Is the iPhone perfect?

Such a ridiculous question I hear you mutter, but I would argue that it is and have a few reasons for such a conclusion.

I watched this again the other day and a few things hit me-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etyt4osHgX0

The original iPhone looks dated for sure and it is tiny in comparison to what we have today, but when I thought about how similar it is to the current models it struck me that Apple stuck mobile gold with their first hit, if we call the Motorola ROKR a mere practice swing.

I remember well seeing ‘swipe to unlock’ for the first time and was amazed which goes to show just how basic our mobile lives were at the time. A year earlier I was in Orlando for 2 weeks with my Treo 650 and had to battle constant resets due to memory overload, poor battery performance and the ability to not do much at all because it wasn’t as clever as I presumed it to be at the time.

Strangely, for all of the amazing interface features the first iPhone offered, it took me a long time to start using one. The lack of apps, the fact that it was not technical enough for me and the on-screen keyboard just didn’t give me what I need. In 2009 I was in Tenerife for 2 weeks and was carrying my trusty, and stress-inducing, BlackBerry the whole time. I had an iPhone 3G with me as well, but I just could not bring myself to like it. It never felt real to me.

At some point in the next couple of years I found myself using an iPhone 4s and I have owned every model since apart from the 12 and the 14. In all of that time I have never suffered a serious hardware issue, no software issues if I remember correctly apart from a dodgy update once, and I have never lost any data.

The iPhone has continued to not change much over the years and it remains a simple slab dominated by a display with some tweaks such as Face ID, losing the home button and form factor adjustments to add something new (sometimes for the sake of it). I used to be able to cover the iPhone screen with a credit card and wonder how I could use such a small space so often, that no longer happens.

Every other smartphone took on this form early and they have also not changed much. Indeed, making significant changes to the simple iPhone form had often resulted in poor sales and it is only now with the folding phones that we may be seeing a successful new phone form.

The iPhone has become my navigator, my music player, my organiser, my games console, my camera, my camcorder, my communicator, my alarm clock, my… everything else it seems.

And it never breaks. It never ever fails me and it never has. The slow changes in the hardware and software are what make it so invisible in my life, yet when I do not have it with me something big is missing.

Of course the iPhone is not perfect, but it kind of is. Long may it not change much, it does not need to.