• @[email protected]
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    386 months ago

    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.

    • @cm0002
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      146 months ago

      To add to this, pre iPhone phones sucked ass. People were absolutely asking for a better phone directly too

    • @[email protected]
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      76 months ago

      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

    • @[email protected]
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      66 months ago

      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.

    • HubertManne
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      26 months ago

      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.