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.
The graphical user interface.
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.
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.
Wrong wrong wrong. Macontoshs gui was crap and buggy as hell. Every seasoned it expert knew it was a shit lousy interface designed to dupe people into believing it was secure when in fact it proliferated viruses and security holes, and drove the control of computing into an avaricious humanity destroying company culture known as apple. DO NOT EVER PROMOTE THE GUI AS GOOD. ITS CRAP.
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.
Wrong wrong wrong. It was never about ease of use. It was always about taking control away from the user, and hiding authority for control. This kind of deceptive practice has led to what we gave today - cars selling subscription hearing seats. The truth is, the gui was always buggy and a product unfit for its purpose from day one. Apple sold it as a means to get consumers to accept a defective product from the start, perpetuating their ability to always sell updates, forcing consumers to pay for things THEY DO NOT NEED.
Wrong wrong wrong. The graphical user interface is crap and will always be crap. The whole matter of popularity is marketing bunkum. Console command interface was al ways faster and better than any gui for general computing tasks. The gui is fine for office tasks, but shit for everything else. The popularity of the gui today has driven a massive upscale of cruddy bloated virus infected software. The fact that most people now only know gui has meant that control of viruses has slipped away. Had console commands been the mainstay for computing, viruses and security holes would never have been allowed to proliferate as they do today.
Bud, you sound like a technophile geek. The kind of person who custom built his own computer. You're not the target customer. Apple builds products for people that don't care about technology, they just care about what the technology does and want it to be easy and seamless. And that is a vast majority of the people.
The first virus was made in 1986 for IBM personal computers. Nothing is free from computer viruses. Not macOS, not iOS, not Android, not GNU/Linux, not freeBSD, not even an IBM PC from the 80s. All software can be exploited. The only reason GUI software is the most exploited is because it is what people use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_(computer_virus)
GUI is not only intended for office tasks. In fact, I would argue that many office tasks are better suited for command line, but I’ll agree that nobody knows how to do that anymore.
GUI was always best suited for artists. Apple has, for a long time, especially since OSX, been explicit about catering to artists. Can you imagine editing video in a terminal? Or editing a layered image? Or producing music?
While you may be correct I think you're still missing the point. CLI is for super nerds. While you and I may know how to use it, the average person doesn't, and is unlikely to put in the effort to learn. That is the innovation that Apple made in bringing computing to the mainstream. It was precisely because people didn't have to learn how to navigate the CLI environment and instead got an easy point-and-click interface that computers caught on with the public at large, and that gained Apple an absolute ton of cash money and noteriety.
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.
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 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.
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
I don't even think making Linux pretty is that hard.
You just have to cut out all the removed who think average people want to use a terminal. Once you start thinking pragmatically, practical solutions come to mind.
Lots of insecure people like to overcomplicate things they don't understand to cover up their lack of knowledge rather than just admitting they don't know.
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 (which I still think are just fantastic) were a NeXT thing.
App bundles were just a better implementation of resource forks, which were invented by Apple and pre-dated NeXT.
(which of course became Apple, but they weren’t at the time)
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
Didn't they steal most of that from X? As in Xerox's graphical desktop environment? It was around long before Apple grabbed it.
Xerox's prototype desktop computer was called Alto, not X, and had some of these features in a very early form. It was never made into a product for the open market; it was used internally at Xerox and at some research universities.
Apple didn't "steal" from the Alto; Xerox invested in Apple and allowed Steve Jobs and Apple engineers to tour their facilities for product ideas.
You might also be thinking of the X Window System for Unix, whose modern descendant most Linux systems are still using. It's pretty different from the Mac approach.
The document-centric model of desktop applications largely originates from the early Mac.
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.
LMFAO at Apple inventing laptops that don’t have weird keyboards
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.
Agreed. They didn't really "innovate" anything. They stole ideas from other people, and just marketed it better.
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.
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.
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".
I miss my old Nokia.
You could write custom apps and load them onto it over Bluetooth.
Them building a smartphone around a capacitive touchscreen with a software keyboard was the primary innovation of the iPhone.
A full browser that rendered webpages is not an innovation, that's a result of increased processing power letting them port more browser code over. Pinch to zoom interfacing on a browser might be an innovation, but a web browser on a mobile phone was not innovative, just iterative.
