&gt; For me the biggest innovation that Apple did was to break the stronghold that wireless carriers had on phone innovation. Note that some others couldn&#x27;t even think of this possibility (Moto, which killed it) or tried it in a half-assed way (Google).<p>Bless you my son.<p>I think unless you worked in the mobile industry in or around 05-07 you don&#x27;t know how bad things were about to get.<p>Carriers took about 70 cents out of every dollar spent on their networks.  They had been squeezing the Moto&#x2F;Nokia&#x2F;Ericcsons of the world hard and their new idea to squeeze harder was to go around them and buy white label phones from their suppliers (which is how HTC got big enough to become a name brand).<p>It was about a year before the iPhone launched that I got out of mobile because I realized the only people who would ever make any money on it were the carriers.  They were getting free labor from VC-backed mobile startups (&quot;eating their own young&quot;) and it was a losing game.<p>Their first phone was bad, but a conversation piece.  Then the App Store launched, and they announced they would keep 30 cents out of every dollar.  People in mobile danced in the streets.  Finally, we can have margins!  People who didn&#x27;t know the situation cried foul, Evil Apple was taking a whole 30% of the profit for &#x27;doing nothing&#x27;.