March 24, 2007 at 12:41 pm
I stumbled across a forum thread that was started as Apple was introducing the iPod in October 2001. As we all know today, the iPod has become a huge, market-dominating success. That wasn't known then, and it's interesting to see the criticism.
The single largest complaint was the $399 price point. There were also complaints about the fact that it originally was Mac-only, it had no voice recording, it only had incremental improvements (like the scroll wheel) over the competition, and some people wanted a new Newton instead of an MP3 player. It was said that Apple had no experience in that market and should stick to personal computers. The iPod was called “another G4 Cube”.
Now, I'm not going to predict a crushing iPod-level success for the iPhone, but I do find it interesting to examine the parallels between the criticism. Too expensive, too limited (the iPhone is limited to Cingular), Apple has no experience in the market, there are only incremental improvements (in the iPhone's case: multi-touch and visual voicemail) over the competition, and it's not a Newton.