Steve was prescient. He's so knowledgeable about consumers he knew that consumers would willingly take UI/UX design and back pedal by several decades just to accept the novelty of a dynamic touch screen.
As much as you as a consumer hate the touch screen... consumers as a whole are the ones who chose to go this direction.
I think this is a misunderstanding of the UX of phones. The fact that keyboard input is harder on a touchscreen than a physical keyboard is of course a disadvantage. But it is a much smaller disadvantage than the UX gains from having more screen space for content when you're not typing. Also, a touchscreen is much better for input than a keyboard for various navigation features - panning, zooming, selection, not to mention many styles of games are all more suited to touchscreen input then keyboard input.
So, the choice is between a phone with a good keyboard but half the screen size (horrible for the web, maps, photos), or a phone with a subpar but still functional keyboard with a full screen. The UX is clearly overall much much better on the second one.
Some people had had PalmPilots for years when Jobs launched the iPhone and were wondering why no one puts a cell phone on them...
Also some people (looks in mirror) had noticed that you could press buttons in apps with your thumbs even on the resistive Palm touch screens and were hoping they enlarge the scroll bars so you can at least view data without taking out the stylus.
Yes, there was the Treo, but mobile internet was still crap and expensive. If i recall correctly, they even added a keyboard back because their customers thought they needed better Blackberrys?
When he said that, he knew well how much prior work had gone into touch- and multitouch-based interfaces, including lots of work outside Apple such as technical developments and a long tradition of HCI research into such interfaces with end users. However, "they'll learn" sounds much more catchy and visionary than "based on doing our homework thoroughly, we have built a grounded theory on how culture and technology have developed to the point where we can sell a newly and nicely packaged thing - and where we are able to mass produce it".
In other words: Apple's thinking process about what to build when and how to shape it are not prescience at all - they are science. They very carefully look at as much context as possible, including - but not limited to - what users (say they) want. Jobs was great at making those processes look visionary and magical which was (very) good for internal and external marketing.
Obviously prescience doesn't exist. I just used the term to illustrate his instinctive ability to predict things beyond the typical data driven way we worship nowadays.
It's not science either. Science requires data and the data overwhelming showed that consumers preferred physical keyboards.
Puahing the iPhone requires one to actually go against the science and against the consumer data. It's unlikely any internal marketing or design team led the way here as their approach would likely be science based. Jobs most likely led the way by intuiting how consumers would change based off of his own experience with the prototypes.
Certainly not super human, but a bit more smarter than your average consumer research scientist to be able to make an analysis that not only goes above science, but against it.
People worship science as the one and only infallible method to answer questions. That's not true. Science needs data and many questions just don't have data available to build an answer. For this kind of thing you need to use induction.
I think our views are not too dissimilar and I agree with Jobs being exceptional. I also agree that the kind of (only) quantitatively driven science you are describing is not sufficient to predict innovation. However, there are also other, more qualitative, branches of science that work in different ways (I've chosen the phrase "grounded theory" which comes from sociology for that reason).
There has been prior work into multi-touch interfaces and all sorts of things related to ubiquitous computing long before the iPhone. Jobs/Apple was aware of this and built on it at the right time - just like they were aware and built on the work at Xerox PARC before.
The truly sad thing is, there was a killer form factor for phones. N900. Full touchscreen, with a slide-out physical keyboard.
It wasn't a perfect device, far from it. The details of the form factor were still off: the device was too thick, and the keyboard was part of a heavy "base". It slid out too little for the keyboard to be properly useful. The screen was the wrong size, with an awkward aspect ratio. But nonetheless, N900 had the right idea. With three or four hardware revisions it could have become something magnificent.
Instead what we have right now is like the Zork opening from an alternate universe - "you are in a maze of twisted options, all equally shitty."
Btw, the consistent desktop experience exists right now. It's called "i3" or "sway", depending on your display tech.
“Sway is a wayland compositor”. Does that give a consistent experience across applications? Or at least a taskbar that doesn’t visibly add and remove icons every time they refresh, recalculating sizes and shrinking and growing all the time? Which was kde’s state last time I used Linux as my main deskop…
In a way, yes. It stays out of the way - in fact, there is no desktop. i3 is a tiling window manager, and rather minimalistic at that. Sway is a wayland-native reimplementation of i3, with the same (lack of) appearance, and i3 configs work with sway pretty much out of the box.
To launch a program you either hit a hotkey combo of your choice or use <win>-d to bring up a top-of-screen text menu bar with full text search to find (and launch) your desired software.
Stating the obvious: I've never been a fan of desktop environments. I found them confusing even back in the GEOS (C-64) and windows 2.x days.
