alt Hacker NewsIf you follow the reasoning that the iPod led to the iPhone which made mobile internet use dominant and common, you can also follow that line to social media and attention economies which many would argue have caused the world to be worse.
But this is kind of like the 'great man' theory of history where you can also argue that the markets would have converged on this outcome regardless of what the specific device was that we attribute to it.
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I think we would have been stuck with BlackBerry/Windows CE/SideKick type devices.
Even the then CEO of Google used BlackBerry devices years after Android came out as opposed to SJ who used the iPhone before it was released and after it was announced, saw that the screen was easily scratched and publicly did a press release that they were going to change it to use Gorilla Glass from plastic.
I was more thinking about normalization of walled gardens in personal computing devices and resulting duopolisation of the market. Widely used mobile Internet, social networks, touchscreen smartphones were coming with or without Apple, and it's not like the carrier-dominated market was all flowers and butterflies otherwise, but ultimately it was Apple who used its market and cultural position to push non-interoperable stuff like iMessage, fight "jailbreaking" and "sideloading", gatekeep software availability etc. which defined the course of action in the industry for the next decades. These things aren't what made iPhones successful and it didn't have to be done this way.