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.
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
interesting, i find generally woman are more into apple products (or at least equally) in my experience. Does the data indeed show that only men found Apple products appealing at first or something?
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.
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.
Before iphones, almost all(all?) phones had resistive touch screen, which required you to actually push your finger on the screen to do stuff.
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 LG Prada was the first capacitive touch-screen phone. March 2007 release compared to iPhone's July 2007 release.
Samsung also fought a patent war with Apple when Apple sued Samsung for creating a similar phone to the iPhone in 2008. The court docs had examples of Samsung's first touchscreen phone.
Apple are very good at marketing and had a powerful personality that people worshiped (Jobs).
Spend 5 mins watching videos by Louis Rossman fixing Macbooks and you'll realise they are shitty products.
A couple months are irrelevant, obviously both phones were designed and released in a similar timetable. Lg prada wasnt a smart phone and didnt have multitouch.
And while many people have turned against modern iphones, i think modern iphones are the best phones on the market. I wouldnt even recommend an iphone from 10+ years ago but modern iphones have addressed almost all issues that i had.
They had
I am probably forgetting tons of other issues that i had with iphones over the years. And apple took all these weaknesses and not only caught up to the competition, but surpassed it and made then a key marketing point.
Samsung also fought a patent war with Apple when Apple sued Samsung for creating a similar phone to the iPhone in 2008. The court docs had examples of Samsung’s first touchscreen phone.
I actually bought samsung wave in 2010, which was the first phone with an oled screen. And it was great, apart from the limited app support, since it was running Bada, a samsung created android competitor. And since then, i refused to get an non oled screen phone. Once you go black, you cant go back.
I think that samsung makes the best android phones.
Spend 5 mins watching videos by Louis Rossman fixing Macbooks and you’ll realise they are shitty products.
I dont care or know much about macbooks but it is obvious that Rossman has an agenda and keeps making "artificial outrage" videos(because they bring the views). From what little experience i have, it seems to me that expensive windows laptops fall apart more often than macbook pros. And all windows laptops have shit battery life, which is very important for many people.
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.
USB-C for example was designed by Apple.
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 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.
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.
I dunno. Apart from predictive text I don't see a whole lot of difference between the onscreen keyboard on my current phone vs the one on a 1990s Palm Pilot, and I'm pretty sure the old school iOS onscreen keyboards didn't have that.
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.
Marketing for electronics is definitely a big one, nobody else really has the same cult following, and when somebody like Samsung gets close it feels like whatever the cult version of a knockoff is.
I'd argue that Sony held a cult like following prior to Apple's resurgence. Walkmen, TVs, Home Stereo and VHS/CD/DVD players would often all ne Sony branded in a number of households.
They also did similar bullshit anit consumer antics like those ridiculous memory stick storage cards that were costly as all hell compared to SD cards.
Sony walked so Apple could run.
That is 100% true. They nailed marketing.
Smartphones had definitely been marketed well before, but Apple hit that "elite and distinguished" spot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 UI was the biggest shakeup
I'd say the biggest shakeup was the features Jobs pushed hard in the keynote.
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 first Android was made about 1999/2000, I'd read about it in a trade mag just before I was laid off from one company (they provided that trade mag, which is why I know the date). The idea of running Linux for a phone OS was intriguiging at the tomr, as we were doing some Linux testing ourselves.
At that same time (late 90's), we were already deploying full-color Palm Pilots with wifi, and eagerly waiting for the integrated phone models whi were projected to be released about 2000.
I was using a Treo with a touch screen before iPhones existed, and I was a late adopter in about 2003 because I don't do early versions, I wanted CDMA, and didn't want the Palm-like flip cover thing. The Treo was kind of the first bar-type smart phone, just rounded. I used to watch movies on that thing on flights. I kept multiple SD cards so I could swap them out (they ejected from the top, no opening the case, no power cycle).
I (well, my deployment team) had deployed thousands of Palm Pilots with wifi access, and then Treos, which synced to a desktop app, in the early 2000s, probably 5 years before iPhone existed.
It could send/receive emails, SMS, calendar, load all sorts of apps from simple games like checkers to Monopoly. It did GPS and mapping with a third party SD card.
It had a third party office app that is now available on Android. I used a shopping app that could sync to an account online. It could browse the web (though the web browsing was pretty awful at the time). It could send data wirelessly to people nearby using infrared.
