What do you mean a "clone of their product" ? Desktop PCs had big icons on screen for years, there was nothing new or even remotely original in having big icons on a screen for an mobile OS. That should be declared an obvious invention and not worth of protection at all. The main new thing that they did was to use a touch screen that can be operated with fingers and gestures, but hey, even that idea was not new either. Frankly, no matter how highly you think of Apple's products, nothing of what they do is really, truly original.

iOS 1 was an inevitable jump from Palm OS and the early days of touch screen. The tech had been in demos before, but there was such a lack of UX work beforehand that it never took off. That, and capacitive screens/advancing tech.

I presume you mean Google - were they close partners? I admit I wasn't following Apple (at all) before iPhone.

This is complete bollocks.

http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Li...

Yeah I remember also there was so much gnashing of teeth that it didn't HAVE A TACTILE KEYBOARD! It's just for show OMG! Japanese phones have had more gizmos^H^H^H^H^H^H features like FOREVER!!

Besides the interface, I thought it was interesting that it had a real unix based OS underneath, which would pay off in the future as phone processors became more powerful.

It's sortof funny looking back. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I guess.

It blew every other phone, but it wasn't that original over PDAs. I had a Windows 6.5 pda then, and I thought the iPhone was way cooler and well-designed. Of course it was inmensely superior to my PDA, but not so incredibly original. It didn't do anything at all I wasn't already doing with PDAs, it just did some of them (chiefly, web browsing) way better, most of them in a cooler way (pinch to zoom, animations), and even a few, slightly worse (browsing while listening to music).

Apple has this fame of original crazy geniouses that have invented X or Y. They have mostly taken other's ideas and perfected them. Perfected them a lot, admittedly; even may be taken them to a new level of awesomeness with a great vision of on which details it was better to improve.

I love apple products, don't take me wrong. They deserve a lot of credit for the iPod, the iPhone, iOS, the iPad...

I think it was extremely childish of Jobs to get so pissed.

I agree 100% with you. It was very original and a very good product.

That doesn't mean they shouldn't have competition. Competition is a basic requirement for a functional economy.

Which is why the patient system is broken.

> Compared to all other phones it was 10 years ahead in vision. All other phones were suddenly ludicrously laid out, with stupid designs.

You are wrong because you are looking at the wrong category for a comparison. Look at PDAs. PDAs had everything that the iPhone could do, more or less. And this, YEARS before the iPhone came out. I know it, because I had PDAs very early on and I remember making fun of the people thinking that the iPhone was so revolutionary at work because I had been doing the same stuff with my PDA for 5 years. Of course, the iPhone had a better browser, was easier to use, was more cool looking, but nonetheless it had nothing NEW in functionality over the previous PDAs. Comparing with phones is therefore irrelevant, the iPhone was PDA-Phone, thus being called a Smart-Phone later on by the mainstream media.

You're confusing aesthetic design with functional originality. The original iphone was very well designed, but it stood on the shoulders of PDAs and was a natural next step. Just as an open-sourced OS like Android was the next step.

That's great, but nobody used it before Apple made it a thing.

Apple didn't create walled gardens either.

Who created LLVM and WebKit is irrelevant. Those projects wouldn't be as awesome as they are now without Apple's efforts and money.