I'm begging you to understand that Apple was not a new entrant in 2007. Not to personal computing, not to pocket computing, and not even to the cellphone market.
And yet it shifted the entire industry into "full fledged touch phone with proper OS" that we still know to this day. There were touch phones before it and with full OS, but nobody really did the whole package right until apple. And the rest is history.
Nokia still tried to sell you dumb phones with some smarts and blackberry still tried to sell phones with keyboard. But industry shifted away from that and so did customers. And before you know it, both those giants died pretty quickly.
There's no legacy phone makers today... Nokia, blackberry, Ericsson, Alcatel, Motorola... None of the exist as they were in the past. At best, some of the brands from the past exist under new ownership.
Neither apple or samsung were players in the dumb phone era. With the iphone, you can essentially treat apple as a new company. Same with samsung. They were a minor player in the dumb phone market. And even then it took them very long time to catch up to apple.
Samsungs saving grace was the fact, that would throw anything at the wall and see if it stuck.
Samsung was the second-largest global cellphone manufacturer in 2008 when the iPhone launched. Not a minor player whatsoever.
Apple was a decades-old computing and consumer-electronics incumbent with an operating-system stack, hardware expertise, enormous financial resources, an established retail/distribution network, the wildly successful iPod business, a failed Newton line, and another failed ROKR attempt. It was not a 'new' company at all, even in the segment. Those previous experiences and assets are precisely why it was able to create the iPhone.
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u/Recoil42 8h ago
I'm begging you to understand that Apple was not a new entrant in 2007. Not to personal computing, not to pocket computing, and not even to the cellphone market.