It's good (maybe even indispensable) for some things. Please don't go "ketchup native" on my ice cream.

I take my first cup of coffee with a little tea-leaf reading based on the activity of the CEO and my former coworkers. If you ever see more than 5 connections reacting/liking the same thing you know that HR or marketing sent out an email about it.

It started out as a toolkit for application development and leaned heavily into the needs of the C developer who was writing an application with a GUI. It was really a breath of fresh air to us crusties who started out with Xaw and Motif. That's the GTK I want to remember.

What it is now is (IMO) mostly a product of the economics of free software development. There's not a lot of bread out there to build a great, free, developer experience for Linux apps. Paid GTK development is just in service of improving the desktop platform that the big vendors ship. This leads to more abstraction breaks between the toolkit, the desktop, and the theme, because nobody cares as long as all the core desktop apps work. "Third party" app developers, who used to be the only audience for GTK, are a distant second place. The third party DX is only good if you follow a cookie-cutter app template.

I switched my long-term personal projects from GTK2 to Dear ImGui, which IMO is the only UI toolkit going that actually prioritizes developer experience. Porting from GTK2 to GTK3 would have been almost as much work since I depended on Clutter (which was at one point a key element of the platform, but got dropped/deprecated -- maybe its corporate sponsor folded? not sure).

The most positive metaphor I have heard about why LLM coding assistance is so great is that it's like having a hard-working junior dev that does whatever you want and doesn't waste time reading HN. You still have to check the work, there will be some bad decisions in there, the code maybe isn't that great, but you can tell it to generate tests so you know it is functional.

OK, let's say I accept that 100% (I personally haven't seen evidence that LLM assistance is really even up to that level, but for the sake of argument). My experience as a senior dev is that adding juniors to a team slows down progress and makes the outcome worse. You only do it because that's how you train and mentor juniors to be able to work independently. You are investing in the team every time you review a junior's code, give them advice, answer their questions about what is going on.

With an LLM coding assistant, all the instruction and review you give it is just wasted effort. It makes you slower overall and you spend a lot of time explaining code and managing/directing something that not only doesn't care but doesn't even have the ability to remember what you said for the next project. And the code you get out, in my experience at least, is pretty crap.

I get that it's a different and, to some, interesting way of programming-by-specification, but as far as I can tell the hype about how much faster and better you can code with an AI sidekick is just that -- hype. Maybe that will be wrong next year, maybe it's wrong now with state-of-the-art tools, but I still can't help thinking that the fundamental problem, that all the effort you spend on "mentoring" an LLM is just flushed down the toilet, means that your long term team health will suffer.'

I think that belies the fundamental misunderstanding of how AI is changing the goalposts in coding

Software engineering has operated under a fundamental assumption that code quality is important.

But why do we value the "quality" of code?

* It's easier for other developers (including your future self) to understand, and easier to document. * Easier to change when requirements change * More efficient with resources, performs better (cpu/network/disk) * Easier to develop tests if its properly structured

AI coding upends a lot of that, because all of those goals presume a human will, at some point, interact with that code in the future.

But the whole purpose of coding in the first place is to have a running executable that does what we want it to do.

The more we focus on the requirements and guiding AI to write tests to prove those requirements are fulfilled, the less we have to actually care about the 'quality' of the code it produces. Code quality isn't a requirement, its a vestigal artifact of human involvement in communicating with the machine.

Often AI critics say things like “quality is bad or “it made coding errors” or “it failed to understand a large code base”.

AI proponents and expert users understand these constraints and know that these are but actually that important.

Any code that's old enough to have its first birthday party is "legacy", which means that "legacy" is a completely useless category. Anyone calling anything "legacy" is generally just showing their own lack of experience.

An alternative definition, legacy code is any code where there’s no one left on the team who has been working on it for years and intuitively knows the pitfalls. Then everyone’s scared to touch it or make big refactors, which actually leads to those small special cases being added instead.

When everyone can sit around one big table, you don't have to consciously polish your "brand" all the time -- most people have direct experience with you and base their opinions on that. You do good work and you will have a good reputation. If you have a conflict with someone who is a jackass or have a project that fails to launch, people know enough about the context to judge pretty fairly.

When there are hundreds of people on the engineering team, especially in a remote-heavy workforce, most people don't have direct experience with you and can only base their opinion of you on what they hear from others, i.e. your reputation. This goes for peers as much as leadership.

