Comment by SirMaster

I would absolutely count blackberry and palm pilot, along with windows ce-based phones. Just because Apple leap-frogged them (and they all eventually folded those lines of business) doesn't mean they weren't existing products in the market.

The difference, if any, was focus. The premium on smartphones before Apple hit the market was on business/professional users who could afford the high premium. Apple instead targeted making a premium consumer product - that professionals then started to jump to over time, depending on how addicted they were to their blackberry keyboard.

> Apple waited on smartphones?

They were not waiting for smartphones, but they did wait for the technology to enable them. They had been working on prototypes for a couple of years before releasing the first iPhone, and smartphones were not really a new thing at that point. What made it possible is improvements in digitisers and batteries (and they were not the first users of the capacitive digitisers in the first iPhones, they were the first to use it at that scale for a full screen), as well as progress on the software side, which took some effort.

It was the same for the first iPod. They jumped when they got a hard drive they thought was small enough to fit in a product they believed was good.

So yeah, they tend to wait and see, but they consider technologies, not only final products.

Apple was considered very late to the smartphone game at the time.

Windows CE was introduced on PDAs around 1996, and was on phones by 2003, so the iPhone was arguably between four and eleven years late depending on how you define the space.

Microsoft’s dominance was a safe bet because they had never really failed to dominate any market at that point in history. Also nobody imagined that the size of the mobile market would eclipse laptops, so “Windows CE already won” wasn’t an absurd statement at all.

Yes