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.
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.
they invented the hardware-based walled garden. an entire ecosystem of shit relying on them alone
Have you heard of game consoles?
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.
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.
Marketing.
What’s dumb about marketing is that people pay more… to be marketed to.
They just took other innovations and put them in a nicer package
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.
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.
Enjoy 😊
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.
“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?
No idea buddy. I think men lean towards tech more than women, generally, so men tend to be early adopters
You wrote “Steve they took those inventions and made them more usable and appealing to the common man.” I assume you had data to back up the male orientation? Which is why i asked. I mean you’d have said “common people” if you were referring to all humans i assume?
Must be a typo. What I meant was Steve Jobs and his company took existing tech but made it appealing and usable by the average person.
oh ok my bad thanks 😀
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
99% of the work is in small refinements
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.
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.
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I had a Sony laptop for awhile where you could draw a circle on the touchpad to infinitely scroll/scrub forward and back (if you started your drag on the far right edge). It was kinda amazing once you got down how to do it.
But scrubbers were around way before apple made theirs.
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.
Apple was the first company to create and profit from data harvesting.
The credit reporting and insurance industries would like to have a wor… What’s that?
Nevermind. I’m being told they wish to be forgotten and ignored so they can quietly make boatloads without the threat of additional regulatory oversight.
The first credit score was introduced in 1989, Apple computers was founded in 1976.
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- That’s the FICO score. There have been other scores as far back as the 1950s.
- Credit bureaus are older than abstract scoring formulas, and credit reporting has been going on at least since the mid 1800s
That’s a good point.
Although, looking at it in a different, much more true way - no they weren’t.
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”
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
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.
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.
Yup. Google developers had to go back to the drawing board for both the hardware and the OS after the iPhone announcement.
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.
Screen sizes, presence and size of notches, and available APIs between OS versions.
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.
I don’t even think making Linux pretty is that hard.
You just have to cut out all the retards 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.
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)
You’re giving way too much to Apple. The important part of the touchscreen was cost. It wasn’t viable as common tech until the cost came down. Apple was just riding that curve down and decided when to make a product.
Sure, cost was almost certainly taken into account, they are a business after all.
But they didn’t just get lucky by gambling touch screens and waiting to become cheap enough. Take a look at the user interface of the touchscreen phones that came before the iPhone. Very limited in what they could do. Users were locked to a few small menus and custom-tailored applets, not much different than the UI of the phones before the iPhone. A touch screen was really more of a tech gimmick than a feature. Most (if not all) only accepted single stationary taps, any movement with a finger pressed to the screen wouldn’t register properly, if at all, and there’s really only so much you can do with that.
What Apple innovated is a better use for touch screens, an improvement in the way we were able to interact with our phones, coupled with a re-imagining of what a phone’s interface should be at a fundamental level. And they accomplished this with huge help from their decision to move away from tap-only touch to something that felt more natural: multiple/moving gestures, such as scrolling by moving your finger up or down, pinch to zoom, etc.
This really caused the single biggest movement away from what cell phones really were for us. Before, they were mostly portable telephones with a few extra poorly-implemented and barely functional gimmicks (ever use a web browser on a Razr?). With the iPhone’s success, Apple single-handedly shifted us into the new cell phone model; a customisable, intuitive to use, modular canvas that anyone can mould into whatever suits their needs via apps created by anyone (which Apple gets huge credit for yet again, because this could only he possible with the developer kits Apple released, effectively outsourcing creative solutions in taking advantage of the iPhone’s functionality).
When you look at what they set out to innovate, how they went about doing it, how much different it was than phones in the past, and how incredibly similar it is to phones today, a whole 15 years later, you just cannot reasonably deny that it was an extremely innovative and influential product.
I agree they didn’t “get lucky”, they timed their device to the costs that were outside of their control. This is a common theme in venture capital: timing. You have to time your entry correctly. Too early and it’s too expensive, too late and someone else did it and maybe took the market.
After that I think we have different ideas of what innovation is. To me innovation is inventing. Something new. Blackberry was the innovative device. They were the first (common) smartphone. Touch screens existed in various places (some things released, some not), apple didn’t innovate that. Yes even the pinch to zoom existed on some smart table thing. Scrolling? Pretty sure that was old fry. Touch screen on phones? Pretty sure Nokia had that. So what did apple do? What apple does well is refine. They took existing idea/invention of a smartphone, they took the existing tech/invention of a touchscreen, they timed it, and put out the a touch phone. This was possible because costs of touchscreens came down. The march of technology did not depend on apple.
I’ll argue that the blackberry was just a better implementation of the already existing PDA exactly like the iPhone was just a better implementation of already existing touch-screen device, but beyond that I just don’t feel like taking time to repeat/clarify points I’ve already made or responding to "pretty sure"s. So I’ll just suggest we agree to disagree on this particular topic and wish you a merry Christmas 🎅
Lol when you start mocking someone you show who you actually are. Speaks louder than anything you actually say.
I’m absolutely not mocking you.
You’re basing some of your arguments on things you don’t seem to actually know, and using incorrect interpretations of my words as basis for some of your counter-points. I’ve noticed a pattern in people who formulate and present arguments/points similar to the way you do, and they tend to be difficult to hold civil discussions with, so I chose to end our discussion.
I’m sorry if that comes off as harsh or rude, but it’s my honest reason for ending our discussion. There’s truly no malice or mockery behind my words
Anyway, this is my last message to you. And since you seem to have read my previous message as a passive aggressive mockery, I really do genuinely hope you have a great holiday season.
Apple purchased their touch screen division from people who had been working on touchscreens for decades before them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, I was thinking of Xerox’s initial investigation into rectangular-window based use environments, which literally every single GUI desktop system inherits from. It’s name wasn’t especially relevant, given it was the only element of its kind at the time.
Most early on, people saw it from Apple. I’m most certainly not referring to the very modern (if simplified) X Window System, which I happen to have in a BSD VM.
My point, which you seem to agree with, is that Xerox did it first, Apple just brought it to market. They didn’t invent it, and they didn’t ultimately innovate it any more than Microsoft, Sun, KDE, GNOME, or anyone else did; they just served as the earliest exposure most people got to the concept.
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.
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. :)
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.
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).
