Apple, just another electronics company?

Not a troll thread. Genuinely interested... Where is Apple innovating anymore? Sure, they took ports off of their laptops and phones, but is that actually innovative? It could be argued iterative, but I doubt "innovative."

Is it too much of a risk for Apple today to be innovative? Have they taken lessons learned of the past to not be first to market (e.g. Newton), but iteratively better next in the market? One might argue that Samsung is doing a better job at attempting to be innovative. Microsoft, of all companies, is actually trying harder as well, IMO.

Was Steve Jobs Apple? He was ousted once before, all to see his company turn to near bankruptcy. Now that he has passed, is anyone willing to take big risks able to take control of Apple again? Are the whispers since Jobs' passing coming to fruition? Will this be a slow, but sure death, due to lack of innovation?

Is Apple just another electronics company now?

iPod, iPad, iPhone were truly innovating.

Everything that cook has made like the watch, ipad pro, ipad mini, homepod, are all shitty ripoffs.

Nothing. They never innovated much in the first place, but now they've dropped all pretense

They've innovated smartphones, but I still feel like we would have done the same without those things. After all, they're just computers with SIM card readers and a webcam. If you need a web browsing experience, carry a real laptop with you.

Plus, we already had text messages and calls before then.

"Innovative company" doesn't necessary imply creating a technology, merely being first to market with it. I think we're all familiar with The Pirates of Silicon Valley story of stealing the ideas from Xerox Park and such.

I'm definitely not an Apple fanboi, and have, in fact, never purchased, new or used, a single Apple product in my life. I've had to service some Apple appliances before, even tearing a few down to fix them, so I am familiar with the ecosystem. Friends, family, and partners have had Apple products I've watched them use. I've asked them questions. Apple and its culture is a genuine curiosity to me. Perhaps this resurgence of Apple in the 2000's wasn't necessarily Jobs' himself, although he had a cult personality following, and still does, but that he brought and lead the innovation in industrial design and UX that was so needed during a time of beige box computers and utilitarian design.

when did apple ever innovate?

apple's strength has always been some form of taking various technologies and figuring out ways to make them marketable in a single package. this was the case with the ipod, iphone, retina displays, etc... — apple never invented multi-touch or high pixel density displays or any of that; they just worked out how to make devices with these features marketable.

this is incidentally part of why Sup Forums throws a fucking fit all the time. because nobody is especially interested in the thing that did X first, but the thing that first did X reasonably well. but that requires too much thinking about other people for autistic people whose social interaction is limited to Sup Forums.

steve's influence was being a good filter. he was insanely and notoriously demanding. his tolerance for cognitive demand was extremely low.

if you really want to search for a thing, then apple's innovation was in usability. that doesn't mean shiny or polished buttons — that's design (and not even really "design" as anyone but laypeople mean it). the iPod wasn't the first portable media player, but the way the user interacted with it made it easy to take off. it's a good example of how nailing the user interface (be it software or hardware or both) really saves you.

it's PARC, as in palo alto research center. also everyone stole from them. microsoft, apple, etc... everyone.

PARC was basically a publishing research institution. mark weiser (invented ubiquitous computing), john seely brown (see declaration of independence of web), stu card (invented virtual desktops), paul dourish (made google docs in like 1992), etc...

bill gates said everyone was stealing from PARC, including MS. you literally can't fathom how much of your life today was first imagined and in many cases prototyped that lab.

Derp on me. I blanked when writing that out. I love computing history. PARC was an amazing powerhouse. To anyone that says private business isn't interest in pure research are fucking idiots. Pure research can and does often lead to practical results; if not now, in the near future.

I respect Apple and Jobs for the "magic" they did in making computing that much better for people. They have certainly changed the computing industry numerous times. I'll still never buy an Apple product out of principle, though.

They still have a lot of great programmers, they will be around for ages, I give them longer than MS and their pajeets

...

