We can accurately point out that the technologies of the iphone (processors, cellular telephony, cellular data, GPS, touchscreens, bluetooth, cameras, etc) were not invented by Steve Jobs.
But his company took those parts and put something together that a few billion people decided was far more valuable than the sum of those parts. And they all decided to start carrying all these tools and using them fifteen times per hour, when they didn’t before.
iPhones literally were visionary. The whole industry was trying to imitate blackberry and overnight apple made them completely irrelevant. Android changed to what it is from what was originally a blackberry interface.
MacBooks, yea, it’s a laptop. They had some really good ideas in there, sure. MagSafe and touchpads that didnt royally suck ass were welcome features. The M-series lighting a fire under intels ass was exactly what the entire industry needed. Love them or hate them, even when Apple is bad, they create good trouble in an industry that needed to be proven wrong from time to time.
the n900 was released two years after the iphone. it was modeled on the iphone from the start, like the entire industry was. (and the n900 still didn’t support multi-touch, which Apple patented.)
the n900’s changes to the n800 were modeled on the iPhone. the n800 is completely different: for one, the touch screen is activated by pressure, not touch. Are you arguing that the n800 is better than the iPhone 1?
A computer, an MP3 player, a tablet, starting a business.
How are any of those innovations?
I’d say killing yourself by ignoring medical advice for an easily treatable desies or pretending your daughter isn’t yours were innovations, but royals have been doing that for centuries.
Apple found that existing digital music players were either “big and clunky” or “small and useless” with user interfaces that were “unbelievably awful”.[10]
The Apple Macintosh wasn’t innovative. Here’s how you “innovate” an Apple Mac: Take an existing product of your company, the Apple IIGS. Make that worse by reducing the processor clock speed so your new product will be superior in some way, because your new product is going to lack backwards compatibility, internal expansion card slots, color graphics or multi-channel audio.
The iMac wasn’t innovative. It was an evolution of their existing product line in trendy packaging.
The iPod wasn’t innovative. Even the UI was taken from Creative. Rio beat them to the market by several years.
The iPad wasn’t innovative. I was handed a Dell tablet PC a full decade before the iPad hit the market.
Apple was innovative twice in its very long history: The Apple II was the first microcomputer that combined color graphics with internal expandability, and the iPhone had a capacitive touch screen. The most innovative thing Steve Jobs ever said in his life was “You can just use your finger.”
The [Creative] Zen patent (6,928,433) covers the aspect of the user interface where a user can select at least one track in an MP3 player using at least three screens to browse for that track in a hierarchical method. As the Creative press release states: “One example would be the sequence of screens that could display artists, then albums, and then tracks. When the user selects an artist, the player displays a list of albums for that artist. Selection of one of the listed albums then displays a list of tracks on the album.”
The first phone with a capacitive touch screen was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada the iPhone was built with the technology that was around at the time.
People credit the iPhone with creating smartphones but much like Tesla’s the tech was ready and they launched at the right time. I guess Apple patented multitouch slowing down adoption of multitouch on laptops by decades, but I’d credit Apple with that not Jobs.
The Apple II was the first microcomputer that combined color graphics with internal expandability
The first computer I ever used (not counting punch cards or the VIC-20) was an Apple IIe, and I can confidently say that color was green. Later versions of the Apple II had full color, but that wasn’t “innovation” by Steve Jobs, it was just the technology for it becoming affordable.
That was a limitation of the monitor you were using, not the computer. All models of Apple II to include the Plus, e and c had color graphics. But it was common practice to pair them with monochrome monitors, first because they’re cheaper than color monitors, but also…the way the Apple II achieved a 16 color palette was through NTSC artifacting. It only ever tried to send something like six colors over the cable, but when you put two dissimilar colors next to each other, they get smeared together somewhere in the analog domain and they come out some other color. It allowed them to achieve 16 colors, but it had a drawback: Text that was supposed to appear black and white would have green and purple fringes, which made it blurry and hard to read. So if you were using the machine for business or something you might choose a monochrome monitor to get sharper, easier to read text. Apple’s first party monochrome monitors were indeed green.
The CGA card used that technique anyway. The IBM CGA card had a 9-pin RGBI digital output and an RCA analog NTSC output. There was a 16 color text mode, rarely used. Color graphics were usually done via the 4 color mode, which chose between four awful pallettes: light and dark variants of white black magenta and cyan, or yellow black red-orange and yellow. So they appeared kinda terrible on an RGBI monitor, but by dithering the colors together and using the analog output, you’d get other colors.
I’ve kinda known that most of my life because my elementary school had a lab of IIes, most of which had color monitors, a couple of them had monochrome monitors. So there were a couple of them that were inexplicably “just green.” Most of the rest of that I learned from The 8-Bit Guy on Youtube.
That Wozniak guy’s a good electrical engineer. Clever dude.
His tenure is that of a businessman, not an innovator or visionary. Good or bad, Jobs was all three.
jobs was not an innovator, hes good at marketing, he as ruthless as a business as any other.
Vissonary maybe but innovator?
IPhones & MacBooks were well built & marketed but neither was really innovative.
We can accurately point out that the technologies of the iphone (processors, cellular telephony, cellular data, GPS, touchscreens, bluetooth, cameras, etc) were not invented by Steve Jobs.
But his company took those parts and put something together that a few billion people decided was far more valuable than the sum of those parts. And they all decided to start carrying all these tools and using them fifteen times per hour, when they didn’t before.
It’s really hard to argue that’s not innovative.
How do you define innovation?
I don’t consider being in the right place when the tech fell into place, innovating (see also Tesla, MS-Dos, etc).
