Version History: iPhone 4

30:07They moved to the fall release schedule right after this one. this is also when they started calling it iOS this is iOS 4 so like kind of a new idea about how we're going to do iPhone stuff here we actually have the iPhone 4 right here the most beautiful phone ever made if you'd like to hold it and have feelings about it well we're going to talk about holding it soon I'm sure oh sure yes we are easily the most beautiful although this is running iOS 7 so yeah it's not it's not quite the same it's not quite the same experience but so the iPhone 4 was just to refresh your memory a little bit about it the new design was the thing as we've talked about but there was actually like a lot of new stuff about this It was the thinnest smartphone in the world at the time.

30:40It had the A4 chip, which was the first app custom Apple Silicon in the iPhone. Look at this. Look at what I'm saying. This is my 17 Pro Max. Look at this. It's like two iPhone 4s. This is nonsense. It's outrageous. It's smaller than the like cell window on the back of my 17 Pro Max. That's great. So this was the first time custom Apple Silicon had shown up in an iPhone. It had shown up in the iPad earlier in the same year. but this was like a big chip move for Apple to make this phone. The A4. The A4. It had the retina display. It had a front facing camera and it could do FaceTime. It had a five megapixel rear camera that was a big improvement over what it had before.

31:20Battery life was still measured in talk time, which is a fact that I just find adorable. That's true. But this one had 40 % more than the previous one. So you could talk on the phone because that's apparently what people did. Even though ironically, Walt, as you point out in your review of this phone, the single worst thing about the iPhone was making phone calls with it. But anyway, it also, this was the first iPhone that foreshadowing for a thing to come here in a little bit worked on CDMA networks. So this is like, this is actually, whether you like this phone the most or not, kind of a like step change in a bunch of directions for Apple in terms of like how it makes the iPhone and what the iPhone is.

32:02Well, that's what I meant about how it set the template. I think seminal is exactly the right word for it. And it was seminal. Part of it was the design, which despite that size difference Neelai just showed, and I remember saying the screen was the same size, but it was considerably thinner. It was actually not lighter than the 3GS. Right. It's a pretty serious piece of equipment. Yeah. Yeah, they put a bigger battery in than the 3GS had. And I think that they could have made it lighter, but they took the opportunity to put a bigger battery in. They sold 1.7 million of them in the first three days.

32:44Jobs called it the most successful product launch in Apple's history. The reviews were like universally great, except for one thing. Like this is about as consistent a set of reviews for a product as I can ever remember. Everybody said, like, Walt, I'll quote you to you. You said, I'd say that Apple has built a beautiful smartphone that works well, adds impressive new features, and is still overall the best device in its class. And then you wrote, like, three paragraphs about how much you hated AT &T. And this is a theme. Like, David Pogue, who was then reviewing stuff for The New York Times, also loved the phone, also had network issues.

33:21Ed Big, who was writing for USA Today, also loved the phone, also had network issues. Josh Sapolsky, writing for Engadget, also loved the phone, also had network issues. Like this was the thing. It was very clear that this was a great phone, completely hamstrung by the network that it was working on. I also, in that column and in a number of subsequent columns or previous columns, said you definitely want this, but you should not buy it unless you're certain that you have reasonable AT &T coverage because otherwise, forget it. Yeah, yeah, it was a brick without good AT &T coverage in a very real way.

34:03And so again, this thing is like doing super well. People are really excited about it. AT &T is a disaster. And then drama number two hits almost immediately. Like within a few days of this phone starting to ship to people, a bunch of people start to notice the same thing, which is that if you hold the phone in your hand with your hand covering the bottom left corner of it, so basically if you sort of nestle it into the palm of your left hand, is generally what people were doing, your reception starts to die. And you can sort of watch it tick down, bar by bar by bar. This becomes a thing people start making videos about, people start talking about on nascent social media platforms.

34:48Here's just one video that I enjoyed very much that I think is, again, a very on-brand and of the moment YouTube video that actually did pretty well. Pick it up. I'm going to hold it in the same direction and just slightly elevated, but my hands are wrapped around the sides of the iPhone. And as I do that, you can see the bars begin to decrease one after another. Oh my God, I have like a physical memory of this video. Yeah, right? And you can see up in the, it's got the reception in the top left corner and it just ticks down. Yep, bar after bar after bar. So this, if memory serves, like almost immediately goes from a thing a couple of people have noticed to like full-blown fiasco.

