Monday, January 9, 2012 at 12:06 pm

5 years ahead

Steve Jobs 5 years aheadFive years ago today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone for the first time, completely changing the mobile industry. (If you haven’t watched his keynote lately, you should. It is his best performance ever, I think.)

That means today is a good time to check in on one of the things Jobs said near the beginning of his iPhone presentation: That the iPhone’s software — what made the iPhone the iPhone — was 5 years ahead of everyone.

For context, here’s exactly what Steve said:

“Now, software on mobile phones is like baby software. It’s not so powerful. And today, we’re going to show you a software breakthrough. Software that’s at least 5 years ahead of what’s on any other phone. Now, how do we do this? Well, we start with a strong foundation: iPhone runs OS X.” [Applause.]

So, was the iPhone really 5 years ahead of everyone? Have any of Apple’s competitors caught up to the original iPhone, let alone today’s?

Yes and no.

I’m not an engineer, so I can’t speak to the technical stuff under the glass. My guess is that there are some areas where Apple is still better, and many where Google has caught up.

But from a user’s perspective, it’s getting close.

Android is not as polished as iOS, and I’d argue that it’s still missing the elegance, simplicity, and beauty that have defined the iPhone’s software since its launch. These things are extremely important to a lot of people, and they’re why Apple has such a devoted base of repeat customers.

But from a practical perspective, for a while, you’ve been pretty much able to do whatever you want on an Android phone that you can do on an iPhone — and some things that you can only do on Android. Whether or not this is only possible because Google and its partners copied Apple isn’t really important here. Google’s execution has been excellent, and on the whole, the iPhone’s software isn’t (and hasn’t been) 5 years ahead of Android.

Sure, there are still some specific apps that are iPhone-only, and again, the iPhone is still a more pleasant experience. But it’s not like it was in 2007, when the iPhone made Palm, RIM, Nokia, and Microsoft look flat-out prehistoric. (Well, actually, none of those competitors has really caught up yet, and Palm is toast. But Google is kicking their butts.)

If anything, where Apple is the most ahead of Android today — perhaps even 5 years ahead — is on the business and customer experience sides.

Apple still seems to have the power in its relationships with carriers, demanding a clean user experience (no pre-installed crap), control over software updates and the length of its update path, a mostly-reliable App Store that makes a lot of money in app sales for developers, distribution through its own retail stores, tight integration with Macs and the iPad, and great devices at great prices. Not to mention an extremely profitable business model — selling tens of millions of iPhones per year for a big profit. These things seem to be more iffy in the Android camp.

What about the next 5 years? Many of the things that matter today will still matter: Hardware design, OS features and elegance, app stores, pricing, etc. But also things like cloud services, home and car integration, and mobile commerce platforms, which are in their infancy today. Those are some of the next races between Apple and Google worth watching.

Also: Apple’s future, as predicted 15 years ago

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  • http://twitter.com/Egocrata Egocrata

    One interesting thing to do is to go back in time and check what reviewers said in 2007 of the original iPhone – it is a humbling experience. Quite a few of them went to great lengths to point out that the iPhone was not feature-competitive with other platforms. For instance, the e-mail client of the first gen iPhone was pretty awful. Windows Mobile back in 2007 had exchange integration, multitasking and tons of other nice things to have, but it really didn´t matter much. 

    On a sidenote, didn´t the original iPhone sell pretty limited numbers, all things considered? The real revolution was a bit later, I think. The app store is what really changed everything. 

    • http://www.fromedome.com/ Dan Frommer

      The original iPhone basically sold out in May-ish 2008, if I recall, about a month before Apple released the iPhone 3G.

      The App Store definitely helped but arguably more important was that AT&T started subsidizing the iPhone down to $199 (from the $399 that the original iPhone started at).

  • http://twitter.com/jyap Julian Yap

    If you asked Microsoft, Nokia or RIM was the iPhone 5 years ahead of the competition? They would say ‘Yes’.

  • http://twitter.com/martinschmidler Martin Schmidler

    “Well, actually, none of those competitors has really caught up yet..” – actually, Windows Phone 7 is a pretty decent mobile OS. Even dedicated Apple fans like John Gruber say that. It’s still not as good as iOS, but from a UX standpoint I think it’s better than Android.

    • http://www.fromedome.com/ Dan Frommer

      It’s pretty solid, but it’s still not a commercial success. Let’s see if the Nokia partnership will do anything.

  • Anonymous

    The way the industry was heading before the iPhone gave them the mother of all wake up calls, I’m more inclined to believe Steve Jobs was right. 
    We might still be using a stylus and a derivative of Windows mobile 6.5 had the iPhone never existed.

  • http://profiles.google.com/rossjudson Ross Judson

    I think there’s a two-part, technological reason why Apple has maintained their leadership. The first is recognizing that silky-smooth animation is absolutely critical to bridging a secondary sort of uncanny divide — the divide that separates our tactile experience with the real world from the tactile experience we have on tablet and phone devices. The second part is a critical design decision Apple made at the API level — that animation would be controlled by, timed by, and executed by the OS on a separate rendering thread (or threads) by a subsystem that is devoted solely to this process. The vast majority of GUI toolkits espouse the single-threaded approach — any changes to the GUI objects have to take place on the “event thread”, or GUI thread (or whatever the platform calls it). If animation must be performed on this thread as well, it is inevitably jerky or inconsistent and produces the tactile uncanny divide we feel. This effect amplified on devices with fewer CPU resources. Jerky animation on Java isn’t the fault of the garbage collector! It’s because the animation process is being performed on JVM equivalent of “user threads”, when our perceptions demand that it have real-time semantics. Years back, on a JavaFX list, I noted that JavaFX would never achieve performance parity with iOS until this key part of the rendering pipeline and the API to it was revisited.