I think he was a visionary in that he had a vision and made it reality, but what was the innovation?
Innovative marketing of a product users couldn’t break (easily).
iPhones literally were visionary. The whole industry was trying to imitate blackberry and overnight apple made them completely irrelevant. Android changed to what it is from what was originally a blackberry interface.
MacBooks, yea, it’s a laptop. They had some really good ideas in there, sure. MagSafe and touchpads that didnt royally suck ass were welcome features. The M-series lighting a fire under intels ass was exactly what the entire industry needed. Love them or hate them, even when Apple is bad, they create good trouble in an industry that needed to be proven wrong from time to time.
What was the innovation in the iPhone?
It was worse in almost every way except marketing than the n900.
The technology had reached the point where you could have smartphones by then, I don’t see what was innovative about iPhones.
You can call it visionary, sure because he spread his vision for a locked down phone, but where is the innovation in the iPhone?
the n900 was released two years after the iphone. it was modeled on the iphone from the start, like the entire industry was. (and the n900 still didn’t support multi-touch, which Apple patented.)
The n900 was an interation in the n800, but sure how that can be modeled on the iPhone without time travel.
Is the iPhones invocation patenting things?
the n900’s changes to the n800 were modeled on the iPhone. the n800 is completely different: for one, the touch screen is activated by pressure, not touch. Are you arguing that the n800 is better than the iPhone 1?
And the apple mac, the iMac, iPod, and the iPad, and cofounding apple. Even the concept of iLife and the market targetting strategy. Yes, innovator.
A computer, an MP3 player, a tablet, starting a business.
How are any of those innovations?
I’d say killing yourself by ignoring medical advice for an easily treatable desies or pretending your daughter isn’t yours were innovations, but royals have been doing that for centuries.
Like what did he do that was innovative?
The iPod wheel is pretty iconic.
The Apple Macintosh wasn’t innovative. Here’s how you “innovate” an Apple Mac: Take an existing product of your company, the Apple IIGS. Make that worse by reducing the processor clock speed so your new product will be superior in some way, because your new product is going to lack backwards compatibility, internal expansion card slots, color graphics or multi-channel audio.
The iMac wasn’t innovative. It was an evolution of their existing product line in trendy packaging.
The iPod wasn’t innovative. Even the UI was taken from Creative. Rio beat them to the market by several years.
The iPad wasn’t innovative. I was handed a Dell tablet PC a full decade before the iPad hit the market.
Apple was innovative twice in its very long history: The Apple II was the first microcomputer that combined color graphics with internal expandability, and the iPhone had a capacitive touch screen. The most innovative thing Steve Jobs ever said in his life was “You can just use your finger.”
I don’t think Apple stole UI from Creative.
No, I’m pretty sure they licensed it, and so did Dell. Go look at Dell’s MP3 players, damn near identical interface.
The first phone with a capacitive touch screen was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada the iPhone was built with the technology that was around at the time.
People credit the iPhone with creating smartphones but much like Tesla’s the tech was ready and they launched at the right time. I guess Apple patented multitouch slowing down adoption of multitouch on laptops by decades, but I’d credit Apple with that not Jobs.
The first computer I ever used (not counting punch cards or the VIC-20) was an Apple IIe, and I can confidently say that color was green. Later versions of the Apple II had full color, but that wasn’t “innovation” by Steve Jobs, it was just the technology for it becoming affordable.
That was a limitation of the monitor you were using, not the computer. All models of Apple II to include the Plus, e and c had color graphics. But it was common practice to pair them with monochrome monitors, first because they’re cheaper than color monitors, but also…the way the Apple II achieved a 16 color palette was through NTSC artifacting. It only ever tried to send something like six colors over the cable, but when you put two dissimilar colors next to each other, they get smeared together somewhere in the analog domain and they come out some other color. It allowed them to achieve 16 colors, but it had a drawback: Text that was supposed to appear black and white would have green and purple fringes, which made it blurry and hard to read. So if you were using the machine for business or something you might choose a monochrome monitor to get sharper, easier to read text. Apple’s first party monochrome monitors were indeed green.
Demoscene groups CRTC & Hornet recently got 1000 colors out of the original IBM CGA card using this technique.
The CGA card used that technique anyway. The IBM CGA card had a 9-pin RGBI digital output and an RCA analog NTSC output. There was a 16 color text mode, rarely used. Color graphics were usually done via the 4 color mode, which chose between four awful pallettes: light and dark variants of white black magenta and cyan, or yellow black red-orange and yellow. So they appeared kinda terrible on an RGBI monitor, but by dithering the colors together and using the analog output, you’d get other colors.
That’s right. They got more colors on-screen for slightly better graphics than I remember on IBM 5150.
Huh, interesting to know. Ninth grade me didn’t give a shit about things like that.
I’ve kinda known that most of my life because my elementary school had a lab of IIes, most of which had color monitors, a couple of them had monochrome monitors. So there were a couple of them that were inexplicably “just green.” Most of the rest of that I learned from The 8-Bit Guy on Youtube.
That Wozniak guy’s a good electrical engineer. Clever dude.
There were way more than 2 things that Apple produced under Jobs…
Ok and none of them were innovative.
Yes and no, the first iPhone was innovative, but after that, it just became refinement.
It wasn’t innovative. They took existing products, and polished and marketed them. Apple has always been a lifestyle brand.
What was the innovation in the iPhone?
It was worse in almost every way except marketing than the n900.
The technology had reached the point where you could have smartphones by then, I don’t see what was innovative about iPhones.