141–150 of 248 posts
Original title: "I'm sorry I criticized you Apple. You win"
> ...this is a time when Amazon is pushing innovations that don’t solve any real-world problems but may create some: like smart speakers, with their threat of big brother-style surveillance in exchange for a minimal increase in convenience, or complex and expensive cashierless stores that won’t deliver much of an improvement to our shopping experience but may cost underprivileged people their jobs. This is a time whe…
> but it really points to how rarely an innovation like the iPhone really occurs Yeah, but don't forget that the pieces to be able to create the iPhone had to be there first.
- USB 2.0 - developed by others, Apple's first use was in computers.
- Flash memory - developed by others, Apple's first use was in iPods.
- LCD screens - developed by others, Apple's first use was in laptops.
- ARM chips - developed by others, Apple's first use was in... iPods? iPhone? Not sure.
- Lithium ion batteries - developed by others, Apple's first use was in laptops.
- High-speed cellular data networks and chips - developed by others, Apple's first use was in iPhone.
- Multi-touch sensor and software - developed by Fingerworks, acquired and further developed by Apple. First use was in iPhone.
- Mac OS X - developed by NeXT, acquired and further developed by Apple.
- iTunes - developed by Soundjam, acquired and further developed by Apple.
You can see why Steve Jobs used to say that Apple is really a software company, and only designs hardware so it can do the software it wants. Most enabling technologies for the iPhone were provided by other companies; the only ones Apple acquired for exclusive use and development were the software and UI.
I'm thinking of the first iPhone here--Apple has obviously since moved a lot of chip technologies in-house too. Again, though, that seems to be tightly coupled to their focus on software.
Yvon Chouinard has a definition of innovation that I really like, which is (paraphrasing) that innovation is the application of technologies in novel ways to create new products. Thus the iPhone was an innovative product, even though Apple themselves did not originally invent any of the enabling technologies, and only owned a few.
(Disclosure: I hold AAPL) Great article but a couple of points: On Tuesday’s call, there was just one question about innovative offerings, and it concerned health applications, an important driver of Apple Watch sales but not a potential world-beating sensation. Apple appears to be happy to think small and focus on its shareholders, not on pie-in-the-sky ideas, like other tech companies, including industry leaders. T…
Most of Apple's R&D spending is not categorized as R&D. R&D spending is for basic tech research not product development.
R&D expenditures don't seem like a metric that can be precisely compared across companies, or even reliably connected to future business success. It's not like companies that report the highest R&D spending are always the ones winning.
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> iPhone was Xerox LoL what? Everything that's built with computers can be traced back to the guy who invented the transistor, but that does not mean innovation stopped then.
The first implementation of a smart phone was likely the LG Prada not the iPhone.
But that would be silly, because the modern "smartphone" era was absolutely started with the iPhone.
Having been a fan of Apple for over a decade now, over the last year I've come to the opposite point of view. Their iPhone and airpods are great products and of course they can ride a long time on those, but in every other area from Macs and accessories I feel they are falling flat on delivering great user experiences. From FaceTime to Siri, to crappy Apple TV remotes, Home Kit... there are just a LOT of mediocre pro…
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Locked and closed compared to what? What makes Android what it is to most people is a bunch of closed sourced Google Services and a bunch of closed sourced binary drivers. That are so closed that not even Google was able to upgrade some of their Nexus devices because they were dependent on closed source drivers.
> Locked and closed compared to what? Did you miss the part where Linux was mentioned as the preferred tinkerers OS? This isn't about Android vs iPhone, it's about freedom vs no freedom.
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A worker at Foxconn has about the same discretionary income as blue collar workers in the states; their food and housing is covered by Foxconn, but isn't normally listed as part of their salary. Now, albeit, they're slightly on the higher end of Chinese workers, but it's not just the shitty aristocrat's kids spending money on iPhones. The people making the things make enough money to buy one, just the same as my hair…
In that case Foxconn isn't an example of an average company paying average wage. The disposable income per capita in China was 36396 chinese yuan in 2017, which makes a little over 400 USD per month. Median disposable income is even lower. You're not even close to buying iPhones with that kind of wages.
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> iPhone was Xerox LoL what? Everything that's built with computers can be traced back to the guy who invented the transistor, but that does not mean innovation stopped then.
The first implementation of a smart phone was likely the LG Prada not the iPhone.
[1] The Hiptop used server-side rewriting of web sites to adapt them to its screen. This seems bananas now, but remember, the web was less than a decade old, and the notion of "responsive design" was years in the future. Back then, most other phones were stuck with WML.
Apple's main endeavor is to develop an actual product. They design and engineer something in the hopes that people buy it. The honesty - and arguably, quaintness - of that consumer relationship separates Apple from the rest of the valley.
Eh, I think this argument is a bit glib. Google's main endeavor is to develop an actual product. They design and engineer something in the hopes that people use it. (Then they sell ads, like the publishing industry has done for 200 years.)
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It really wasn't as massive a leap as you make it out to be. It's likely that we would have ended up with something very similar to today's smartphones even if the iPhone had never existed. It wasn't the first smartphone. It wasn't the first phone to use a capacitive touch screen. The first iPhone didn't even have the app store - it launched with the 3G a year after the the first iPhone was released, if I remember co…
How long do you think it would have taken? Seriously? It took Google a few years to catch up having their massive resources and Apple as a guidepost. RIM had no incentive, they were trying to lock you into the BB server product and tried to get consumers on it to. The phone was a means to an end. MS wanted to push Windows. They’d been trying since CE first appeared and it still didn’t take off. As long as Balmer was…
About the only major thing iPhone brought was direct carrier deals from AT&T and Verizon for big data plans.
Also lost the keyboard. (Not the first device to do so either.)