Did Apple say anywhere that they invented the tablet and/or the smartphone?
No.
But they could boast, and they would be right, that they invented the modern tablet and the modern smartphone, because all modern tablet and smartphones copy their iPhone and iPad designs (heck, the first Android smartphone came out a year after the iPhone), not the tablet and phone designs that came before them.
Then why didn't they patent them, given that Apple always thoroughly and excessively patents stuff when they get the chance?
Answer: they didn't invent them.
Because "invented the modern X", doesn't mean created X as a raw technology (to patent it), but created the version of X most people actually care about from them on...
That said, they do have tons of patents on the iPhone and iPad, and on phone/tablet design. Not to mention they've made the Newton already, a defining 90s tablet...
As for the inventor of the smartphone, that was IBM, with the Simon Personal Communicator. Do you care much for those devices in 2020? Didn't think so, like I don't see people buying TV sets from the inventor of TV, or clothes from the inventor of clothing...
If however, you're a developer selling apps, then I can see your point. Apple took the business model of game consoles and brought it to smartphones. Most people love it, developers love it, and that's probably why they call it an "innovation" even though it isn't.
Well, as someone who mostly likes raw meat from animals I kill, I also don't see the big innovation with this "cooking" thing.
But I hear it's popular with many....
>Apple took the business model of game consoles and brought it to smartphones.
They also added the multi-touch all-screen UI that everybody else copied immediately, gestures, various sensors and capabilities, native apps, proper web browsing (and not the crappy "mobile" experience of smartphones of yore), and several other things besides. Plus things like the ability to listen your voice messages in your order, or send text messages without the SMS/MMS toll via the same app you use for regular text messaging.
And the first iPhone didn't even had third party apps. People demanded for it to get an app store...
Also true when the iPhone appeared: most people didn't have any kind of smartphone, and the apps they could run were at best Java mobile crap. There were smartphones but they were not as popular, and not as user friendly (I had a few, e.g. Sony ones, there were Nokia etc. Nothing compared to the iPhone or the "modern style" smartphone. And most people had a regular phone or -if they did business- a BB). After the iPhone everybody wanted to get into the smartphone thing...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/apple-awarded-design...
Because you can't patent a rounded rectangle nor is that what Apple did. They patented the very specific design for the iPad.
"I think most people don't understand what it means that this is a design patent - it's not the same thing as a "regular" patent (a utility patent). Design patents allow a company to get an exclusive right to the form of a functional object so that a 3rd party can't make a different device with identical appearance (well, not legally at least). Almost every company that puts the time into making a distinctive shape for their devices gets one: Microsoft has one for the Xbox, George Lucas got one for Yoda etc."
It took someone 20 seconds in a CAD tool to do the exterior product design on the iPad, using intern-level skills.
There's a difference.
You'd be very suprised.
Not to mention, if it was so trivial, tons of other companies would have made the exact same design before, not copy it after it was released.
Hardly, but that's irrelevant.
Not to mention, if it was so trivial, tons of other companies would have made the exact same design before, not copy it after it was released.
Gee. It's almost as if it's what's inside that matters, and lacking the technology inside the iPad, those other companies had no reason to adopt the corresponding product design.
(Except, of course, in the TV and movie industries, where any number of prop designers did exactly that, decades before Apple.)
It's similar to how Apple invented the tablet and the smartphone (though, curiously, they don't have any broad patents on these concepts).