It had a camera (a shitty one) that could also do video. It used a data connection with the cell provider. It had Bluetooth, and could send Palm apps to other devices with it.
There were versions that had Windows Mobile on them, they were pretty good.
I moved to Android from Treo in 2009.
Smartphones weren't a new idea, Palm had been on it since the mid 90's, just waiting for the phone tech to be small enough to pack into a Palm Pilot.
Apple never leads, despite what their PR is so good at promulgating.
What they are excellent at is watching the market and timing their entry perfectly, with a product people want, giving the impression that they lead the market. And I don't say this as a criticism, what they do is brilliant, and the products they release are usually good at what they're intended to do.
I really like their design at times. The iPhone, from a physicality stand point, is brilliantly balanced, shaped, sized. Unfortunately iOS just doesn't meet my personal needs.
The first Android was made about 1999/2000, I’d read about it in a trade mag just before I was laid off from one company (they provided that trade mag, which is why I know the date). The idea of running Linux for a phone OS was intriguiging at the tomr, as we were doing some Linux testing ourselves.
Android as a company was created in 2003 with no product at all. They started working on a phone operating system in 2005, were acquired by Google, and then had an early prototype Blackberry knockoff in 2006. The iPhone was announced in 2007 so they abandoned the original plans and started making an iPhone knockoff. The first Android phone was released in 2008.
Smartphones weren’t a new idea, Palm had been on it since the mid 90’s
Apple shipped the Newton in 1993. Well before Palm. And long, long, before shipping the Newton they were talking about hand held computers. The idea that they copied Palm is ridiculous.
Like Palm, the Newton wasn't good enough to achieve widespread market adoption (and Apple recognised that - killing it in 1998).
Sure - iPhone wasn't the first pocket computer and it was a very obvious invention that companies all over the world had failed to pull off for decades. I think Microsoft was the closest - their Pocket PC that was pretty good and they had a massive decade long version almost rebuilt from scratch about to ship when the iPhone came out... But Apple beat them to it and Google followed close behind - reportedly Google's early hardware partners were planning to ship Windows on those devices but Microsoft lost out on the contract negotiations, Satya Nadela said they were just too slow - their hardware partners want to wait for them.
Apple was first to ship a good pocket computer. That was real innovation. Real innovators are the ones that get it right, and being first (to get it right) matters because once it's done once everyone else can just copy your idea instead of wasting time developing and testing dead end solutions to hard problems. The early Android devices for example, looked more like the old Pocket PC or a Blackberry. They probably weren't good enough to be successful. They quickly copied ideas like the software keyboard from Apple, and quickly adopted Apple's open source technology like the WebKit rendering engine.
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.
I always thought that was one of the dumbest things about an iPod.
Would've much preferred to just have simple buttons.
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.
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...
Marketing, baby.
Modern day planned obsolescence.
True that.
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)
You might like this: Triumph of the Nerds. Covers early Apple, Microsoft, Xerox PARC.
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.
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.
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.
I had to do some googling, but it looks like it was the Apple Network Server that I'm thinking of.
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
Add to that list the 20th Anniversary Mac.
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.
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".
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
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.
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 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.
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.
They didn’t create the first MP3 player, but they created the first massively commercially successful one.
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.
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
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.
High prices for people that have way too much money
Indeed.
Selling an aluminum strip for $60.
they invented the hardware-based walled garden. an entire ecosystem of shit relying on them alone
Have you heard of game consoles?
They just took other innovations and put them in a nicer package
ipod
I think the better answer is iTunes. Could be wrong but I don't think so.
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.
Everyone smartphone looks the same because of the iPhone
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...
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.
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.
narcissim
Get more money for less
Rounded corners on their devices and marketing. We already had smartphones, but nobody made the leap to specifically market form over function. Once jobs realized that, it was a simple matter of showing how smooth and limited iPhones were compared to the competition.
Rounded rectangles (in computer interfaces specifically; they were already everywhere else, and Jobs just copied them, like everything else; but copying them was an innovation of sorts, since no one else had considered that wasting resources rounding corners might be worth it).
I mean, he always had the philosophy that form was the priority... Function wasn't bad, but form was king for him.
You aren't wrong.
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