Who doubted Apple would be successful in ~2008? The iPhone and the MacBook Air were phenomenal products.

The first Macbook Air was a seriously limited device, style over substance. Expensive, weak CPU, mechanical hard drive, low battery life.

It was with the second generation (2011) that they knocked it out of the park, where they added fast Core i5/i7 CPUs, SSD, greatly improved battery life, two (!) USB ports, choice between 11' and 13' models.

And most of all they sold it at an entry level price (for Apple standards). Considered that the competition at the time were bulky Sony Vaio, HP and Dell "bricks", it was like a laptop from the future.

The Macbook Air wasn't in any way intended for developers, though. All the people I knew buying Airs (even first gen) were the frequent travelers and types of people who do loads of work involving email, text documents, and slideshows. Nothing that required heavy processing, but work that involves being out of your desk and having to haul your work with you.

A lightweight PC small enough to slip in a folder was what they wanted.

The Macbook Pro was generally for more of the processing-intensive work and development side. Recently I've been seeing/hearing more and more dissatisfaction from that crowd.

It wasn't a powerhouse, but it was (the second generation one) the first successful "thin" laptop that made reasonable compromises so that it could be used a development machine.

In an era of remote servers and web scripting languages, not every developer needs a full-blown workstation.

I agree it wasn't indended for developers, but it ended up being adopted by many of them.

I used a 2013 Air with maxed specs as a dev machine for a while and still use it for web browsing and while traveling rather than lug around my more expensive MBP. With an i7, it's a very capable machine with great battery life.

Doing front end development, it was more than powerful enough for anything I had to throw at it.

> In an era of remote servers and web scripting languages, not every developer needs a full-blown workstation.

I haven't really found that to be the case, especially these days with "modern" frontend tooling, like Babel/Webpack/etc, static analyzers like ESLint/Flow/Typescript, and the various types of frontend testing. Every bit of performance helps.

You can debate whether all of that is necessary, but the reality is many companies use them.

The Apple's MBA11 was a fantastic device, but they stopped improving it and Dell came out with the XPS13. It is a similar form factor, has a bigger display, and runs Linux.

Neither were guaranteed hits when they were introduced. Apple’s biggest claim to fame at that point was the iPod. Even after the iPhone was released, it was years before critics looked at it as a product that could withstand the test of time.

In 2008 the iPhone was a $500 subsidised device (at a time when other phones were "free" or up to $200) which really didn't do anything. It didn't do MMS, third party apps didn't exist, google maps didn't have turn-by-turn. I'm sure the user experience of a reasonable sized capacitive touch screen was great compared to the alternatives - but I never even saw one in real life and on paper it was very expensive and didn't have anything to sell me on it.

Once the iPhone 3G came it out was clear the device was a phenomenon and not a rich people toy, but initially the market was pretty confused, from what I remember.

This is absolutely silly.

I am not an apple fanboy, but I had a couple generations of Danger products (by far the most modern at the time) prior to the release of the iPhone and owned a few generations of iPhone from the start. The 1st generation iPhone was revolutionary and deserves every last bit of credit it gets. The 3G was a yawner, like adding leather seats to a flying car. Yeah 3G is nice... but seriously, the car is freaking flying how did you not notice that??

Exactly. The iPhone had the revolutionary UI and the revolutionary functionality (functioning web browser that worked with the most pages not specially made for phones) at the moment it appeared.

The 2G did not have an app store, it had no killer features. It was a nice device to use when it could be used. But it wasn't often that one could.

I think, that you didn’t see it in person was the reason you didn’t expect it to be a success.

The 3G had 3G, but otherwise same hardware specs as the original.

What sold me was that Apple got the UI right (“smooth as butter”), the webbrowser and email actually worked, and jailbroken it was almost Unix in your pocket! It really felt like a phone with so much potential and a far ahead of anything I had seen. The things you mention were just a matter of software updates. Btw. 3G and App Store both came out in 2008.

Yeah to me it was clear after seeing a smooth UI in an internet ad. I got the 1st gen - what surprised me was the empty shop without a queue. Maybe it was luck but to me it was an obvious game changer without even touching it.

The original iPhone was unsubsidized. It required a contract until it was unlocked, but you could only buy it at the full retail price, forfeiting any subsidies.

$500 with a required contract is a subsidised device; it doesn't really matter how you phrase it. AT&T paid for it to be exclusive and the retail price would have been set taking that into account. If it wasn't there'd be no reason for Apple to allow a carrier exclusive with a required contract - the buyer would own the device.

The original iPhone was unsubsidized and it was GSM only, so there wasn't an option to offer it on Sprint and Verizon then. The 4 Gb iPhone was $499 and the 8Gb one was $599. Because Apple was new to phones, they only wanted to deal with one carrier initially.

Back then, you could get a Treo or a Blackberry for less than half as much, as they were subsidized by the carriers.

And because paying that much for a phone at that time impeded sales, Apple discontinued the 4 Gb model and dropped the price of the 8 Gb model to $399 two months after it was released. They also "gave in" to the subsidy model, since that was the standard practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation)#Releas...

It was clear to me that there was a phase change when the iTunes store came out - wow, was that 2003? Anyway, the reason I am not rich is because I didn't believe in Steve Jobs, so I didn't have the faith to hold AAPL stock forever. But the iTunes store was the point at which it was clear something spectacular was happening and Apple was moving in to a new world, compared to the days when the WSJ constantly called them "beleaguered".

in 2007, it was a widespread analyst consensus that iPhone will fail, since competing phones have obv. better specs

> So would the success of (...) Docker and Kubernetes and (...) and microservices

It's hard to tell if they're a success. With enough time and money you can make almost everything work. It does not mean that there weren't better alternatives available.

Tesla? Why would anyone on HN doubt survival of Tesla?

Except making impossible claims about delivery deadlines, they weren't mentioned in any especial sins worth mentioning. And Tesla Roadster looked definitely like the big future in 2008.

Probably because they are burning through cash and aren’t profitable yet. They’ve had some close calls with running out of money in the past.

That's fine, why not? Isn't this the whole startup thing? Burn money until you IPO or get acquired? Otherwise it is look down at as 'revenue business'.

Because Tesla was David vs Goliath. The laptop market and especially the phone market were much more open to newcomers.