What DID Apple innovate?
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.
The graphical user interface.
They don’t invent it (xerox PARC did), but Apple correctly identified that the user experience of existing computer systems was holding it back from being a thing everyone owns, and made computers a bad fit for many types of work that seem extremely obvious now (digital media creation particularly)
They did this more or less again with the smartphone: business folks and super nerds were the smartphone market before Apple. Now it’s the average person’s computer.
A million times this. Not only did they popularize the ideas, but MacOS's UI design was so ahead of its time that it's barely changed since then. It was by far the most polished operating system at the time. Old Apple actually was innovating while the market was kind of stagnant.
This screenshot was in 2007. The competition was Windows Vista. It's a night and day difference. I had this version of the iMac at the time and was super impressed, even if I did switch back to Windows a couple of years later. Looking back at it, it still looks quite "modern".
Just to piggy back on this comment, OSX was released before 9/11 and windows XP, so Microsoft was still selling Windows ME at the time! Aside from the desktop backgrounds looked very similar.
I've got an '08 iMac with this version of MacOS, El Capitan I believe. Going from that to my 2019 M1 MBP running Sonoma is really no different. Sure there's features missing but I can still sync my notes and the few other Apple things I actually use between the two.
Plus my iPods can still sync with both devices, they just moved iPod into Finder in the new versions.
It still blows my mind that Apple are so happy to drop OS support on iPhones and iPads that are considered too old, but I can still sync my 4th gen iPod with my M2 Air. There’s damn near 20 years between those two devices, but aside from needing a USB A>C dongle, they work together without any trouble.
Well, I will say it's a little different. Your iPod doesn't get software updates or apps. From a functional standpoint it's about as supported as any old iPhone or iPad is.
Yes, that’s very true.
It does make me laugh when it tells me that my iPods’ various softwares are up to date, and that it’ll check again next time. You can check, but you’ll not find anything…
I feel old.
Time to schedule your colonoscopy gramps
Well, KDE3 could look cool too.
I'll admit, back then I really wanted a Mac.
Just after trying to use them a few times I know that behavior is more important than appearance on screenshots. Also such looks exhaust you emotionally.
and i think in general, their attempt to really focus on user experience first always seemed to define their business.. trying to make things that people would WANT to use was what made Jobs and Apple stand out.. other brands were better known for performance, for example..
Exactly. They innovated
I could probably go on for a while. The thing is that everything in tech is an iteration: almost nothing is completely new. Apple has consistently applied design and usability to revolutionize many different areas of tech. It is true innovation with real change and huge impact
Jobs really wanted to make tech usable for the mainstream. Just look at the first iPod all the other MP3 players at the time were for the geeks and music nerds. They were clunky, had ugly geek esthetics and the software was hard to use for most people. And the non techies had no idea where to get mp3s. The iPod together with the iTunes Store really sold the MP3 player to the masses.
Fucking everyone except Xerox BOD figured that out.
There's an old saying in computing. "you improve usability by taking away options and features" apple didn't necessarily invent this mindset. But they perfected it.
They took BSD, a security focused, but not very user friendly, offshoot of Linux/unix and made it "popular" by adding several layers of polish and doing a lot of the configuration work for you and made it osx. This was a time when Linux usability/management on the personal/newbie scale was garbage. If you wanted to install a certain distro of *nix, you better make sure you have supporting hardware and the right up to date tutorial, which is managed by an unknown volunteer, which was usually some person bored on the weekend a few months ago and never updated, they've made *nix installation and management a lot better though recently.
They also did this with music. People used to have large collections of unorganized mp3s in the early 00s, unless you were really anal and had a lot of time in your hands, because you were likely downloading them from several different illegal places, and legally buying mp3s were all over the place. You could buy the album off this weird obscure website that you didn't want to trust with your CC information, because there were a lot of mom and pop music stores online. Then apple brought out iTunes and allowed both buying and managing (and eventually upgrading, traveling around with) music to be dead simple.
For smartphones, they stole a LOT from BlackBerry, but they took it to the next level. Blackberry had email, a private messaging network, and mobile web scrolling waayyyy before anyone. And so many people loved it so much that even Obama famously didn't want to give his up when he took office. Then apple came out with the iPhone, and blew it away with a bigger screen and again, a lot more polish.
Innovation happens in small steps over years. Apple didn't invent mobile phones, smart phones, tablets, or computing, they didn't invent security, encrypted audio/video calls, or music management. They've done a lot of crappy stuff, and they charge super high amounts of money for less than state of the art hardware. Their innovation could be summed up by this profound statement I remember a friend said to me once around 2003/4.
"Osx, because making Linux pretty was easier than fixing Windows"
Came here to say something similar about touchscreens on phones. It's probably the most impactful innovation they've had, and ever will have imo. I can't ethically support Apple as a company and I haven't owned an apple product since the first iPod touch, but they absolutely deserve credit for this one.
Even if they didn't invent the touch screen, or even the touchscreen phone, they certainly figured out how to perfectly integrate touchscreens into mobile devices a fluid and intuitive user interface which served as a canvas on which to build pretty much anything you wanted in the form of a mobile app (a $200B+ industry which the iPhone absolutely catalysed the explosive growth of).
It arguably even began a significant change in the course of modern human interaction, due to how much more versatile and therefore more commonly used mobile phones with a similar UI basis became since then; because of that, increasingly popular social media platforms now had a new way to provide use for their platform (via mobile apps) on a device that pretty much everyone now had with them all the time. I don't think it's coincidence that social media use saw such substantially explosive growth soon after the iPhone and subsequent "copycats" were on the market.
So their innovation here was really the first step in a number of global paradigm shifts. It was just such a monumentally impactful step forward. Because of this I genuinely think that the iPhone is almost guaranteed to be in history books for centuries, like the printing press or the light bulb.
They’ve also excelled at seamless integration across devices. I can start an iMessage conversation on my iPhone, switch to my laptop for a while, then to my iPad.
Same thing with phone calls. If my phone is on the other side of the house and starts ringing, then both my laptop and iPad ring as well. I can grab whichever device is closest and answer the call on it.
Seamless integration has been around since the first real-time chatrooms though. Again, just making a better UI
For phone calls that's just VoIP which was around waaaaayyy before the iPhone, Skype was doing something similar in the consumer geek market in 2004/5. They just brought it to the big consumer market, and again, made it 1000x easier to do.
This is something that can easily be done on Windows and Linux also, its just not an out of the box setup like Mac
It's pretty out of the box now with windows and android. You have to link the two but then it just works (I don't find it a useful feature though)
Apple purchased their touch screen division from people who had been working on touchscreens for decades before them.
