It’s wild how antique the iPhone interface design looks. It’s not THAT old.
joegibbs•Mar 13, 2026
Yeah in comparison OSX Mountain Lion or Windows 8 look basically the same as the modern desktop OSes, while mobile releases from that era look totally different. I suppose it had only been 5 years since the release of the iPhone so there was still a lot of experimentation
uzyn•Mar 13, 2026
It seems our fingers have gotten thinner, or more skillful at tapping at relatively tinier buttons now. Look at how huge those buttons are.
I am aware screen size has increased tremendously, even then I think the buttons were still quite huge compared to the size of today's tappable links.
lillecarl•Mar 13, 2026
The models detecting touch has become better and the touch grid has become both higher resolution and more reliable.
Being able to detect the middle-point of a fat finger wasn't a 1.0 feature
justsomehnguy•Mar 13, 2026
> It seems our fingers have gotten thinner
Of course not. It's actually way simpler: smartphones became taller and heavier and you no longer can use it with one hand anymore even if you are 2m tall man. So the main mode of interaction changed to a two-hand mode and one-hand is relegated for the doom scrolling, selfies and quick replies.
Hell, my Moto has a special one-handed mode!
>> Use one-handed mode
>> Want to use one thumb to navigate your phone? Turn on One-handed mode.
>> This mode is only available if you're using Gesture navigation.
Trivia game: try to guess to which smartphone these dimensions belongs to:
115.2 mm 58.6 mm 9.3 mm 137 g
130.7 mm 68.9 mm 8.99 mm 145 g
146.7 mm 71.5 mm 7.4 mm 162 g
163.0 × 77.6 × 8.25 mm 227 g
thrdbndndn•Mar 13, 2026
Just curious: why your otherwise neatly formatted table uses a different format for the last row?
justsomehnguy•Mar 13, 2026
This question should be addressed to Wikipedia from where I copied the data.
devmor•Mar 13, 2026
As an aside - I am a slightly under 2m tall man and I still use my phone with one hand. I still use a 7” tablet with one hand as well.
sunaookami•Mar 13, 2026
It looks better with actual buttons that are easy to read and tap.
bonoboTP•Mar 13, 2026
It's 19 years since the iPhone came out, that's almost two decades. 19 years before the iPhone was 1988. Things from 1988 definitely seemed dated in 2007. In fact I think style/aesthetics change is now getting slower and slower. Anything within the last 10 years looks like it could have been made today, since the image resolution / quality doesn't significantly change in such an obvious way. Throughout the 90s and 00s, it felt like things were constantly changing year to year. Totally different mindblowing graphics in games in each release, new OS features, digital cameras, cell phones (at all), then color screens on dumbphones, PDA, smartphone etc. etc., any Internet at all, then broadband etc. It subjectively felt much more rapid than today. The only exception is AI today, but even that is a different feel.
peebeebee•Mar 13, 2026
The rate at which AI is accelerating seems the same as other big inventions.
Some examples:
- Tim invented the WWW in 1989, but I'd took until around 2000 (10 years) to go to the web we now know with Streaming and Social Media.
- The first big mobile success (Nokia 3310) was in 2000, the 'end-stage' phone (iPhone 5 or something) was also 10 years later.
- Google Deepdream was in 2016, to "Will Smith eating spaghetti" in 2023, to now AI generated video literally unrecognisable from real.
I think we will be seeing some 'end-stage' AI in the next 5 years too, where the rate of improvements will sharply drop.
Robotics will probably be next? First company that can create an all purpose robot.
bonoboTP•Mar 13, 2026
My point was more about how dated something feels, how much it esthetically feels like a different dusty era.
high_na_euv•Mar 13, 2026
>AI generated video literally unrecognisable from real.
What?? Not even close
randallsquared•Mar 13, 2026
You may be thinking of video you saw generated last month.
bonoboTP•Mar 13, 2026
I think the tells of AI video are becoming more subtle, similar to language. It's no longer so much that the visuals are categorically impossible, such as mangled hands or impossible geometric arrangements of objects, but you can still see style and composition that is more frequent in AI video (but could be possible in a real video as well in principle).
