Comment by cruffle_duffle

The thing was all the faults with that iPhone was software. You can update software. Lack of copy & paste was a software feature that was no doubt in some product backlog for a while before getting picked up. And once it got picked up and shipped, suddenly every device people bought had that feature.

I don’t recall any of my older phones having software updates that had major new features. Any update would have been some esoteric bug fixes or something.

The idea that the phone was just another general purpose computer with an operating system that could be updated to a significantly changed interface was not a concept that existed in the mainstream at the time.

All the players before were hardware manufacturers who were deeply in bed with the carriers. Phones were locked with whatever software happened to be installed at the time. Each phone had very different software that was fixed and unchanging. The entire ecosystem was built around that and Apple came along and made that model obsolete.