Are you saying that other people had been working on and creating what became Apple's mobile phone touchscreen interface, and they just bought the already near-finished product? If that's the case I wasn't aware.
Or if you're trying to correct me (I assume you're not, but you never know), I did acknowledge that Apple didn't invent the touch screen or touch screen phone, the tech has been around since the 1960's and even on phones since the early 90's iirc.
Lots of things like pinch-to-zoom, auto-switching the phone from portrait to landscape mode depending on how it was rotated, basically the actually-usable-as-a-browser features that are part of every modern touchscreen, were originally popularized by Apple. They were the first to make a touchscreen UI that rivaled a desktop computer instead of a pretty substandard WAP interface.
For clarity, BlackBerry devices still loaded “mobile” websites, aka “WAP” sites. The iPhone’s innovation was figuring out a way to allow browsing of full, normal web pages. By displaying the full page and using the touchscreen features to zoom in and out, it made every page out there almost instantly usable on mobile.
Also they basically invented software keyboards. People didn’t think you could have an efficient software keyboard, even the android prototypes still had a physical keyboard for typing.
Yup. Google developers had to go back to the drawing board for both the hardware and the OS after the iPhone announcement.
I still miss having a physical keyboard for messages. If HTC had kept making slide out keyboard phones, I woulda kept buying. Though it seems, based on market trends, I might have been one of the very few.
Also standardizing hardware. Part of the iPhones success was that developers had to develop for A phone, singular. There were a lot of cool palm programs and whatnot, but having a single hardware set to bug-smash had to be a big part of making the app-market go into hyper drive.
I don't own a single apple product, but credit where credit is due.
Not only for iPhone, but for Mac as well. It's easy to install bsd on a machine when you have access to the best hw engineers and documenters on the planet.
Ahh, no. The window where existed only one iPhone and you could develop for it was very narrow. And then you need not only develop for different hardware, but software as well. Yes, different versions of iOS are different. Source: developers for mobile for three years.
Isn't the problem now just different screen sizes? I thought that, other than that, everything is easily portable from between different iphones, ipads and whatnot
And the iPhone screen size didn’t change until the App Store had been around for 4 years, during which time it became huge. I am not sure why this person is trying to discount what you’re saying.
Perfect description, they made very complex functionality accessible by the general public.
Steve Jobs in particular was extremely anal in removing whatever he deemed "not needed". The first mac nearly didn't have arrow keys for its keyboard. He hated the function keys of keyboards so much he once personally removed the keys from a person who asked for an autograph
Thank you, exactly
Was bsd an offshoot of linux? I thought it was the other way around. Honest question.
BSD and Linux are offshoots of Unix.
Yeah .... I wasn't sure when I wrote it and didn't think it'd matter tbh
I thought about making a comment and decided it didn't matter, but skeezix gave me the opportunity to do it indirectly.
The document-centric model of desktop applications largely originates from the early Mac. How do you open a document in a desktop OS? You double-click on the document, and the OS finds the correct application to open it with. That was a Mac thing. On most other systems of the mid-1980s, you run your application program (from the command line) and then tell the program to load a file.
Applications as "bundles" of code and data was a Mac thing too, starting with the resource/code division in the classic Mac System. Rather than an application coming with a mess of directories of libraries and data files, it's all bundled up into a single application file that can contain structured data ("resources") for the GUI elements. On a classic Mac, you could load an application program up in ResEdit and modify the menus, add keyboard shortcuts, and so on, without recompiling anything.
The Apple Newton had data persistence of a sort that we now expect on cloud applications like Google Docs. Rather than "saving" and "loading" files, every change was automatically committed to storage. If you turn the device off (or it runs out of battery power), you don't lose your work.
Other systems did have double-click, and app bundles (which I still think are just fantastic) were a NeXT thing. (which of course became Apple, but they weren't at the time). But yeah, Apple way refined and brought those to a mass market.
App bundles were just a better implementation of resource forks, which were invented by Apple and pre-dated NeXT.
NeXT was founded by people who worked at Apple (not just Steve) and they were largely put in charge when they came back to Apple. I wouldn't call them separate companies. Just a weird moment in the history of the company. A lot like what just happened at OpenAI.
App bundles have virtually no relationship with resource forks. I guess you could say that App Bundles COULD include SOME metadata that you could have included in Forks, including the idea that something was an application or not. But that's about it.
On the NeXT always being Apple thing - I mean, some of it maybe was spiritually Apple, and eventually it was 100% Apple. But we're splitting hairs.
Eh, the difference between app bundles and resource forks isn't the functionality itself, but rather how the filesystem interface cuts through the functionality.
An OSX bundle is a Unix directory, whereas a classic Mac application is a file in a filesystem that supports multiple forks within a single file. Either way, you have typed objects (files or resources) that get carried around with a master object (the application).
The first Mac came out in 1984; NeXT didn't have a product until 1988.
NeXT was later bought by Apple and their tech became the foundation of Mac OS X in 2001.
But I was referring to the original '80s Macintosh System, not OS X. :)
Kinda funny that iPad/iOS has sort of gone in reverse on this, by virtue of not really having an open file system. You now open the app, then open the document within it.
There’s also the Files app too that Apple added that does give you a filesystem view, where you can tap files to have them opened in their associated application.
Originates from Xerox PARC. I see you discuss this below, it was Xerox BOD that couldn't see beyond their nose and sold it to Apple. From Jobs own description of being blown away by Xerox, it sounds like he would have never thought of it.
Polish.
It useless to be first if that product isn’t reliable, sustainable, practical. Apple adds polish to other concepts to make them usable by the vast majority of people.
Laptops existed…..with weird keyboard layouts and mice that were afterthoughts. PowerBook pioneered the keyboard forward design that every laptop now has.
Smartphones existed……incredibly limited, weird UI, awkward input, targeted at businesses instead of regular people. iPhone changed everything so much that every other design died.
Collecting different innovations and figuring how to combine them in a way that is practical and sellable is their continuous innovation.
I'm sorry but this is kind of horseshit. Apple has legitimately brought some new polish to areas that hadn't seen them before, but LMFAO at Apple inventing laptops that don't have weird keyboards.
Apple had great trackpads with multi finger gesture support before anyone else, their keyboards have been nothing special compared to ThinkPads and business grade laptops that sold for the same price as them. Their difference was marketing and convincing consumers to pay business grade prices for consumer laptops.
They weren't saying the keyboards themselves were particularly good, they were saying Apple's keyboard placement was a step forward (and it was). This page has a couple of pictures of early laptops - note where the Powerbook keyboard is compared to the others.
No kidding huh. The fanboys are rewriting history as if only Apple can figure out a laptop.
The iPhone. It was revolutionary when it came out.
