> For people interested in AI research

I think he is pointing out for people interested in research.

OTOH, it is interesting to see how a company is applying AI to customers at the end. It will bring up new challenges that will be interesting from at least an engineering point of view.

Apple was first with 64 bit iPhone chips. Remember Qualcomm VP at the time claimed it was nothing. Apple Silicon for M1 was impressive for instant in low power high performance.

Those are both still (major) incremental improvements to known tech, not cutting-edge research. Apple takes what other companies have already done and does it better.

all cutting-edge research other companies are supposedly doing are also incremental. Depends on your vantage point.

But last at bringing a calculator on the iPad =)

No one has ever brought a native (not 3rd party) calculator to the iPad before. Apple is the first.

> No one has ever brought a native (not 3rd party) calculator to the iPad before. Apple is the first.

I'm not sure I understand... Considering apple makes the ipad, wouldn't all ipad calculators other than apple's be 3rd party by definition?

Prototyping tech is one thing; making it a widely adopted success is another. For instance, Apple was the first to bring WiFi to laptops in 1999. Everyone laughed at them at the time. Who needs a wireless network when you can have a physical LAN, ey?

On the other hand, people who laughed at them removing the 3.5mm jack can still safely laugh away.

> On the other hand, people who laughed at them removing the 3.5mm jack can still safely laugh away.

Then laugh at Samsung and their flagship line of phones as well, since they haven't had headphone jacks for a while now. "After Note 10 dumps headphone jack, Samsung ads mocking iPhone dongles disappear" (2019):

* https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/after-removing-headphone-ja...

"Samsung is hiding its ads that made fun of Apple's removal of headphone jack":

* https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-headphone-jack-ads-...

>> On the other hand, people who laughed at them removing the 3.5mm jack can still safely laugh away.

> Then laugh at Samsung and their flagship line of phones as well, since they haven't had headphone jacks for a while now. "After Note 10 dumps headphone jack, Samsung ads mocking iPhone dongles disappear" (2019):

I totally do. One of the problems with Apple is the industry seems to mindlessly ape their good and bad decisions. Their marketing has been so good, many people just assume whatever they do must be the best way.

> One of the problems with Apple is the industry seems to mindlessly ape their good and bad decisions...

That's not a problem with Apple.

It's more of a regulatory problem, under a certain light.

Regulation that stops companies copying ideas from one another would be a disaster.

I'm more suggesting that bad decisions should be litigated against fast-and-early, so other companies aren't encouraged to follow in Apple's footsteps. If every company had their own Lightning connector, there would be no choice but to force them all to converge. The original sin is letting it happen at all, in the first place.

I don't really see how you could litigate against dropping the headphone jack from the iPhone, which is the context of this thread.

Who decides which ideas are good and bad? I assume you wouldn’t want regulators to have retroactively forced Apple to keep floppy disk drives in their computers. Or cdrom drives? It’s just the “obviously bad” ideas that should be banned, right?

Do you have a crystal ball that lets you know ahead of time which choices are good and bad? Even in retrospect I’m not sure Apple made the wrong choice with the lightning connector. It’s a better connector in just about every way than micro-usb, which was the only standard alternative at the time. Apple’s experience with lightning was rolled into the design process for usb-c, which as I understand it they were heavily involved in. USB-c might not exist as it does today without Apple’s experiments with the lightning connector.

Even if we pretend you’re better at picking winners and losers in the tech world than Apple and Samsung, do you think regulators are going to be as canny as you are with this stuff? US politicians don’t seem to understand the difference between Facebook and the internet. Are you sure you want them making tech choices on your behalf?

If you ask me, I think regulators would make a dogs breakfast of it all. If they were involved we’d probably still have laws on the books mandating that all laptops still have parallel ports or PCMCIA slots or something. The free market can sure take its time figuring this stuff out. But competition does, usually, lead to progress.

> If every company had their own Lightning connector, there would be no choice but to force them all to converge.

You mean like forcing every phone maker to use the awesome connecter known as micro USB-B?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply

At the time I felt like Apple was getting rid of the 3.5mm jack as a potential bottleneck for future iPhone designs (as one of the limiting aspects of form factor), but there still doesn't seem to be anything design-wise to justify it, even several years later. It is very clear now that it was merely to encourage Air Pod adoption.

I would say this was obvious to the cynical of us from the very beginning. Unless you are trying to go portless (for water resistance perhaps?) or have a very thin phone, there’s very little benefits of removing the jack… except to drive airpod sales, of course.

I mean to go thinner than 6/6s I can see the 3.5mm causing trouble. Part of me is still sad they bounced they went the other direction when it comes to iPhone thickness

I draw the line on going pure portless. I would like to retain USB-C thank you very much.

> One of the problems with Apple is the industry seems to mindlessly ape their good and bad decisions.

That's hardly Apple's fault, but it is so annoying. Hardly any of my cables have proper reinforcement sleeves any more.

Apple started making awful cables that snapped at the plugs, and everybody else just copied them.

We absolutely do laugh at both already.

I would gladly laugh, but it's nearly impossible to buy a good phone now. TBH I don't care that much about my phone not having a 3.5mm (even if I would need to use wired headphones, which is very rare now, I can use an USB adapter for that), but there are basically no phones without this stupid hole in the display, or with a good dedicated (not under screen) fingerprint scanner (because who needs that, when you can have face recognition, right?) All top-line phones are like $1500 now, but still are considered like disposable products that are naturally expected to be changed every 2 years. Batteries are not removable, yet devices are not actually (reliably) waterproof.

And maybe I'm wrong, but somehow it feels each improvement like that was actually pioneered by Apple. In the dreamworld of free-market enthusiasts this should have made Apple bankrupt or iPhone a very niche consumer device, but in the real world everything just became iPhone. There are some rare exceptions, but these are either outright experimental and gimmicky (because being different is their identity), or just bottom-of-the-line products that have these "intentional defects" that should make you chose the more expensive option.

i seems you exclude many android options, that have hidden selfie camera and good working fingerprint scanner. ZTE Axon 20 5G as an example.

Interesting that you suggest laughing at their decision to remove the headphone jack, when it was actually just the first of an industry-wide shift that has done so by other companies.

This is such a tired talking point. Use a (lightning|USB-C)->3.5mm adapter or use bluetooth.

And your experience for phone use cases will be better, because walking with wired headphones in gives you nasty telephonic effects (sound transmission along the cable) and they get tangled up.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Those who wish to use Bluetooth headphones can happily use them, while those who prefer wired can continue to use them. There's no reason smartphone manufacturers shouldn't support both.

They do, you can get the little dongle and it has superior audio quality to most audiophile DACs on the market.

But that 3.5mm port takes up a lot of room that could be used for more battery, backup antennas for when the user's hand is covering one of them, vibration motors etc.

I'm pretty sure you could find justification even for why top models don't support microSD card expansion. The problem with this line of argument is that if they wanted to, they could support both without any issues. The real reason is money. It's more profitable to have Bluetooth only when you also make AirPods, and not include storage expansion when you sell built-in memory options at a 400% markup.

Was that really the case? I remember they were mocked for e.g. offering wifi only, firewire only etc., while the respective removed alternatives were way more common.

In the consumer space at least, WiFi was nowhere to be seen on a typical PC when Apple adopted it. Same with USB. So while it technically originated and existed elsewhere, there was no serious traction on it prior to Apple adoption.

What you say is also true: many people weren't ready to ditch the old when Apple decide to deprecate it.

This has been true for ages. They were the first to ditch the floppy disk drive and later cd drive in their computers. Both choices were very controversial at the time.

They were also the first to usb-c nirvana - they were shipping laptops with thunderbolt in 2011, and moved to usb-c in 2016, giving you four full-capability outputs at a time when most laptops had one, sometimes, and it took another 5 years before most laptops adopted at least one as standard and premium laptops sometimes had two.

