2007: The original iPhone
The original iPhone is announced at Macworld Expo, featuring a non user-replaceable battery, no physical keyboard, and no support for Adobe Flash. These clueless technical decisions ultimately caused BlackBerry’s global smartphone market share to plunge to levels under 1%.
Also, Apple’s idiotic decision to not support Flash in the Mobile Safari browser was singlehandedly responsible for the widespread adoption of totally dumb, highly efficient, non-proprietary cross platform multimedia standards used by every hardware and software manufacturer in the world, such as HTML5 and H.264.
2012: iPhone 5
The 30-pin dock connector is replaced with an all new, physically incompatible “Lightning” connector. This was a devastating financial burden to millions of people who were able to pay over $600 for a mobile phone, as well as the requisite overpriced monthly cellular service contracts, yet did not have any money left in their bank accounts to purchase an additional $19 Lightning to USB cable.
2013: iPhone 5s
“Touch ID” fingerprint sensor technology is introduced, an obvious indication that Apple intends to expand it’s total dominance of the consumer electronics market into new frontiers of collecting civilian biometric data for their own nefarious, fascist purposes.
This plot was ironically thwarted by Apple’s own blundering hardware engineers, who designed the Touch ID architecture so that actual raw fingerprint data never gets stored or transmitted outside of the device.
An unfortunate side effect of the adoption of Touch ID is that it made it much easier for terrorists like you, me and your grandmother to keep their personal data secure, while reducing the tendency to use numeric passcodes like “0000”.
2016: iPhone 7
The headphone jack (a design which has been relatively unchanged since its introduction in 1878) is completely removed from the phone.
Millions of users are rendered unable to listen to their complimentary copy of U2’s Songs of Innocence, despite the fact that a Lightning-to-Phono plug adapter was included in every box the iPhone 7 came in. Other users, having spent most of their paychecks at Starbucks and “artisanal toast” food trucks, simply couldn’t afford the $9 required to purchase each additional adapter that they might need in their home.
2017: iPhone X
The Home button and Touch ID fingerprint sensor are removed in favor of a new “Face ID” face-detection system. These features were a sure sign that Apple had “stopped innovating”, because both features had already been implemented in products by companies like Samsung. And because Samsung already tried a face detection based unlocking system which really sucked—and was easily defeated simply by holding a photograph up to the camera—there was obviously no way that Apple could ever hope to ship a product with a decent face detection system. Everyone knows that PC guys are not going to just walk in and figure stuff like this out.
And there’s also that whole “nefarious, fascist purposes” thing, too.
Strangely enough, It turns out that Face ID apparently works so well—better than Touch ID by nearly all accounts (including those of this author)—that the only conclusion that can be made about the iPhone X is that all of its positive reviews are written by paid Apple shills.