It literally created the modern smartphone market. The Palm Pilots and Blackberries of the day couldn't compare: the iPhone had a FULL BROWSER. It was insane. The team developing Android saw the iPhone and had a real "holy shit" moment, they had to go back to the drawing board and completely start over in order to compete.
Full browser might be an overstatement. It was still a web full of Flash at that time. And it caused a pretty major limitation on the browser. If there wasn't an app available, you were often SOL. I do think it sped up the demise of Flash on the web considerably.
That's unironically an innovation right there
This. Being able to actually open all those sites that used Flash was a big advantage of Android back then.
Yeah, Android had that advantage LATER, when they got their shit together. But when the iPhone initially released, it changed the game.
Sure, a browser minus Flash, but it was still a real browser. Most of the web functioned without Flash. And none of the competition even had anything close. It was such a revolutionary product that the iPhone didn't even HAVE competition until Android got its shit together, which took a couple years.
In what aspect? There were mobile devices with installable applications. And Samsung already had a phone with that form factor.
I had several Symbian/WinMob phones prior to getting my first iPhone, and I never, ever want to return to those days. Sure, they were fine for the time, but using iOS for the first time was a revelation.
And who bought them before iPhone came out? There were tablets before the iPad. Nobody bought them either.
A lot of people. If you went with idea they sold previously business oriented devices to regular users, I'd give you that. But it's not like Apple invented that format or form. I advise everyone watch documentary on Springboard, which was really really ahead of its time. When everyone was messing around with dumb phones, Springboard was working on unified device with camera built-in, connectivity, etc. In fact they were too early with their product, ten years before first iPhone. More to the point, Jobs visited Springboard, said their product was shit, and went on to produce the exact same device with better polish, which was a dick move in my opinion, but that's business. But saying Apple invented smartphones or refined them. No. It's an iterative process like everything else.
This is the phone I had as my own and sold to my customers. It came out a year before iPhone among many others. It was a mature product. It was quite shitty in terms of performance, but it had all connectivity and gps stuff, and many apps to work with it all.
Windows' shitty interface could be improved by cool touch-oriented interfaces (Spb Mobile Shell being one of them), there were 3rd party keyboard apps as well. https://m.gsmarena.com/htc_p3600-1694.php
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
documentary on Springboard
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Apple doesnt create products. Apple creates markets. Nobody bought modern phones before the iPhone. They existed, nobody bought them. Nobody bought tablets before the iPad. They existed, nobody bought them. Nobody bought mp3 players before the iPod. They existed, nobody bought them. Everyone bought them after, and not just from Apple.
You seriously need to get out of that bubble. If product exists, that means there's a market demand for it. By your own statement world is filled with infinitely rich companies which throw R&D resources on new products and constantly flopping and not turning profit, which is really not the case. People certainly bought MP3 players and tablets before Apple made their own version. iPod was popular but unattainable to most of the countries with poor economy and it's not like people didn't listen to music until Apple came along to save us all.
What bubble? The iPod was an enormous cultural phenomenom that brought mp3 players into the mainstream. Nobody's ever heard of the saehan mpman, even though it predated the iPod for years, because it was bought by a few thousand early adopters and made no impact at all.
This guy hates apple so much he's trying to convince me they're not financially successful lmao
What your arguments probe is that Apple had a better marketing team and brand recognition (due to iMac) than the manufacturers who were there before.
Yeah, Apple was financially successful, but not due to innovation. Just good marketing.
So you're strawmanning me, basically. I said they created a market. I said that because it's true. I never said a damn thing about how they created the market, in fact I went to great lengths to point out that all of these devices existed before apple created theirs. You're so desperate to rant about fanboys that you inserted opinions into my post that weren't there.
Here's the deal, bro. Fanboys and haters are equally annoying. I can't imagine how empty your life must be to have such strong opinions about a fucking phone.
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
Nope, there was a lot of Windows Mobile smartphones before iPhones and Androud devices. WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, phone, thousands of apps, "full browser" (I don't know what a commenter meant by that, but I could use internet normally)
When iPhone appeared, it was sooo limited. A couple of my regular customers (I was selling qtek/htc smartphones) bought them, but then came back to me: "uhhh, this thing doesn't allow attachments in emails", "uhhh, do you have normal maps app for that? can't drive with that"
These comments are from people who wouldn't care about PDAs before iPhone.
I have big clumsy sweaty fingers and struggle even with today's big smartphones.
I was a kid back then, but those PDAs would have normal keyboards and a stylus and an OS with a UI not feeling as if it were made for asylum patients.
But that's not important, why would one even defend against really functional systems something the main features of which were "look how I can zoom pictures with two fingers on that thing", "look how cute it looks, shiny" and "look, nice icons, you'll wanna lick 'em".
Apple is good at making existing tech usable by people who don't have time to bother learning the new tech.
Hard disagree. Android user here. The number of times if had to show iPhone users how to use their shit is annoying.
Workflows agree no better on a fruit phone than an Android device half the price.
Now, do you think that’s because iOS is inherently worse than Android, or because Apple have been more successful at targeting people who don’t want to fanny about with their tech? Not trying to perpetuate a Android/iOS war, btw. I recognise that choice is good, and am happy to fuck about with the Android things I need to use at work.
I think Apple knows its customers really well, and caters to them in a way that winds up feeling exclusionary to a lot of folks that have a hard preference for Android for mobile, or Linux or Windows for PC. Apple builds products and makes designs that meet the needs and wants of the people that use their products, and they do it very well. What an enthusiast might gripe about is a convenience for many others.
I think of it like features in a car, like traction control. Max Verstappen might prefer no traction control because he can control the car better without it, but Becky down the street doesn’t have that skill so having the feature on automatically is the better design, because there’s only one Max but thousands of Beckys. Max has the alternative of going out and buying a race car or sports car that meets his needs, but it doesn’t really make sense for him to bitch about how much Becky’s car sucks because it automatically turns on traction control.
WiFi is automatically on, and only paused from control center, because it’s a better experience for most of Apple’s users. Almost all use-cases are that the user wants to turn WiFi off temporarily, but having it turn fully off makes it so that it’s more likely for the user to forget to turn it back on and burn their mobile data. Most of us have had that experience. But, since Apple rolled out that feature, it hasn’t happened to me, which I see as a better user experience. I understand that’s not what many others want, and that’s fine. It just tells me iOS isn’t for them.
I've gotta be honest, it feels like it takes several more steps to do anything on iOS than on Android. Finding anything is a chore, it's slow in favor of long animations, and settings are so far out of the way or non-existent, that it's so difficult to troubleshoot issues.
Personally, I don't think iOS is any easier than Android, it's just that Apple strips away everything that your grandparents don't need, but that regular users could really benefit from.