35:41So the gadget logs, which again was my universe at the time, we're gonna cover every inch of this, right? The iPhone 4 is out. It's the thing that everyone's talking about. We're going to publish every video of everyone trying to make the signal drop when you hold it. We're going to test holding it ourselves. You know, our comments are all lit up. You know, the design of the phone was new. The antenna was incorporated into that outer band. There's a million stories about how Apple's sense of design has gotten over, you know, traditional wireless engineering. You got your Nokia fanboys and Motorola fanboys in the comments being like, the real cell phone companies would never let this happen.

36:19I mean, this was, at least in our corner of the universe, as big a story as could exist. The thing that really surprised me is that it broke out. Yes. And it really did. It broke out into the mainstream. And this is a thing I always think about is when does a gadget story hit the local news? And I lived in Chicago at the time. And, like, when does ABC7 in Chicago start covering gadgets? Like, you know something is going to go sideways. Right? You know, something else has happened and the story will take on a different shape. And it's always that's the that's the symbol to me. Right. When is the local news decide this is important enough?

36:56And the iPhone 4 antenna hit the local news in like two hours. I don't think there's been a gadget story like it ever since where it immediately went to Steve Jobs's baby has a problem. Yes. No, that's I think that's exactly right. One thing I very much enjoyed about this is I think one of the the moment that helped it break out was somebody sent Steve Jobs an email basically being like, this is a problem. Are you aware of it? And Jobs replies and he says, not you're holding it wrong, which is how everybody remembers. This is like a weird Mandela effect thing. He doesn't say you're he never says, as far as I can tell, you're holding it wrong.

37:36What he says is just avoid holding it that way. and this becomes like an admission of guilt right because he's saying it happens yeah it is broken just don't don't hold it like that and and so everybody takes this and this pours so much more fuel on the fire that all of a sudden it's like okay this is not an isolated incident you've you've now acknowledged this is when it gets the problem and this is when it becomes antenna gate and once it has the name it's all over it's a great as soon as it becomes a gate like what are you what are It's out of hand. I do feel like this like slightly diminishes both the actual events and the history and legacy of Watergate.

38:13But it was intended. Yes. And it got the name because he sent that email. So Steve Jobs, basically like three weeks after the phone launches, ends up giving a press conference to address this, which is like unheard of. He flew back from a vacation in Hawaii and this was one year before he died. He was very sick. interesting he was very sick in fact the first time i saw the ipad which neil i leaked but the first time i saw it i i had to go to his house and see it in his living room because he was so sick that he he wasn't uh consistently going into the office and he still had it covered by the way in in a gray cloth on his coffee table and he just pulled it out.

39:03But anyway, so he was sick. He was in Hawaii, presumably to try to get better. I don't know. And he flew back and did that press conference. And he was, I can't describe this press conference as anything other than just like a 20 minute exercise in passive aggression. I was there. It was aggression, aggression. That's fair. I agree. It was just aggression, aggression. You're right. I agree. I was in there. Josh Chpalski and I were in that room together. Yeah. Walt, I bet you were there. And he was just like, you idiots. Yeah. All the phones do this. And then he showed us all the phones from all of his competitors attenuating their signal when you held it anywhere near the antenna.

39:43Yeah. And he was like, did you even check? I checked. Here's all the phones. All the phones are doing this. And by the way, they ran that video or they made a more cohesive video showing all the other major phones doing this, which they somehow, I don't think it was a TV ad, but they put it out into the world for about two days and then it went away. I forgot about that. That's really funny. Yeah, because it wanted everybody to see it. They wanted this idea. But it was incredibly convincing. It didn't let them off the hook totally because none of these other phones had external antennas where, you know, you could block it.

40:23You couldn't attenuate it, but you were attenuating an internal antenna by pressing on the outside. Wait a minute. Let me just play you a short clip from it just so you can get the vibes. We started getting some reports of people having issues with the antenna system, which is a very advanced new antenna system. And the problems they were saying, obviously Gizmodo put their video on the web, people were touching, X marks the spot here, and they were seeing a large drop in bars. And this has been since dubbed Antenagate. So, we heard about this not long after we started shipping, just 22 days ago from today.

