Marc Haine and Dawn Holly Johnson discuss how Apple abandoned the basic phone design that had persisted since rotary phones, replacing separate ear and mouthpiece with an integrated device. Rather than incrementally improving existing constraints, Apple rethought what a mobile phone could be.
But the metaphor that popped in my head as you were speaking was the cell phone industry, right? When they first invented mobile phones, everything was a— the parameters are what is a normal phone. And so, if you remember the big brick and people had handsets, right? Yeah. And it wasn't until somebody like Apple said, let's just rethink this whole idea of what it means to have a cell phone because we had flip phones. And again, it had the ear mouthpiece. And it was still based on the same paradigm. It wasn't until Apple came around and said, let's just rethink the whole idea around cell phones, that they were able to actually create something absolutely phenomenally different than anything we ever grew up with— rotary phones, push-button phones, and so on.
