Before Apple came up with iPhone, I had a freaking Ericsson brick thingy. None of Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung were innovating. None of those old, non original ideas were in any of those devices. Nokia had a webkit browser with a ridiculous cursor that you operated with that joystick thingy. I'm glad that Apple actually pushed them forward.
So yes, I think Apple has original products and they are innovating.
I use Apple everything. I love Apple products. But to say there wasn't any innovation happening before it in the phone sector misses some really cool things.
PS. I would pay all the money in the world for an updated P1i, same qwerty rocker keyboard, capacitive 3" touchscreen @ 720p running Android. One can dream, right?
There's a big difference between a good concept and a good execution of a concept. Apple have always been brilliant at execution, even if they don't have many original concepts (they don't do basic research). Is it not innovative to take a good idea and execute it better than anyone before? I find that a hard thing to dismiss. However, now that they are on top of the world, it would be nice to see them invest in open basic research to give back to the community where they got all their ideas and technologies from, like microsoft does with microsoft research.
RE giving back to the community; FreeBSD, CUPS, WebKit, LLVM and Clang to name a few. Notice I haven't claimed that any of these were directly invented by Apple, but all have varying levels of investment and contribution from Apple.
This is all out there on the internet. It takes a couple of seconds to look up with whatever search engine fits in with your ideology.
I agree that Apple's UX was a significant advance. (See this 2007 review talking about "paradigm-shifting interface"
http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/03/iphone-review-part-1-hard... )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9h...
Steve comments again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnkXa3eTV88
The Mac's 30th anniversary a few weeks gave the original Mac launch videos a lot of recent play where Gates and Microsoft basically played an eerily similar role to Google with the iPhone launch. Of course MS, like Google did want to do everything.
It's clear as day why Steve felt betrayed by Google. As he said in the internal town hall:
We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake teams at Google want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. "Don't be evil is a load of crap"
{I've edited in the two updates/corrections from the bottom}
I can't believe anyone contests this.
I remember seeing an iPhone for the first time. Compared to all other phones it was 10 years ahead in vision. All other phones were suddenly ludicrously laid out, with stupid designs. Even the settings section for the iPhone blew every single other phone in existence out of the water. Something that simple, that essential, had been revolutionised by this thoughtful new way at looking at phone interfaces.
Android, on that very day, looked like every other phone. 10 years behind, old, tired, pathetic, no vision what so ever.
In less than 6 months the android team lifted every single iPhone design element, added very little of their own and unveiled what is possibly one of the biggest design rip-offs in tech history.
I can understand why Jobs was pissed.
http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Li...
> Chris DeSalvo’s reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. “As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”
> On the day Jobs announced the iPhone, the director of the Android team, Andy Rubin, was six hundred miles away in Las Vegas, on his way to a meeting with one of the myriad handset makers and carriers that descend on the city for the Consumer Electronics Show. He reacted exactly as DeSalvo predicted. Rubin was so astonished by what Jobs was unveiling that, on his way to a meeting, he had his driver pull over so that he could finish watching the webcast.
> “Holy crap,” he said to one of his colleagues in the car. “I guess we’re not going to ship that phone.”
http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-day-...
This is not one of those Apple vs Google fights; it's straight up well-sourced journalism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1FJHY...
That is the exact old skool interface that was so terrible.
That is Android pre-iPhone.
His only argument is 'well look later, there's some touch too'. But that's even more damning as the touch was so badly designed and clunky.
Watch the whole thing if you want. Notice the use of right-click menus. Notice the zoom had to use buttons. The program switcher is lifted from Vista and looks nothing like what actually happened, which was a iPhone copied home button.
What the video shows is that Android had an interface and it was nothing like the one that came out 6 months later which was wholesale lifted from the iPhone.
Windows Mobile showed you didn't have to do it anything like Apple did, so why did android look so much like the iOS?
Besides the interface, I thought it was interesting that it had a real unix based OS underneath, which would pay off in the future as phone processors became more powerful.
It's sortof funny looking back. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I guess.
Apple has this fame of original crazy geniouses that have invented X or Y. They have mostly taken other's ideas and perfected them. Perfected them a lot, admittedly; even may be taken them to a new level of awesomeness with a great vision of on which details it was better to improve.
I love apple products, don't take me wrong. They deserve a lot of credit for the iPod, the iPhone, iOS, the iPad...
I think it was extremely childish of Jobs to get so pissed.
I'm not sure why people always ignore the second part of why Jobs was pissed. It was the Schmidt one-two sucker punch that really pissed him off.
I've never thought of Jobs as being someone mature and reasonable anyway. He was already like that in his younger years whenever the competition heated up. He didn't change.
That doesn't mean they shouldn't have competition. Competition is a basic requirement for a functional economy.
Which is why the patient system is broken.
You are wrong because you are looking at the wrong category for a comparison. Look at PDAs. PDAs had everything that the iPhone could do, more or less. And this, YEARS before the iPhone came out. I know it, because I had PDAs very early on and I remember making fun of the people thinking that the iPhone was so revolutionary at work because I had been doing the same stuff with my PDA for 5 years. Of course, the iPhone had a better browser, was easier to use, was more cool looking, but nonetheless it had nothing NEW in functionality over the previous PDAs. Comparing with phones is therefore irrelevant, the iPhone was PDA-Phone, thus being called a Smart-Phone later on by the mainstream media.
I'd like to think they noticed it because it was good. KHTML at the time had quite strong CSS support compared to its competition (not necessarily the best, but it competed well), had done some important advances in l18n support compared to others (e.g. strong support for bidi text layout), and the design of its render tree which e.g. allowed for hardware-accelerated layer compositing was later adopted by competitors like Gecko. It was a pretty good codebase.
Sure, it's been a decade since those events, and the majority of the engineering effort by now lies chiefly on the WebKit side of things. Apple employees working on WebKit have done a ton of good work, as have other stakeholders. Apple was an important factor both in terms of workforce increase and popularity increase for the project. But I think it's very legitimate to continue to credit the KDE community with its inception.
ever.