You're too poor to own an Apple product. Apple is a premium experience.

it's true that PARC was a powerhouse but i don't know if i'd say it's a great illustration of how private institutions contribute to research specifically because they were way outside the norm. nobody else was publishing like they were. today you have microsoft research which is much larger but i would argue less influential per capita, and then you look at other companies and it's a disaster:

- social computing companies like facebook, twitter, airbnb, etc... publish, but they don't make ANY data publicly available for replication, which raises questions about WHAT THE FUCK WE'RE EVEN DOING

- amazon, google, and a number of other companies are *extremely* cagey about publishing. they all do it, but they generally don't have institutions like PARC or MSR where there are people whose job descriptions include/d publishing research.

weirdly, snapchat has hired a senior social computing researcher from MSR recently so we'll see where that goes.

as for this principle thing, i think you're taking this stuff too seriously. i know a handful of former PARC people and they all use macbook pros. if the fact that apple stole shit from PARC should bother anyone, it'd be them. especially stu card.

if he can get over it and just get work done, so can you.

steve jobs worked tirelessly to figure out what fits in peoples daily lives.
there's an essence to technology that's important but often overlooked. do I want to toss this on the bed? where is it going to be in the room?

it's not just "marketable"
using that buzzword does a disservice to intelligent discourse. something becomes marketable when it achieves an identifiable and important form.

/thread

This sounds like trolling but it is true. Though now it's clear they have become dependent on self-reference, and their brand is no longer legitimate.

It was premium experience. Now it's premium ripoff.

>using that buzzword does a disservice to intelligent discourse. something becomes marketable when it achieves an identifiable and important form.
fine. i assumed that when i said "marketable" it was clear that i was talking about apple making devices with these new technologies desirable, but since you're evidently upset about this, let's just say that apple figured out how to manage the compromises necessary for relatively new - but not cutting edge - technologies such that they could persuade people to buy these devices.

My gripe with Apple isn't that they stole ideas from PARC. My gripe is about how they're over-priced hype machines. While they did bring innovation to the computing markets, they are selling lots of hype and brand more than substance. GNU/Linux + AMD plz

APPLE = SEARS

think about it

>they're over-priced hype machines
everything is an overpriced hype machine. samsung spent $10 billion on marketing worldwide in 2016. even lenovo spent more than $10m in 2014.

any company that introduces a device with features that aren't common -- like multi-touch, or retina display, or whatever else -- has to advertise that feature. any time you sell someone something new, you have to take a rigidly formed notion of how the person does something, break it, and THEN sell them on the new way. that's insanely difficult.

this isn't like selling someone a new hammer or something. when the iPhone first came out i distinctly remember thinking that there was no way i would want a portable media player sharing the same battery as my phone because the PMP already had poor battery life. how the hell would any company get over that hurdle except by hyping the device? certainly you wouldn't suggest *waiting* until battery lives got sufficiently better as to negate that concern; that'd set us back more than a decade.

the ipod, ipad, iphone, retina macbook pro, etc... all forced companies to deliver better experiences on various dimensions that suddenly mattered to consumers. but they didn't suddenly matter spontaneously. they mattered because apple articulated different ways of using these kinds of devices.

let apple spend 2 billion on advertising high pixel density displays at 120Hz and all that shit. it puts a spotlight on samsung and others to explain why they haven't been making laptops and tablets pushing 120Hz for fucking years.

that's the entire game. Nintendo is really good at it too. Or was back when they were all alive.

People have been naysaying Apple for years. Yet at no point after iPod have they ever actually declined

>iPod is insanely priced, why pay for this when other mp3 players are already around cheaper?
best mp3 player around

>Macbook air has no disk drive? Apple has lost it
one of the most successful laptops of all time, everyone copies the thin meme

>iPad is just a big iPhone lol
turns out to be a hot new market

absolutely. there's something to be said for that — bringing things together (especially when the technology is still not _quite_ ready), making compromises in some ways without sacrificing important aspects of the experience in others, and persuasively articulating a use case that we didn't have before — but it's not like they're doing fundamental scientific research, learning new properties of elements or something. to be fair, most of the people doing that are in public-facing universities, but that too is the point about PARC earlier: everything is getting stolen from research institutions.

there's a conference called ubicomp in like 3 or 4 days. it's sort of small-ish but you can bet that the stuff you should expect to see in 5-10 years all around you — drones, wearable computing, all that — will all be there. a relatively small proportion of publications will be from industry because industry's currently implementing stuff from ubicomp 2014 and '15

Apple doesn't innovate. They never have. They just either take away the downsides of a blossoming technology/ dumb it down for normies.

>iPad
>innovating

No. No one uses a tablet. Only fags in starbucks.

yeah that was what i said earlier in the thread, except with more substance to back it up and a bit of nuance.

i use a tablet to read papers (the conferences i tend to read papers from often have multi-colored figures now that we live in the 21st century). in principle it's true that i could read papers on my laptop, but it's too easy to slide back into writing or browsing the web or something.

it's an excellent reading device. i'm sure there are other similarly valid uses. if you're too narrow or simple-minded to think about how other people with different uses cases than you might benefit from something, do the rest of the world a favor and don't make things for other people.