I didn’t get one until the 3G came out, but I have a very clear memory of the “wow!” feeling: right after buying the phone, I went down the street to a coffee shop and started browsing the web while waiting in line. I was instantly cured of my prior skepticism that it could actually be a major improvement over my flip phone + iPod.

Also GPS maps with that shiny glass dot. You bought a phone, and you got a GPS navigator for free.

I had a friend who had just bought a high end Nokia. We arranged to meet for lunch. She got hopelessly lost because Nokia's GPS and mapping were crap.

Apple's just worked. Same with the App Store.

I'd guess this is going to have some kind of VApp Store. But I suspect what it really needs is plain old MacOS running everything as usual, with slightly customised support for virtual displays.

I don't have much to add except for a "back in my day" story:

I still remember when the only option for GPS directions was buying a dedicated Garmin, or paying your cell carrier for an extremely crappy and very expensive service that was hard to use because phone screens were too small. Everyone I knew used printed map quest for directions.

GPS being standard on smart phones is just so flipping good compared to what we had before and am positive is still the killer app that pushes people to get smart phones.

It’s worth remembering the original iPhone did not have GPS at all. It had google maps for calling up information like you would with map quest, but no turn by turn/live navigation

It had basic geolocation feature though so you could mostly see where you were on a map which was still very useful compared to flip phones

Cellular triangulation worked really well on the classic iPhone - if you were in a very crowded place. In more rural areas, you could be off by many kilometers. I’m not sure if they had Wi-Fi SSID location back then.

I remember Garmin and TomTom share price dropping when Google announced it was adding turn by turn navigation to Google Maps. It was an amazing time.

Original Maps in iPhone was actually Google Maps.

This make astonishing growth in Google Maps.

Of course, with Google, nothing is "free" free.

Google tracks your location so that they can track ad conversions based on store-visits (no I'm not kidding).

Not sure what maps your friend was using, Nokia S60 series has Google Maps, it’s not bad compared to original iPhone. I could use keyboard to zoom in and out, after log in all the layered map stuff works. In comparison, iPhone’s Google Maps didn’t have turn by turn navigation till a while later.

Yep I actually remember standing on the sidewalk on my lunch break outside of a cafe, and I pulled up the Reddit website.

It sounds so incredibly unrelatable in 2023, but you have to put yourself in that time. Web browsing was just something you did at work, or at home. Period. Visiting that website while on the sidewalk was really one of the major game-changers in my life.

In Spring 2008 I got my first iPhone as a hand me down from my brother. He didn’t like it at all, since iPhone OS 1 was very limited and went back to Windows Mobile. However, I became a very spoiled kid with access to Wikipedia at the age of 14 in a classroom, at least 3 years before smartphones became mainstream. It most certainly didn‘t improve my character to have such an expensive phone at that age.

And Visual Voice Mail—that was a huge step forward.

Believe it or not, my carrier finally got visual voicemail in 2022.

Just in time for regular phone calls to be on their way out.

There were also hundreds of phones doing that already. And phones with touchscreens.

I guess we’ll need to wait to see what happens with this. Apple has a good track with proving tech literate people wrong.