(People look down on the move to usb-c which I don’t quite get, everyone seems to fawn over usb-c in other contexts but macbooks, amirite!?!?. Yes it’s nice to have a hdmi port but fundamentally if you buy into this vision that usb-c does everything but you also want to use a bunch of legacy ports (vs thunderbolt video, thunderbolt networking, etc) then obviously you’re going to have to have dongles, and people supposedly buy into that vision in other contexts. Apples implementation of that vision was fundamentally at least a decade ahead of the curve there, if you’re going to do that you want lots of ports and you want every port to do everything, not “this one is the only one that can charge fast”, “that one doesn’t have video output”, “if you run both ports they drop to some weird lower capability because you’re dividing the controller”. Those complaints are the things people don’t like about the base-tier M-series processors today, and apple’s previous models solved that problem long before anyone else did.)

Hell until very very recently a lot of the time the competition didn’t even have thunderbolt/Pcie tunnelling… you got 10gbps usb-c and a grab-bag of charging and display features, and you’re gonna like it. That’s still the case with motherboards and it’s literally only with this years’ release that we’re finally getting usb4/thunderbolt as standard on high-end boards. Literally more than a decade from when apple started putting thunderbolt on laptops, almost a decade from the era of 4x tb3 full-spec ports.

… and reminder that in classic usb fashion, usb4 still doesn’t even guarantee Pcie tunneling support. So really it can still be just a normal usb-c 10gbps connection in a silly mustache and trench coat. Even on the next-gen stuff. What’s the term for doing an ok, moderately competent but not even exceptionally good job while your competition repeatedly shoots themselves in the face, again? But it’s by design - the intent is deceiving and manipulating the customer into buying last year’s junk, it’s working as intended for USB-IF’s real customers and stakeholders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB4#cite_ref-auto2_15-0

> They were also the first to usb-c nirvana

Intel says hi.

> People look down on the move to usb-c which I don’t quite get

People loved Thunderbolt for replacing Firewire. They hated Apple's choice because these USB-C Macbooks shipped with precisely zero USB-A ports and relegated every user to carrying around a dongle.

The year is 2024, we're almost a decade out from Apple going all-in on USB-C and the predominant peripheral connector is still type-A. I don't like it either, but plugging our ears and pretending like it's not a problem is silly and only makes consumers mad.

> and reminder that in classic usb fashion, usb4 still doesn’t even guarantee Pcie tunneling support.

That is in fact the correct default to use. Ever heard of Thunderspy? https://thunderspy.io/

> Intel says hi.

Intel helped make this move possible, but it doesn’t manufacture laptops. Apple took the heat for “donglegate”.

On the x86 desktop, usb-c is still surprisingly rare. I think my motherboard (that’s less than a year old) only has 2 usb-c ports and 8x usb-a.

> Intel helped make this move possible, but it doesn’t manufacture laptops. Apple took the heat for “donglegate”.

And rightfully so. They took Intel's technology and told an unprepared and uninterested industry to switch or die. Naturally, very few manufacturers switched over and Apple's all-or-nothing strategy made more people mad than happy.

Having 4 lanes of Thunderbolt connectivity is awesome. It doesn't really fix the fact that none of them can easily connect to a wired keyboard or mouse.

> On the x86 desktop, usb-c is still surprisingly rare.

My motherboard only has one TB connector, everything else is type-A too. Most of the bandwidth is broken out over SATA or PCIe internally, and frankly I don't regret it one bit. 99% of my life, there is nothing plugged into that Thunderbolt port.

> For instance, Apple was the first to bring WiFi to laptops in 1999. Everyone laughed at them at the time. Who needs a wireless network when you can have a physical LAN, ey?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPort:

"AirPort 802.11b card"

"The original model, known as simply AirPort card, was a re-branded Lucent WaveLAN/Orinoco Gold PC card, in a modified housing that lacked the integrated antenna."