41:11And so we've been working our butts off for the last 22 days to understand what the real issues are here. Once again, I would just like to say to every tech executive out there, they listen to our show, they pay attention to us, they certainly listen to Walt. Walt, if you could underline this message for me, that'd be great. If they could start talking like regular people and say we've been working our butts off a little more often, I think we'd all be better off. But so Jobs ends up, I think, I agree with you, Walt, that he ends up making a very convincing case that this is like a normal thing that happens to a lot of phones.

41:42And then he offers two actual reasons that this is happening, maybe more to Apple than to most other phones. One is, we have sold a lot of phones and nobody else cares. Which is a very funny and iPhone-y way to think about the world. I think they said like 0.1 % of the calls to Apple support were about this. Yeah. But then he offers two things about the device that I thought were really interesting. One, and he says in that clip, X marks the spot. The thing that Apple did is show you where the antenna is in a way that a lot of phones didn't. And it's a phone you touch and move around, and they both put it in the wrong place and showed you where it was for it to be in your hand.

42:23I think it was the seam between two antennas. I don't know if it was the Wi-Fi antenna and the phone antenna, but it was a seam between them. Yeah. And then he also blamed, as you were just talking about, well, the algorithm that determines how many bars Apple shows at any given time. And you'll notice that in that clip you played, he said people have been noticing that the bars are increasing. He did not say people have been noticing that the calls are dropping more. Right. But I went back and reread my column just as you did. And in my tests, I did find the bars dropping more on the new phone in certain places, the usual dead spots I knew about around my area.

43:18But it was the bars. I mean, it wasn't necessarily the cause. Right. And I think I yeah, it was very funny going back to this because I find myself basically completely thinking Steve Jobs was right because they issued the software change to change the bars and they offer these free bumper cases to everybody. Because if you had a case on your phone, it didn't like conduct electricity on your hand the same way. And it more or less solved the problem. So they're like, we'll give you he very passive aggressively says, we'll give you a refund if you want it. Yeah. knowing full well nobody was going to take Apple up on this, but then offers free bumper cases to everybody who has an iPhone 4, but is clearly just so enraged that this is a scandal at all.

44:01So at the back end of this presentation, he does the presentation, he makes this offer. He then took the press into Apple's wireless testing rooms at the Apple office. So a really interesting thing about that video you just showed is the spaceship had not yet been built. Right. And that room that he was in was tiny. That theater at Infinite Loop, I don't know if you remember this. It was teeny tiny. It was called Town Hall. Town Hall. It was teeny tiny. It was tiny. And there was an even tinier one called the Piano Bar, like right down the way. I never was in the Piano Bar. And they would do events in these tiny rooms.

44:34And so he was talking to a room of, I don't know, maybe 200 people that were right on top of him. Like we were right there. There was no distance the way there is at Apple Park or in the big theater or on the internet now. And then we all were taken to like, look at the wireless testing facility. Cause they're like, look, we tried hard. We're better at this than you. And what they came up with was the bars are confusing you and here's a bumper. Shut up. And I think they added a bar. I think they went from four bars to five or three bars to four. It seems very clear that they changed the algorithm to just have more bars.

45:10Yeah. Yeah. And he even said, we've been doing this wrong the whole time. Yeah. Yeah. we have screwed up the bar thing, but now we're fixing it. But what I want to highlight is the extent to which this wasn't like a presentation the way people perceive Apple events to be presentations now. It wasn't like Tim Cook swooping around in CGI being like, you will have a new iPad to millions of people. It was Steve Jobs basically like this far away from you being like, shut up.

45:47he was like just telling this group of people that they were going to get over it yeah and here's how we were going to get over it and it's that does not happen anymore it also worked super well it worked it worked it worked perfectly the scandal just immediately went away yeah like immediately went away it's crazy uh but anyway so yeah so they they offer the bumper cases they They issue this off-tar change and it just absolutely, antenna gate just disappears. And my memory of it had been that this was like an actual scandal and it just wasn't. It was like 10 days of everybody being like, oh my God.

46:23And then Steve Jobs was like, shut up. And everybody just did. And this goes down in the various biographies and the oral histories of all the Steve Jobs moments. This, I think, is in, among the people who knew him, who've talked about it, this is one of his finest moments that he was like, I'm going to come back. I think he brought his son with him to all the meetings. His son was very young. He's like, I want him to see how I do this. And he's like, I'm going to shut this down. And then his ability to tell a story and make good, because he did make good. He did offer the refunds as passive-aggressively as he offered the refunds.

