What DID Apple innovate?

ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 155 points –

Genuine question.

I know they were the scrappy startup doing different cool things. But, what are the most major innovative things that they introduced, improved or just implemented that either revolutionized, improved or spurred change?

I am aware of the possibility of both fanboys and haters just duking it out below. But there's always that one guy who has a fkn well-formatted paragraph of gold. I await that guy.

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Everyone absolutely thought the original click wheel iPod, the iPhone and the iPad were all doomed to fail. Hell, the Apple watch didn't exactly get off to a hot start for that matter.

And back at the beginning, the Mac OS GUI. Yes, Steve Jobs saw the idea of a graphical GUI at Xerox Park, but what his engineers turned out is something completely different. And at the time it was easily as revolutionary as the touchscreen interface of the iPhone.

Actual duds by Apple that I can think of off the top of my head:

  • The Cube
  • The Mac IIcx
  • The Mac IIfx
  • Whatever that ungodly massive Unix box was that they branded as Apple
  • The liquid cooled G5 cheesgrater

Add to the list of duds:

Apple Pippin - a 5th gen games console. 'competed' with PS1, N64 and Sega Saturn. Made the Saturn look like a runaway success by comparison.
Apple Newton - a PDA that sucked balls and was widely mocked.

Whatever that ungodly massive Unix box was that they branded as Apple

You might need to be more specific - all Apple computers have been Unix boxes since OSX 10.0

Steve Jobs and a lot of the best people at Apple left the company in 1985. The company was taken over by idiots ("bozos" was Steve's preferred term).

Steve (and all the people at NeXT) returned to Apple 12 years later. Officially Apple "bought" NeXT but for nearly half a billion dollars but in reality that was clever account keeping to satisfy investors and Apple was in fact on the brink of going bankrupt. They didn't have half a billion dollars. They didn't even have enough money to cover salaries of their employees. The people at NeXT took over and made it into what it is today and they refer to 1997 as the year that NeXT bought Apple.

Both the Pippin and the Newton shipped several years after Steve and his core team left. They were products of the "Bozo" management team. Both were killed pretty much at the same time as Steve coming back. He killed a lot of other stupid products as well.

Pippin was just the original Xbox concept before the Xbox arrived. Similar to Microsoft’s windows ce gaming agreement with Sega Dreamcast. Cram a low end computer in a console and put the bootable OS and app on a CD. Boot directly into the game. Same cd could be played on a Mac.

Problem was, it came out at a time when Apple had too many projects going on at once. So it was both too expensive, and left to rot with “licensees” instead of being built, promoted, and sold by Apple.

The original Xbox was a very fragile success; if Halo 1 wasn't such a god tier system seller, that console would have been dead in the water too.

Microsoft had a VERY hard time convincing developers to get onboard with the console before it launched. I imagine Apple and Bandai had similar issues but no system seller.

I have a weird obsession with the cube. It's such a cool looking computer even by today's standards. If they didn't cost a ridiculous amount of money on EBay, I'd buy one just to put on display

The Cube, along with the G4 iMac are two of the most beautifully designed computers I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen a couple of videos of people retrofitting the guts of an M1 mini into both of those, which is a ridiculously tempting project that I’ll never actually get around to doing.

That's something I'd love to try too! My main desktop is actually kind of similar. I bought a gutted Power Mac G5 case and stuck regular PC parts inside. It was a lot easier of a project though since it's such a big case haha