> I feel that we've drifted from our original discussion about innovation. The Mac touchpad hardware/software is genuine innovation. Same for getting great sound into a small laptop, removing pixels from being a factor with high DPI retina displays, same for all-day battery, and same for the M chips. These are all things which change the way we do computing. And these examples are all things where nobody would prefer something worse.
I think this difference in perception is really the crux of it. My TL;DR would be that Apple really pushed the enveloppe for decades, until it mostly stopped doing so (the M chips are the last real advancement for me)
To go point by point:
> touchapds
Apple introducing decent touchpads was an innovation, it happened in 2006. From there they refined the formula, became the absolute best at making touchpads, and decided to leap to button-less touchpads in 2018. That was 7 years ago.
> retina
It was a huge leap in display management and technology. It happened in 2015, 10 years ago.
> all-day battery
The 2010 macbook pro touted 10h of battery life.
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/macbook-pro-u...
Current macbook evolved a lot from there, but given how Apple also touted "all day battery life" for the first watches, that milestone was in reach 15 years ago.
---
> [other manufacturers] do, in limited niches. And they also innovate, but they never make good implementations.
Apple's niche is also limited. It grew bigger than in the platinum macbook days, but even today I'd consider it a small part of the global market. DELL or Lenovo would be an example of an actual mainstream PC maker. Jobs would spit on their designs, but if we look at the numbers that's what a non niche maker looks like.
On whether an implementation is good or not is on the eye of the beholder, I think we can agree to disagree.