46:57He offered the refunds. He said, we're going to do the bumper. But he told the story of what the problem was, how Apple was going to solve it, and why you were stupid. And everyone was like, yep, master storyteller Steve Jobs has done it again in a way that I think no other company, no other tech executive has ever really been able to do. He did. And I was surprised. I know there was a lot of news coverage, even on the local station in Chicago, but and other local stations. But when I went back and read not only my own review, but the Gadget review and the Times review and all those other reviews, people hardly ever mentioned having any lesser bar i i mentioned it mine was one graph uh much less than what i wrote about facetime for instance yeah and i said it's a bug apple couldn't explain it but they say they're going to fix it and the bug was the bars right not the cause.

47:58As it turned out, it was like even, it was very funny going back and watching this press conference because it sounds like shenanigans to just be like, no, it's not a real problem. We're just going to fix how many bars it shows. That'll make it go away. But it turns out that did in fact make it go away. But the Verizon piece is the last turn of this story because Antenna Gate blows over. The phone keeps selling super well. This winds up being a huge success. Like after all of this chaos, the iPhone 4 was a wildly successful iPhone. but the biggest last turn was in January of the next year so we're into 2011 when Verizon starts selling the iPhone for the first time and Verizon ran a Super Bowl ad advertising that it was getting the iPhone and I have that ad for you and I'm going to play it because it's hilarious

48:51it's just shadowy pictures of the iPhone it's beautiful it's intelligent it is beautiful even genius but does your network work yes i can hear you now this is america's largest and most reliable network horizon built so you can rule the air this is just an attack out against at &t that's all this is it's fabulous and they used that guy who was the symbol of their other ads yeah so that even before they said the word verizon you immediately knew this was a verizon ad yep it worked super well uh as it turns out the verizon and apple had been negotiating to do something since 2008 so it's like the apple was desperately ready to get out of this exclusivity deal and jumped it as far as i I can tell the first moment it was able to.

49:50Well, because Verizon was the other biggest company. There's a sequence of events that happened starting around this time where every quarter Apple sells more iPhones than had ever been previously considered. And it's because they were just lighting up new carriers in new countries. Yep. And eventually, like some smart analysts is like, they're running out of countries. Right. Like this growth will stop because there's not just another China mobile. You can't just turn on another place. Yeah. They're like, they're going to have to go to Mars. But at this point, there was a long way to go on that road.

50:19There's a long way to go. And this is the beginning of the just sharp upward turn in iPhone 6. Yeah, totally. And so the other part I like about this is the Verizon iPhone also shipped with the personal hotspot feature for the first time, which is just another flex on AT &T. Not only can you come do things, come do more data on our network. Let's do this. Do you remember where they announced the Verizon iPhone? I don't. It was at CES. Of course. So Apple loves to upstage CES. and so in the middle of CS we're all in Vegas we're covering whatever Palm Pre 2 is happening whatever nonsense is going on and we get Apple invites and so everyone in Vegas gets on a plane and flies to San Francisco to I believe it was the Moscone Center go to a big press conference and Steve Jobs is like yeah same phone on a different hour also comes in white now and everyone's like that's it and this is the biggest story on all of our traffic charts everything in CS is like down here white iPhone 4 on Verizon is way up here The white iPhone 4 was sick, though.

51:16It never shipped. It looked so good. It looked really good, but the white iPhone 4 on Verizon did not ship. It took until the iPhone 4S. They couldn't figure it out. Yeah, they had some, they actually ended up giving a statement on the white one because it was such a thing. I wrote this down. It says, white models of Apple's new iPhone 4 have proven more challenging to manufacture than expected. And as a result, they will not be available until the second half of July. The availability of the more popular iPhone 4 black models is not affected. I love, shut up. I love them saying the iPhone 4 in black is more popular than the non-existent iPhone 4 in white.

51:51Don't look too hard at this. That's very good. Also, before it died, the iPhone 4 became the first iPhone to sell on Sprint. Yeah. Like, this was Apple opening up in a big way. And this was like, yet again, this is a seminal iPhone, right? This is the one. It escapes the confines. So, all right. So, this is basically where the iPhone 4 story ends. It ends up being, it's the most popular phone in the world until it's replaced by the iPhone 4S, which becomes the most popular phone in the world. Because they lit up more carriers. This is the beginning of that sequence. Apple is at the, like, truly, like, legendary run of phone growth is fully kicked off.

