I cant find the quote and article now, but I read that before it was released no one else believed a computer like that could have any reasonable battery life. Then they opened it up and discovered the iPhone was really just a battery with a small logic board attached to it, and a lot of the heavy computational lifting was done when it connected to your computer.
Can you expand on what you mean? What heavy computational lifting?
I wish I could find the original article, it was a link from a link from the bibliography of Chip War.
I think it was things like how you couldn't initially purchase music, and had to sync to iTunes to do that. I think there was more.
I did find this article, on iPhone being basically just a battery: https://mathiasmikkelsen.com/2011/05/blackberry-makers-thoug...
The first iphone indeed had rather poor battery performance, epsecially at that steep price of 500$..