You have to be aware of how an org changes over time, and how things that were once not important are now essential skills for success.. and decide if any new essentials are skills that you are interested in developing.

I bought a Rivendell about 10 years ago and it's probably my last bike. Is a steel frame heavier than carbon? Yes, a bit, but I don't have to throw it away after a crash, it rides like a dream, and the weight difference is less than the extra "water bottles" I carry around my midsection. Most of the weight of the bike+rider (which is what you have to haul around) is the rider, not the bike, and the frame is just a fraction of the weight of the bike!

Even though new bikes are getting more and more proprietary, I don't foresee a time when I can't buy a new Shimano cassette or other replaceable parts.

You should check AliExpress for those. You might be able to find some knock-offs. AE is actually really good for things like this. The other place to check is Ebay, in case someone is selling NOS (new old stock).

As the tale went, he was sent out to this doomed-from-birth spinoff as a "sunset cruise" to basically force him into retirement (for this bad decision) without the bad publicity of a public head-chopping.

The first iPhone was also gigantic, hideous, couldn't send pictures - something even a cheap $20 Samsung from the carrier could do - and it also didn't sell very well. People were more into "The Google phone", the Sidekiq, or the latest Razr. Think it wasn't til the 3GS came out with a ton of marketing push that it started to gain popularity, and it ended up having more to do with the App Store than the hardware - people did not like those touch screens for the first several years of smartphones. They came out at the height of texting and ringtone era, and we were pretty set in our ways, and it took years to change that behavior.

I think the App Store resonated a lot more with people back then rather than the iPhone as a device. MySpace was still around, the Bush-era recession had everyone looking for a side hustle. Most young/ambitious people I was around in "tech" (which was effectively HTML-based SEO and WordPress design) had a Blackberry and a side business. This kid I worked with became "rich" from an iPhone app that just combined other iPhone apps haha. Loved that time period. Graffitio!

Would have been very hard to predict the success of the iPhone, even as I was already entering orders for customers on a fully touch screen Aloha point-of-sale long before iPhone.

The razr2 sold 5M units and the sidekick sold 3M to iPhone 1’s 6.1M.

The n95 did outsell the iPhone with 10M units but Nokia had a massively more mature sales pipeline whereas Apple had to build out carrier relations. It also shipped before the iPhone was even announced which gave it time to accumulate sales.

Everyone in the space though recognized how big it was because carriers were going out of their way to try to get it on their network (since at the time Apple was doing 1 carrier per country). Apple got lucky that AT&T bought Singular which made the iPhone accessible to many many more people.

3GS’s 37 million units was because Apple had 2 years to build up manufacturing capacity and carrier sales channels to match demand for what had become clearly a smartphone revolution.

This worry removed, and the fact you actually had a real browser that could open real websites were the two main features that to me seemed like a huge leap forward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdULhkh6yeA

Am I remembering correctly that originally the iPhone only supported AT&T? My family all was on a shared Verizon plan at the time, and I have a vague recollection of the fact that it wasn't an option for us, but I'm not positive I remember correctly. Nowadays, the idea of a phone not being possible to purchase for a given network seems silly, but I feel like it was a thing at the time.

Yes, for the first few years. Within a year or two, the writing was on the wall and the other providers were dying to get it.

Verizon couldn’t have the iPhone, so they pushed that as their equivalent with a huge marketing campaign. Always felt to me like that single-handedly pushed Android into the public consciousness.

Like without that maybe Android would be huge, but we updated have gotten the name recognition. Or at least not so fast, and instead would have been more of an implementation detail in most people’s minds.

Sprint tried to compete with the Palm Pre which was neat but had issues. Then Verizon got the Pre and Sprint’s last shot at relevance died.

"But they were new to the space!" "It was still a good start!" is peripheral

It was prototype though. A lot of people could see the potential but the device itself was pretty bad.

Nokia and Blackberry were selling a lot more than both brands at the time. Blackberry alone had 20%+ market share when the Pearl was released. Nokia sold the most phones by far.

Apple sold over 6M units of the first iPhone unless you’re saying 1.4M in the first quarter after launch since it launched in September. I was comparing it to phones released at a similar time and claiming that sidekick was somehow more successful is straight up laughable regardless of how you look at it.

The first iPhone defined what the smartphone category should be. Google took heed which saved Android. Nokia and blackberry did not and you can tell where they’re at now.

So? If anything it supports the point that iPhone wasn't an immediate success. It wasn't as successful as the Razr flip phone was before it, not for a while. The original point was just that it would have been difficult to predict the success of iPhone even after it released, because it didn't do that well at first.

