patrick.net

bob2356 says

Apple took an existing, but unreleased, technology and put a very nice and unique interface on it.

The Diamond Rio was released. Even more importantly, the MPEG 2 Layer 3 Standard (MP3) was developed by a lot of really smart people, none of which worked at Apple.

Apple also didn't the solid state memory that made modern MP3 players, smart phones, and tablets possible. Nor did Apple invent the wireless ad hock network technology or the LCD displays or the rechargeable batteries or any other technology needed for today's devices.

But hey, you are right that Apple put a nice looking, polished logo on the product and that makes it so much prettier. Where would we be without Apple?

Dan8267 says

Where would we be without Apple?

You make it sound like Apple's innovation was easy.

If it were easy, other companies would have beat Apple to market with the long list of things they got right, first.

Steve made the first useful personal computer (as opposed to hobbyist computer). A large part of the Apple II's success was actually due to Markkula, who was an avid PC users and pushed the company to create the floppy disk drive at a more affordable price. At any rate the Apple II was the best PC of the 1970s.

Steve then shipped in 1984 the Mac, and after its rough edges and design mistakes were largely worked out over the next two years the 1986 Mac Plus was arguably the best PC of the 1980s, in terms of utility for the money.

It worked extremely well with Apple's LaserWriter, which revolutionized how we worked with paper. HP had released its LaserJet earlier in 1984, but it was just a glorified LPR until well after the desktop publishing revolution got going.

Then Steve got booted out of Apple and then shipped the NeXT machines. The color NeXT computers were beyond state of the art -- about 10 years ahead of the rest of the PC industry. Of course, they were priced well above what PCs cost in the early 1990s, so they were more like personal workstations.

But NeXT got a lot right with that and thus far Apple's purchase of NeXT can't be considered a mistake.

The iPod got big because it was the first PMP to be small enough to carry in a pocket but with enough storage to hold most peoples' entire libraries.

The iPhone was an incremental advance on what other companies were doing, but, again, Apple was first to actually execute on what needed to be done.

Foremost was lose the stylus. Secondly, Apple actually spent the effort and hard lifting to get a pretty good OS and graphics stack working under the pretty interface, and that pretty interface was so smooth because Apple worked to get it right first. Android only achieved parity with Apple in this area with "Project Butter".

Nokia actually shipped phones with OMAP (which had PowerVR) before Apple did, but DIDN'T HAVE THE DRIVERS WORKING for the Power VR renderer.

While Apple not only had OpenGL ES working for developers in 2008, they also had a super-slick image API (called CoreAnimation) that exposed this rendering capability for all app programmers, not just OpenGL-based games.

Remove the innovations that Apple shipped first from our current tech life, and we'd have pretty limited capabilities.

One thing Apple missed was the optical mouse. Microsoft got HP's invention here to market well before Apple. 3D accelerators -- SGI, 3Dfx, nVidia -- that too advanced w/o Apple's involvement in the 1980s and 90s.

But other than that, industry has always been slipstreaming behind Apple, for most of my life now.