Such as higher production quality, too beautiful people, a kind of stock photo sheen, etc. Of course if you use special LoRAs or prompts and input images, it's possible to leave the stock footage style, but most people don't bother with it, just like most people use stock ChatGPT in its default voice with its favorite trope-filled cadence etc.
seba_dos1•Mar 13, 2026
It looked old when it was fresh already.
When it comes to iPhones, iPhone 4 and iOS 7 were the first ones that looked modern and pleasant (don't confuse aesthetics with UX though).
nunez•Mar 13, 2026
iOS 7 really changed the game on the iOS aesthetic. We probably would've had more refined skeuomorphism had that re-design not been as aggressive as it was.
I read this article when it was new and I've shared it with a bunch of people because it it unbelievably fascinating to me.
There's something borderline "voyeuristic" (for want of a better term) about it. There are all these videos that are public, I'm allowed to watch them, but they were clearly not meant for me to watch. It's like when you see a family photo at a Goodwill or something.
It's definitely worth trying out if you get bored; it's a proper time capsule. There's absolutely nothing cynical about it; these videos weren't made for profit, they weren't made to sell you something. They're candid videos of people as they were in ~2010.
nick_lt•Mar 13, 2026
Yeah that's weird, its like a time capsule seeing all the fashion.
I just tried random numbers and it showed many videos that would only send to your family
echelon•Mar 13, 2026
Should archive team get on this?
On the one hand, this absolutely is a time capsule. It's hard to get something this real and authentic. It is a legitimate snapshot of 2009 - 2012 and probably has no like anywhere else in the world.
On the other hand, do these folks even know? Would they be okay with it?
I suspect Google might close this if it gets enough eyeballs.
I think Archive Team should archive these. It's a fleeting glimpse at a disappearing world, where smartphones were brand new. We won't be able to recover it if it's lost.
kypro•Mar 13, 2026
> There are all these videos that are public, I'm allowed to watch them, but they were clearly not meant for me to watch.
I disagree. I think most people probably intended them to be public and thought it would be cool if people watched – that was the attitude back then. In the early stages of web 2.0 people who were online would share everything and anything. Social media was public by default and no one really had a problem with it.
It was in the years that followed the launch of the iphone and the mass-adoption of the internet that various incidents caused companies and people to realise they needed to be more careful about what was shared publicly online.
I think the appeal of these videos is that they're authentic and highlight something we've lost today, not that they're "voyeuristic".
Most videos people watch on YouTube today have high production value, even most TikTok creators which show up on the "For You" page are professional content creators. Additionally, this was back in an era where people didn't really care about their public/online persona, and act as such.
It's not just a time capsule... It an alternative reality where people are not overly self-conscious about their image and where the internet is full of real people sharing real and rather mediocre things that are happening in their life, rather than curated moments to serve the advertisement interests of corporations. And it's an alternative reality which existed just 15-20 years ago. These people are not that dissimilar from us, but live in a completely different, far more authentic world.
gonzalohm•Mar 13, 2026
There are also creepy videos. I just searched for IMG_ date of my birthday and there is a video of someone recording a dead pig. Nice way to start my day
tombert•Mar 13, 2026
Sorry you saw that. I have tried a bunch of numbers and everything I saw was pretty innocuous, but I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s gross or disturbing stuff.
mid-kid•Mar 13, 2026
It's worth noting that while these videos may have been unintentional, this was also an era when youtube was still inventing itself. Sure, there was real content creation, but the structures of sponsors and ad revenue that can be a real income today weren't there. Let's plays were just starting to dominate the platform, and people were still figuring out how to make money off of that.
As a result, there was a lot of this type of content: barely edited, poorly performed, honest moments of real life, amateurish creations of any kind, be that digital animation, music, acting, etc. I feel these IMG_xxxx videos reflect some of the vibe of the era. Now, sharing videos with people is easy enough in group chats, and youtube content feels so manufactured that people feel it's less appropriate to share this sort of thing via youtube.
Razengan•Mar 13, 2026
I love wondering if and how this kind of "Wild West frontier" in technology and communication and social interaction will ever come again:
Say we colonize Mars. Streaming anything from Earth takes hours (well 3-22 light minutes). Martians may invent their own planetary social network and share their own weird Martian memes for a while.
Or interstellar colony ships traveling for decades between the stars, and then practically cut off from Earth at whatever new exoplanet we land on.