That was also how lucent’s access points worked.

It was pretty neat how you could take the PCMCIA card out of an AirPort or WaveLAN/Orinoco and stick it in a laptop and it would just work.

I think you misinterpreted OP's comment. Apple makes it sound like there's smth new, but there isn't. They don't have to innovate, but it's good practice to credit who've done what they're taking and using. Also to use the names everyone else is already using.

The strange thing is Apple did mention (twice) in the article that their adapters are loras so I don't understand OP's comment.

I gathered from OP's "huge development" comment he was talking about others people's popular perception that it wasn't a lora.

> Also to use the names everyone else is already using.

That would be a very un-Apple thing to do. They really like to use their own marketing terms for technologies. It's not ARM, it's Apple Silicon. It wasn't Wi-Fi, it was AirPort. etc. etc.

> It wasn't Wi-Fi, it was AirPort. etc. etc.

FWIW the term “airport” predated the name “wifi” — in those days you had to otherwise call it IEEE 802.11.

And the name as great: people were buying them like crazy and hiding them in the drop ceiling to get around the corporate IT department. A nice echo of how analysts would buy their own apple II + visicalc to…get around corporate IT.

I’m OK with Apple using “apple silicon” as the ARM is only part of it.

Just commenting on your two examples; in general I agree with your point.

As far as I know, both the AirPort trademark and the term Wi-Fi got introduced in 1999 (could be that AirPort was a couple of weeks earlier)

Airport came out in the beginning of the year, maybe January, at Macworld. WECA renamed themselves the WiFi Alliance a few years later, but the name (and trademark) had to exist for it to be worth them doing so.

WECA reminds me of other "memorable" names of the era, my favorite being PCMCIA, though VESA is another fave.

Thanks for the info. That was pretty much around the time when I started out in IT. And yes PCMCIA, what a mouthful! I remember Ethernet cards in this format.

People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms

See also: FireWire, iSight, Retina, FaceTime, etc.

None of these really fit the pattern. Apple invented FireWire, called it FireWire, and other companies chose to call it different things in their implementations (partly because Apple originally charged for licensing the name, IIRC). iSight is an Apple product. FaceTime is an Apple product. Retina is branding for high-resolution displays beyond a certain visual density.

"Apple invented FireWire" is maybe not fully accurate (but actually a good example of the point here).

Wikipedia: FireWire is Apple's name for the IEEE 1394 High Speed Serial Bus. Its development was initiated by Apple[1] in 1986,[3] and developed by the IEEE P1394 Working Group, largely driven by contributions from Sony (102 patents), Apple (58 patents), Panasonic (46 patents), and Philips (43 patents), in addition to contributions made by engineers from LG Electronics, Toshiba, Hitachi, Canon,[4] INMOS/SGS Thomson (now STMicroelectronics),[5] and Texas Instruments.

What might be interesting in this regard is that Sony was also using its own trademark for it: "i.LINK".

> It wasn't Wi-Fi, it was AirPort.

Except in Japan, where it's AirMac. And China, where it's WWAN not Wi-Fi.

> Apple has never been big on living at the cutting edge of technology

There was such a time. Same as with Google. Interestingly, around 2015-2016 both companies significantly shifted to iterative products from big innovations. It's more visible with Google than Apple, but here's both.

Apple:

- Final Cut Pro

- 1998: iMac

- 1999: iBook G3 (father of all MacBooks)

- 2000: Power Mac G4 Cube (the early grandparent of the Mac Mini form factor), Mac OS X

- 2001: iPod, iTunes

- 2002: Xserve (rackable servers)

