156
What DID Apple innovate?
(lemmy.world)
Marketing
Everyone absolutely thought the original click wheel iPod, the iPhone and the iPad were all doomed to fail. Hell, the Apple watch didn't exactly get off to a hot start for that matter.
And back at the beginning, the Mac OS GUI. Yes, Steve Jobs saw the idea of a graphical GUI at Xerox Park, but what his engineers turned out is something completely different. And at the time it was easily as revolutionary as the touchscreen interface of the iPhone.
Actual duds by Apple that I can think of off the top of my head:
- The Cube
- The Mac IIcx
- The Mac IIfx
- Whatever that ungodly massive Unix box was that they branded as Apple
- The liquid cooled G5 cheesgrater
Add to the list of duds:
Apple Pippin - a 5th gen games console. 'competed' with PS1, N64 and Sega Saturn. Made the Saturn look like a runaway success by comparison.
Apple Newton - a PDA that sucked balls and was widely mocked.
Whatever that ungodly massive Unix box was that they branded as Apple
You might need to be more specific - all Apple computers have been Unix boxes since OSX 10.0
Pippin was just the original Xbox concept before the Xbox arrived. Similar to Microsoft’s windows ce gaming agreement with Sega Dreamcast. Cram a low end computer in a console and put the bootable OS and app on a CD. Boot directly into the game. Same cd could be played on a Mac.
Problem was, it came out at a time when Apple had too many projects going on at once. So it was both too expensive, and left to rot with “licensees” instead of being built, promoted, and sold by Apple.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
most of the things they're known for, they didn't invent. but they've always been better at packaging these ideas and tech up, and marketing them well.
Invention is not innovation. They didn't invent the GUI but they innovated it. They blew away what Xerox PARC had been working on. They saw all the ways it could be better and implemented them. They didn't just package up the GUI and market it better, they made it better.
Apple is incredibly well polished. It takes ideas that already exists and makes them work for the 90% of people.
It brought the smart phone to the masses. The ipod the iPad. It is the only smart watch manufacturer making profit.
All these existed and most server a function and niche community. Apple bought it polished it and server it up with a user friendly interface.
Can it reinvent the wheel with smart glasses ? This will be it's biggest test. This is a niche area. This is incredibly expensive and it's going to be a hard sell.
iPod. It was the first commercially available MP3 player that sported more than 512mb of storage. First model was 5GB. Second was 10GB.
I got in on the second model, as a Windows PC user. I had to buy a FireWire expansion card just to use it.
Literally nothing else was like it, and at the time, you could leave it on the seat of your car while you went shopping because that far back, nobody knew what the fuck it was and so would leave it alone.
They didn't create the first MP3 player, but they created the first massively commercially successful one.
Through this, they also pioneered the first digital storefront for music which in itself was a fucking feat considering there is already a music company named Apple. They threaded the fucking needle with that one. They had trademark disputes with Apple Corps (holding company for music by The Beatles) going back to the 1970's but put that all to bed with the release of the iTunes store.
load more comments
(4 replies)
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.
load more comments
(4 replies)
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.
load more comments
(11 replies)
Selling an aluminum strip for $60.
this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
156 points (81.0% liked)
Technology
59287 readers
3652 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS