iPhone 3G

And if I click through to the other videos, it's like all kinds of random stuff with a couple of other Steve Jobs videos.

Like there is a Steve Jobs interview about the iPhone 3G, one from 1991.

Wow, Jobs' hair is something there.

Yeah, there's a couple of Steve Jobs videos intermixed with a bunch of random music videos and like Hollywood interviews, which is weird, but...

And so it's a little bit harder for Apple to move on an eight-month timeline.

And also remember how they used to have pretty massive improvements year after year from the iPhone 3G to the 3GS to the 4 to the 4S to the 5.

It was just so many different updates.

And eventually you got to like iPhone 12, 13 onwards.

Yeah.

So looking at old devices, looking at what you need, and knowing that because we are in peak smartphone, the difference from one device to the next is not super revolutionary, right? I mean, back, back in the day, when you jump from the iPhone 3G to the 3G- 3GS to the 4, those were all quite sizable differences, but we've hit a law of diminishing returns, it feels like.

So when you take all this together, if we're buying a new smartphone today or tomorrow, how should I work out, in your perspective, how much smartphone I actually need, what should be triggering that, uh, purchase response, and whether I should stop spending, right? Effectively here, Alex, what is the Alexander Wong buying guide to smartphones today?

[laughs] Uh, that's a very interesting question.

And so during the first generation of the iPhone, people didn't realize that they needed to protect these glass screens.

And then finally by the second gen, iPhone 3G came out in 2008.

We need a screen.

And so this little microcap company, it was a 65 cent stock.

I know.

Exactly.

And so when that iPhone 3G came out in the middle of 2008, when the world was starting to buckle, you know, in the markets, their growth just went straight up.

You know, and they went from, again, it was a 65 cent stock.

The first iPhone that came out, iPhone 1, was $499.

iPhone 2 was 499. iPhone 3 was 499. iPhone 4, when they introduced...

What did they introduce with iPhone 4? Can't remember what they introduced iPhone 4.

But iPhone 4 was the first one... iPhone 4 was still 499.

Number two, we have so many experiments that we're running at every single point in time, not all of them need to run on like the newest hardware.

So the analogy I always give, let's say you bought an iPhone back in 2011, and it's an iPhone 3G, and then you bought another iPhone and another iPhone and another iPhone.

You could have a drawer in your house with like five iPhones that are collecting dust 'cause you can only use one iPhone at a time.

But if I own 100,000 GPUs, I'm still gonna use all of them at the same time.

That device changed the world.

And then a year or two later the iPhone 3G came out and suddenly you were like, oh, actually this is a good thing and look where we are now.

But to me it's like that.

At the time, you'll find loads of freezing cold takes on the internet of people saying the iPhone's doomed to fail.