> When was the last time people were surprised by what they saw?

The performance per watt and rollout schedule of Apple Silicon?

Who besides industry geeks actually cared about that?

ipod was innovative for the common man.

iphone was innovative for the common man.

ipad was innovative for the common man.

The rest? Meh.

Nowadays it's just an upgrade treadmill, consisting of "To re-pair my old watch I first need to update to the latest watch software (even though it worked fine before I unpaired it). But to update the watch software I need to update my phone software to a higher version than it supports, so now I need a new phone, which now won't work with my computer unless I update that, but it doesn't support the latest OS so now I need to buy a new computer..." For want of a nail.

My wife doesn’t care about CPU architectures, but she was astonished that her new MacBook Pro didn’t get hot on her lap, and how she could work through the day on one charge. Then she was astonished by the sound quality of the speakers. It’s not a revolution but people care about the end result of those incremental innovations.

AirPods were the first Bluetooth headset that just worked and made you want to ditch the cord.

We had Bluetooth earpods in the early 2010s used by a lot of people. What's innovative in releasing the same product but for two ears something revolutionary. Capacitive touch is revolutionary, a Bluetooth earpiece is not

One that actually works properly and doesn’t sound like ass is revolutionary. That’s where apple win.

I feel it's a "good product" not a "revolutionary" one

That’s all I want

Apple Watch, Apple Pencil, AirTag, AirPods...

They made a pencil?

Huh. And I guess stalkers quickly embraced the AirTag.

Apple Pencil = Apple Drawing Stylus, with Tilt, Pressure, and Interesting Choices About Friction And Power Management. I’m an artist and more and more of my fellow artists are using Procreate or Clip Studio on an iPad as their main tool for serious work now that there’s a decent stylus.

You list off 3 products that changed the world.

And then say “meh”

I just don’t understand some people.

Apple’s contributions to modern computing, from GUI work, to WebKit, to AirPods is game changing.

Yes I forgot airpods, mostly because I don't use headphones, sorry.

Webkit is nice but not groundbreaking. Their GUI work isn't much better than the competition, although I do hope SwiftUI goes somewhere...

So I listed 3 products (should have been 4 products) that changed the world, but the meh is not for those (they were quite good!). The meh is for a return to 1990s Apple. Most of the existing technologies have largely plateaued and are being pushed ever higher in diminishing return increments (battery life being the final frontier). Without a product visionary, this is where we'll be for awhile.

It is absolutely groundbreaking, so much so that every major browser that the entire population of the planet use, sans Firefox, is based on technology that was born in WebKit.

As for the “apple can’t innovate”, I don’t buy it. Apple of the 90s was full of poorly conceived ideas. I see little difference in the “world changing product development velocity” of Apple then and now.

I do miss the flavor of old apple though, grey has somehow replaced beige as the “boring color every computer uses”

WebKit which was forked from KHTML. Apple did work, of course, but they did not make that from scratch.

I love Apple, been a user since we had a MacPlus at home (then a Mac 2Vi, then a LC3, then PPC7600, then...) but let's not be overzealous.

Have you actually looked at the deltas between KHTML and WebKit? There is a reason WebKit was chosen.

No one who was paying any attention to iPhone and iPad performance was surprised by that.

There is enough bullshit in the leaks to make it still a surprise on the day. Almost all of the truth gets leaked beforehand but it only makes up 40% of the leaks published.

The point is that Apple wants to stay in control of the messaging, which is still the case with these “leaks”.