> In its first week, Apple had sold 270,000 iPhones domestically.[47] Apple sold the one millionth iPhone 74 days after the release.[48] Apple reported in January 2008 that four million were sold.[49] As of Q4 2007, strong iPhone sales put Apple no. 2 in U.S. smartphone vendors, behind Research In Motion and ahead of all Windows Mobile vendors.[50]

> As of October 2007, the iPhone was the fourth best-selling handset in the U.S., trailing the Motorola RAZR V3, the LG Chocolate, and the LG VX8300.[51]

I’d say being the #2 smartphone vendor on your first model and beating all Windows Mobile would be a fantastic first step and a clear indicator it would be extremely successful in addition to being #4 across all us handsets. 4M were sold in the first 6 months. You’re just simply misremembering how big it was and how well it sold.

The 3G version the next year sold 4x as many units (25M) . You could say it’s because 3G was such a huge upgrade our other software things like mms and App Store, but the first iPhone was in 6 countries while 3G was in 22 and got to 70. The 3GS did outdo the growth of that since it shipped 5M more units than would be explained just by being available in more countries (80 vs 70).

Could you predict it would end up dominating the smartphone market even as that market ate up more of the legacy feature phone market? Maybe that’s harder but the iPhone’s success wasn’t all that hard. The lack of any competition that could really keep up was another indicator. Android was a pretty big failure for a few years until enough of the feature set became parity and table stakes that people felt comfortable using it (or because Android was available in a lower price segment Apple wasn’t competing in).

The iPhone 2G was an interesting phone. But there were no 3rd party apps until the software update that came out at the same time as the 3G.

The 3G had (insert app here). And boy did that drive sales.

First I think you may be misremembering your Apple history. The iPhone was very much Apple’s first product release post their iPod success which rescued their company. While they weren’t a failing company that they were in 2001 (like near banrukpt failing) they were not by any means a behemoth. In 2006 they made 2B in profit on 10B of revenue. By comparison Nokia made $7B in profit. Looking at MacBook belies that you seem to not realize how insignificant those sales were to Apple’s revenue (and how that’s even more true today even though they’ve actually grown their market share in that segment).

> Are you aware that RIM is Blackberry? This is what I've been saying, iPhone was behind the others like Blackberry, Razr, Nokia, etc.

Except not. Razr isn’t a smartphone and iPhone outsold any smartphones that Nokia made. By 2007 when Apple shipped the iPhone RIM had been shipping the blackberry for about 8 years and had completely taken over the enterprise segment which until Apple cracked it was considered to be the only place that smartphones would be successful and that it would perennially remain Blackberrie’s to lose. To have a competitor who’s never done cellular or smartphones before take #2 from the get go is huge considering how unlike traditional consumer electronics that Apple had engaged in until then, the sales channel and regulatory environment looked completely different. Think about it - one huge innovation they did was that you could buy the cell phone directly from them and through the Apple Store and they took care of the carrier onboarding experience. No one else attempted (or even could attempt) to do that.

You’re simply misremembering or trying to paint a weird picture that the first iPhone was this niche device no one wanted. That’s literally not true. It’s inherently impossible to enter a mature market and become #1 overnight. That Apple came in at #2 is really astounding and everyone was paying attention to it and Google literally hit pause on their launch by a year to completely redesign their OS because they saw it as the future.

> Having lived through that era I would have never predicted the success of Airpods.

Well I worked at Apple before they launched AirPods and got to see an exec demo of them. From the first instant I knew they were going to be a hit. Did I know it was going to be a multi billion dollar business by itself? If I’d done the math on it I probably could have worked it out just from estimating an attach rate. I think you shouldn’t extrapolate your inability to predict hits to others and say no one saw things coming.

As for touch screens, we actually didn’t have capacitive touch screens. All the smartphones to date had been resistive and the introduction of multitouch that capacitive enabled as well as better scan rates made a huge difference. I think you’re outing your viewpoint when you’re discounting people who were enthusiastic about the iPhone as members of a cult even now without allowing for the possibility that maybe they see something you don’t. Same kind of reasoning happened with the iPod too and I made the same mistake thinking they wouldn’t be big and it was this weird Apple thing and the UX seemed weird until they fixed their strategy to open it up to Windows users. My excuse was that I was still a teenager so I didn’t have sufficient perspective. Btw not everything Apple touches is gold immediately. I think they’re going to struggle with Vision Pro. I think they did a bunch of novel interesting UX innovations but the “killer product” hasn’t been built in that space yet and Meta is a much savvier opponent than they have ever had to face to date in a new product line.

