Agreed. The iPhone was groundbreaking. The iPad somewhat. Since then they've done some great work on their laptop line, but that's about it. They were even late to the game with smartwatches.

Of course, the problem with complaining about things like this is that I have no idea what I actually want Apple to do, except surprise me.

So I don't think Apple needs another iPad/iPhone to be called innovative, it can be new software features, or little hardware features. I just genuinely cannot remember the last time I've legitimately been jealous of an Apple exclusive feature. Maybe Lightning's reversible-ness in 2012? What since then? That was three years ago.

It was sort of gimmicky (as were a lot of the features of the Atrix) but it existed on Android first.

Of course it never worked once I switched to cyanogen mod and I never used it even when it did work.

It's non-obvious on Android/pre-Android because software developers won't care much about an API for a fraction of an OS's market. Which is why I'd venture to guess most Android apps still don't take advantage of fingerprint sensors.

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l...

Siri still doesn't seem to be able to do that much of note (though I haven't read through today's announcements) and a straw poll of my iPhone using friends suggests that none of them really use it anyway. I'm the same with the voice functionality on Android, though I do use the cards provided by Google Now a lot.

I'm not super familiar with TouchID and its capabilities, but is this true? According to Wikipedia, Apple announced its fingerprint reader in late 2013, not 2012, and this feature was available on a high-end Android phone (I forget which) a couple years before that (2011 if I recall correctly). I understand that "having a touch button" isn't quite a binary feature, and TouchID could have some novel elements as a product, but as I said I'm not super-familiar with TouchID. Is there something in particular about TouchID that was innovative/bleeding-edge?

That being said: I didn't have the Atrix et al (my first fingerprint reader is on my S6, and Samsung didn't even pretend they weren't borrowing heavily from Apple with this phone's design), but from what I had read, it performed pretty consistently as well. Looking up a random review of its performance:

"The Atrix prompts you to set up the fingerprint reader by swiping your left and right index fingers over it, and also asks you to provide a back-up password in case you go into the witness-protection scheme and have your fingerprints erased. In our tests, the biometric sensor responded to a quick swipe from either finger, so we found it fun and convenient to use. It seemed secure enough too, denying access to all of the interlopers we roped into our tests."

http://www.cnet.com/uk/products/motorola-atrix/

They were late to the game with smartphones (Palm, BlackBerry), tablets (Gates was pushing them in the 1990s), and MP3 players ('No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.'), too. Seems to be their MO.

The iPhone was a triumph in proving that smartphone software can make a very real, very huge difference to a device, and that hardware does not rule all.

That's precisely my point, though. They came late to the game, but they did it right. Apple's rarely the first to market.

That's because almost no one is first to the market. There is only ever one first MP3 player, radio or TV.

iPod, iPhone, and iPad all followed the same basic template. Lots of companies built products in some product category (MP3 players, smartphones, tablets). The technology got to the point where they were decent, and people recognized them as something desirable albeit niche, but nothing really appealed to the masses. Then Apple took what was out there, refined the crap out of it with an eye to making it useful for regular people, and sold boatloads.

Smartwatches, in contrast, are still very much in the early days. Apple is the first big company to really push smartwatches. This is really unusual for them, and makes me wonder if they aren't seriously jumping the gun.

That's completely inaccurate.

Samsung has released tons of smartwatches, as has Sony, Acer, LG, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Toshiba. All before the Apple Watch was even announced, so unless you expect us to believe that none of these are "big companies" your point is provably and factually wrong.

This is yet another example of "Apple invented it" from Apple fans well after the industry had been well established and Apple jumped in late (see e-payments for another great example).

I mean for crying out loud the Samsung Gear 2 and Moto 360 have been out almost a year ahead of Apple's watch and one has a camera and the other actually has the same physical dimensions and shape of a traditional mechanical watch. It is absurd to ignore how far this sector has come.

It's amusing to be called an "Apple fan" though.

I saw almost nothing of smartwatches before Apple's. I think I saw one two or three times in the world, and always at technical conferences. MP3 players and tablets, while far from ubiquitous before Apple's entry, were things I saw at least semi-occasionally out in the world. Smartphones were relatively common, although of course nothing like how they ended up being after Apple came in.

Remember, Apple was incredibly late to market with the product that saved them from eventual bankruptcy: the iPod. There was no shortage of MP3 players when the iPod launched.

And there was Blackberry and Palm long before the iPhone.

So, yeah, Apple is early here even if a year late. And they're taking their smart watch more seriously than any of their competitors.

