Yeah arguably the biggest innovation the iPhone had was the capacitive touch screen - they weren't the first (that was the LG Prada) and the various interactions like pinch zooming and inertial scrolling were done before, but they did have a 2004 patent on capacitive multi-touch screens.

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djtango 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I'm so glad someone else remembers and values their contributions here.

That full package of capacitive touch, a UI and UX optimised for touch, inertial scrolling with pinch and zoom came together to form something much greater than the sum of the individual parts: an experience that could convince you to part with physical buttons

Also I think it took me almost a decade to find a touch keyboard (fleksy) I liked as much as the iOS keyboard. I think people also take for granted how far ahead their quiet innovations in the touch keyboard were without fanfare.

The ones in 2007 were unusable, the original android ones were terrible and I didn't much like swiftkey. Google Keyboard came much later but lacked some of the smoothing and tappiness of the Apple one

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tomduncalf 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah as I recall it, the iPhone was the first device where touch felt really natural and fun. They nailed that feeling that you’re actually interacting directly with what is under your finger. Previous touch devices I tried felt kind of disconnected because they hadn’t sweated the details in the same way.

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ffsm8 5 hours ago | parent [-]

thats a very different narrative though.

but this discussion always has the tendency to go completely off teh rails because there are so many people unable to talk rationally about apple products.

innovation basically never happens in a vacuum, and especially apple products have historically "come second" into a product category -- and just nail the implementation so well that they just felt great to use. (and yes, smartphones were well established by the time the iphone was released. thats what i'd call the product category there. dialing in to ever narrower definitions to make it into a "new" category is exactly the reason why this can never be settled - because you can call _every_ product a new product category like that)

So now we got endless discussions about "who was first" even though its completely meaningless to ask this question -- because that "previous product" also took inspiration from other products, and if you squinted enough, could also be called "just an iteration" vs a "innovation".

	▲	JoBrad 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It’s not really a different narrative, though: They started with the idea that the phone should be nearly all screen (which was very controversial at the time) and designed the software around that. No one had a UI or UX that was as fully committed to this idea as the iPhone, although they certainly got inspiration from others. You’re right that Apple isn’t usually a first mover within a product segment. But that have a tendency to nail what they consider to be a better execution of that product.