> Perhaps a faint idea of drones deliveries, balloon weather projects, AR/VR tech, failed chat apps, quantum something, and a lot of PR.
This line dismisses the huge achievements in quantum engineering as "quantum something" and, just for example, ignores other high profile breakthroughs like AlphaGo and AlphaFold. I'd also say that many of the profound inventions invented at Bell Labs would not be fully appreciated until decades later, and will be the same case with today's research.
AT&T was a ruthless monopoly. The mythical image of bell labs was crafted and maintained partially to keep congress and regulators at bay.
I though that smartphones were a kind of inevitable outcome of technological advancement, and that many other similar products where already out there.
I have to agree that Apple's marketing was spot on, as it still works to this date.
So LG could have become Apple but for some poor UI decisions and worse marketing - they released their own capacitive-screen phone, the LG Prada, a month _before_ Apple, but cheaped out on the UI development: no on-screen keyboard, and not using the touch screen to its potential with scroll/page-turn gestures.
But, iPhone just hit it out of the park on a bunch of different levels. From the architecture, the software, UX and having the balls to tell Verizon to fuck off, they hit a home run.
There’s lots of ground breaking work being done at labs today, I just don’t think they’ll be winning Nobels like Bell Labs was. Bell Labs has 9 Nobel prizes. Make a measurable claim on how many google research will get, and I’ll wager against it.
And understanding quantum mechanics really enabled transistors, so the folks making the transistor didn't really do anything fundamental. Oh, and calculus in mathematics enabled understanding of quantum mechanics really, so all the physicist did was put a bunch of math symbols together, mathematics is the real innovation here — you see where I'm going with this?
> I can't name a single thing from Google X or Amazon 126, Apple or Microsoft Research departments.
This is a very narrow way of looking at who's making things of value.
Let's take a single example out of those companies mentioned: Apple's iPhone and the demand it generated for smartphones, pushed many industries to invest in research, development and mass production of high resolution, low cost, low power screens, low power (and now even faster than desktop workstations) compute in small form factor SoC, ever so small low noise and high resolution camera sensors and lenses, faster, higher bandwidth, cheaper and more widely accessible cell networks, and so on and on and on...
Take any single one of the above components/infrastructure and one can list 100 products of value stemming from its cheap and widespread availability. Apple didn't just make a phone, it changed computing forever (something Jobs would probably say on stage) in span of a few years.
Also, did you forget https://research.google/ or just ignored it? There are mind numbing number of research papers *with* corresponding global scale real products used by millions/billions of people, that based on those research.
I am sick of people glorifying the past when today, right under their noses, exists orders of magnitude greater research and innovation. Their title may not be sweet and straightforward like "invention of the telephone" but that's how progress works — the more you move forward, the more nuanced and specific things get.