Unless we look at the actual data (i.e. Mac revenue was always bigger and was a actually growing at very fast pace unlike iPod by the time the iPhone came out)

Revenue from Q4, 2005:

Mac: $1,611, iPod: $1,212

Q4, 2006:

Mac: $2,213, iPod: $1,559

Q4, 2007:

Mac: $3,103, iPod: $1,619, iPhone: $118

Q4, 2008:

Mac: $3,620, iPod: $1,660, iPhone: $806

Q4, 2009:

Mac: $3,952, (only MacBooks: $2,866) iPod: $1,563, iPhone: $2,297

Revenue from iPhone sales didn't surpass MacBook sales (so desktops excluded) until 2010.

(iTunes revenue was lower than Peripherals, Other Hardware, Software and Service in all of those years)

2001 (ipod initial launch at end of year): 4.1B/5.36B, 76% Mac, <1% iPod

2002: 4.3B/5.74B 74% Mac, 2.5% iPod

2003: 4.9B/6.21B 79% Mac, 20% iPod

2004 (Windows support added late 2003): 5.3B/8.28B 64% Mac, 21.7% iPod

2005: 6.2B/13.93B 38% Mac, 44.5% iPod

2006: 7.4B 38% Mac, 40% iPod

2007 (iPhone launch - should cannibalize ipod): 10.3B/24.6B 42% Mac, 33% iPod

2008: 14.2B/37.49B 38% Mac, 24% iPod

2009: 16.4B/42.91B 38% Mac, 18% iPod

2010: 17.2B/65.2B 26% Mac, 12.7% iPod

When I say it's "insignificant" I don't mean to say that Apple could have cancelled it and it wouldn't have mattered. Mac still remains a meaningful pillar of their product lineup even though it only contributes ~10% of revenues.

What you have to do is consider that Apple leadership views it as an ecosystem. Mac by itself isn't a lucrative or really important business. However, it's importance is that it makes sure that a customer in their ecosystem always has an Apple product they can buy when they need something. Importantly, if they have an iPhone they're more likely to buy a Mac and if they have a Mac they're more likely to buy an iPhone (& now Watch, AirPods etc). The refresh rates for these are also different enough that you're likely to remain stuck there by default once you get into the ecosystem because it's just an easier experience.

What I'm saying is that the strategic focus and resources was not really on Mac because Apple leadership did not see growth there by itself unless it was as an attachment to the iPod. You can see in the % numbers where iPod took over Mac as contributing a huge portion of % to their bottom line as soon as they made it generally available and that Mac sales themselves only started going up like crazy once iPod became generally available to everyone. Similarly, once the iPhone comes out we see it crazily cannibalizing iPod sales. At that point strategically the iPod barely got any attention. They didn't cancel it until 2022 because it was still bringing in significant revenue streams (+ a form factor Apple didn't have a replacement for until they got the Watch). Additionally, the overall laptop market has been shrinking even as Apple has been growing which is why their marketshare in laptops is so large even though it's comparatively such a small product for them.

So while the revenue from Mac was important from a "keep working on this" perspective & "ecosystem play", the vast majority of resources, focus, and energy were definitely thrown at iPod & then iPhone because of how much bigger the opportunity was and that even for Mac iPod and iPhone were the flywheel engines driving growth in those spaces.

If you're taking "insignificant" as the cancellation point for Mac, I think it would be that they succeed in their pitch that the Vision lineup is a Mac replacement. If they manage to succeed in that product line, Mac won't be much longer for this world.

High level: You're trying to make the case that iPhones were immediately more successful than the conventional market leaders like Razr and Blackberry when that's not the case by far - it wasn't true for several years.

When someone shows that's wrong with numbers (e.g. 130 million Razrs sold in 2 years vs iPhone's 6 million in 2 years) you say something like "yeah but they were new to the space!" But that's totally peripheral, and counter to your original claim.

You'll never convince those of us who were 18-24 years old when iPhone released what happened. You obviously don't have a clue, probably were a child or out of the country at the time because you're using ChatGPT to pull up (false) info we all know intuitively.

Other awful takes:

> Macbook sales were insignificant

False.

> Mac by itself isn't a lucrative or really important business.

