Ballmer Laughs at iPhone

What people said

encom · 2024-06 · Reference

>what Steve Balmer said about the iPhone The first iPhone, running iOS v1, was kinda shit. It's easy to look at what the iPhone is today and laugh at Ballmer, but I don't think what he said was wrong at the time he said it. [VIDEO]

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latexr · 2024-01 · Reference

> When the iPad was introduced, everyone was shocked by the very low price and the sleek form factor compared to previous Windows tablet devices. What I remember is everyone making fun of it, including the name¹, for being “just a big iPod Touch”. Similarly, the iPhone wasn’t taken all that seriously² on launch. The App Store wasn’t even an idea yet, let alone a reality. That is to say this always happens: people discount a new thing and use as contrast something else which was also discounted at the time but framed as if it had always been perceived by the current lens. I have no idea if the Vision Pro will “succeed” (however we define that), but we can be reasonably sure that the current version is the worse it will ever be. In other words, it will get better and it’s too soon to judge its impact. ¹ [LINK] ² [VIDEO]

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somsak2 · 2023-06 · Reference

Interesting just how similar his reaction is to what Ballmer's was when asked about the iPhone. "We like our strategy," comments about how it's so expensive (in fact giving almost precisely the same comparison; $99 vs. $500 back then is quite close to the $500 vs. $3500 with VR!), and mentioning that they're selling "millions of phones per year" while Apple is selling zero. [VIDEO]

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