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.
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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
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”.
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.
buggy as hell
No it wasn’t
viruses and security holes
That has nothing to do with GUI
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…
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.
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.
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?
Let me guess, you use arch?
If this guy isn’t rolling his own distro he’s basically a scrub like the rest of us.
Marketing
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.
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I am not an Apple fan in the slightest but the Apple Watch is in like, it’s 10th generation? And I never see anyone wear any other type of smartwatch. And for good reason, pretty much everything else is garbage.
Is only nice if you also have an iPhone otherwise its basically useless expensive garbage.
Better look at Huawei, Zepp and Garmin if you want cheaper but equally good garbage. Fitbit is also a nice brand.
Garmin makes great watches for fitness tracking. Not so much for general use.
And those Chinesium watches require you to install spyware on your phone before they’ll do anything at all.
I used to have a pebble back in the day, and then later a pebble steel. I’ve not found a modern smartwatch that is as good for my needs (partially because it doesn’t look like a smartwatch).
I use a Samsung Galaxy wear, which also looks like a normal watch. I’m sure competing products are used a lot and you just don’t notice them because their styling is modelled off of dumb watches.
A new Pebble would be great. Too bad Migikovsky spends his days chasing his tail with iMessage now.
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.
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…
Get more money for less
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.
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Where’s the answer? I don’t want it to get downvoted if it’s not bad.
Selling an aluminum strip for $60.
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
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.
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.
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.