Lol. Saying $10 billion a year is not lucrative is crazy. Saying that 30%+ market share on the laptop market is not important is crazy.

> Once the iPhone comes out we see it crazily cannibalizing iPod sales. At that point strategically the iPod barely got any attention.

Nobody ever compared iPhone to iPod - we were talking about feature phones of the day like Razr, Blackberry, Nokia, etc.

Most of your paragraphs are pure conjecture.

To be fair using only Q4 figures was a mistake, since iPod sales were always the highest in Q1 because of the holiday season (not as noticeable for Macs).

> ChatGPT to pull up (false) info we all know intuitively.

I summed some of those years from Apple's Quarterly reports (annoyingly they didn't seem to report by segment FY sales...) and they are more or less similar:

2006 : Mac : $7,375 (49.01%) iPod+iPhone : $7,676 (50.99%)

2007 : Mac : $10,314 (55.02%) iPod+iPhone : $8,428 (44.98%)

2008 : Mac : $14,276 (56.48%) iPod+iPhone : $10,997 (43.52%)

2009 : Mac : $13,824 (43.93%) iPod+iPhone : $17,657 (56.07%)

As for the ChatGPT dig, for what it’s worth I spot checked various numbers that they were consistent with other sources and Apple’s official Q4 numbers. If you can point out specific issues I’d be happy to correct. I called it out simply in case someone wanted to triple check the numbers. But again, please refrain from baseless attacks and point out actual errors in the facts presented if any.

I pointed out that Apple on initial launch was the #2 provider outselling ALL windows mobile manufacturers including Nokia. They were widely recognized as completely reinventing the smartphone market even at the time which you can tell because Google had an “oh shit” moment with Android to competent rethink the OS to build it around multitouch. I don’t know what else to tell you. This is based on reporting and direct anecdotal conversations I have had with Google and Apple coworkers that related that history to me contemporaneously.

The successful Razr version was released a year before and Motorola was a very mature cell phone company that basically introduced phones worldwide right away similar to how Apple does phones today and was not a smartphone. It’s also important to remember that was actually the first “Apple” phone since it was integrated into the iTunes experience (ie if your wanted iPod + cell phone). So if anything, a feature phone at the same price point as Apple a year prior selling like hotcakes only proves that it was clear iPhone was a big deal.

> Lol. Saying $10 billion a year is not lucrative is crazy

It is crazy but that’s less than 3% of 2023 revenue (in 2023 it’s still about 10% at 30B but down 27% from 2022).

It’s a strategic product to build the Apple ecosystem but tactically it’s not where they make their money and sales and focus is. That’s why you see them still making Apple TV’s for a fraction of Mac revenue (watch + AirPods + tv + HomePod is $9B and the majority there is going to be watch and AirPods).

Also if you actually follow the space you’d know the reason that Apple has a significant portion of the laptop market is because the market itself has stagnated and shrunk because smartphones and tablets have eaten it. In the same time period since 2007 that Mac revenue have taken to double Apple's overall revenues have 10x. I gave context from before in 2001 to show that Mac sales were stagnating and not at all a way that Apple would survive and once they knew how big iPod was they knew their future was not Mac. This by the way is straight from the horses mouth - Steve Jobs was one of presenters for interns that year.

As for the strategic hypotheses, keep saying it’s conjecture all you want but please be aware I’ve had conversations with people who were within the company including some senior leaders. So while it may be wrong I suspect my conjectures may have a slightly larger chance of being correct than someone who remembers the iPhone as some “also ran” phone that no one could predict was going to be that big and forgetting all the lines at stores even it launched and so the constant non stop press it had for years even post launch.

I’ll reiterate - if you have issues with my facts or conjecture, please actually point out specifically which facts are wrong or provide news articles or analysis contradicting what I’ve stated. Your recollection of how big a moment iPhone was in popular perception and in the tech industry is wrong or you weren’t paying proper attention or were in the wrong community that was on the periphery of everything happening.

> I’ve had conversations with people who were within the company including some senior leaders

There we go, why didn't you just say that in a disclaimer up front? At one point I cursed the Apple influencers and was mainly referring to you :D

You had a very different experience than the mainstream since you worked at Apple when it launched.

> This by the way is straight from the horses mouth - Steve Jobs was one of presenters for interns that year.

Sounds like you were doing keg stands in the Apple Koolaid while most of us were still pirating Windows Vista off LimeWire and changing discs at red lights! You haven't lived unless you had a 6-disc changer (in your trunk for some reason).