- 2003: Iterative products only

- 2004: iWork Suite, Garage Band

- 2005: iPod Nano, Mac mini

- 2006: Intel Macs, Boot Camp

- 2007: iPhone and Apple TV

- 2008: MacBook Air, iPhone 3G

- 2009: iPhone 3Gs, all-in-one iMac

- 2010: iPad, iPhone 4

- 2011: Final Cut Pro X

- 2012: Retina displays, iBooks Author

- 2013: iWork for iCloud

- 2014: Swift

- 2015: Apple Watch, Apple Music

- 2016: Iterative products only

- 2017: Iterative products mainly, plus ARKit

- 2018: Iterative products only

- 2019: Apple TV +, Apple Arcade

- 2020: M1

- 2021: Iterative products only

- 2022: Iterative products only

- 2023: Apple Vision Pro

Google:

- 1998: Google Search

- 2000: AdWords (this is where it all started going wrong, lol)

- 2001: Google Images Search

- 2002: Google News

- 2003: Google AdSense

- 2004: Gmail, Google Books, Google Scholar

- 2005: Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Talk, Google Reader

- 2006: Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sheets, YouTube bought this year

- 2007: Street View, G Suite

- 2008: Google Chrome, Android 1.0

- 2009: Google Voice, Google Wave (early Docs if I recall correctly)

- 2010: Google Nexus One, Google TV

- 2012: Google Drive

- 2013: Chromecast

- 2014: Android Wear, Android Auto, Google Cardboard, Nexus 6, Google Fit

- 2015: Google Photos

- 2016: Google Assistant, Google Home

- 2017: Mainly iterative products only, Google Lens announced but it never rolled out really

- 2018: Iterative products only

- 2019: Iterative products only

- 2020: Iterative products only, and some rebrands (Talk->Chat, etc)

- 2021: Iterative products only, and Tensor Chip

- 2022: Iterative products only

- 2023: Iterative products only, and Bard (half-baked).

Some of your choices and what you consider iterative/innovative are strange to me. For 2009, a chassis update for the iMac and a spec/camera bump for the iPhone doesn't seem particularly innovative especially in comparison to say the HomePod in 2017 or Satellite SOS in 2022.

Also small correction but iTunes (as Soundjam MP) was originally third-party software and Final Cut was acquired by Apple.

Yes, it's not perfect.

About iTunes: I did not know that! Thank you.

About iterative/innovative: I considered hardware and software that became household names or general knowledge to be significant innovations. It is not rigorous, I tried to include more rather than less. Still, on some years these companies mostly did version increases for their hardware and software, like new iOS and macOS versions, and that was it. Those years I marked as iterative.

I included a few too many iPhones, although when I wrote that, my thought process was that these phones were pivotal to how iPhones developed. I should have included the original iPhone, and iPhone 3G — the first iPhone developed around the concept of an app platform and with an App Store. This has undoubtedly been a big innovation. iPhone 4 and 3Gs, perhaps, should not have been included.

It's loose and just to illustrate a general trend, individual items are less important, we could all pick slightly different ones. But I believe the trend would remain.

You're missing Apple Silicon, which has had a huge impact across the entire industry even if random soccer dad doesn't know about it -- if any one thing is responsible for Intel's marketshare collapsing in the future, the M series of processors is it.

> if any one thing is responsible for Intel's marketshare collapsing in the future, the M series of processors is it.

If anything, that would be AMD. But I'd guess they're both more worried about the entire desktop & laptop market shrinking way more than anything Apple does.

The iMac refined a form factor that dated back to at least Commodore. The iBook came after decades of iteration by other companies on laptops. The Cube was just a PC with a more compressed form factor. The iPod came a few years after other commercial digital media players. Etc, etc.

Note that I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with their approach or that they didn't make real improvements. I'm just saying that Apple has never produced any successful product that would count as "new" to someone interested in cutting-edge research. They've always looked around at things that exist but aren't yet huge successes and given them the final push to the mainstream.

It depends on the definition of "new". With some definitions, we may claim that nothing is ever new — we may say computers started with the Antikythera mechanism and abaci, or maybe before. With other definitions (like "new" as in a "new for most people") we will see that Apple has brought about many new things. So we need to agree on the definition.

I used the definition of new somewhere between "new for most people", "newly popular", and "meaningfully advanced from the previous iteration". With such a definition, I think you can agree with me.

