they were envisioning a laptop or a netbook, no one thought it would be a mobile phone
Exactly this. If a company can show me a phone that can do something new that my current phone can’t-- not just a marginally better camera or invasive AI assistant-- then I would say to them “I still wish you would have spent your resources on dog longevity, but yeah maybe I’d be into that.”
An iPhone isn’t a flip phone but better… It’s a whole different thing.
that is a good point and no one wanted a walled ecosystem. We really did not get what we wanted just like so many things it was kinda what we wanted.