> "Why on Earth would anyone want one of those!?"

That reaction really only came from makers of competing phones. (RIM execs famously refused to believe the battery life was possible, Balmer threw very unconvincing dismissals.)

Everyone else was standing in line to buy one.

I think this is hindsight talking.

I remember thinking (and hearing):

'Way too expensive'

'I want a tactile keyboard'

'Nice, but I don't need one'

and so on.

The only commonwealthidespread complaint was about the lack of 3G and copy/paste.

However, the overwhelming response to the iPhone was extremely positive. Even from non Apple sources.

RIM didn’t think the iPhone was possible when it was first released. Google instantly changed the direction of their Android project when the iPhone was released.

> The only commonwealthidespread complaint

Maybe also complaints about bad autocompletion?

"Too expensive" is a perfectly fine thing to think about a product like that, and is very far away from thinking nobody wants it.

Qwerty keyboards were always a niche, and "nice, but I don't need one" is reasonably classified as an underestimate of the product but it's still approval.

I still want a slide out keyboard like my Nokia N900 had... and if you don't think $1000 is overpriced for an I-Phone, you probably haven't tried a $300 phone that has very similar capabilities...

It really wasn't that popular initially, at least nowhere near what it is today. There were only 1.5 million sales in 2007, and about 12 million in 2008. For comparison, there were over 210 million sold in 2018.

Actually, the first one wasn't in that much demand, because it had laughably slow processor and cell standard support even by 2007 standards (no UMTS, which was already available on cell networks back then, just not with an iPhone). Apple fanboys stood in line for it and since Apple wasn't able to even produce enough for them, it seemed like "everyone wanted one".

The iPhone 3G changed this fundamentally; you didn't have to be a die-hard Apple fanboy to justify wanting one of those, because it was the only phone on the market that actually gave you sufficiently usable mobile access to "the real Internet".

I certainly didn't stand in line. The iPhone seemed primitive and lacking to me at the time. And I wasn't alone in spending lots of money on alternative phones.

The iPhone was also ridiculously profitable.

The original iPhone sold for $600 and a 2 year AT&T contract.

The iPhone had a ton of pricing headway to make itself more attractive.

Tesla is almost the exact opposite.

Now, this isn’t an argument against Tesla or its stock price (that’s a different argument altogether). This is an argument against the idea That Tesla and the iPhone are in any way comparable.

The iPhone hit in a market where competitors have mutually agreed to hide away from regulator attention as long as possible.

That is most certainly not the state of the car industry.

And you can see how "old industry" will play with old wet cell batteries and newer batteries in data center spaces (newer batteries are considerably safer in reality with each cell monitored, with the battery wall automatically removing problematic cells, and requiring less than a fifth of the space of wet cells). However wet cell manufacturers have been really good at manipulating and adding regulations that make newer batteries untenable to have since regulations are purposely broad enough that each inspector you bring in will cited the same regulation as having a different meaning.

haven't we seen the auto industry hiding from environmental regulations like Volkswagen and emissions standards?

On top of that: no (physical) keyboard, no GPS, no 3G support.

They were almost the textbook definition of a disruptive product (worse on traditional metrics by which products compete, but better on some key factors that have customer value)...

Which phone was able to run Flash at that time?