I bought an innovative new convertible tablet from HP in 2008. I now appreciate Apple's hesitancy to implement innovative designs before they're ready for prime-time. Sometimes, quality of execution is more innovative than the concept.
I still have a vintage 2010 HP TouchSmart tm2 sitting around. It was certainly an early execution of the convertible idea, and I appreciate it for that. Doesn't stop me from also appreciating my modern Surface Book 2 and Dell XPS 13, though.
Anyway, that's basically the creation myth of the iPhone, no? That it supposedly was basically iterated on for quite a few years before the technology got to the point where a high-quality execution was allowed. I also had Windows Mobile smartphones and remember the iPhone releasing. I didn't recognize or appreciate that difference then.
I also had WM phones at the time of the iPhone release. Most WM users at the time, myself included, were power-users who criticized the iPhone for a lack of features and never actually bought one. I couldn't install my network scanning app, connect to exchange, or even copy/paste with the iPhone, so what was the point?
Turns out I was entirely wrong: Apple wasn't positioning this phone for IT/business professionals for corporate use. They were building a consumer product. The feature set they were prioritizing was entirely counter-intuitive from my perspective. The features that I thought were gimmicks at the time ended up being the features that made it successful: natural multi-touch input, a (then) gigantic screen, and a bare-bones UI/UX. It had nothing that I wanted or needed, but it had everything that they needed to open up the market to millions of people who weren't using HTC bricks on their Verizon corporate plan that their IT admin configured for them.
Just search "windows mobile" on YouTube and look back at the awful (but feature filled!) experiences we used to think was awesome. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXDgsZvSTP8