Oh yeah for sure, like actually disabling wifi is a 3 step process, wtf. If you're a fan of what android can provide, you'll probably run into many grievances on an iphone. But here are a few examples I can think of what iphones do better or easier than any android:
iCloud/iTunes phone backups: either automatically through the cloud or manually using a pc, but taking a full backup and restoring them has always been easier. Using iCloud is by far the easiest, for a price ofcourse, a full backup continuously safe from loss or damage. Same with your pictures and personal data. Google and samsung now provide similar services, but apples' is more complete and hassle free. They also provide a fully free temporary backup for 30 days so you can sell your current device with no data loss at all.
Transfering to a new iphone: kind of the same as backups but the transfer process is at least half the amount of steps and is so much more beginner friendly than android, samsung takes a strong second place with smart switch and oppo a third with clone phone. But apples is without fail the most complete.
Interdevice connectivity: also mostly an icloud advantage but if you have more than one apple device or trying to send data to another iphone, airdrop and icloud have always been the most seamless. Other android services are coming close, but nothing can beat the apple ecosystem, at least not yet.
Basic stability: the optimization of memory and cpu usage has greatly improved the stability and longevity of iphones, by having very strict rules on what 3rd party apps can do on the device. Also increases the amount of performance they get out of the phone as a whole.
App store: has always been much less garbage and malware. By having a strict review process I've never seen an application doing to a persons phone what some android apps are still doing to this day. Tricking the user into allowing full device control some apps litter phones with ads, spam and malware, bad form Google.
For the record, I hate apple as much as the next lemming, but I acknowledge what they to well. And what they do, goddamnit they do it well. People will always be confused by technology, but apple does such a good job making very complex functionality accessible to the masses. Functionality on literally any other platform would require extra software, extra configuration, extra effort.
If you define innovate as invent something from scratch, then they did not innovate anything. Everything they've done has existed prior to them doing it. But under Steve they took those inventions and made them more usable and appealing to the common man.
That's their strength really. Make stuff easier and more enjoyable to use.
Unfortunately that has led to lock-in in order to hold onto customers. Yes, they give you convenience but you're bound to their products.
I first realised this when I had an Apple Watch and iPhone 7, then sold my iPhone and got an Android phone and the Watch became useless. Even though I had 3 Mac's and an iPad Pro, they couldn't work with Watch. You HAD to have an iPhone.
So I sold the Watch.
Then I paved over MacOS with Linux and I'm happy. Free to use whatever, whenever, however I want to, and added YEARS to the life of my mac's which both had come to the end of support of MacOS.
My 2015 MacBook Pro and 2012 Mac Mini would be useless now if I was running OSX/MacOS and many apps wouldn't be supported or even work. New apps definitely wouldn't be supported because Mac Devs love to drop support for older versions.
On Linux they run great! Fast, fluid, can run any latest app no problem. I think Linux has probably added at least 10 years into the life of these machines.
I had never thought of wiping an old mac and putting Linux on it to give it a new life. That's a great idea! Thank you.
Depending on the Mac, you could use OCLP to put a more up to date macOS on it. My work Mac is a 2014 mini that’s running Ventura like a champ, despite Apple’s protestations that it’s only capable of running Monterey. I have had Sonoma running on it, but the install corrupted and I haven’t gotten around to sorting it out.
Enjoy 😊
"it just works" always struck me as such an odd adage for apple because so many things don't work on their platforms.
For the common folks who use all Apple stuff, it’s largely true. Messaging, email, web browsing, office tasks, media consumption, all works as well as it could. It’s not as true for some more enthusiast tasks, but that’s not necessarily the core demographic Apple is after and it’s definitely not where the profits are.
Hmmm. Distro?
Linux Mint Debian Edition. But if you install Ubuntu or a distro with the latest gnome, you'll get all the Mac trackpad gestures as well. Cinnamon doesn't support that yet
I don't think I'm going to be that guy, but also not one of the fanboys/haters.
Apple were pretty significant in the development of both FireWire and USB. They were also pretty crucial in driving the adoption of USB with the iMac. Most PC motherboards at the time had a set of jumpers for USB, but you had to buy the actual ports, which took up an expansion slot on the back, and connect them to the motherboard. It was a huge pain in but as the jumpers were censor-specific so had to look at all the specs and buy the right connector. Some aftermarket cases had USB ports on the front/back, but again you had to buy the right connector for your mobo. So everyone kept using serial/PS2/parallel. So peripheral makers weren't making any devices either. When Apple released the iMac, they got rid of all of those other ports and only had USB. All of a sudden you started seeing USB keyboards, mice, CD/DVD drives, etc..
Designing phone ui for fingers first. While there were many other touch phones, many of which could be used with your finger(especially if you were a hipster, you could modify them to be more finger friendly), their ui was primarily designed for stylus use. This is a huge point that basically defined the OS and app design for the next 15 years.
Making capacitive screen popular. Before iphones, almost all(all?) phones had resistive touch screen, which required you to actually push your finger on the screen to do stuff. This was fine with stylus, less fine with finger. Capacitive worked with the lightest touch, which gave a smoother user experience.
Made multitouch mainstream and a core part of touch interface. Again, older touchscreen phones were mostly made to be used with a stylus, so multitouch wouldnt make much sense.
It is important to note that one of the reasons apple succeeded was because nokia was too stubborn and late to adopt and promote touchscreen phones. Thats why while nokia was the phone bid dog of that day, users had turned to sony ericsson(SE) for their flagship, touchscreen phones.
And for 5 years before the iphone, people were using phones like the p800, that had a large touchscreen and even a removable keyboard for that full touchscreen experience. SE had taken nokia's symbian OS and made it more touch friendly. Nokia continued releasing super capable(great cameras, video, fm radio, etc) but non touchscreen phones or with a small touchscreen for years after that, allowing SE to dominate that market. For example nokia released the 6600, which was a great phone but didnt have a touchscreen and its screen was small in comparison to SE's touchscreen flagships.
The first iphone had a terrible camera and couldnt even film videos. Something that other "smart" phones could do for many years. The first iphone didnt have third party apps. Competitive smart phones had had apps for over a decade. The first iphone wasnt 3g, couldnt share stuff over bluetooth, etc. It was a pretty but pretty stupid phone in comparison to the competition.
But over time, apple kept improving, catching up and often surpassing competition in every aspect. I remember when iphones had shitty resolution and when apple caught up, they advertised it as retina display. Nowadays, iphones are the best or almost the best in everything. Now if only apple gave 120hz refresh on base iphones and a faster charging rate. And werent closed garden assholes.
I remember the resistive touchscreens! My dad had bought a BlackBerry (oh man I miss them) for his business work and it had those screens. It definitely took work to get used to because my mom was using a Samsung Galaxy Y at the time... Smallest screen ever but that capacitive touch screen 🤌🏼.
