The iPhone platform.
John Gruber has written a very smart piece on understanding the success of iPhone platform. As with most DaringFireball posts it is well worth a read. The idea of the iPhone being created as “a framework designed for future evolution and growth” certainly rings true although i can’t say i wholly agree with the following…
There’s a long list of features many experts and pundits claimed the original 1.0 iPhone needed but lacked. Ends up it didn’t need any of them. Nice to have is not the same thing as necessary_. But things the iPhone_ did have, which other phones lacked, truly were necessary in terms of providing the sort of great leap forward in the overall experience that Apple was shooting for.
Clearly the iPhone, even at 1.0, was an amazing device (look how other manufacturers rushed to replicate it) but I’d argue, from the European perspective at least, that the one thing iPhone 1.0 did need was 3G connectivity. It might have been sophisticated in almost everything else but the lack of something as trivial as 3G was laughable. Look at how sales over here increased when the 3G model finally arrived. With the 1.0 release only the Apple-diehards bought them, with the 2.0 release the masses bought them. If it’d had 3G from day one, it would have been an even quicker (and maybe even bigger) success story.