There will definitely be lots of "golden eras of creativity" still to come, if we survive that long.
unselect5917•Mar 13, 2026
Mars' gravity is only 38% of Earth so I think quite a few would be crazy feats of strength or odd trajectories of objects. At least they would be if I were making them.
Razengan•Mar 13, 2026
I would like, subscribe and hit the bell icon
unselect5917•Mar 13, 2026
I bet I could throw a football a quarter mile... ;)
jl6•Mar 13, 2026
Any time someone carves out a new space online, the same sort of thing happens. Pioneers create infrastructure. Early adopters rush to explore the new medium. New possibilities or new constraints spur creativity. Then, usually one of two things happens: the new space was a brief fad, and it dies away; or the masses arrive and it undergoes an eternal September, standardization, commercialization, enshittification, drama… in other words, becomes integrated into the wider net. Those fed up leave and begin to carve out a new space…
Some initiatives (like the Gemini Protocol) remain (for now) in a tenuous niche where mass adoption seems impossible and yet they also don’t seem to be going away.
jrmg•Mar 13, 2026
Yeah, the _reason_ this was in the iPhone is that YouTube was a normal and reasonable (if unusual - because sharing videos online was unusual) way to share videos with friends and family. And people cared way less about privacy back then.
derefr•Mar 13, 2026
One might say that early Youtube was mainly thought of as a video pastebin that allowed (JS-assisted) hotlink-embedding into other pages. Youtube was to video as image-hosting sites like Imgur were to images. Which was important, in both cases, because not just video but even (HQ) images were hard to host yourself at the time, and also hard to send to other people without hosting them somewhere.
With both video and image-sharing sites, you didn't really expect the site itself to function as a social network that was worth "browsing." Rather, you expected the "front page view" to be an upload view; and from there, to take your uploaded assets and embed them onto a page to put them into proper context. And it's these webpages-that-contextualize-image/video-assets that you'd share links to, on forums and on early social bookmarking platforms (Fark, StumbleUpon, etc.)
Wonderful. I love that you can just let it play and it will continue with the next video. This is really magical to me. Thanks for sharing.
jrms•Mar 13, 2026
WOW simply lovely
CM30•Mar 13, 2026
I've always wondered what the people in these videos/making these videos think of this extra traffic from articles, sites and subreddits like this. Do they ever randomly go on YouTube, then freak out when they see a ton of notifications from people they don't know? Are there people involved here who see the popularity of some random clip, realise there's a business/channel opportunity involved and go all in with it?
What it's like seeing some random seemingly unlisted/unedited clip you posted suddenly get thousands or millions of views from random people online?
erghjunk•Mar 13, 2026
this is outstanding.
MartiCarmona•Mar 13, 2026
lol
tartoran•Mar 13, 2026
I absolutely love to watch random stuff but not random stuff that youtube wants me to watch. This feels like a hole in the matrix.
popcornricecake•Mar 13, 2026
I recently stumbled upon a small channel called KVN AUST, who's been making videos about what he calls "YouTube's Recycle Bin". It's about this and SO many other search terms (over a hundred), that turn up videos that have been public for over a decade often without a single view. It's so fascinating to see the random things people have uploaded.
It's stupid that my YT front page is simply empty, because "Your watch history is off", when it could simply be filled with a random selection of videos.
ggggffggggg•Mar 13, 2026
Stupid for us, but I bet people enable it just to get the empty page to go away.
13 Comments
IMG_0416 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42102506 - Nov 2024 (324 comments)
I am aware screen size has increased tremendously, even then I think the buttons were still quite huge compared to the size of today's tappable links.
Being able to detect the middle-point of a fat finger wasn't a 1.0 feature
Of course not. It's actually way simpler: smartphones became taller and heavier and you no longer can use it with one hand anymore even if you are 2m tall man. So the main mode of interaction changed to a two-hand mode and one-hand is relegated for the doom scrolling, selfies and quick replies.
Hell, my Moto has a special one-handed mode!
>> Use one-handed mode
>> Want to use one thumb to navigate your phone? Turn on One-handed mode.
>> This mode is only available if you're using Gesture navigation.
https://en-us.support.motorola.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1...
Trivia game: try to guess to which smartphone these dimensions belongs to:
Some examples:
- Tim invented the WWW in 1989, but I'd took until around 2000 (10 years) to go to the web we now know with Streaming and Social Media.