As for the rest of your comment, the multi-touch was definitely insane. I can't find this anywhere atm but I remember reading that they introduced pinch to zoom, which is definitely a flex. Maybe not the first, but on capacitive smartphones, probably yes.
Are you the fabled "well-formatted paragraph guy" I was told about? 😂
The “fingers first” part is ironically why the Apple Pencil took so damned long to come to fruition. Steve Jobs outright refused to allow a stylus for the iPad, because his whole marketing thing with the early iPhones was that you didn’t need a stylus. So he refused to allow development of the Apple Pencil.
Then once he died, Apple quickly pivoted and began developing the Pencil, so they could start marketing the iPad towards digital artists. Because the company had recognized the large void in the digital art world years prior, but Jobs had refused to allow the Pencil the entire time. Once he was out of the way, the company’s leadership was free to begin development.
It’s notable because it was one of the first big examples of Apple veering away from Jobs’ wishes after his death. It proved that the company wasn’t going to simply remain in his shadow forever.
Marketing.
What's dumb about marketing is that people pay more... to be marketed to.
Apple is one of the companies behind the USB standard. There are other major companies (especially Intel) but they often make really stupid decisions and I don't think the world would be using USB today if it wasn't for Apple coming on board and doing some really awesome work. USB-C for example was designed by Apple. And Thunderbolt - another Intel project - was pretty much exclusive to Apple hardware... and it's rumoured that Apple pushed intel hard to make serious improvements such as using copper instead of fibre optic and including it modern USB standards (thunderbolt, if you don't know, is basically PCI-E over a USB cable - it works so much better than a regular USB connection the only drawback is it costs slightly more).
They took KHTML, a niche rendering engine that nobody had heard of which didn't work for major websites... and made it into the foundation that backs every browser except FireFox.
The ARM CPU architecture was technically an independent company, but Apple provided nearly all their funding in the early days, provided ongoing funding for decades before they did anything interesting, and ARM's founding CEO was an Apple employee.
Most of the best programming languages in the world, especially modern ones but even some old ones that have been re-architected, depend on LLVM which, while it's an open source project, for many years was exclusively worked on by Apple (who hired the university student that started it as a side project and gave him an unlimited budget to make it what it is today).
They figured out how to make touch screen phones work. It existed before, but it was shit - in particular typing was unusable and while it wasn't as good on the first iPhone as it is today it was Apple who was the first to find a way to make it "good enough" and that was some seriously innovative stuff. It looks like a tiny keyboard with touch buttons but that is not what's going on under the hood. It's far more complex.
Going forward - the Vision Pro headset has some pretty awesome innovations.
I could go on, but you get the picture. A really common theme is they took something that already existed (e.g. the mouse) and figured out how to actually make it good enough for people to adopt it. It takes a lot of R&D to develop something as comprehensive as, for example, the HIG:
Could someone else have achieved those innovations? Sure. If ARM/Apple didn't do it... I'm sure someone else would have figured out how to make a fast processor that could run all day on a battery small enough to wear on your wrist. But with that and so many other things, Apple's work was critical (a lot of that was software, not hardware - for example technology like ARC was critical to reach acceptable levels of efficiency). Somebody else would have done it eventually, but I'd argue Apple made it happen decades earlier than it otherwise would have. And once they proved it could be done, others coped them. Which is awesome - as Steve Jobs loved to quote Picasso "good artists copy; great artists steal" and said they do it shamelessly and expect their competitors to do the same... as long as they don't steal branding. That's when Apple's legal team gets fired up - as they did with the early Samsung phones where everything, even the icons on the home screen which could have easily been unique, looked like an iPhone.
Only a little bit.
KHTML wasn't so bad. "Major websites" at that time meant less than now. It wasn't Facebook/Reddit/Google/Twitter time with everything important being on those platforms.
They did lots of dick moves to prevent their changes from going back to upstream. I'm not sure taking someone else's work and then behaving as if that's a divine blessing is a good thing.
Chromium now is really far from Webkit, and of course from KHTML, which died as its own project relatively recently.
I give Apple indirect credit for touch-screen keyboards. I don't think they invented them, but their marketing of the iPhone resulted in mass adoption regardless of how good/bad the on-screen keyboard was. And that created market research that led to the significantly better ones we have now.
I remember using one on an original iPhone for a few minutes and thinking I'd never waste my money on it--it was so unpleasant to use that it sullied the whole experience for me. Finally gave in somewhere around 2013 when they had gotten usable and there were multiple options.
They definitely weren't the first for touch screens, but I definitely agree that they pushed the smartphone industry to put a lot more work into it.
Prior touchscreens were laggy and unpleasant. Apple just gave us a really smooth touch screen (It was good for it's time) experience compared to what was out there and that forced other smartphone makers to get with the program.
The Ipod interface. Making people move their fingers on a circle for explore menus was innovative.
Which is ironic, because Steve Jobs significantly delayed the iPod’s development by initially demanding that it be a single button interface. After several months of failure, he eventually relented and we got the wheel interface as a compromise. But he originally wanted the entire interface to only be the single button.
That was definitely cool. The next time UI navigation ever wowed me was the Windows Phone UI... (So many people will kill me for this lmao)
I always liked the windows phone, it's honestly too bad it didn't last
One of the only pieces of tech news that make me cry internally.
I might be missing a lot but I feel the iPhone was a complete market segment they created themselves. Android followed a year later.
They also created the tablet market a year or two later.
They also set the trend of earbuds we have nowadays.
Removed headphone jacks.
Removed power adaptors.
There maybe something else that I might have missed.
I remember the first keynote. Jobs kept repeating phrases like music player, web browser, and phone together like that. And then boom, he whipped out the first iPhone that was in his pocket the whole time. While there were similar devices at the time, nothing (to my knowledge) was all one package especially in an all touch device that small.
Yeah, people seem to forget just how groundbreaking the form factor, all the swipe and pinch (and multitouch) interface stuff, having one giant touchscreen, the user friendliness if pretty much everything (versus other phones at the time), etc was. Soon everyone was trying to copy it, which is fine. But saying all they innovated was rounded corners and everything else already existed and was just as good is dumb.
There were a lot of little things that aren't relevant today but were a big deal at the time. For example it had a web browser that actually worked to view the real internet, even though 99% of webpages were designed for screens the size of 30 iPhones.
Today all webpages are designed to work well on small screens - but that never would have happened without Apple. Or at least it would have taken a lot longer to happen. They got enough people using the internet on a phone to force web developers to support small screens. That was a big achievement - even today it's a massive amount of work to design a webpage that works well with a mouse and with your thumbs. The tools we have now didn't exist back then, and before Mobile Safari there weren't any users of small screens anyway so why would anyone put in all that work?
