Did the iPhone change the industry structure by much? We still have two year contracts in the US. The price of plans seems to be increasing still. You still can't take a phone from one carrier to the other (at least not easily).
What did Apple change? Updates directly from Apple? As others have noted other phones did that before, including Nokia. Buying phones at the Apple Store? Radio Shack and Best Buy have long had huge sales centers for phones. An app store? Those long existed to, although generally carrier provided or via 3rd parties (like Handango). So Apple provided their own app store. That might be new, but it's hardly industry structure changing.
What Apple did show is that if you make a good enough product, people will suffer through worse service.
With that said there is a HUGE opportunity here for Apple. Apple has shown it knows how to work with Samsung and the likes to make great displays and hardware. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Apple ship the highest quality display available. Plus with their volume on phones/tablets they can probably use pressure to drive prices down on for a TV.
Next they integrate iOS into the TV. Then offer a subscription to iTunes content and AirPlay support. The cable provider is now completely out of the picture. They could charge $2500 for this TV and they'd sell 1M in the first week. 1M in TV sales for a single model, I'd imagine, would be a blockbuster.
In many ways I think this industry would be easier to take than phones.
Except they almost all existed prior to the iPhone:
You can have a complete new feature without changing your phone
I had this with Windows Mobile seven years ago. Not as frequently as today's phones, but happened -- especially at transition points
You don't depend on your carrier in order to buy applications
That's a feature phone issue. As I noted before 3rd party app stores have existed for a long time. And for SmartPhones were the dominant way apps were purchased.
No crapware (sorry this advantage is available only on non-open devices)
If you go back far enough with smartphones they didn't have crapware either. Largely because the carriers hadn't developed any yet. But Apple did get rid of them for the newer generation of smartphones.
They opened the mobile development industry to indie and small developers
That was also the case with smartphones prior to the iPhone. Look at the apps on PalmOS and Windows Mobile. Most were written by small shops. And because of their deployment models there were a large number of enterprise apps written for them too. In fact in many ways the iPhone introduced Fortune 500 mobile apps. On WinMo and Palm you were a lot less likely to find Disneyland and Walmart apps as you are now with the iPhone.
Apple changed the use of phones, the sale of related software, and the quality of phone's OSes massively. Android likely would've had a similarly huge impact if it had come out first, but it didn't.
Right. Apple made a great phone. But my point was I don't think they changed the industry structure. Even to this day the industry structure is pretty much as it was in 2006 (see the points I listed before). But we do have much better phones, thanks, in part, to the iPhone.
> But my point was I don't think they changed the industry structure.
Right, I think it depends on what you mean by "industry". If you mean handsets, they've obviously completely disrupted it. Touch was not a mainstream interaction model for phones before the iPhone, the mobile software market qualitatively changed and continues to explode, phones were almost never updated after they were purchased, real web browsing wasn't really possible, etc.
If you mean carriers, the impact has been more limited. They have made extremely important inroads inasmuch as the iPhone turns the carrier into a dumb pipe. All iPhone owners have the same features regardless of carrier (with a few notable exceptions like AT&T customers getting MMS after every other market in every other country).
Phone software sales is absolutely different, though. It used to be difficult to get ringtones - only PalmOS (and blackberry? I never had one) devices had applications, and the market was so small it was laughable.
By making applications easy to make and (extremely) easy to buy, the focus of smart phones has shifted dramatically. The industry is more interested in side-channel profits where previously they were a dead-end, used only to drive a few long-tail sales.
edit to agree with other comment: absolutely, carriers are largely untouched by this, if you ignore the massively-increased bandwidth usage (which would have happened anyway).
All the smartphones had applications. They all had app stores, but they were done by 3rd parties. The big difference was that smartphones were much smaller in 2006 than 2011.
The industry is still all about revenue from plans, at least in the US. These revenues subsidize cell phones, including the iPhone. What's the data on profit that Apple makes from apps? I suspect that it's a small fraction of their profit on the device.
What did Apple change? Updates directly from Apple? As others have noted other phones did that before, including Nokia. Buying phones at the Apple Store? Radio Shack and Best Buy have long had huge sales centers for phones. An app store? Those long existed to, although generally carrier provided or via 3rd parties (like Handango). So Apple provided their own app store. That might be new, but it's hardly industry structure changing.
What Apple did show is that if you make a good enough product, people will suffer through worse service.
With that said there is a HUGE opportunity here for Apple. Apple has shown it knows how to work with Samsung and the likes to make great displays and hardware. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Apple ship the highest quality display available. Plus with their volume on phones/tablets they can probably use pressure to drive prices down on for a TV.
Next they integrate iOS into the TV. Then offer a subscription to iTunes content and AirPlay support. The cable provider is now completely out of the picture. They could charge $2500 for this TV and they'd sell 1M in the first week. 1M in TV sales for a single model, I'd imagine, would be a blockbuster.
In many ways I think this industry would be easier to take than phones.