Genuine question.
I know they were the scrappy startup doing different cool things. But, what are the most major innovative things that they introduced, improved or just implemented that either revolutionized, improved or spurred change?
I am aware of the possibility of both fanboys and haters just duking it out below. But there’s always that one guy who has a fkn well-formatted paragraph of gold. I await that guy.
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Designing phone ui for fingers first. While there were many other touch phones, many of which could be used with your finger(especially if you were a hipster, you could modify them to be more finger friendly), their ui was primarily designed for stylus use. This is a huge point that basically defined the OS and app design for the next 15 years.
Making capacitive screen popular. Before iphones, almost all(all?) phones had resistive touch screen, which required you to actually push your finger on the screen to do stuff. This was fine with stylus, less fine with finger. Capacitive worked with the lightest touch, which gave a smoother user experience.
Made multitouch mainstream and a core part of touch interface. Again, older touchscreen phones were mostly made to be used with a stylus, so multitouch wouldnt make much sense.
It is important to note that one of the reasons apple succeeded was because nokia was too stubborn and late to adopt and promote touchscreen phones. Thats why while nokia was the phone bid dog of that day, users had turned to sony ericsson(SE) for their flagship, touchscreen phones.
And for 5 years before the iphone, people were using phones like the p800, that had a large touchscreen and even a removable keyboard for that full touchscreen experience. SE had taken nokia’s symbian OS and made it more touch friendly. Nokia continued releasing super capable(great cameras, video, fm radio, etc) but non touchscreen phones or with a small touchscreen for years after that, allowing SE to dominate that market. For example nokia released the 6600, which was a great phone but didnt have a touchscreen and its screen was small in comparison to SE’s touchscreen flagships.
The first iphone had a terrible camera and couldnt even film videos. Something that other “smart” phones could do for many years. The first iphone didnt have third party apps. Competitive smart phones had had apps for over a decade. The first iphone wasnt 3g, couldnt share stuff over bluetooth, etc. It was a pretty but pretty stupid phone in comparison to the competition.
But over time, apple kept improving, catching up and often surpassing competition in every aspect. I remember when iphones had shitty resolution and when apple caught up, they advertised it as retina display. Nowadays, iphones are the best or almost the best in everything. Now if only apple gave 120hz refresh on base iphones and a faster charging rate. And werent closed garden assholes.
The “fingers first” part is ironically why the Apple Pencil took so damned long to come to fruition. Steve Jobs outright refused to allow a stylus for the iPad, because his whole marketing thing with the early iPhones was that you didn’t need a stylus. So he refused to allow development of the Apple Pencil.
Then once he died, Apple quickly pivoted and began developing the Pencil, so they could start marketing the iPad towards digital artists. Because the company had recognized the large void in the digital art world years prior, but Jobs had refused to allow the Pencil the entire time. Once he was out of the way, the company’s leadership was free to begin development.
It’s notable because it was one of the first big examples of Apple veering away from Jobs’ wishes after his death. It proved that the company wasn’t going to simply remain in his shadow forever.
Before iphones, almost all(all?) phones had resistive touch screen, which required you to actually push your finger on the screen to do stuff.
I remember the resistive touchscreens! My dad had bought a BlackBerry (oh man I miss them) for his business work and it had those screens. It definitely took work to get used to because my mom was using a Samsung Galaxy Y at the time… Smallest screen ever but that capacitive touch screen 🤌🏼.
As for the rest of your comment, the multi-touch was definitely insane. I can’t find this anywhere atm but I remember reading that they introduced pinch to zoom, which is definitely a flex. Maybe not the first, but on capacitive smartphones, probably yes.
Are you the fabled “well-formatted paragraph guy” I was told about? 😂
The LG Prada was the first capacitive touch-screen phone. March 2007 release compared to iPhone’s July 2007 release.
Samsung also fought a patent war with Apple when Apple sued Samsung for creating a similar phone to the iPhone in 2008. The court docs had examples of Samsung’s first touchscreen phone.
Apple are very good at marketing and had a powerful personality that people worshiped (Jobs).
Spend 5 mins watching videos by Louis Rossman fixing Macbooks and you’ll realise they are shitty products.
A couple months are irrelevant, obviously both phones were designed and released in a similar timetable. Lg prada wasnt a smart phone and didnt have multitouch.
And while many people have turned against modern iphones, i think modern iphones are the best phones on the market. I wouldnt even recommend an iphone from 10+ years ago but modern iphones have addressed almost all issues that i had.
They had
- shit screen resolution
- not oled
- tiny screens
- terrible cameras
- not usb-c
- shitty cpu
- shitty gpu
- very little ram(they still do but most apps are designed with that in mind)
- no fm radio(now almost no phones have one)
- no headphone jack(same)
- inability to easily send media and files from one from to another
- limited variety of apps
I am probably forgetting tons of other issues that i had with iphones over the years. And apple took all these weaknesses and not only caught up to the competition, but surpassed it and made then a key marketing point.
