> As a mechanical engineer working in software, I think both fields have completely different philosophies of product development.

A sloppy mechanical engineer can be sued for malpractice and lose their license to practice. If they do something unethical they can't blame it all on management and could end up being held personally responsible with fines and even jail time.

Sometimes I think it we might be better off if the same held for software engineers.

Apple is always a hardware company first, they always have been. The software is supposed to be a reflection of their hardware perfection and passion (we can discuss this later).

I didn’t use slow in a negative way. On the contrary, my context behind that “slow” was “patient, detail obsessed and immaculate”. Also I didn’t mean that they are not innovating. Again, they innovate and bake well, then release things, which is how I like my hardware.

Thanks for your reply though. Seems like I missed the point I was trying to make by a mile.

Considering practically every smartphone to this day is derivative of the 2007 glass slab hardware design (and software UX), I'd say they were on to something even if it didn't launch with the App Store immediately.

I went from a Palm Treo to the iPhone in 2007, these devices were not in the same league. Years apart in all aspects. I had an external box for tomtom gps on the treo and a janky mp3 player and some crappy apps on a resistive touch screen that looked like it had a permanent hazy film over it as all resistive ones do.

The apps part was rectified pretty quickly but even the kind of halfway decent web apps available after iPhone launch beat treo apps.

Your older Palm device was almost certainly much worse at browsing the web both in fidelity and interactivity. Loading a full desktop website on a device that small and being able to pinch to zoom in to sections was pretty novel at the time.

Nokia was dominating the smartphone market when iPhone was released. There was no ecosystem there. All these "pocket PC" devices were very cool for their time, but they were really really far from mass market adoption.

There was the “sweet solution” :) When reading the stories about how the first iPhone came to be, had they tried to also have an sdk with the first release, it would not have shipped on time. And although Jobs was famously stubborn, this is something he changed his mind quite quickly on. In no small part due to the ecosystem that popped up despite him thanks to jailbreaking.

And on the other side of that argument are people lamenting that it didn’t stay web app centric with PWAs and whatnot

an ecosystem of apps

To be fair here, you're replying to a thread where people were discussing mechanical engineering, and hardware. Not software.

Held to that metric, the software layer isn't part of the original discussion.

Not saying that discussing other things is wrong, but the comment you replied to seems to be "The hardware was an enormous cut above".

Yes, Apple reliably lets other manufacturers discover the hard problems, and then Apple solves them. And then residents of HN and Reddit think this is a great zinger every time.