Hindsight Is Hilarious: 5 Times Everyone Was So Wrong About The iPhone

It’s the 10th Anniversary of Apple’s game-changing phone/ipod/email/life-ruler, the iPhone. Happy Birthday tiny device that has made it so that we are now unable to sit quietly with our thoughts for even a nanosecond before we feel the urge to stroke your shiny exterior again.

When the iPhone hit the shelves 10 years ago, there was a lot of skeptics among the tech journalists of the era. Reading their scathing reception of the device that has profoundly altered our culture in the decade since is pretty funny. Especially given that the likelihood is you are currently reading this on the supposedly doomed-to-fail iPhone.

Advertising Age wrote “The iPhone will be a major disappointment” in an article boldly titled Why the iPhone Will Fail, their’main quibble apparently?being that it was a convergence device and that consumers typically didn’t take to multifunctionality. Riiiiight. Imagine having as many devices as there are uses on iPhone all rattling around in our handbags all day. Hang on, let me just grab out my email box, my wireless, my camera obscura and my Facebook tablet.

MarketWatch was equally doubtful: “These phones go in and out of style so fast that unless Apple has half a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately successful, will be pass? within 3 months.” Their headline advised Apple to “pull the plug on the iPhone”!

TechCrunch trumpeted “We Predict The iPhone Will Bomb” in their headline, followed by a litany of complaints about the low battery life, cracked screens et al. All things that we do admittedly complain endlessly?about and yet tolerate such is our devotion to the iPhone.

Even?The Guardian was pretty sure that the iPhone would be “set to struggle”.

Perhaps the most ironic quote of all came from TheStreet.com who emphatically maintained “The iPhone isn’t the future. It isn’t a revolutionary mobile device ushering in a new era.”

Photo by?Bruno Gomiero?on?Unsplash