Steve Jobs Introducing The iPhone At MacWorld 2007

> There's a circus about them that permits them to stomp out history And how do you think they would do that? Apple sometimes uses a bit of hyperbole to describe itself ( [link] ), but I don’t think Apple ever claimed "Apple invented the mouse" or they had "the first mp3 player" or "the first smartphone". I also have never met anybody who made such claims, only people saying there are people who make such claims. It also would be weird for them to do so. Their marketing differentiates their products from the competition, and has been doing that for years. The competition sells MP3 players, the iPod was a _music_player_ or just the iPod (look at [link] , and count how often Steve says music before he says mp3. [1]); the iPhone an iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device ( [this video] ), the iPad just the iPad. [1] There’s a claim in hat video that Apple invented FireWire. I think that is mostly correct. They were the driving force there.

Xerox created the GUI, and much of modern computing, but Jobs/Apple certainly deserve credit for the smartphone. Before the iPhone the phone market was primarily "feature phones" - flip phones with a keyboard and a few built-in JavaScript apps. The Blackberry wasn't much different - just a better keyboard with a focus on messaging/business use. The iPhone was quite radical - masterfully presented as an iPod, phone, and internet communications device, before revealing that they were all capabilities of the same device. [this video] The effect on the phone market was immediate, and turned the market upside down. It was basically the end of Nokia who had been dominant up to that point, and caused everyone else to scrap current plans and go back to the drawing board, realizing that this new pocket-computer smartphone concept, with it's large touch screen interface was obviously the future.