The basic idea is from Xerox (bought a paid by Apple stock), but the refinements done by the Mac team are really not given enough credit. I wish Parc had been able to release their stuff, but one should really go search for how their windowing system actually worked. The Mac team did some serious refinements (not to mention an amazing job of getting it to run on such a resource starved system).

Truthfully though, the current Apple is really more of an NeXT takeover of Apple and *Step is a direct legacy.

It is fair to say that the Mac team invented the GUI, while Xerox invented the Mouse.

That would be fair, except that the mouse was invented at SRI. Also, Xerox did release a commercial GUI product before the introduction of the Mac, as did Three Rivers (PERQ) and AT&T/Teletype (the Blit). So there's that.

They did invent overlapped windows, and clipping efficient enough to get away with it. They thought they had seen overlapped windows at PARC, but those were actually just tiled.

Also auto-configured network clients.

BeOS had an online application store before Linspire, I believe.

You're right, I vaguely remember BeDepot. I can't remember whether or not you could buy software (as I wasn't much of a BeOS user).

> The App Store concept had been implemented some time beforehand by Linspire (with Click 'n' Buy for Lindows) which in turn was a front-end to Debian's APT package management tool.

Saying that the App Store is an improvement over apt is a huge stretch though; it's not nearly as comprehensive.

>There's very little out there that Apple can honestly lay claim to having invented.

Please study computer history before making statements like this. All of your examples are false, and you didn't even scratch the surface of original inventions to come out of Apple.

You may not be familiar with the history of Apple, and may not use Apple products. That's fine. But please refrain from repeating the rationalizations of anti-apple zealots as if they were fact. Like Apple or not, there is no bay area tech company that has invented more in the area of personal computers.

> All of your examples are false.

Ok, I'm happy to be corrected, how so?