this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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There's an old saying in computing. "you improve usability by taking away options and features" apple didn't necessarily invent this mindset. But they perfected it.
They took BSD, a security focused, but not very user friendly, offshoot of Linux/unix and made it "popular" by adding several layers of polish and doing a lot of the configuration work for you and made it osx. This was a time when Linux usability/management on the personal/newbie scale was garbage. If you wanted to install a certain distro of *nix, you better make sure you have supporting hardware and the right up to date tutorial, which is managed by an unknown volunteer, which was usually some person bored on the weekend a few months ago and never updated, they've made *nix installation and management a lot better though recently.
They also did this with music. People used to have large collections of unorganized mp3s in the early 00s, unless you were really anal and had a lot of time in your hands, because you were likely downloading them from several different illegal places, and legally buying mp3s were all over the place. You could buy the album off this weird obscure website that you didn't want to trust with your CC information, because there were a lot of mom and pop music stores online. Then apple brought out iTunes and allowed both buying and managing (and eventually upgrading, traveling around with) music to be dead simple.
For smartphones, they stole a LOT from BlackBerry, but they took it to the next level. Blackberry had email, a private messaging network, and mobile web scrolling waayyyy before anyone. And so many people loved it so much that even Obama famously didn't want to give his up when he took office. Then apple came out with the iPhone, and blew it away with a bigger screen and again, a lot more polish.
Innovation happens in small steps over years. Apple didn't invent mobile phones, smart phones, tablets, or computing, they didn't invent security, encrypted audio/video calls, or music management. They've done a lot of crappy stuff, and they charge super high amounts of money for less than state of the art hardware. Their innovation could be summed up by this profound statement I remember a friend said to me once around 2003/4.
"Osx, because making Linux pretty was easier than fixing Windows"
Came here to say something similar about touchscreens on phones. It's probably the most impactful innovation they've had, and ever will have imo. I can't ethically support Apple as a company and I haven't owned an apple product since the first iPod touch, but they absolutely deserve credit for this one.
Even if they didn't invent the touch screen, or even the touchscreen phone, they certainly figured out how to perfectly integrate touchscreens into mobile devices a fluid and intuitive user interface which served as a canvas on which to build pretty much anything you wanted in the form of a mobile app (a $200B+ industry which the iPhone absolutely catalysed the explosive growth of).
It arguably even began a significant change in the course of modern human interaction, due to how much more versatile and therefore more commonly used mobile phones with a similar UI basis became since then; because of that, increasingly popular social media platforms now had a new way to provide use for their platform (via mobile apps) on a device that pretty much everyone now had with them all the time. I don't think it's coincidence that social media use saw such substantially explosive growth soon after the iPhone and subsequent "copycats" were on the market.
So their innovation here was really the first step in a number of global paradigm shifts. It was just such a monumentally impactful step forward. Because of this I genuinely think that the iPhone is almost guaranteed to be in history books for centuries, like the printing press or the light bulb.
They’ve also excelled at seamless integration across devices. I can start an iMessage conversation on my iPhone, switch to my laptop for a while, then to my iPad.
Same thing with phone calls. If my phone is on the other side of the house and starts ringing, then both my laptop and iPad ring as well. I can grab whichever device is closest and answer the call on it.
Seamless integration has been around since the first real-time chatrooms though. Again, just making a better UI
For phone calls that's just VoIP which was around waaaaayyy before the iPhone, Skype was doing something similar in the consumer geek market in 2004/5. They just brought it to the big consumer market, and again, made it 1000x easier to do.
This is something that can easily be done on Windows and Linux also, its just not an out of the box setup like Mac
It's pretty out of the box now with windows and android. You have to link the two but then it just works (I don't find it a useful feature though)
Apple purchased their touch screen division from people who had been working on touchscreens for decades before them.
Are you saying that other people had been working on and creating what became Apple's mobile phone touchscreen interface, and they just bought the already near-finished product? If that's the case I wasn't aware.
Or if you're trying to correct me (I assume you're not, but you never know), I did acknowledge that Apple didn't invent the touch screen or touch screen phone, the tech has been around since the 1960's and even on phones since the early 90's iirc.
Lots of things like pinch-to-zoom, auto-switching the phone from portrait to landscape mode depending on how it was rotated, basically the actually-usable-as-a-browser features that are part of every modern touchscreen, were originally popularized by Apple. They were the first to make a touchscreen UI that rivaled a desktop computer instead of a pretty substandard WAP interface.
You're giving way too much to Apple. The important part of the touchscreen was cost. It wasn't viable as common tech until the cost came down. Apple was just riding that curve down and decided when to make a product.
Sure, cost was almost certainly taken into account, they are a business after all.
But they didn't just get lucky by gambling touch screens and waiting to become cheap enough. Take a look at the user interface of the touchscreen phones that came before the iPhone. Very limited in what they could do. Users were locked to a few small menus and custom-tailored applets, not much different than the UI of the phones before the iPhone. A touch screen was really more of a tech gimmick than a feature. Most (if not all) only accepted single stationary taps, any movement with a finger pressed to the screen wouldn't register properly, if at all, and there's really only so much you can do with that.
What Apple innovated is a better use for touch screens, an improvement in the way we were able to interact with our phones, coupled with a re-imagining of what a phone's interface should be at a fundamental level. And they accomplished this with huge help from their decision to move away from tap-only touch to something that felt more natural: multiple/moving gestures, such as scrolling by moving your finger up or down, pinch to zoom, etc.
