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.
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.
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.
Marketing
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.
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.
Ease of use
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.
While I personally have not tried it, nor have many others, yet those who have tried and commented and as I have assessed via video of the device, the Vision Pro seems to be poised to once again define how we interface with the next computing platform. The spatial/immersive computing platform. It is apparently like magic and I cannot wait to try it.
For 3k. You and maybe 100 other folk. So real people might get it when ?
Hard to say, but I would guess that by the end of this decade more people will be wearing XR glasses than those still looking at smartphones. My guess too is the price will never be less than an iPhone today but the value will be higher as it will do more. A lot more.
I have xr glasses. They are useful for certain things. However they are really annoying. I pick up my phone a lot because glasses require a very specific situation.
Low light/ bright situation. Easy example of using them in bright sunlight. Unusable. Hat, unusable. Move them to take a drink.
I think they will be hard by a niche community. But I think cost and and usefulness
These are the limitations of the tech today, but a wave of innovation is inbound. 7 years from now XR glasses are going to much more slick and solved many of the issues you have raised. If not 2030, some point before 2040 unless we go extinct first.
Lmao. The vision pro defines nothing that wasn’t already defined by Valve / Oculus / Meta or every random AR / MR tech demo.
It brings nothing new to the table but an absurd price tag to pay for external 3DS googly eye displays.
The same was argued about the iPhone and while I will agree that really, nothing new was brought to the table from a hardware perspective, their integration is unsurpassed it would seem. We will have to wait and see, but being a heavy VR/AR user myself, the overall package Apple has provided it the gold standard right now for immersive computing interaction. Those who have used have said it was like magic and even a sharp developer made their version of the gaze interface on a Meta Quest Pro and said it was like magic. That is the innovation that others have missed. Like the Meta Quest Pro has eye tracking and could have easily had the magical user interface that uses eye gaze, but they did not. I bet they will in the next one as it does seem like this is the path forward. This is where Apple innovated and really does show that they tried a lot of input methods before they found one that just made it feels seamless.
Marketing
The concept of removing features and making people pay for them back.
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.
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.
Modern day planned obsolescence.
Marketing.
INNOVATE not INVENT
wireless charging? i mean magnets in qi2 are apple’s idea, also i wonder how current smartphone market would look like without iPhone, would we still have stylus operated resistive screens? i know they weren’t the first ones with capacitive touchscreens and finger oriented UI, but whey popularized it, definitely made it mainstream
Nah, Samsung had wireless charging in 2015 with the Galaxy S6, Apple started wireless charging with the iPhone 8 in 2017.
And wireless charging has been around long before that. Even those rechargeable toothbrushes have used it long before smartphones were a thing.
And Microsoft released the Surface Pro with a stylus before any iPad had them and I’m sure you could go much further back for other devices that had them before that.
