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Android is a fine OS, but no one can deny that the original iPhone was truly an innovative device and I mean that in the traditional sense of "innovative".

Today, companies through the word "innovative" around constantly to describe incremental improvements. In truth, innovative should me a major change, something that creates an entire new class or fundamentally changes the way we accomplish things. The original iPhone started that, it was innovative.

The traditional sense of innovation is any incremental or revolutionary improvement. Anything that is new to the world is innovation. The fingerprint scanner on the 5S is innovative because it is the first to use that specific method of scanning technology in a phone, even though Atrix had one first, it didn't use the same technology. Retina display is innovation. Improving the camera megapixels is innovation.
 
Samedung or shamedung, they're evil... Even when they have to pay 1 billion dollars for stealing and copying, that's 1/4th the cost of apple's original research.

Quite the contrary. That is six times what Apple spent.

According to every history, Apple only spent about $150 million on the first iPhone. And that includes millions buying test equipment that every phone maker needs forever, like test chambers, dummy heads, cell site emulators, etc.

(Back in 2007, from my own design and manufacturing experiences I had publicly estimated about $100 million, but I wasn't including test equipment.)

Ok that I can maybe buy. But to believe it we have to believe then that Steve Jobs was pretty ignorant about technology. Unless this is something only a top level engineer would know about.

Now you're kidding me, right?

Steve Jobs was indeed pretty ignorant about technology. He was a dropout with no tech education. He never designed a circuit nor programmed a line of code in his life, nor did he know how to do those things... much less have any clue about how antennas work.

His lack of knowledge can be exemplified by the time that he ordered the Mac engineers to make the memory circuit lines go in a "pretty pattern", even though they told him that would cause cross talk. Sure enough, the circuits failed and they went back to their old layout.

In fact, it was partly Jobs' technical ignorance (on top of his being a total jerk) that got him pushed out of Apple to begin with. He didn't stop being a jerk, but he later realized he needed to listen to his engineers when they really pushed back.
 
Now we know the truth.
Android did copy the iPhone.
Enough said.

That was never an unknown. Android did a blatant copy. But both operating systems have borrowed from each other since. That's undeniable.

I don't think borrowing features is bad because it helps to adopt better ways of doing things across a larger audience (computer mouse, anyone?), but to go from one design to another that nearly replicates the entire experience is flat-out stealing.
 
Android is a fine OS, but no one can deny that the original iPhone was truly an innovative device and I mean that in the traditional sense of "innovative".

Today, companies through the word "innovative" around constantly to describe incremental improvements. In truth, innovative should me a major change, something that creates an entire new class or fundamentally changes the way we accomplish things. The original iPhone started that, it was innovative.

I had used devices with iPhone capabilities for years before 2007. They sucked. Apple added multi touch to their own version of hardware & software.

This was revolutionary to me. But it wasn't innovative in the way you describe.
 
I disagree. Palm was able to copy iPhone far better than Google in short order and MS could have as well but poor mgmt did them in. Google won because of their distribution strategy. I still remember getting a seed of the G1 and thinking, this thing is unusable! But the carriers loved it and bought them time to make improvements and allow hardware advances to cover up much of Android's major warts.

Just copying wasn't gonna cut it though - differentiation, speed of iteration, distribution strategy, diverse device profiles, the Droid marketing campaign etc. all worked to get Android where it is. Palm was stuck with their tiny buggy device with little apps for a real long time. Microsoft - well you know.

Oh and iPhone had the major warts too if remember right - no app store, poor battery life, no Exchange support, no multitasking etc. Any Rev 1 product has - so that point really is moot.

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Hm... sounds like you're saying Google had big hopes for Android but didn't know what direction to go in until Apple showed them. Agreed. :D

Well if you are into misrepresenting/oversimplifying/generalizing things - suit yourself. :rolleyes:

But to reiterate - Google already had plans for both BB style AND iPhone style devices. They could certainly have rolled both out and let the market decide for itself. Choice was part of their strategy - a big one in fact. So with or without iPhone it would have been the same - iPhone just sped it all up.
 
No denying that Apple changed the whole phone market with the first iPhone. The companies that realised this like Google have benefited where the companies that didn't like RIM and Microsoft were left so far behind its pretty much impossible for them to catch up. Without the iPhone Android would have just been a Blackberry clone and smart phones would probably have still been a fairly niche market.
 
They certainly do have the content streams. Personally, I hope Apple sticks with making computers and supporting peripherals. Outside of making a smart TV that costs twice as much as the competing smart TV yet does half as much but still has that something that some folks want, I don't see Apple gaining much ground in a market that doesn't have much room to grow.

Now, if they decided to branch out into some new untapped TV-like market that no one expected, then they'd be doing something like the OG Apple of yore.

That is what I'm worried about, Apple' days of break through new ideas are gone. Now days they have some big media even to tel everyone they have added more megapixels to a cell phone camera or they have a new color for the back of an old phone. They've watered down the meaning of "innovation".