> Apple is the first big company to really push smartwatches.

You're trying to redirect discussion away from what they actually said (in so many words) to some other point that has nothing to do with anything (invent Vs reinvent).

Are you telling me that Apple Watch was Apple reinventing the smartwatch?

What Apple did truly do first in the space, however, is make a smartwatch that's as much a watch as it is a mobile device. The Gear does not compete in the watch space from a fashion perspective, whereas the Apple Watch clearly does.

Complaining that Apple doesn't invent things is a red herring. They didn't make the first MP3 player or digital music store, but for practical purposes they created the market for them, along with the market for per-track/album digital downloads. They didn't make the first smartphone, but nearly every smartphone that came after the iPhone looks way more like an iPhone than like anything else. They didn't make the first tablet computer but they made the first tablet computer that had mass-market success, and again, it's impossible to look at Android tablets and the Surface and deny the iPad influence. They've been doing this for going on three decades now -- as much as the Mac was a relative failure in pure commercial terms, it set a template for How User Interfaces Work that we're still largely following today.

Last but least: yes, the Moto 360 is circular. Yes, that makes it look more like a watch. We get it. :) But it's not a watch. It's a smartwatch. You know what kind of thing smartwatches have to display an awful lot? Lists. You know what kind of shape is better for displaying lists than a circle? A rectangle.

For example the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 launched with splitscreen multi-tasking in October 2012. All of the Sammy stuff since then has had it.

Damn it, the phone was basically impossible to use outside of the Californian weather.

In the past, however, they've focused on differentiating themselves while also poo-poohing any features their competition has but they don't, saying you don't need that feature anyway.

I'm glad Apple's gotten away from the sour grapes mentality, but I hope this puts an end to the false claim that Android owes its success to copying Apple's innovations.

Isn't this a good thing? If Android has a good feature, I am happy if it comes to iOS, just as I am happy when good iOS features (e.g., ask for permission on first use, rather than on install) come to Android. I would be significantly less satisfied with an NIH mentality on either system.

I'm just pointing out that it's a huge change in Apple's product planning from what came before, and I think it should be noted.

(and by "before", I pretty much mean "under Jobs")

The company line is that they don't release features like this (or iOS notifications, or intra-app services, or even copy/paste) until the technology is mature and they feel ready. Thus far each of these features has worked perfectly at launch. I see no reason to doubt their explanation.

And I would say that for most people, this strategy has been very successful, even though e.g. jailbreakers might get a more advanced version of something that eventually gets integrated many months in advance. It's basically free R&D and proving out concepts for Apple.

I wonder sometimes if they actually know about other channels for jailbreaks, but don't close them all at once due to the value this provides. Of course, they could never admit to this / have a paper trail for it, software is hard / complex, and jailbreakers are amazingly talented, so maybe I'm crazy, but that's what I would do in their position.

Apple always takes it's time to do things because it does them in a way that people can actually use, rather than rushing to be 'first'.

Android does rush features out, often getting them into a few devices ahead of Apple, but because of the failure of distribution of updates for Android, Apple actually gets to deliver features to consumers well ahead of Android.

Also, Android does often end up having to copy the iOS way of doing things when it proves to have been well thought out - e.g. The new permissions model.

In general, Apple likes to sit back, wait for somebody else to innovate and open up various market opportunities, pick one and then execute the hell out of it and push the envelope where other companies have execution weaknesses (and exploit those weaknesses). This has a side effect of "settling" a diverse market around pretty much whatever Apple has chosen.

It's beautiful strategy for the most part and it's too easy to look at an Apple announcement and say "welcome to 2-5 years ago Apple, thanks for finally catching up" without thinking about the context of their actions.

Apple has never led in terms of raw innovation, but what they do is take cool shit and make it work together really solidly.

Sure it does 10,000 things. But the image of the watch face, that ubiquitous emblem of trudging monotony, is what people see first and what gives them an impression of the device.

Instead of a new concept for navigating your day you've got $350 worth of pixels doing mostly the same thing as your $40 swatch. Apple had the perfect opportunity to reinvent timekeeping and they missed it. Luckily for them it's a software problem only - perhaps they'll figure it out.

And it's not marketed only with an analog face. For example, on my phone, the first image I get when I go to http://www.apple.com/watch/ uses the Solar face, which shows the position of the sun as a point on a graph along with a printed time. Personally, since I have depression with some link to whether the sun is out, I find that quite a useful way to think about time, although of course mine is a relatively uncommon scenario.