How a fruity little number took the world by storm

10 October 2012

Jonathan Ive may not be a household name, but he deserves to be. For every household that has an iPad, iPod or iPhone in it, there should be someone thanking this man. Sir Jonathan is a London lad who has as much right to say he helped revive Apple's fortunes as did the late Steve Jobs; Ive was the lead designer behind these Apple products and many others.

One of Jonathan's projects, the iPhone, has been an incredible game-changer. There are 84 million iPads floating around the world and over 350 million iPods being listened to, but it was the iPhone which triggered the world’s love affair with smartphones. Over 240 million iPhones have been sold since it was launched in 2007 (whereas iPods have been out since 2001). The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, and for many people it is not even the best one. But it would be churlish to deny the fact that the iPhone was the torchbearer for a market that could see sales of over 1 billion smartphones a year by 2016.

The iPhone is now in its 6th generation with the recently released iPhone 5. It is light (112g, less than a dormouse), about as thick as an average pencil and comes with the fast and powerful Apple A6 chip. If the iPhone 5 was a dinosaur, it would be one of those "intelligent" velociraptors from Jurassic Park III. It's mean, it's hungry, it has teeth and it will bite a huge hole in your wallet or purse.

And how did this fruity little iPhone take the world by storm? Well as Jonathan Ive put it:

"It's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better."

The iPhone was a beautiful combination of form and function. It had a multi-touch touchscreen, a 32-bit CPU and 128MB of memory, practically making it a tiny computer as well as a telephone. Thanks to Apple's existing brand loyal customers and the fact it was an aesthetically pleasing product, the iPhone heralded the way for the smartphone industry. It was simply better than other phones at the time. Imagine Sir Isaac Newton's face if he knew that in 300 years' time millions of people would be speaking to each other on apples!

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