i've been watching a lot of Blackberry (brand) content after watching the (excellent) Blackberry... comedic... mockumentary... movie thing, and it is so fascinating to me as an example of software eventually becoming more valuable than hardware, which mirrored that history in desktop computing
like ok. blackberry first got big due to the fact that they had the good hardware, right. they had a qwerty keyboard and a neat little device. yeah obviously the software was ALSO important, but by the time of the iphone & early android in 2007 it was clear that they were losing ground at least partially due to the fact that well... it turns out the hardware wasn't that important? at least, not to the end-user.
it was neat, for sure, but what outweighed it dramatically was the fact that iphone and android both had easily-accessible app marketplaces, which allowed whatever the hardware the OS was running on to have some cool features. and eventually, Blackberry (brand) would end up making android phones, ironically trying to make "blackberry-styled" android phones which meant gradually less and less as Android standardized as an OS and left hardware manufacturers mostly just making variants of the same design for compatibility reasons
and that's not unique to blackberry or even the phone market specifically (desktop pcs and laptops basically did the same thing) but it's... idk. it's weird. i think there is a certain tyranny in the way that software dictates much more of the computing experience than hardware these days, but i don't know if that's a bad thing per se. it does lead to less interesting hardware decisions, which... kind of sucks on a level of design, but obviously there are advantages. idk.
i just wish computers/phones/devices were kind of weird again, as always. with more and more standardized software/OSes, it's harder to justify more experimental physical/hardware designs. anyway i have a linux laptop now