Phones with web browsers predated the iPhone. They were completely unusable.
In the 2007 tech press lull between announcement and launch, there was briefly a made up scandal of accusing Apple of using models with really large hands in promotional photos/videos to make the iPhone look smaller than it was. It's wild to think about now.
Blackberry did all of that years before Apple. Sure, they didn’t have a touchscreen, but all of the capability was there.
I had a Blackberry Curve and I don't recall it having a music player. It was also so clunky compared to the iPhone is that it's almost unfair to say it had the same capabilities. I'm not an Apple fan but I have to grant that their UI was a huge advancement over anything that came before it.
The user interface itself was the innovation. Hell, even Microsoft and Intel had the portable Windows Mobile things. Compared to an iPhone they liked like they were from the Stone Age. I had one and swapping it felt like going to another dimension.
I had two WinMob devices, and while they were pretty cool to show off, they were awful, clunky pieces of shit to actually use. I was forever glad they had a slide out QWERTY keyboard, because having to ‘type’ messages on a resistive screen with a stylus was hell.
When people found out they ran on ‘Windows’ they’d ask if they could run x or y software, and I’d have to say no, the OS is really just Windows branded and doesn’t actually really work like Windows.
I guess it would be better to say they innovated the slate style phone. Android didn’t come out until 2008 and all other top phones used physical buttons. The iPhone technically only had 5 for general functions.
The LG Prada did that before iPhone too. More accurate to say Apple popularised it and made it a more cohesive package
Haha I had to look it up, but that’s the definition of “innovation”. Literally taking something existing and making it better.
My ex-wife had the non-Prada version of that handset, and it was actually pretty cool. Didn’t really do much more than any normal phone of the time, mind, but was at least technically a smart phone.
Well, there existed phones that were kind of what smartphones became. Blackberries and Palms get a lot of the attention as they were what executives used, but there were also PocketPC devices that were usually white label manufactured HTC devices that were branded after carriers or some other company like HP. They generally were much larger screened devices with a few buttons at the bottom. They were resistive touchscreens so using your fingers was pretty meh for responsiveness, and the UI was just not designed in a way that was pleasant to navigate. Picture a shrunk down desktop interface. I'd say the UI was the biggest shakeup that they did in the product category, followed by steadily raising the bar for hardware in a space that often would have cheap plastic components. Don't get me wrong, I think too much glass and aluminum is actually poorer than something like kevlar especially for dents and dings, but it doesn't look nearly as sexy.
I'd say the biggest shakeup was the features Jobs pushed hard in the keynote.
It was an iPod. Everyone (who could afford one) owned an iPod and it sucked having two gadgets in their pocket all day and keeping two gadgets charged. That was the feature that made the iPhone a "must have" product. Combining your phone and music device was a massive improvement and an obvious one even if you weren't sure about the other stuff. Other phones could play music by then, but they were all still really terrible. I could only fit a single album on my Symbian phone and it took hours of stuffing around and reading manuals and installing buggy software to figure out how to load MP3s onto the device. Yuck.
It was able to browse the internet. The real, full internet. Everyone working a desk job was used to doing that all day every day, but now it was possible to do it away from your desk. That was a huge deal and I think by far the most meaningful feature of the iPhone... except it was a product nobody had ever used before, so it couldn't be the only headline feature.
Ah, that makes sense.
Apple was famous for its innovations in market segments and feature removals.
Maybe modern Apple, but the GUI wouldn't be where it is today without Apple and specifically Jobs's Macintosh team, especially those who followed him to NeXT and what they accomplished there then brought with them when Jobs was brought back to Apple.
The insane amounts of vertical integration that they’ve become known for. They can do really interesting and fascinating things with a bunch of very low-level/hardware-oriented optimization that simply isn’t possible unless you have full control of and visibility into ALL the hardware and software that goes into your devices.
All this control, yet MacOS still doesn't have Window tiling
Just use Rectangle to put windows where you want.
install yabai. Not native, still good.
Target display mode let you plug another computer into your iMac, hit a key sequence, and use your iMac as an external display.
Target disk mode let you hold a key sequence at boot and use your Mac like an external hard disk.
Force Touch is something I am not sure that was ever done outside ~the Mac~ Apple. I still love how the trackpad isn't really a click, but a haptic tap that can occur at a configurable pressure, and does not occur at all when the device is powered off.
LiDAR in a consumer device was unheard of when it came out with the iPad Pro. At the time it came out, I was working in a lab where we used $160k velodyne LiDAR devices. To have one in a $1k tablet was amazing.
Force Touch was done outside the Mac.
They added it to the iPhone 6S then removed it after iPhone 8.
As someone who used to work for Applecare, TDM was a bit of a lifesaver on some calls!
It’s actually been around since the PowerBook — where it was called scsi disk mode.
The recent Surface laptop also use haptic trackpads. That said I feel like I'm in the small minority that absolute hates force touch which is a real shame because the pre-force touch trackpads was the best trackpads anyone has ever made. I can definitely feel the lack of movement when I use a force touch trackpad and it feels extremely uncomfortable to me. So much that a Macbook is completely unusable without a mouse for me.
Can’t you bump mouse sensitivity?
I mean the physical movement of the trackpad. Traditional non haptic trackpads physically get pushed down when you click on them.
Ah, you mean that kind of haptic. Yeah I hate these too, but note that force touch and getting pushed down when clicking are not really exclusionary.
Marketing
Best reply, and I wasn't expecting it. They truly did revolutionize computer product marketing.
Nobody has mentioned the scroll circle thing on the iPod. Not sure if you’ve ever used one, but that made it so much faster to navigate.
Also, Apple started the touchscreen phones revolution.
I don't know about the iPad things because I'm not interested in the tablet format in general.
But touchscreens were already a thing before the iPhone. Apple just took them, polished the UI a bit and used their already influential position with iMac and iPods to commercialise the product.
I wouldn't call that innovation, just having good brand recognition and a great marketing campaign.
The concept of removing features and making people pay for them back.
I mean, you don't technically get them back anyway... You get a consolation prize...
They seem to have a knack for taking something and making it palatable for the masses when it comes to UI and such. I don't agree with a lot of it, but then again I am not "the masses" in the computing demographics.
Malignant charisma is certainly not new to this century let alone apple itself.
Marketing, baby.
The facts are that large companies rarely innovate anything major. They tend to buy up smaller companies that have taken the risk and succeeded. Look at Google and Microsoft and tons of others. It’s a problem with growing big. The forces that make a company a successful scrappy little startup die out in the name of organizational efficiency. If you want to know what Apple innovated you have to look at what they did in the 70s or extend your criteria to companies they have bought.
