Quote:
Originally Posted by Barnes
No, they wouldn't have totally scrapped it but the development path would have been considerably different had Cingular not accepted Apple's terms. They scrapped the ROKR and approached Cingular without Motorola before developing the phone. A deal in principle allowed them to start developing a phone based on touch screen, goofy iPod phones and OS X work they were already working on. They had just completed moving OS X to x86 so ARM was the next step.
Had Cingular backed out, Apple was prepared to buy wholesale minutes and resell them as a carrier. They would not have settled with any deal other than the one they got.
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Nobody (outside of Apple's inner circle, perhaps) knows that. It is a great marketing strategy and it bolsters them in all future negotiations to have people believe they get what they want or they walk, but if they didn't get this deal, they may have taken another one.
Anyway, I think I'm veering away from my point, which is that the iPhone was coming to market no matter what. If it wasn't the deal they made, maybe they would have bought wholesale minutes, maybe they would have struck a deal with another carrier. But they needed to come to market with a phone.
A lot of phones were able to play MP3s four years ago or whenever it was the first iPhone came out. With the majority of people say over 12 having a cell phone, I'm sure the writing was on the wall that dedicated MP3 players were going to quickly begin losing market share to cell phones. Geez, I remember looking at my iPod and thinking why don't they just throw some phone guts in here?