Samsung also fought a patent war with Apple when Apple sued Samsung for creating a similar phone to the iPhone in 2008. The court docs had examples of Samsung’s first touchscreen phone.
I actually bought samsung wave in 2010, which was the first phone with an oled screen. And it was great, apart from the limited app support, since it was running Bada, a samsung created android competitor. And since then, i refused to get an non oled screen phone. Once you go black, you cant go back.
I think that samsung makes the best android phones.
Spend 5 mins watching videos by Louis Rossman fixing Macbooks and you’ll realise they are shitty products.
I dont care or know much about macbooks but it is obvious that Rossman has an agenda and keeps making “artificial outrage” videos(because they bring the views). From what little experience i have, it seems to me that expensive windows laptops fall apart more often than macbook pros. And all windows laptops have shit battery life, which is very important for many people.
Wooooah ok let me start by addressing your point RE: Macbooks. You may not know about them but if you do then you realise Apple’s tech and entire business is questionable. I suggest you read more…
I’m talking about old Louis Roassman, not modern-day ‘consumer champion’ Louis. The guy ran a Youtube channel in the 2010s where he just fixed Macbooks in his shop. It was his day job as the owner of a laptop repair shop. He’s a laptop repair guy by trade so I listen to him when it comes to laptop build quality.
I found him after my unibody Macbook Pro fell apart in 2011. It was the first model that came out in 08/09. He was very straight forward (no agenda) and showed how shitty the design & build of the Macbook was. Those issues still exist today!:
On my Macbook:
- The screen has a very thin metal around it to hold the panel in place. This thin metal then has screws put through it to hold it in. It leaves a less than 1mm piece of metal either side of the screw. The result: my Macbook Pro’s frame around the screen snapped, the glue separated and the whole lid/screen fell apart 3 years after I’d bought it.
- The vents that face out of the back of the Macbook blow hot air onto what? GLUE! The bottom of the lid/screen is glued together and the hot vents heat and cool the lid constantly. After 3 years, as above, the lid separated at the bottom from the panel.
The two aboive combined so I basically had a panel, lid and frame all separated and snapped. It was fucking MESS. But Louis showed this was a common problem and I was shit out of luck.
NB: Not to mention the 3-4 hardware issues that cropped up during my ownership in just 3 years due to fucked up graphics chips and other hardware fuckups due to shoddy design. Apple tries REALLY fucking hard to avoid accepting hardware faults and recalls but I was plugged into all the Apple forums/communities and saw how often these things happened and every time without fail Apple would go blue in the face before accepting liability.
Remember the stupid as fuck iPhone aerial that stopped working if you were LEFT HANDED?! There was a gap in the edge of the case that if bridged with a hand would drop the signal to 0. Apples response? “Don’t use it left-handed”
So what did I do?
I swore off Apple products. I noticed Louis was a fan of Lenovo laptops so I looked at what was available. I got a P51 and it’s still going after 6 years.
Lenovo Thinkpads don’t look sexy. They aren’t ‘unibody’ aluminium. But holy shit - they’re built like fucking tanks. I can poor a litre of water over the keyboard of my P51 and it’ll still work cos it has built-in drainage holes. Do that to a Macbook - or hell try using a Macbook for more than a few years and it’ll break and fall apart.
Apple products are NOT well built. They LOOK nice, but they’re shitty engineering.
Design flaws exist in most laptops. But making videos about how shitty hp laptops are wont get many views and engagement.
I have had tons of windows laptops failing on me. And yes lenovo thinkpads are nice but they are different. Also i am not so sure they still are good, everything seems to have gone to shit. Very few laptops last over 5 years.
Or phones. Though lately, phones seem to have become more reliable. Then again phones have 0 moving parts and passive cooling, so not many mechanical things that can break.
Apple tries REALLY fucking hard to avoid accepting hardware faults and recalls but I was plugged into all the Apple forums/communities and saw how often these things happened and every time without fail Apple would go blue in the face before accepting liability.
Apple is an asshole company, i dont think many will dispute that. They go the extra mile to fuck you.
I swore off Apple products
I have 0 apple products. But if Apple wasnt making the iphone, i would probably have had an iphone and i wouldnt even consider any other phone.
Apple products are NOT well built. They LOOK nice, but they’re shitty engineering.
They look nice and they are better than other “nice looking” alternatives. High end hp, high end dell, even high end asus. Though dell and asus seem to have improved lately, hp i have no idea, i avoid them like plague.
The Ipod interface. Making people move their fingers on a circle for explore menus was innovative.
Which is ironic, because Steve Jobs significantly delayed the iPod’s development by initially demanding that it be a single button interface. After several months of failure, he eventually relented and we got the wheel interface as a compromise. But he originally wanted the entire interface to only be the single button.