Fair. I was actually looking forward to learning about the old stuff they did since I was definitely sure they've done no such thing in the recent years afaik (which isn't much anyway)
Modern day planned obsolescence.
True that.
You might like this: Triumph of the Nerds. Covers early Apple, Microsoft, Xerox PARC.
https://youtu.be/c1yzXkH5Pfo
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/c1yzXkH5Pfo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Will have a look. Thanks!
To answer your main question now that I have a minute to type:
People may not like this but Apple didn't innovate very much. They were always second to the market. During their renaissance with the imac they were only good at making colourful plastic shells. Moving along they were second to the market for mp3 players. What apple was good at was refining existing products, so for the mp3 player they made it smaller by using a smaller hdd (1.8") and copied the wheel from a tv remote iirc. They were second to the market for smartphones, blackberry was everywhere and nicknamed the crackberry. The refinement on that was that they correctly distinguished between consumption device and creation device. The phone was primarily consumption, so they made a full size screen and a software keyboard for the occasional entry. iPad was a bigger version of that once the price of touchscreens came down.
Outside of specific products they were very good at marketing and branding. Remember those mac vs pc commercials? They had to portray PC as old nerdy, and mac as cool young hip. Or when the ipod came out they had all those dancing silhouettes. They put themselves as the cool brand and slowly became a luxury brand.
Right... Good point.
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:
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.
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.
Irony — Halo was originally a Mac-only title.
https://kotaku.com/when-halo-was-on-the-mac-and-was-a-totally-different-g-5796019
I had to do some googling, but it looks like it was the Apple Network Server that I'm thinking of.
https://512pixels.net/2012/03/apple-servers/
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
Like a reverse Hackintosh. Nice.
Add to that list the 20^th^ Anniversary Mac.
Ayo fuck TekSyndicate but he did put it quite succinctly:
“Apple are not a technology company. They are a technology recipe company. They take innovations that other companies create and combine them to create compelling products.”
Sorry but that's bullshit. That would be like disregarding all the engineering that goes into developing a car, just because someone else invented the wheel.
Sure - without that invention they couldn't exist - but real innovation isn't just the foundational features of the product. 99% of the work is in small refinements - for example about two hours a day my Mazda is a horrible car to drive because the sun catches the chrome logo on the steering wheel and blinds the driver. The newer models? They have a slightly different shape on the steering wheel that puts the shiny logo in the shade at that time of the day. It takes real work over decades to figure out tiny details like that. Most of the job is things that aren't obvious when you first have an idea to build a product.
Someone else probably, probably millions of other people, likely had the idea long ago... the real innovator is the one that actually does the hard work to make it a product someone will actually want to use.
Sorry but that's bullshit. Inventing something takes a lot, a lot, a lot more effort than packaging something. Incremental improvements are much easier (in comparison ) when you've got the working prototype already on the market.
And wtf is that analogy? The fanboy in you is really showing.
I bought an iPhone 15 Pro on launch week, and even I can’t match that level of fanboy..
UI and general product design is innovation. Tech people have a lot of difficulties grasping this.
End to end user experience.. They control the HW and the Software better than anyone else.
Ease of use
But only if you are trying to do things in the way they want you to. Any deviation from that path is exponentially more difficult though.
Temporarily, my provider uses appletv boxes for as their set top box and typing on a single file keyboard is ridiculously anti consumer to encourage people to use their iPhone.
Pretty much all set top boxes have this problem. At least you can use your phone or voice search on the remote. I’m pretty sure you can connect a Bluetooth keyboard as well.
It's never easy but theirs is the worst I've used.
And then started to undermine that innovation in their UIs instead of paying to use patents that are better than what they have come up with in its place.
High resolution displays on laptops, SSDs in laptops.
Those are the two I can think of right now. I believe Linus (LTT) talked about this on WAN show not too long ago aswell.
It's crazy to think that the original MacBook Air had a spinning hdd, which was 1.8".
It came from the iPods at the time.
It’s crazy to think that the portable, pocket really, music player had HDD.
The Nokia N91 from 2006 also had an HDD. I assume it was the same Toshiba one that Apple used in the iPod Minis.
Every now and then I remember this, and ponder the feasibility of flash-modding a 1st gen Air with an iPod’s mod kit. Just casually rock 1tb of flash storage in that bad boy.
But they’re still too pricey to be a fuck about project, and beyond that they kinda suck.
Marketing
most of the things they're known for, they didn't invent. but they've always been better at packaging these ideas and tech up, and marketing them well.
Invention is not innovation. They didn't invent the GUI but they innovated it. They blew away what Xerox PARC had been working on. They saw all the ways it could be better and implemented them. They didn't just package up the GUI and market it better, they made it better.
Apple is incredibly well polished. It takes ideas that already exists and makes them work for the 90% of people.
It brought the smart phone to the masses. The ipod the iPad. It is the only smart watch manufacturer making profit.
All these existed and most server a function and niche community. Apple bought it polished it and server it up with a user friendly interface.
Can it reinvent the wheel with smart glasses ? This will be it's biggest test. This is a niche area. This is incredibly expensive and it's going to be a hard sell.
iPod. It was the first commercially available MP3 player that sported more than 512mb of storage. First model was 5GB. Second was 10GB.
I got in on the second model, as a Windows PC user. I had to buy a FireWire expansion card just to use it.
Literally nothing else was like it, and at the time, you could leave it on the seat of your car while you went shopping because that far back, nobody knew what the fuck it was and so would leave it alone.
They didn't create the first MP3 player, but they created the first massively commercially successful one.
Through this, they also pioneered the first digital storefront for music which in itself was a fucking feat considering there is already a music company named Apple. They threaded the fucking needle with that one. They had trademark disputes with Apple Corps (holding company for music by The Beatles) going back to the 1970's but put that all to bed with the release of the iTunes store.
Going back to what others have mentioned about Apple, the iPod's success was a big part because of the intuitive interface. If it's easy to learn and use, it will become popular.
The iPod was released in 2001. Back then it was mac only. Creative offered MP3 players with more storage earlier.
The real innovation was pairing it with itunes, allowing you to be able to organise your music collection, convert cds, etc. That and the itunes store a few years later.
The form factor was different though. Large storage, truly portable.
I mostly agree, but I'd just put the itunes pairing as one of the top 5 innovations (maybe #4), not the main one.
And ah yeah, the Itunes store. The Store, and Job's personal (and surprisingly effective) crusade to bring sanity to the way (and prices) that music were being sold was huge huge.
I remember reading about it when it came out. Apparently other companies had discarded the idea of using a spinning drive in an MP3 player because it might only last 3 to 5 years, which was abysmally short at the time.