In the consumer space, I'm not sure I can think of any examples from anyone ever that are examples of cutting-edge research at the time. It's hard to build consumer products on the bleeding edge. You'd be releasing phones today using CHERI, for example, which is not quite ready for prime time.

No Newton?

Missed it, but should have been included for 1998. A very good example.

> - 2000: Power Mac G4 Cube (the early grandparent of the Mac Mini form factor), Mac OS X

The Next Cube being a very obvious inspiration here.

Mac OS X was a needed step, and entire books have been written about its creation. While it has some innovative pieces, it was very much a do or die situation for Apple, not brought on by innovation so much as the need to survive. (I'm sure BeOS fans will argue that BeOS was the real innovative OS. ;) )

> - 2001: iPod, iTunes

iPod was a, very well done, refinement of the existing MP3 device category. iTunes' innovation was the licensing deal they got with record companies, that is what really surprised everyone.

> - 2002: Xserve (rackable servers)

Not sure how this is an innovation? Rack mount servers had been around a long time.

> - 2004: iWork Suite,

Microsoft literally had a product called Microsoft Works that was originally released in 1988 and came shipped on tons of home PCs.

> - 2005: iPod Nano, Mac mini

The iPod Nano was cool, the Mac mini was a wonderful feat of engineering and cost reductions.

> - 2006: Intel Macs, Boot Camp

Necessity brought this about.

> - 2007: iPhone and Apple TV

This is a perfect example of Apple entering an existing product category and doing an amazing job of execution. Palm, Blackberry, and Microsoft were already releasing very capable smart phones, but none of them bothered polishing the product (MS and Blackberry focused on corporate sales, end user experience was not the top priority) and while Apple did push a lot of technology forward to make the iPhone (notably screen tech and using capacitive touch screens), their main innovation was realizing they could get customers to pay for a cell phone. For those who don't remember, prior to the iPhone, most customers got their cellphone for "free" from their cellular provider in return for agreeing to a 2 year contract. Apple realized if they made a really nice product, that people would buy it.

Apple also did some really cool, and now largely forgotten about, positioning here involving the iPod Touch, where the iPod Touch had access to the full App Store and became entry level "kids toy" devices that got people into the ecosystem.

Heck arguably the App Store was a larger innovation than the phone.

Fun fact: Microsoft had an App Store ready to launch for Windows Mobile (pre Windows Phone 7) but it was scrapped at the last minute because an exec thought that "no way would phone users ever pay for apps".

(When I joined MS in 2006 the source code was still laying around in the Windows Mobile source tree!)

Apple TV was arguably too early at this point in time, I'd say it didn't really take off until later generations when more streaming media was available.

But innovative? Web TV was out in the late 90s (!!) and Microsoft tried to do Media Center PC's since 2002. Heck for awhile with Xbox 360, Microsoft basically owned the "TV smart device" market segment. (and they released the Xbox One as a media streaming device and sort of forgot that it was also a games console... oops)

As with most products, Apple just did a really good job of it, but Roku has dramatically outplayed everyone else in the market by getting embedded directly into cheap TVs sold at Costco.

> - 2010: iPad, iPhone 4

iPad is/was an amazing product, and it succeeded thanks to great apps.

It was also a refinement of Tablet PCs which have been around since the late 80s/early 90s.

Apple was willing to do what Microsoft wasn't, break all back-compat and make a really good single purpose device. Microsoft's tablets (some of which are really damn nice!) were always hamstrung because Microsoft never could go all in on abandoning existing x86 software. (The closest attempt being Windows 8 RT, which managed to make the perfect set of compromises to anger everyone!)

> - 2015: Apple Watch, Apple Music

The first generation Apple Watch was... meh. Now, I say this as someone who was working on a direct competitor - I am still not sure how it has such a miserable battery life and why such a massively overpowered CPU and GPU still dropped frames.

I am not sure what is innovative about Apple Music, vs every other streaming music service.