Could the iphone/ipad have come out earlier?

[micrometers]

Say, early 2000's? Or was advances in fabrication tech what made them possible?

Basically, MS had a line of tablet PC's years before Apple, though they never really got the vision right of the capacitive screen or the OS.

Also, it appears to me that the ARM processors that they are using aren't too complex, and not as engineering intensive as the intel processors. So I"m saying wouldn't it have been possible in like 2003 for Apple to have come out with an iPad? The price might have been sky high, but capacitive screens and ARM processors were out. It wouldn't have been as fast or as smooth as the machines today, but it would have worked.

 

[bearxor]

Apple used ARM for Newton.

Tablet PC's are... Complicated. The vast majority of them were convertible notebooks. They weren't designed from the ground up to be used with a stylus.

They were aimed for at the commercial business sector, not the home user. They sold well enough, commercially.

 

[alent1234]

there was the Motorola Rokr but word was steve jobs hated it

i remember when i had an ipaq and an ipod i was thinking that it would be killer to have a phone that could play music or the other way around.

apple could have made a Palm clone with some phone hardware built on it. but steve jobs hated a stylus and it took the introduction of capacitive touch screens to make the iphone

 

[OS]

yeah i think atleast some microsoft platform could have, and i remember wondering about this in the early 2000s.
the ipaq/winCE stuff was pretty advanced for its day and had a media player, internet browser and later wifi.
Really someone just had to throw a cellphone radio onto it.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

The Sony Walkman phones did quite well overseas. Even the non walkman branded ones had solid music players and good sound quality. For some reason loading MP3s onto your phones in the US didn't become big til the iPhone. Carriers locked everything down lol.

 

[Oyeve]

The Sony Walkman phones did quite well overseas. Even the non walkman branded ones had solid music players and good sound quality. For some reason loading MP3s onto your phones in the US didn't become big til the iPhone. Carriers locked everything down lol.

My old Sony Ericsson P910 was freaking awesome for its day. A few years befor the iphone. looked great and worked great.

 

[vshah]

i freaking loved my SE w800i and P1. still have the w800i. amazing camera for back then, and great music player.

 

[MrX8503]

I'm going to lean towards probably not. Steve Jobs wanted to release a tablet for a really long time and he didn't like the whole stylus clunky tablets that were already out. The iPad1 in 2010 was what he dreamt of what a tablet should be.

While working iOS (originally meant for the iPad), they put it on hold and created the iPhone instead. Whatever held back Apple from releasing the iPad earlier was due to software/hardware and I'm willing to bet it was more on the software side. Current tablets had a horrible user experience and so that was what Apple probably focused heavily on.

Once Apple had a stranglehold on the iPhone and gained a lot of knowledge and experience, they used what they learned and applied it to their iPad 3years later.

 

[micrometers]

I'm going to lean towards probably not. Steve Jobs wanted to release a tablet for a really long time and he didn't like the whole stylus clunky tablets that were already out. The iPad1 in 2010 was what he dreamt of what a tablet should be.

While working iOS (originally meant for the iPad), they put it on hold and created the iPhone instead. Whatever held back Apple from releasing the iPad earlier was due to software/hardware and I'm willing to bet it was more on the software side. Current tablets had a horrible user experience and so that was what Apple probably focused heavily on.

Once Apple had a stranglehold on the iPhone and gained a lot of knowledge and experience, they used what they learned and applied it to their iPad 3years later.

The thing about software is that there really is no limit to it, since it is written by people. Hardware OTOH has hard limits. I'm sure that they could have written a good stable OS back in like 2003, but in all likelihood the tablet would have been really thick and heavy and the UI would be slow due to processor speed limitations and power consumption among other things. Advances in fabrication techniques since then have improved things.

 

[bearxor]

yeah i think atleast some microsoft platform could have, and i remember wondering about this in the early 2000s.
the ipaq/winCE stuff was pretty advanced for its day and had a media player, internet browser and later wifi.
Really someone just had to throw a cellphone radio onto it.

My first windows mobile phone, a Toshiba 2032SP in 2002, was essentially this. It was a Toshiba Pocket PC with a Sierra wireless compact flash modem soldered on to it. It was pretty ridiculous.