Apple managed to predict (and maybe help promote?) the short market span of consumer electronics. Most companies were still designing with a 20-year lifespan in mind.
Apple does refinement a lot better than they do outright innovation, but refinement is a core part of the process: your average user doesn't want to be using things that feels like a chore to use.
They refined touchscreen phones, mp3 players, all in one PCs, laptops, peripheral connectivity, tablet computing, GUIs, UNIX, and so much more.
The smartphone case is one where I'd say they largely did invent the modern smartphone. I mean, they didn't design every component from the ground up, but so much of what went into that first iPhone was new and completely redefined things, to the point where these interfaces and design languages still define how virtually every smartphone still works 15 years later.
Similar.with essentially creating the modern tablet market, instead of just trying to sell a reskinnrd desktop OS like everyone was trying to do at the time. But even that was 90% influenced by the iPhone (and its original non-phone design)
Hardware wise? no. There is plenty of prior art for everything that went into iPhone 1.
What they did right was the building of their UI around the touch screen. Gave us more than simple taps to work with. Swiping to see new screens, flicking a list to scroll through it fast, those kinds of things. It felt fast and easy in a way that touch UIs never did before.
Hardware-wise? Yes, some of that too.
Like what? Only thing I can think of is the in-screen fingerprint reader. Touch screens were already popular in Blackberries and Windows Phones at this point.
They took the GUI that Xerox invented and made it so ubiquitous that other companies copied it from them (GEOS, Windows, Amiga, etc. etc.)
They took the Bubble UI that Palm invented, and the PalmOS driven Handspring cell phones, and turned it into a full blown mobile operating system.
What's "Bubble UI"? I searched it up and couldn't find anything.
The bubble ui is using little circle icons to do anything.
I don't think anything beginning with "They took" answers what OP is asking
What do you think “improved” means in the OP?
That and other people were already working to use what PARC had developed.
But I'll give Apple the credit for being the first to implement a personal computer that made computing much more approachable, with the MAC.
It was years before Windows had anything close in Windows 3.1, which frankly wasn't actually all that close.
NT 3.1 is probably the first Windows OS that had the consistency of Mac OS, with modern (non-DOS) underpinnings.
And the reality is it was heavily influenced by the DEC Alpha system because MS had hired much of the Alpha team from DEC. Technet Mag had a great article about it circa 1996.
3.1 was a kludge, 3.11 was a disaster. Windows didn't come close to Mac like usability until Windows 95.
Pretty much every other GUI was ahead of Windows until 95.
Agreed on the GUI.
NT 3.1 at least had modern underpinnings, and using the Norton Desktop on it instead of the Windows Shell made it much like what we got with "Chicago" - the 95/Win2k UI.
Wow, you got me thinking about that stuff and remembering Norton Desktop. I'd forgotten ever using it on NT back then. Gonna have to go look for a copy now.
I am not an Apple fan in the slightest but the Apple Watch is in like, it's 10th generation? And I never see anyone wear any other type of smartwatch. And for good reason, pretty much everything else is garbage.
Garmin makes good watches, but its for a different market I think.
True, it's a bit of a niche
Is only nice if you also have an iPhone otherwise its basically useless expensive garbage.
Better look at Huawei, Zepp and Garmin if you want cheaper but equally good garbage. Fitbit is also a nice brand.
Garmin makes great watches for fitness tracking. Not so much for general use.
And those Chinesium watches require you to install spyware on your phone before they'll do anything at all.
I used to have a pebble back in the day, and then later a pebble steel. I've not found a modern smartwatch that is as good for my needs (partially because it doesn't look like a smartwatch).
I use a Samsung Galaxy wear, which also looks like a normal watch. I'm sure competing products are used a lot and you just don't notice them because their styling is modelled off of dumb watches.
A new Pebble would be great. Too bad Migikovsky spends his days chasing his tail with iMessage now.
Selling an aluminum strip for $60.
High prices for people that have way too much money
Indeed.
They just took other innovations and put them in a nicer package
ipod
Creative Labs and others were doing MP3 players before them.
dankpods
Yeah but they weren’t very good. iPod was the first one with a high speed connection, hard drive, practical means of scrolling through hundreds of songs, desktop software for synchronization. It was a pretty huge improvement.
...but it was still an incremental step over what already existed. Apple's whole thing is to improve what already exists, and pretend like they invented it.
They didn’t pretend they invented the MP3 player. Steve Jobs slagged the existing ones when he announced the iPod. He just said they were badly designed and he was right.
I think the better answer is iTunes. Could be wrong but I don't think so.
Everyone smartphone looks the same because of the iPhone
You can consider this comment stupid but I found the action button pretty cool while I was toying with the iPhone 15s at a T-Mobile recently
What's the action button?
Dinky little button iPhones have that let you assign certain actions to it (like the camera or changing the ringer mode)
Honestly wish androids had something like it
I don't find this comment stupid at all! I find multi-purpose tech really cool. I just find it stupid that they did it by saying that they launched some sort of technological marvel.
Airdrop.
No. Tons of prior art. The just built it into the OS
They have a really nice user-interface. I suppose being user-friendly and accessible can be considered innovative, but that's only when talking to idiots who don't see the immediate value in such things.
That's it.
User-friendly is a subjective opinion I guess... But yeah.
they invented the hardware-based walled garden. an entire ecosystem of shit relying on them alone
Have you heard of game consoles?
Very few people used any sort of video calling before FaceTime. Now it's commonplace.
Hmm... That's kind of true as well. While Skype and Hangouts were definitely what brought video calls to the rest of the world, I guess FaceTime really was America's biggest introduction to video calls...
They pioneered the use of computers in education. They gave educational discounts, in part as marketing, but also because both Steves believed computers could be used to educate, and not just about how to use computers.
It was mostly marketing. Especially back when they started and the market was saturated with computer manufacturers all churning out their own computers that didn't interoperate well with others. It saved educators and then businesses time because they didn't have to waste time re-educating students or employees on a new system. This especially bore fruit as computers started gaining power and the ability to perform functions that had been relegated to mainframes, meaning experience with computer type X could become central to that role. I really think Apple took Moore's Law to heart and projected out the future of the role of computers in business as a result of it and the increasing shrinking of components. Why pay for a super expensive powerful mainframe when only a few people in a company might need that much power and the rest need far less? More cost effective to buy a few powerful desktops and save tens to hundreds of thousands on a mainframe.
Bullshit in computing connected to being with "anti-culture". Everybody puts bullshit in adverts, but being a Mac user or liking Apple's style and approach somewhere in 2007 still had some association with "underground", which is amazingly weird.
On a serious note - Hypercard. I'd love that today.
narcissim