That was definitely cool. The next time UI navigation ever wowed me was the Windows Phone UI… (So many people will kill me for this lmao)
I always liked the windows phone, it’s honestly too bad it didn’t last
One of the only pieces of tech news that make me cry internally.
They seem to have a knack for taking something and making it palatable for the masses when it comes to UI and such. I don’t agree with a lot of it, but then again I am not “the masses” in the computing demographics.
Malignant charisma is certainly not new to this century let alone apple itself.
You might like this: Triumph of the Nerds. Covers early Apple, Microsoft, Xerox PARC.
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Will have a look. Thanks!
To answer your main question now that I have a minute to type:
People may not like this but Apple didn’t innovate very much. They were always second to the market. During their renaissance with the imac they were only good at making colourful plastic shells. Moving along they were second to the market for mp3 players. What apple was good at was refining existing products, so for the mp3 player they made it smaller by using a smaller hdd (1.8") and copied the wheel from a tv remote iirc. They were second to the market for smartphones, blackberry was everywhere and nicknamed the crackberry. The refinement on that was that they correctly distinguished between consumption device and creation device. The phone was primarily consumption, so they made a full size screen and a software keyboard for the occasional entry. iPad was a bigger version of that once the price of touchscreens came down.
Outside of specific products they were very good at marketing and branding. Remember those mac vs pc commercials? They had to portray PC as old nerdy, and mac as cool young hip. Or when the ipod came out they had all those dancing silhouettes. They put themselves as the cool brand and slowly became a luxury brand.
Right… Good point.
Marketing
They have a really nice user-interface. I suppose being user-friendly and accessible can be considered innovative, but that’s only when talking to idiots who don’t see the immediate value in such things.
That’s it.
User-friendly is a subjective opinion I guess… But yeah.
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Where’s the answer? I don’t want it to get downvoted if it’s not bad.
Everyone absolutely thought the original click wheel iPod, the iPhone and the iPad were all doomed to fail. Hell, the Apple watch didn’t exactly get off to a hot start for that matter.
And back at the beginning, the Mac OS GUI. Yes, Steve Jobs saw the idea of a graphical GUI at Xerox Park, but what his engineers turned out is something completely different. And at the time it was easily as revolutionary as the touchscreen interface of the iPhone.
Actual duds by Apple that I can think of off the top of my head:
- The Cube
- The Mac IIcx
- The Mac IIfx
- Whatever that ungodly massive Unix box was that they branded as Apple
- The liquid cooled G5 cheesgrater
Polish.
It useless to be first if that product isn’t reliable, sustainable, practical. Apple adds polish to other concepts to make them usable by the vast majority of people.
Laptops existed……with weird keyboard layouts and mice that were afterthoughts. PowerBook pioneered the keyboard forward design that every laptop now has.
Smartphones existed……incredibly limited, weird UI, awkward input, targeted at businesses instead of regular people. iPhone changed everything so much that every other design died.
Collecting different innovations and figuring how to combine them in a way that is practical and sellable is their continuous innovation.
I’m sorry but this is kind of horseshit. Apple has legitimately brought some new polish to areas that hadn’t seen them before, but LMFAO at Apple inventing laptops that don’t have weird keyboards.
Apple had great trackpads with multi finger gesture support before anyone else, their keyboards have been nothing special compared to ThinkPads and business grade laptops that sold for the same price as them. Their difference was marketing and convincing consumers to pay business grade prices for consumer laptops.
Get more money for less
INNOVATE not INVENT
wireless charging? i mean magnets in qi2 are apple’s idea, also i wonder how current smartphone market would look like without iPhone, would we still have stylus operated resistive screens? i know they weren’t the first ones with capacitive touchscreens and finger oriented UI, but whey popularized it, definitely made it mainstream
Nah, Samsung had wireless charging in 2015 with the Galaxy S6, Apple started wireless charging with the iPhone 8 in 2017.
And wireless charging has been around long before that. Even those rechargeable toothbrushes have used it long before smartphones were a thing.
And Microsoft released the Surface Pro with a stylus before any iPad had them and I’m sure you could go much further back for other devices that had them before that.
not wanting to be rude but either I’ve worded myself poorly or you may have reading comprehension problems, regarding the wireless charging I’ve meant the magnets they introduced in iPhone 13 (?) became a part of qi2 charging standard, it’s an innovation in my book, also the stylus thing, i didn’t mean modern ipad or samsung styluses but those pieces of plastic we used with resistive touch screens of PDAs back in the days before iPhone, while you could use your finger, it wasn’t precise enough because interface was cursor oriented instead of finger oriented like iOS was
Not sure what magnets Apple introduced, but the Palm Pre had wireless magnetic charging back around 2010ish.
Yeah, “I’m ignorant so I’ll say something” lol