52:29We need to take a break, and then we're going to go back and we're going to answer the eight version history questions, including whether this thing gets into the Hall of Fame. All right, we're back. It's time for the version history questions. We ask the same eight questions about every product to see where it lands. The first question is, where does this thing belong on the time matrix? The time matrix is idea versus time. It belongs in one of four quadrants. Was it the right idea at the right time? Wrong idea at the wrong time. Where does this one belong? This is the easiest one. This is just the top right.

53:05Right idea, right time. There's no... Yeah, I 100 % agree. The only argument here is that AT &T was not ready. AT &T was not ready for sure. But yeah, I think the things this phone was doing, it did correctly and at the right time. We have not even talked about FaceTime, which Apple promised to open source and never did. I'm fully shocked that Apple didn't open source a hugely successful piece of software. All right, I think this one's easy. I think you're right. I think it's right idea, right time. Yeah, this is maybe the easiest one I've ever had. This phone just, it hit the way that it was supposed to hit.

53:42Best iPhone ever. Okay, so question number two, was this peak anything? And the first version of this was this peak iPhone. For as much as Apple wants to pretend that it changes the design of the iPhone ever so often, they haven't. They still look exactly like this. It's just much bigger now. They still make glass and metal sandwiches. This one also had a headphone jack, which makes it better than everyone that didn't have a headphone jack. You know, I don't want to say it, but it did have a headphone jack. This was a design object. When you look at, John Gruber says this a lot, when you look at the icons of phones out in the world, they look like iPhone 4s.

54:18Yes. This is what phones look like. You know, until folding phones hit whatever cultural moment they'll hit next, this is a phone. This is what a phone is. I actually prefer the size. Like, I think if phones never got big, like, maybe democracy would be safer. You know? Like, we might live in a different world. I would like that to be a crazier theory than it actually is. I'm just saying. Yeah, I think this is peak fun. This is that moment. Wait, peak... Let's bring this in a little. Peak phone shape is what you're saying. Peak phone design. Peak phone, everyone... There's no way this is peak phone.

55:02No. Well, okay, let me define peak phone. And I'm curious for Walt's perspective on this too. If you were in it at that moment, you knew it was happening. Like you could tell like, oh, things are changing now. People care about these phones in a way that they didn't before. And this one is beautiful and it's the one to have. And it is culturally important that this phone exists in a way that a new iPhone event does not feel like that anymore. I agree. Walt, what do you think about all this? Peak phone? I hate to agree with Nelai again, but I do. But I mean, I think we need to explain, and I hope we agree on this, peak means not necessarily the best.

55:47It means a moment where nothing that has come since has fundamentally changed the idea of the product. That's right. It's the spikiest spike in the chart, I think. Yeah. And I just everything Eli said is right. I mean, just to remind you, this changed the world in a way that the four didn't because nothing like this existed before. But you don't see any bulbous phones anymore. you just you know compared to the iphone 4 which i agree with nilai all the phones except the foldable ones which as far as i'm concerned might as well not exist in terms of people's use of them they look like the iphone 4 yeah they're they're they have i I mean, Apple certainly has glass on both sides.

56:56The flat phone, the corners, the whole thing, tiny changes. But really, if you looked at this today, if they brought this out today with all the current specs, but they design a bit. And the fact that it had FaceTime and a front camera. And a headphone jack. And the headphone jack. If Apple brought out a phone today with a headphone jack, instant. There are a bunch of iPhone mini fans out there who are just screaming with joy at this idea. And I would just tell you that the sales of the iPhone mini may put a damper on that theory, Walt. But I like where your head is. My wife still has an iPhone SE.

57:43That's what she likes. Fair enough. I do feel I should say out loud once before this episode ends that the iPhone 5 was a better phone. I just, I need to be on record having said that the iPhone 5 was a better phone. There's a lot of people who write the iPhone 5 was the ultimate iPhone because it was the one with the iPhone. I think it was the best iPhone that has ever been made. All right, question number three. If knowing everything we know now, if you could time travel back and be the person in charge of the iPhone team around the iPhone 4 launch, is there anything you would change to make the product more successful?

