I can practically guarantee that people who say they hate tea haven’t tried brewing any kind of loose leaf tea at the proper temp and time.

I got a 1kg brick of the cheapest loose-leaf black tea I could find for ~$3.50, and it’s delicious. I drink it almost every day, I bought it in June last year, and I’m just now running low. I brewed a bag lipton black tea at work recently, took one sip and I dumped it the fuck out. Absolutely foul, that stuff.

So I can see why people hate tea if they’ve only ever tried cheap bags with boiling water

Sure, cost was almost certainly taken into account, they are a business after all.

But they didn’t just get lucky by gambling touch screens and waiting to become cheap enough. Take a look at the user interface of the touchscreen phones that came before the iPhone. Very limited in what they could do. Users were locked to a few small menus and custom-tailored applets, not much different than the UI of the phones before the iPhone. A touch screen was really more of a tech gimmick than a feature. Most (if not all) only accepted single stationary taps, any movement with a finger pressed to the screen wouldn’t register properly, if at all, and there’s really only so much you can do with that.

What Apple innovated is a better use for touch screens, an improvement in the way we were able to interact with our phones, coupled with a re-imagining of what a phone’s interface should be at a fundamental level. And they accomplished this with huge help from their decision to move away from tap-only touch to something that felt more natural: multiple/moving gestures, such as scrolling by moving your finger up or down, pinch to zoom, etc.

This really caused the single biggest movement away from what cell phones really were for us. Before, they were mostly portable telephones with a few extra poorly-implemented and barely functional gimmicks (ever use a web browser on a Razr?). With the iPhone’s success, Apple single-handedly shifted us into the new cell phone model; a customisable, intuitive to use, modular canvas that anyone can mould into whatever suits their needs via apps created by anyone (which Apple gets huge credit for yet again, because this could only he possible with the developer kits Apple released, effectively outsourcing creative solutions in taking advantage of the iPhone’s functionality).

When you look at what they set out to innovate, how they went about doing it, how much different it was than phones in the past, and how incredibly similar it is to phones today, a whole 15 years later, you just cannot reasonably deny that it was an extremely innovative and influential product.

Are you saying that other people had been working on and creating what became Apple’s mobile phone touchscreen interface, and they just bought the already near-finished product? If that’s the case I wasn’t aware.

Or if you’re trying to correct me (I assume you’re not, but you never know), I did acknowledge that Apple didn’t invent the touch screen or touch screen phone, the tech has been around since the 1960’s and even on phones since the early 90’s iirc.

Came here to say something similar about touchscreens on phones. It’s probably the most impactful innovation they’ve had, and ever will have imo. I can’t ethically support Apple as a company and I haven’t owned an apple product since the first iPod touch, but they absolutely deserve credit for this one.

Even if they didn’t invent the touch screen, or even the touchscreen phone, they certainly figured out how to perfectly integrate touchscreens into mobile devices a fluid and intuitive user interface which served as a canvas on which to build pretty much anything you wanted in the form of a mobile app (a $200B+ industry which the iPhone absolutely catalysed the explosive growth of).

It arguably even began a significant change in the course of modern human interaction, due to how much more versatile and therefore more commonly used mobile phones with a similar UI basis became since then; because of that, increasingly popular social media platforms now had a new way to provide use for their platform (via mobile apps) on a device that pretty much everyone now had with them all the time. I don’t think it’s coincidence that social media use saw such substantially explosive growth soon after the iPhone and subsequent “copycats” were on the market.

So their innovation here was really the first step in a number of global paradigm shifts. It was just such a monumentally impactful step forward. Because of this I genuinely think that the iPhone is almost guaranteed to be in history books for centuries, like the printing press or the light bulb.