The vast majority of the market didn't need an iPhone at all until it was introduced. If you enable compelling enough use cases people will find ways for them to fit their workflows, and/or come up with brand new ones.
The biggest hurdle standing in the way is that making a single one of iPhone/iPad/Mac too powerful (in terms of usability, not just raw processing power) will take away sales from the other two.
The vast majority of the market didn't need an iPhone at all until it was introduced. If you enable compelling enough use cases people will find ways for them to fit their workflows, and/or come up with brand new ones.
It was a compelling value proposition to Crackberries of the era; Apple clearly did market research before flinging it to the masses. Danger Inc / Google were already converging on this with their first Android.
The biggest hurdle standing in the way is that making a single one of iPhone/iPad/Mac too powerful (in terms of usability, not just raw processing power) will take away sales from the other two.
Cannibalising their product line is probably the most plausible explanation, but I'm sceptical. I reckon it's just that they haven't found a "killer" use case for it and probably bottom in the list of ideas for improving the product (if it even made a list).
Yeah, the appetite for something iPhone like had been clear for quite some time, Apple was just the first to pull off a really solid version. Getting the touch interface right was a big factor.
But for earlier examples, I had a Palm VII back in 1999. I was working for a CRM reseller and we got one to play with as a potential solution for a client project.
It was super limited but being able to browse the web while on the go was immediately obvious as a very big deal. BlackBerries didn't get web until a couple years later but I'm sure users of that would say something similar.
There have been numerous attempts at dockable phones over the years.
> The biggest hurdle standing in the way is that making a single one of iPhone/iPad/Mac too powerful (in terms of usability, not just raw processing power) will take away sales from the other two.
No it won’t. Nobody is cross-shopping a full size laptop with screen and keyboard or a phone with a tiny screen and no keyboard.
the most recent attempt with linux is pretty good, but it was held back by the slow hardware and driver support.
If the pinephone had enough power to record a video, and maybe better waydroid integration I would use it. I like the convenience of using the same apps as on my laptop, and being able to develop on the same platform that I am targeting. That is a unique selling point.
Apple has the funding to do this, but they choose not to. It would damage their whole market segmentation scheme. It is a penetration strategy
> I like the convenience of using the same apps as on my laptop, and being able to develop on the same platform that I am targeting. That is a unique selling point.
And almost all of my apps have iPhone, iPad and Mac versions with cloud syncing of the data between them.
It’s just a flag for developers to allow iPad apps to run on ARM based Macs without any modifications.
> *and being able to develop on the same platform that I am targeting. That is a unique selling point.*
With ARM based Macs, they basically are the same except for the screen size. Compilation speed would be much slower on an iPhone than a Mac.
When the iPhone was introduced, the worldwide penetration of cell phones was already 1 billion. Jobs said he wanted to sell 10 million or 1% of the market during the first year.
The iPad and the Mac combined is 20% of Apple’s revenue. People buy iPads because they want a larger screen.
I mean you can carry around a portable USB C monitor and plug it into your iPhone today. I have one that gets power and video from one USB cord for my laptop. But most people don’t want to do that.
> I mean you can carry around a portable USB C monitor and plug it into your iPhone today. I have one that gets power and video from one USB cord for my laptop. But most people don’t want to do that.
Have some imagination? I know plenty of folks that use their phone as their main computer, but could use more screen space on occasion to finish a complex task at a desk with a mouse and keyboard.
Something like phone mirroring that utilizes the full display (Perhaps full macOS?) would be amazing for that use case. Could be wireless or a magsafe stand, or even a homepod-style handoff thing with the phone’s nfc chip.
The hardware for this is pretty much there, Apple just needs to productize it.
Okay you can already use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse on an iPhone and the USB powered portable monitor I have can be used with my USB C iPhone. Because of power constraints, it can only drive the display up to 50% brightness. But you can plug power up to the other USB C port on my monitor to power the display at full brightness and charge the phone.
This is my iPhone 16 Pro Max with my external portable monitor. The phone is connected with a standard USB C cord and the Anker battery is plugged in with another USB C cord into the monitor.
That’s really neat, I just wish Apple would go all-in on monitor support.
There’s no good reason I shouldn’t be able to plug my phone into my Studio Display when I need a bit more room to work on a task I started on my phone. Yes, there’s handoff between iOS & macOS, but it’s very tied to specific apps, and requires another Mac that may not really be necessary.
Well, that monitor has a just a regular old monitor with two USB C ports and a mini HDMI port. I am connecting it with a regular USB C to USB C cord. There is no reason you can’t use a standard USB C to HDMI cord to connect the phone to your Studio Display.
What work would you start on your phone that doesn’t either have an app on your Mac where everything is synced via cloud services and/or there isn’t a web app where you can’t start on one and keep going on another?
I can already use GSuite (work and personal), Office365 (personal subscription), and iWorks across my Mac, iPhone, and iPad using apps and/or the web and things automatically sync and of course notes, calendar, mail, messages, Slack, etc are synced between everything.
My personal Trello board is synced between all of them and even my third party podcast app - Overcast - has an iPhone, iPad, Mac and web interface that syncs.
The biggest hurdle standing in the way is that making a single one of iPhone/iPad/Mac too powerful (in terms of usability, not just raw processing power) will take away sales from the other two.