For Vista in this era it was mostly boot from USB stick because it was too big for CD and DVD was bougie

No argument about what happened after the iPhone (specifically 3G + App Store) came out, but I'm not sure I fully agree with:

> What I'm saying is that the strategic focus and resources was not really on Mac because Apple leadership did not see growth there by itself unless it was as an attachment to the iPod.

By 2007 iPod's market share was ~72% in the US. The MP3 player market was pretty saturated and there was very little growth left (especially with increasing competition from (feature)phones). On the other hand Apple only had < 5% of the PC market (in the US) by 2006 so there was a lot of space to grow especially in the laptop market if if they started released more competitive products (by ditching PowerPC).

If we look at iPod + iPhone revenue around those years

2007 :

Mac: $10,314 (42.94%)

iPod+iPhone : $8,428 (35.09%)

2008 :

Mac: $14,276 (43.92%)

iPod+iPhone: $10,997 (33.82%)

Mac sales were actually growing faster even if we combine iPhone and iPod sales (which probably meant that a lot of people switched to other phones/mp3 players instead of buying an iPhone at least initially)

I think that's mainly related to the the PowerPC to Intel transition. It's not clear if the iPod really had a huge impact on Mac sales since Mac's market share started growing much faster when iPod had already peaked. Then after iPhone sales started accelerating Mac sales growth rates began declining which would imply that handheld and PC segments aren't necessarily related that much.

If Apple hadn't released the iPhone, Mac probably would have done just fine on its own and iPod sales would have remained stagnant or declined significantly (e.g. worldwide they weren't doing that well compared to Sony Ericsson's phone sales in 2006-2007, who IIRC leaned heavily into MP3/media in those in those years). It was pretty obvious that phones/smartphones were the future regardless of what Apple did (the transition would have just been quite a bit slower without them).

Of course (compared to you) I really have no clue what the internal sentiment inside Apple was a at the time so I'm just commenting on the market as a whole.

As for iPod saturation, I don’t know if that’s actually true and I’m too lazy to look up the numbers as to when it happened. I’ll point out two things area important when thinking about things - you have market share and market size. You don’t have saturation until you have stopped growing. Owning a constant 70% of a market that’s growing consistently each year is not saturation - was the portable music market stagnant by 2007? Maybe. But you can’t tell that just from market share. According to ChatGPT growth started slowing down in 2008 but that’s already post Razr and iPhone when it became an obvious calculus of do I want and old tech iPod or a general purpose computer and cell phone in my pocket. Nanos and shuffles kept selling well because the cell phones didn’t have an appropriate answer for a very very long time (too much growth elsewhere to bother with that use case).

The transition to Intel was in 2006. I’m skeptical that’s a motivating reason for a lot of switchers and the numbers show more growth correlation with iPod windows support and iPhone which makes sense for the attachment theory whereas I don’t see in the numbers that making a big dent. It’s important to remember that consumers don’t make decisions on what CPU is in a machine; even technical people wouldn’t make that decision since even in the tech community today it’s framed as windows vs Linux vs Mac and not Intel vs AMD unless you are building a PC from parts (and Apple isn’t in that segment).

I’m not sure why you say iPod has peaked at the time of Windows transition which was in 2004. 2007 which is when growth had started slowing is when the iPhone kept up the growth. I agree that phones being the future was going to be obvious and the Razr was likely their first dip of a toe to estimate how big the market for an iPhone would be since they had a deal with Motorola for iTunes support.

As for Apple’s computer market share, the reason it’s so high is that the overall market is stagnant but Apple is managing to eke out growth here and there. Same as with smartphones where Apple has 30% of market share but 98% of the profit; they are much more streamlined than their competitors. Expect to see their market share grow one cell phones stagnate although the story there is more complicated since they play in a wider range of economic households whereas Mac products are (as they’ve always been) in more higher end segments (since the lower end would be dominated by chromebooks or no laptop). I see no indication of Mac growth stopping pre or post iPhone - it only started more recently which makes sense it would take so long because Apple is not immune to the reality in that space even though they’ve defied it for so long (and as for many companies COVID spiked sales since kids needed to do school remotely so the recent stagnation could just have been a temporary anomaly and reversion to pre pandemic numbers).

