Should we really believe that the tech. which allowed Apple to produce the 2008 iPhone did not exist in 2007?

Question

Steve Jobs said: "Just one year after launching the iPhone, we're launching the new iPhone 3G that is twice as fast at half the price."

That's fantastic, but should we genuinely believe that they couldn't have done it last year? It seems very convenient that they waited for all the Apple fanboys to fork out the full price for the 2007 model before launching a half-price version.....

Answer 1

Tempting to believe, it's true.  But the technology we had in the 1960's was pretty impressive, and the IC chips in the 1970's proved that the Future was Now.  But ownership of movies in the home was still the province only of millionaires.  In 1987, I was able to buy my very own full-powered computer that used a 4.77 MHz clock (not GHz), maxed at 640K RAM, 16-color monitor, and a huge 20 Mb hard drive.  Oh, yeah, and a printer that was only black & white, and consisted of little dots to create the images and text.  All for the unbelievable low price of $1,700 (plus tax).  And it could run one program at a time.  (Three years earlier, it cost my company $4,000 and that was with a 20% discount.)

The explosion in technology over the last 20 years has been inconceivable and it hasn't yet stopped, much as people might want to believe that.  It's not a matter of WHAT can be invented, but how to package, market, and sell it.

Where people used to wait 2 - 5 years for the next big innovation to come out, now it can happen in less than a year.  The evolution of technology is still accellerating and researchers often don't know what they can do until they've released a previous product into 'the wild' to see what can be done in reality to improve it.