58:13One I will offer you is move the antennas? Would it have mattered? Which they did with the FN4S. Yeah. They did redesign the antennas. And there is some history that Johnny Ives and Steve Jobs wanted the antennas to look like this and the wireless engineers at Apple told them this would be a problem in the design one over the engineers, which is a very common Apple thing. So I think that's the one. Okay. I would have open-sourced FaceTime. Open-sourced FaceTime? Yeah. You're like, shut up. I wouldn't have open-sourced FaceTime. Neither would Apple. Well, look, if I was the head of the iPhone team at any point in history, it would have been a disaster.

58:53So just to clear that up. Sure. But, yeah, the one thing I would have done was listen to the engineers, if Neelah is right, about their objections. And I wouldn't have, no matter how beautiful it was, and I've already said I considered it part of the beauty of the thing, I would have put it inside or done something different. Maybe I would have had one of the antennas as the outside bar so there wouldn't have been that seam and the other antenna inside. Whatever would have spared them this issue, which I agree with you, turned out to be basically a blip. The only other one I could think of is would I have tried to find a way to sell it like day and date on Verizon and have this be all one launch?

59:46Like we have this new iPhone and it is available now to everybody on Verizon, Sprint, and AT &T. I don't know if that makes a difference. That's a business decision, not an engineering or a design decision. That's true. And they obviously were working with Verizon. Verizon had already caved on who gets to control the phone because this was only, what, six months? but um uh in a way it gave them another opportunity to surprise everyone and and jack up iphone sales yeah they got to upstage ces yeah that's a victory that's probably i think they had some like timing with the at &t contract that they had to overcome right yeah yeah okay all right so question number four um will the youth ever make it cool again could the iphone 4 have a retro nostalgia moment.

1:00:43I do love this phone. I'm not going to lie. Like everyone in the office who has picked up this phone since we got it is immediately like phones should be like this again. Yeah. Bring this back. I mean, this is one of those things where the revealed preferences of people say much more than the things they actually say. Yes. Everyone says they want this phone and then everyone has the biggest phone. Big ass phones. Yeah. Not me. There you go. What do you have? What's your daily driver? I have never bought the big ass phone. I always have a standard phone. and I just like the feel of it better. It fits in my pockets better.

1:01:17So I have a 16 Pro right now because I no longer upgrade every year because I'm a poor pensioner. And it's because we're not paying you. I get it. Yeah. I'm sending you a theme here. Question number five. What feature, I fear this one's going to be very easy as we all look at this phone for two seconds. What feature of this device would you lift off of it and put onto current versions? The answer is the headphone jack. The answer is the headphone jack. The headphone jack. What's funny is there aren't all that many options because this actually originated so many things that are still in so many modern smartphones.

1:01:58Yeah. That like, I think the only two you could plausibly choose are the screen size and the headphone jack. And to me, the headphone jack is like the clear choice. Yeah, it's obviously a headphone jack. 100%. Okay. Yeah. All right. So now we have the three. I do want to point out that I have been, over time, extraordinarily vindicated about the headphone jack thing. You have. You've been annoying about it, but you've been right, which is the Neelai Patel special, I would say. Did you know I was right? It's nice to meet you. Now we have the three version history Hall of Fame questions. And, Walt, just so you know, we decide at the end of every episode whether something makes it into the version history Hall of Fame.

1:02:34And in order to get in, it has to satisfy three criteria. Criteria number one, did this product do something truly new? Yes. What? It created the phone as a cultural object in this specific way. And FaceTime. I don't think you can look aside FaceTime. I think FaceTime is the more credible argument of the two. Like the one is kind of squishy. It made FaceTime is more plausible. but like something truly the first iPhone did something truly new. Sure. This is mostly in that lineage to me. Well, what do you think? Is there something truly new here for you? Two things, both of which we've all mentioned or I've mentioned at least one of them, which is FaceTime, obviously.

1:03:25And I devoted a big chunk of my review to that. and uh then the template idea this is this is belongs in your hall of fame because this set the template in order to be hall of fame worthy this would have to be one of probably two iphones that belongs the only one it's the first one in this one i actually don't think you can make a case for any others really yep well do you agree with that if we're talking hall of fame yeah i I mean, I can make a case that newer iPhones are better. I think they are better. But Hall of Fame, because of that template thing and because of FaceTime, Hall of Fame. Okay, all right.