It’s genuinely hard to say what would have happened if Apple had not released the iPhone. Certainly Apple had stabilized as a company by 2001. But Mac sales had stagnated in the years prior to iPod and without iPhone as another engine it’s unclear what would have happened to Mac sales after that especially as the overall laptop and computer segments started collapsing (but this happened much much later after the smartphone revolution). Their music business may have helped a bit but a huge part of growth there itself was due to iPhone as well. These are reinforcing effects that are really hard to tease out. It’s likely it would have kept going since it was financially more stable but it would likely be at least a 10x smaller company.

Thank you for engaging factually and thoughtfully with the analysis.

iPod sales grew by 18% in 2006 and 17% in 2007. It was 140% 2006 and 373% in 2005. So yeah they weren't technically really stagnant just slowed down significantly. Even if we look at combined iPod and iPhone sales they grew slower than Nokia and Sony phone in the same period (Motorola had peaked in 2006). That didn't change until the 3G came out in 2008 and "high-end feature phone" market collapsed by 2009.

> It’s important to remember that consumers don’t make decisions on what CPU is in a machine

Yes but IIRC G5 had pretty awful performance per watt and Apple never put it into any laptops. They were stuck with G4 which wasn't really competitive with x86 by 2006.

> 2007 which is when growth had started slowing is when the iPhone kept up the growth.

It didn't initially though, not until mid 2008 if we compare to how fast Mac sales grew in the same period. Between 2006 and 2009 Apple's laptop sales increased by almost 3x or so. While even if we add up iPod + iPhone sales they "only" grew by 2x. Especially 2007 to 2008 was relatively pretty bad since iPod + iPhone sales only went up by 1.3x. Macbooks were the fastest growing product/segment between mid 2006 and mid 2008.

To be fair I'm mostly nitpicking at this point since I do agree with your longterm analysis more or less, but since Mac sales grew at the fastest during the period when iPod sales were relatively stagnant and iPhone sales were still relatively very low (2007 to mid 2008 before the 3G, the original iPhone wasn't a particularly good smartphone it had a large multitouch screen and that's about it..) it's not that obvious to me that iPod/iPhone sales were driving Mac sales that much.

Of course that specific period was pretty unique. Laptop market was growing very fast and Apple finally was offering devices which were incredibly competitive with other laptops at the time. It doesn't change the big picture too much (most growth was coming from iPod sales before that and iPhone/iPad afterwards)

It definitely didn't get mainstream popularity until the 3GS/4 and the App Store, but people were definitely interested from day 1. Don't forget that early builds of Android looked much more like a Blackberry clone until the iPhone was announced, and then Google immediately scrapped everything and rewrote it from the ground up to be iPhone-like.

The iPhone is that. I used to deride it at launch when I had my Sony P1, but it was truly a revolution. Anyone denying its success looking back,even as a v1, is living in a bubble.

Touch is probably the single most intuitive and easy to use interface ever created for computing. It is so obvious even a 5 year old child understands it without being taught (as both my kids did). Very very very few people found touch to be a significant learning curve at all so I'm not sure where that idea comes from.

There was definitely a whisper campaign from the tech talking heads that people wanted keyboards and touch screens were not the future... but that was mostly from people who never used it or competitors who had nothing to compete with.

> The first iPhone was also gigantic, hideous, couldn't send pictures - something even a cheap $20 Samsung from the carrier could do

It wasn't much larger than competing "smart" phones at the same and the large size was in fact a huge selling point: a bigger screen to see more content in apps and on websites.

MMS support was missing for sure but was also rolled out as a software update to all existing customers for free. The first time AFAIK that ever happened in the cell phone game. Prior to that (and still in Android land) updates require carrier cooperation and manufacturers did not hand out free features - buy a new phone for that.

> and it also didn't sell very well. People were more into "The Google phone", the Sidekiq, or the latest Razr.

I would say it sold quite well and exceeded expectations. In the iPhone announcement Apple said they'd like to sell 10 million of them by 2008 and sold 13 million. Sales roughly doubled the next year (2009). And the next (2010). And the next (2011). And the next (2012).

> I think the App Store resonated a lot more with people back then rather than the iPhone as a device.

I don't agree it resonated more than the device at that time but it was certainly an extremely important milestone. Apps, especially games, definitely drove a lot of adoption.

Yeah that's all I was saying. I've used iPhone exclusively for 15 years and am not anti-Apple, but people cannot handle nuance in online forums, so they they come out swinging if you share any experience that doesn't 1:1 reflect the brand marketing of the company.

Nah. The only reason the iphone didn't take off faster was that, for its time, it was extremely expensive.