This really caused the single biggest movement away from what cell phones really were for us. Before, they were mostly portable telephones with a few extra poorly-implemented and barely functional gimmicks (ever use a web browser on a Razr?). With the iPhone's success, Apple single-handedly shifted us into the new cell phone model; a customisable, intuitive to use, modular canvas that anyone can mould into whatever suits their needs via apps created by anyone (which Apple gets huge credit for yet again, because this could only he possible with the developer kits Apple released, effectively outsourcing creative solutions in taking advantage of the iPhone's functionality).
When you look at what they set out to innovate, how they went about doing it, how much different it was than phones in the past, and how incredibly similar it is to phones today, a whole 15 years later, you just cannot reasonably deny that it was an extremely innovative and influential product.
I agree they didn't "get lucky", they timed their device to the costs that were outside of their control. This is a common theme in venture capital: timing. You have to time your entry correctly. Too early and it's too expensive, too late and someone else did it and maybe took the market.
After that I think we have different ideas of what innovation is. To me innovation is inventing. Something new. Blackberry was the innovative device. They were the first (common) smartphone. Touch screens existed in various places (some things released, some not), apple didn't innovate that. Yes even the pinch to zoom existed on some smart table thing. Scrolling? Pretty sure that was old fry. Touch screen on phones? Pretty sure Nokia had that. So what did apple do? What apple does well is refine. They took existing idea/invention of a smartphone, they took the existing tech/invention of a touchscreen, they timed it, and put out the a touch phone. This was possible because costs of touchscreens came down. The march of technology did not depend on apple.
I'll argue that the blackberry was just a better implementation of the already existing PDA exactly like the iPhone was just a better implementation of already existing touch-screen device, but beyond that I just don't feel like taking time to repeat/clarify points I've already made or responding to "pretty sure"s. So I'll just suggest we agree to disagree on this particular topic and wish you a merry Christmas 🎅
Lol when you start mocking someone you show who you actually are. Speaks louder than anything you actually say.
I'm absolutely not mocking you.
You're basing some of your arguments on things you don't seem to actually know, and using incorrect interpretations of my words as basis for some of your counter-points. I've noticed a pattern in people who formulate and present arguments/points similar to the way you do, and they tend to be difficult to hold civil discussions with, so I chose to end our discussion.
I'm sorry if that comes off as harsh or rude, but it's my honest reason for ending our discussion. There's truly no malice or mockery behind my words
Anyway, this is my last message to you. And since you seem to have read my previous message as a passive aggressive mockery, I really do genuinely hope you have a great holiday season.
You were absolutely mocking. 100%. And you continue! (with even more apparent attacks). Anyway when you mock people I have no desire to converse with you. Cheers.
For clarity, BlackBerry devices still loaded “mobile” websites, aka “WAP” sites. The iPhone’s innovation was figuring out a way to allow browsing of full, normal web pages. By displaying the full page and using the touchscreen features to zoom in and out, it made every page out there almost instantly usable on mobile.
Also they basically invented software keyboards. People didn’t think you could have an efficient software keyboard, even the android prototypes still had a physical keyboard for typing.
Yup. Google developers had to go back to the drawing board for both the hardware and the OS after the iPhone announcement.
I still miss having a physical keyboard for messages. If HTC had kept making slide out keyboard phones, I woulda kept buying. Though it seems, based on market trends, I might have been one of the very few.
Also standardizing hardware. Part of the iPhones success was that developers had to develop for A phone, singular. There were a lot of cool palm programs and whatnot, but having a single hardware set to bug-smash had to be a big part of making the app-market go into hyper drive.
I don't own a single apple product, but credit where credit is due.
Not only for iPhone, but for Mac as well. It's easy to install bsd on a machine when you have access to the best hw engineers and documenters on the planet.
Ahh, no. The window where existed only one iPhone and you could develop for it was very narrow. And then you need not only develop for different hardware, but software as well. Yes, different versions of iOS are different. Source: developers for mobile for three years.
Isn't the problem now just different screen sizes? I thought that, other than that, everything is easily portable from between different iphones, ipads and whatnot
And the iPhone screen size didn’t change until the App Store had been around for 4 years, during which time it became huge. I am not sure why this person is trying to discount what you’re saying.
Screen sizes, presence and size of notches, and available APIs between OS versions.
Perfect description, they made very complex functionality accessible by the general public.
Steve Jobs in particular was extremely anal in removing whatever he deemed "not needed". The first mac nearly didn't have arrow keys for its keyboard. He hated the function keys of keyboards so much he once personally removed the keys from a person who asked for an autograph
Thank you, exactly
Was bsd an offshoot of linux? I thought it was the other way around. Honest question.
BSD and Linux are offshoots of Unix.
Yeah .... I wasn't sure when I wrote it and didn't think it'd matter tbh
I thought about making a comment and decided it didn't matter, but skeezix gave me the opportunity to do it indirectly.
I don't even think making Linux pretty is that hard.
You just have to cut out all the retards who think average people want to use a terminal. Once you start thinking pragmatically, practical solutions come to mind.
Lots of insecure people like to overcomplicate things they don't understand to cover up their lack of knowledge rather than just admitting they don't know.