Why the iPhone is the Model T of the 21st Century

I have been thinking for a long time about how to exactly describe the iPhone and what it has done for mobile computing. Plus, there arises the question of how to describe its competitors, such as Android, WP7, and webOS. Then it came to me: the iPhone is the Ford Model T built for the 21st Century.

The following is taken directly for the beginning of the Model T's Wikipedia article: 

The Ford Model T ... is an automobile that was produced by Henry Ford's Ford Motor Company from 1908 through 1927. The Model T set 1908 as the historic year that the automobile became popular. It is generally regarded as the first affordable automobile, the car that opened travel to the common middle-class American; some of this was because of Ford's innovations, including assembly line production instead of individual hand crafting.

Does that sound familiar to a certain phone made by a certain fruit company? No? Let me help you out:

The Apple iPhone ... is a mobile device, or smartphone, that was produced by Steve Jobs's Apple, inc. from 2007 through the present day. The iPhone set 2007 as the historic year that the smartphone became popular. It is generally regarded as the first affordable smartphone, the device that opened mobile computing to the common middle-class American; some of this was because of Apple's innovations, including a touch screen-based application-centric mobile operating system.

It is quite scary just how much sense the iPhone makes when put into this context. The iPhone and the iPad put Apple on the leading edge of the two most rapidly growing markets in the tech industry: smartphones and tablets. Along the way, Apple has become the most valuable tech company in the world and the second most valuable company in the world of any kind behind Exxon Mobil.

Apple has achieved this success largely in spite of offering almost no customization choice when buying an iPhone or iPad. Every other computing product Apple sells offers many customization options -- 13, 15, and 17 inch MacBook Pros. 21.5 and 27 inch iMac's. The iPod Shuffle, Nano, Classic, and Touch. The iPhone offers no customization other than increased storage. But hey, you can always buy last-year's model!

The iPhone will likely remain the best-selling smartphone for many years. The iPad is probably in the same category. But that will increasingly become irrelevant as Android continues its incredible rise on the backs of multiple devices from multiple carriers. Apple may sell 5 million iPhones per month, which is an amazing figure and will surely bring them huge profits, but we will soon see Android phones selling 15 million phones per month or more. There are already at least 300,000 Android phones activated every day - that's 9 million per month, folks - and this number will continue to grow into 2011.

So Apple will retain the "best selling smartphone" and "best selling tablet" crowns for the near future. But there  is no denying that Android is the best selling mobile operating system. And in the war for application developers, that is the only number that matters at the end of the day.

Remember, any customer can have any iPhone in any color as long as it is black.