1:04:08Well, that's criteria number one. Criteria number two, was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad? And this one, I actually think, I think you can make a case that it is neither one. Yeah. And that actually, in fact, this thing is going to miss out on the Hall of Fame because its networking was bad. Like AT &T might kill this phone from the Hall of Fame. But it was on Verizon. Eventually. But still, it was the iPhone 4. It was on Verizon. No, it was. You're right. But even then, it only had 3G. You can't. I'm kidding. But I think. Being like the HTC Incredible keeps the iPhone 4 out of the Hall of Fame is brutal.

1:04:47This phone was very good. There's no question about that. But was it remarkable in that sense, even at the time? Yes, I'm going to say remarkably good. I think the design of this phone, the idea that a tech product could be this beautiful, could connect to the lineage of other extraordinarily high design, expensive devices like Leica cameras, but be mass market that had never existed before. That's all Steve Jobs. Like whatever legacy he had, that's the real legacy, right? Is you're going to care about design because I'm going to make you. and I'm going to do it in the most mass market way possible.

1:05:22That's the iPhone, really. There's nothing else. Nothing else was in the ballpark for years. All right. And then Hall of Fame criteria number three is, did it have a lasting impact? Yeah. I mean, that's the whole episode is about its lasting impact. So what I wonder in the frame of impact is, this was clearly the first of lots of things. But did it change the curve of anything because of its existence. Do you know what I mean? I think if Apple had put out an iPhone 4 that looked like the iPhone 3GS, no other manufacturer ever steps up its game to make aluminum and glass phones. It just simply does not happen, right?

1:06:05If Apple doesn't push forward, we're going to really care about the camera. And they really cared about the camera. I remember Phil Schiller talking about the camera on this phone in the 4S. Yeah. This is when they really started to care about the camera. And by the time they got to the sixth is when they started doing shot on iPhone. This is a very compressed period of time to Apple go from, oh, we threw a camera on the first iPhone and it looks like a potato to we really care about this camera, right? Instagram launches a few months after this phone does. Yeah, like there's just a moment in time where Apple, you know, we keep calling it the template, but the template is defined by how much Apple cares, right?

1:06:44They care about the way this phone looks. They care about how it's built. They unfortunately care about how the antenna works to its own detriment. They care about the camera, which I think is the lasting impact of the smartphone is cameras. I just don't think the rest of the industry does that without Apple pushing. I agree. I was surprised to see this in my review when I went back of the iPhone 4. I noted that, you know, there's this and that about the photos, but the videos are way better than anyone else's. And to this day, their videos are better than anyone else's, I think. And so, yeah, it's a Hall of Famer.

1:07:28I'm not going to lie. This feels bad to me. Like, all of your points are right, but inducting just the iPhone 4 feels insane. but I have no successful counter arguments to this. I'm telling you the only thing I think it might fail is I think it might not have been remarkably good. I think it was remarkably good. What I'm realizing is going forward on version history we're going to have to start doing many worse gadgets just so not as many things get in. We got to stop doing bangers here on version history. Yeah. We need some garbage. I think I'm okay. I think this one gets in. All right. Well, can I say in my defense in the Walter Isaacson book that Steve Jobs biography the authorized biography, the title of the chapter about Intenegate is called Design vs.

1:08:12Engineering. I didn't just pull this out of a hat. Oh, it makes perfect sense. Completely perfect sense. I'm not just a good journalist. I'm a good writer of book reports. I'm a good reader of other available journalism. We're very excited for you. All right, we are done here. Thank you. Thank you, Walt. And thank you, Nili. This has been a tremendous amount of fun. Thank you to everybody for watching and listening. If you want to support all of this that we're doing so that we can pay Walt for this next time, for the love of God, subscribe to The Verge. It's a good website. We're out here. We just need to buy more iPhones on eBay so we can keep seeing if they're in a good.

1:08:46We will be back soon with much more Version History. We'll see you then. Version History is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. It's produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branton, Eric Gomez, Owen Grove, Chris Gereza, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkin. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. studio support from Matthew Heffron our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland be sure to follow the version history feed wherever you get podcasts to get all of our new episodes as soon as they drop and if you want to support everything that we do here at the verge plus get access to all of our podcasts ad free subscribe to the verge thank you as always see you next time