- The first big mobile success (Nokia 3310) was in 2000, the 'end-stage' phone (iPhone 5 or something) was also 10 years later.
- Google Deepdream was in 2016, to "Will Smith eating spaghetti" in 2023, to now AI generated video literally unrecognisable from real.
I think we will be seeing some 'end-stage' AI in the next 5 years too, where the rate of improvements will sharply drop.
Robotics will probably be next? First company that can create an all purpose robot.
What?? Not even close
Such as higher production quality, too beautiful people, a kind of stock photo sheen, etc. Of course if you use special LoRAs or prompts and input images, it's possible to leave the stock footage style, but most people don't bother with it, just like most people use stock ChatGPT in its default voice with its favorite trope-filled cadence etc.
When it comes to iPhones, iPhone 4 and iOS 7 were the first ones that looked modern and pleasant (don't confuse aesthetics with UX though).
There's something borderline "voyeuristic" (for want of a better term) about it. There are all these videos that are public, I'm allowed to watch them, but they were clearly not meant for me to watch. It's like when you see a family photo at a Goodwill or something.
It's definitely worth trying out if you get bored; it's a proper time capsule. There's absolutely nothing cynical about it; these videos weren't made for profit, they weren't made to sell you something. They're candid videos of people as they were in ~2010.
On the one hand, this absolutely is a time capsule. It's hard to get something this real and authentic. It is a legitimate snapshot of 2009 - 2012 and probably has no like anywhere else in the world.
On the other hand, do these folks even know? Would they be okay with it?
I suspect Google might close this if it gets enough eyeballs.
I think Archive Team should archive these. It's a fleeting glimpse at a disappearing world, where smartphones were brand new. We won't be able to recover it if it's lost.
I disagree. I think most people probably intended them to be public and thought it would be cool if people watched – that was the attitude back then. In the early stages of web 2.0 people who were online would share everything and anything. Social media was public by default and no one really had a problem with it.
It was in the years that followed the launch of the iphone and the mass-adoption of the internet that various incidents caused companies and people to realise they needed to be more careful about what was shared publicly online.
I think the appeal of these videos is that they're authentic and highlight something we've lost today, not that they're "voyeuristic".
Most videos people watch on YouTube today have high production value, even most TikTok creators which show up on the "For You" page are professional content creators. Additionally, this was back in an era where people didn't really care about their public/online persona, and act as such.
It's not just a time capsule... It an alternative reality where people are not overly self-conscious about their image and where the internet is full of real people sharing real and rather mediocre things that are happening in their life, rather than curated moments to serve the advertisement interests of corporations. And it's an alternative reality which existed just 15-20 years ago. These people are not that dissimilar from us, but live in a completely different, far more authentic world.
As a result, there was a lot of this type of content: barely edited, poorly performed, honest moments of real life, amateurish creations of any kind, be that digital animation, music, acting, etc. I feel these IMG_xxxx videos reflect some of the vibe of the era. Now, sharing videos with people is easy enough in group chats, and youtube content feels so manufactured that people feel it's less appropriate to share this sort of thing via youtube.
Say we colonize Mars. Streaming anything from Earth takes hours (well 3-22 light minutes). Martians may invent their own planetary social network and share their own weird Martian memes for a while.
Or interstellar colony ships traveling for decades between the stars, and then practically cut off from Earth at whatever new exoplanet we land on.
There will definitely be lots of "golden eras of creativity" still to come, if we survive that long.
Some initiatives (like the Gemini Protocol) remain (for now) in a tenuous niche where mass adoption seems impossible and yet they also don’t seem to be going away.
With both video and image-sharing sites, you didn't really expect the site itself to function as a social network that was worth "browsing." Rather, you expected the "front page view" to be an upload view; and from there, to take your uploaded assets and embed them onto a page to put them into proper context. And it's these webpages-that-contextualize-image/video-assets that you'd share links to, on forums and on early social bookmarking platforms (Fark, StumbleUpon, etc.)
What it's like seeing some random seemingly unlisted/unedited clip you posted suddenly get thousands or millions of views from random people online?
It's stupid that my YT front page is simply empty, because "Your watch history is off", when it could simply be filled with a random selection of videos.