Eh, I don't think it's HN being fond of Tesla. I think it's just that Tesla (rather, Elon Musk) is very good at grabbing headlines and people are sometimes not as well informed about the state-of-the-art as they wish they were.
Same thing happens with other companies of course. Er, Apple, in particular. If you ask most people "what was the first smartphone?", they will probably say "the first iPhone"... even though there were a few earlier devices that used the same tech and would have been called "smartphones" today (by the same token as the original iPhone). They just never caught on in the same way as the iPhone did.
It's marketing, innit. I don't think you can win against it.
> They just never caught on in the same way as the iPhone did. It's marketing, innit. I don't think you can win against it.
The iPhone is synonymous with smartphone technology because its debut was a quantum leap ahead of the competition at the time (Blackberry, Palm, etc.). Google was working on a phone that used a physical keyboard until they saw the iPhone announcement and then quickly modified Android to ape iPhone/iOS.
I'm really sick of people trying to downplay Apple's innovations as nothing more than slick packaging and marketing. It's a stupid meme that refuses to die.
As far as I know, there were two new things that came along with the iphone: multitouch capacitive screen and 3g data plans that were actually worth using because apple threw their weight behind negotiating with the carriers. A few generations later, the iphone app store was a huge achievement too. All of those were huge, but there are also a lot of other innovations associated with the iphone that were actually around years before.
Same thing happens with other companies of course. Er, Apple, in particular. If you ask most people "what was the first smartphone?", they will probably say "the first iPhone"... even though there were a few earlier devices that used the same tech and would have been called "smartphones" today (by the same token as the original iPhone). They just never caught on in the same way as the iPhone did.
It's marketing, innit. I don't think you can win against it.