$600 upfront plus a 24-month, $60/month contract [1]. That's $2000 back in 2007, or $3000 today.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2007/06/26/iphone_contract_price...

Prices for the 2G iPhone really were that high and Apple even cut the price after a few months because it wasn't moving like expected.

I don’t know what Nokia’s reaction was. I don’t think I’ve ever heard.

As the smartphone king at the time in the US RIM is always the one people talked about.

You are forgetting, there was no App Store when the iPhone launched. Apple was originally against the idea of Apps. The App Store launched a year later, with the iPhone3G. Yet the iPhone was wildly popular not just from the day it launched, but from the day Apple first demoed it.

I think what caught people's attention with the iPhone is that it's one of the first phones where you could easily browse websites from your phone in a way that didn't feel like a gimmick.

Other phones had web browsers, but they only really worked on special mobile versions of websites. They were also slow and painful to use even on those mobile optimised websites.

Then iPhone came along, and Apple had someone managed to squash a full desktop web browser on it. It did a half decent job of reformatting desktop-only websites to fit on the screen. When pages didn't reformat, the new touched-based panning and pinch-to-zoom gestures allowed you to still experience them with ease.

And Apple managed to make the whole OS feel responsive, despite using the exact same hardware as their competitors.

This was not true per my memory. Literally everyone I knew in their 20s and 30s in NYC was switching to the iPhone 3G as of summer 2008. You had to wait in line to buy it for months.

Unlimited 3G + GPS + touchscreen browser was what made it explode. Broadband internet, in your pocket, with mapping capabilities. It felt like the possibilities were limitless, with new apps and functionality being discovered and released daily.

There was no money in mobile SoCs, and there still isn’t. Apple makes their own chips anyway!

Intel was right to focus on the x86.

Qualcomm market cap: $193 billion

TSMC market cap: $888 billion

Seems designing and fabbing SoCs is plenty valuable

Taiwan Semi's market cap is $888 billion. They're - remarkably - now worth 10x what Intel is.

In any other context, that might be splitting hairs but it’s a meaningful distinction in this conversation.

Intel didn't just miss out on business as a fab, Apple would have used their chip design as well.

Which leads you to wonder if Apple still would have begun designing chips themselves, if Intel had put some real effort into designing mobile chips.

I think it's safe to say that they had already selected an off the shelf Samsung CPU before they did the public demo of the device.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9708/analyzing-apple-statemen...

I suspect if anyone else could keep up with TSMC Apple would still dual source.

But between their lead and the benefits of being such a big customer they get first crack at the cutting edge stuff, single sourcing manufacturing probably makes the most sense.

And their interests are aligned, unlike their dependencies on MS/Adobe/Motorola/IBM/Intel.

Intel could have moved big volumes during that period. At the very least they could have been a fab.

They also largely switched to their own chips because vendors weren’t meeting their needs.

Again, Intel could have staved it off on both computers and phones if they didn’t mess up so badly on delivery over the last several years.

And when you need to read the source to figure something out, it's just a few files of pretty self-evident C-ish code.

Cornut recently did a 10 year retrospective of Dear ImGui: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/7892 - an interesting read for me, as a Dear ImGui library user for many years now, but worth your time I think even if you aren't a user yourself. There is a specific section about the scope of the library: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/7892#issuecomment-22...

because of the immediate mode paradigm it's not really a general purpose framework. The constant redrawing is just a complete resource hog in non real-time applications. The reason other graphics frameworks retain internal state (which Imgui exactly avoids) is to only redraw components when necessary. In theory you could write yourself some sort of widget state manager on top of it but then you've just reinvented react or Qt or what have you.

It's so popular in games and real time visualization because that's one of the domains where you redraw constantly anyway.

> IMGUI does not mean that the library doesn't retain data.

> IMGUI does not mean it needs a continuous loop nor need to refresh continuously.

Second, Electron is not just UI. It's networking, file access, 2d drawing API, vector graphics, video conferencing, video playback, audio playback, video capture, audio capture, USB access, image decompressing, WebGL, WebGPU, WebAssembly, and many other things in a cross platform package.

It's trivial to make an app on one OS and ship on the other OSes without actually owning those OSes or even if you do own those OSes it requires almost zero knowledge of those OSes quirks and tools to make an app. Compare that to most other native cross platform frameworks and that's rarely true. Learning XCode on Mac, GCC/make/autotools on Linux, Visual Studio on windows, etc...