Steve Jobs knew his company was in big trouble.
In 2001, Apple introduced its incredibly popular “iPod”, a tiny music player that was essentially a memory card with a speaker and LED screen attached to it.
It sold like hotcakes, but when Jobs saw this he knew the device was doomed.
The Nokia N91, released in 2006. Not only could it hold as many songs as an iPod, you could also make phone calls, take pictures and run a little software. No-one would want an iPod if they had one of these and merely making an iPod have more memory was out of the question.
So he needed a killer. As such, when the N91 was announced in 2005, Jobs started pushing something that would totally blow it out of the water. It was going to be a phone that could do anything you wanted to.
And, about 18 months later, he hinted he would reveal three new products - a widescreen iPod with touch controls instead of a wheel, a revolutionary mobile phone, and an internet communication appliance.
And then, he stepped onto a stage in San Francisco and showed them it was all the same gadget.
Apple had managed to cobble together a working prototype and Jobs was determined to make it look better than any other similar device on the market. To make it work, he literally had to follow a script that would allow the thing to work without crashing. It would be about six more months before you could actually buy the darn thing. Unlike a Nokia or Blackberry, there were hardly any buttons. Unlike a Palm Pilot, you didn’t need a stylus. It did more than all three of them combined.
They sold 270,000 of them the first week. It kept getting better as developers found the iPhone to be an excellent software platform.
It was another 16 months before anyone else had anything like it - the HTC Dream the following October.
But those buttons! You couldn’t type on its screen. It was another six months before HTC came up with a screen only version, the Magic, where you could use the screen for input. Moreover, by this time, the iPhone had tremendously more software available for it.
Now, eventually Android devices caught up and surpassed iPhone capabilities for less money, but by this time Apple already had an established customer base and a reputation for ease of use. Right now, Apple phones only account for 21% of all smartphones… but they’re still the single biggest manufacturer.