the imminent death of the iPhone
Here is a hilarious article listing all the influential tech pundits who made predictions of certain doom when Apple prepared to release the iPhone three years ago.
How accurate were those predictions? Apple’s sold just under 34 million iPhones, and 20 million of the iPod Touch.
So, not so much. I bet these guys thought that housing prices would never go down, either.
But I, too, write about technology, and I wrote about the iPhone when it was released! Let’s go back in time, all the way to the…Year 2007…and see what I had to say:
Out of curiosity, anyone going to buy an iPhone?
I’m not. Good heavens. I mean, $500 for a cell phone, and $60 for monthly charges. Utter madness!* Though I am curious to see if it flops or if it flies, for two reasons…
So, if the iPhone’s touch-screen works, and if it manages to integrate its myriad functions well, and if it truly functions as a mobile computer instead of a phone with some extra features tacked on, who knows? It could truly become The Next Big Thing. Maybe in a hundred years they’ll first talk about how Microsoft launched the computing revolution and then Apple launched the mobile computing revolution.**
But I’m still not buying one. $500? No way.
And my predictions have come true! I didn’t buy an iPhone! (I did buy an iPod Touch, though.) And my other predictions held up pretty well. Apple did manage to pull off all that stuff, and the iPhone is the new paradigm; practically every touch-screen phone released since has copied its design.
So I was more accurate than those guys. Clearly I deserve an influential pundit job for at least $100k a year.
-JM