But on the other hand look at the new Mac Pro. It really is a computer unlike any other. The common thermal core idea is great.

NEXT Apple needs to tackle storage. We still have the same darn file system we had 30 years ago. UNIX files have not changed in decades. We need to LOOSE to concept of physical disk drives. They need to act like RAM where you add more and go from 4GB to 16GB of RAM but no one has to worry about what is stored on which memory stick, it is just all pooled. With RAM we accept this and think it's normal. Way to we still treat disks differently? There are 100 other things I can think of like that need to be done. They need to be innovating in the computer software space. Making computers that do things we can't do now rater then tiny increments
 
INNOVATION THIS, INNOVATION THAT

seriously, the most overused buzzword in MacRumors forum, and probably the entire internet this age.

I'll give 100% credit to Apple for completely abusing this word and putting it wrongly into the mindset of the world.

I've said this 10000000 times. i"ll say it 100000 more whenever people start throwing it around and trying to redefine it to what they think it is.

The Textbook definition of the word "Innovation" or "innovate"

to introduce (something new) for or as if for the first time: to innovate a computer operating system.

So. if something has been done before, it's not innovative. plain and simple, unless you have come up with a new THING or METHOD. its' not innovation.

Need an Example:
Innovation: Apple using a 64bit ARM CPU in the iPhone5s is innovative. Why? because up till apple did it, no one had even made the 64bit CPU yet, nevermind use it anywhere. they were the first. And Credit where credit is due.

Not Innovative: changing your screen dimensions to a standard 16:9 shape and upping the resolution.

Innovative: The Invention of a brand new Pixel technology (such as IGZO) in order to create a new type of display

Not innovative: taking existing technlogy and speeding it up. (overlcocking a CPU by 200MHZ is not innovative. it's revisionary.


geeze, everytime i have to go into this, I just read my signature and remember... I can't win.
 
That is what I'm worried about, Apple' days of break through new ideas are gone. Now days they have some big media even to tel everyone they have added more megapixels to a cell phone camera or they have a new color for the back of an old phone. They've watered down the meaning of "innovation".

That's an interesting statement. I don't know how you can be so sure about that. I guess unless you consider:

2001: Apple releases the iPod
2007: Apple releases the iPhone
2010: Apple releases the iPad

Three revolutionary products in a decade. Maybe they've set the bar too high, a standard that is probably not fair to hold any company to.
 
I have a feeling the number is only "useless" to you, because it doesn't fall on the side of your opinion.

Well I'm interested in knowing what benefit to Android this number is giving them that amounts to "winning" over iOS. Please enlighten me. Otherwise it really is useless. If Android was to iOS like Windows is to OSX then he would have a point.
 
We need to LOOSE to concept of physical disk drives. They need to act like RAM where you add more and go from 4GB to 16GB of RAM but no one has to worry about what is stored on which memory stick, it is just all pooled. With RAM we accept this and think it's normal. Way to we still treat disks differently? There are 100 other things I can think of like that need to be done. They need to be innovating in the computer software space. Making computers that do things we can't do now rater then tiny increments

The cloud could help do that, but why would you want to rely on an internet connection that's, on average, hundreds of times slower than your average SSD?

What we need to do is lose the concept of volatile ram and non-volatile drive space as separate things. Instead of having a system that loads information off an HDD into ram, it's already there, stored in and ready to launch right from it without any break between where it's stored, and where it's actively used. It'd mark the end of load times, because accessing anything off that would be nigh instantaneous.

We already could do that now in theory, and I'm pretty sure someone has a system just like that running in some lab somewhere. The problem is that it'd be expensive as hell to produce, and you'd end up with far less drive space than what you'd get from slower, less expensive flash storage. That's the ultimate roadblock when it comes to computer tech innovation reaching the mass market. When you release a new tech, it has to be better overall without any drawbacks, and not cost much more than the old standard. I bet a system like that with 64GB of ram-drive would cost at least $20,000 or so just for a basic, no frills setup. That's so expensive, even the high end pro market would do a spit-take when seeing it.
 
Apple could have owned the dominated the smartphone industry with such a great head-start but Tim Cook ruined it for everyone. Google and Android currently own the smartphone industry and Apple is just a shadow of what it used to be in industry respect and shareholder value. While Google is at all-time highs, Apple is just sputtering along trying to sell a few million more iPhones than last year with most of the analysts believing Apple will again fail to meet expectations. No China Mobile deal for Apple while every other smartphone manufacturer has been officially selling smartphones on China Mobile for years. Apple moves at a snail's pace and everyone wonders why Apple is being left behind. Despite sitting on a mountain of wealth, the iPhone is said to be inferior to the high-end Android smartphones. :confused:

Sadly, Steve Jobs is no longer around and didn't have to witness his "going thermonuclear" plan against Android dissolve into harmless chalk dust. Android has practically ruined Apple's iPhone business. The student became the master and Apple is the now joke of the industry with such a small amount of smartphone market share it almost seems laughable if it weren't so disappointing. Practically everyone on the planet buys Android devices and the iPhone is fading fast in market share. Google shareholders are laughing all the way to the bank and Apple shareholders are the biggest losers. Thanks, Tim. If it weren't for you, I would never have believed such a cash-rich company could be run into the ground in a short couple of years. This year will likely end up a repeat of last year's fiasco. :(
 
responses to your nonsense in bold... scroll down and read Renzatic's post. it's pretty good an explanation

Sorry, but I know what I'm talking about RE PlamOS devices. Cuz, I actually used them for years. It was primarily a stylus-based interface, with either Graffiti or a QUERTY thumb keyboard for text (Graffiti was a system for entering text with a stylus).

Also, Palm (read that as including Handspring -- while technically a separate company at times, you can hardly talk about one without the other) doesn't support your contention that the market was moving to touch screens before the iPhone came out. Palm -- the only company before Apple to produce a decent touch-based information device of any kind -- was nearly dead at that point. The market was technically moving away from touch when the iPhone came out (though I realize Palm's problems had nothing to do with its touch interface.)
 
Sorry, but I know what I'm talking about RE PlamOS devices. Cuz, I actually used them for years. It was primarily a stylus-based interface, with either Graffiti or a QUERTY thumb keyboard for text (Graffiti was a system for entering text with a stylus).

Also, Palm (read that as including Handspring -- while technically a separate company at times, you can hardly talk about one without the other) doesn't support your contention that the market was moving to touch screens before the iPhone came out. Palm -- the only company before Apple to produce a decent touch-based information device of any kind -- was nearly dead at that point. The market was technically moving away from touch when the iPhone came out (though I realize Palm's problems had nothing to do with its touch interface.)

the problem is you keep qualifying.

the only company before Apple to produce a decent touch-based information device of any kind -

Just because the others weren't decent, doesn't meant they didnt exist


this is a common thread of discussion on these forums. "Appple did it first!". "no they didn't, see example A, b and C..."

"A, B and C did them shittily and terribly, Apple did it right, my point is still right and you're wrong!"

its terrible logic and it's why people throw terms like "fanboy" around when you say stuff like that.

Yes, Apple did it right. YES before Apple, they weren't nearly as fluid or smooth. I NEVER EVER said alternate to that.

However, just because of failed attempts, doesn't meant those failed attempts didnt exist.

and yes, I owned multiple Palm OS devices through the years. Also a few Windows mobile devices and CE devices, and a few Apple devices. And a few no name devices. and what I didnt own, I made sure I spent hours in Best Buy ? Future shop playing with them extensively to at least be able to form an informed opinion on such items.
 
Another interesting revelation in the book, is about a wish that people used to bring up here all the time (an iPhone mini):

Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s top hardware executive then and known to many as the Podfather for driving the creation and development in the iPod, said there were even long discussions about how big the phone would be.

I was actually pushing to do two sizes— to have a regular iPhone and an iPhone mini like we had with the iPod. I thought one could be a smartphone and one could be a dumber phone. But we never got a lot of traction on the small one, and in order to do one of these projects you really need to put all your wood behind one arrow.”

Vogelstein, Fred (2013-11-12). Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution (pp. 35-36). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Rubinstein, of course, is not only known for the iPod, but for leaving Apple for Palm and pushing the development of WebOS.

This brings up my favorite topic, which is: Companies don't invent things. People do.

And in Silicon Valley, it's quite often the same people involved over and over again, just for different companies... moving where their ideas can be brought to fruition. In Rubinstein's case, it was the idea of an HTML based OS with a multitasking card paradigm.
 
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That's an interesting statement. I don't know how you can be so sure about that. I guess unless you consider:

2001: Apple releases the iPod
2007: Apple releases the iPhone
2010: Apple releases the iPad

Three revolutionary products in a decade. Maybe they've set the bar too high, a standard that is probably not fair to hold any company to.

I think the problem is, because of the 3 big hits in the short period of time, everyone sees apple as this company that can see the future and come out with revolutionary market changing products.

nobody wants to accept that this isn't normal behaviour for most companies or even Apple. its completely unreasonable to think that they can keep up "re-inventing" new markets.

as a tech geek. I DO love what apple has managed to do. When I got my first MP3 player, yeears before the ipod was even a rumour, it was considered purely a geek toy. An unsuitable replacement for CD players (despite looking like one!) and generally most people would never have even imagined them.

in comes the iPod, with a sleek and sexy white polycarbonite exterior that fit easily into your pocket that could hold a few thousand mp3's. It didnt do anything in particular that the other MP3 players didnt do. it just, felt right.
 
I'm in the middle of this book, and so far I can't recommend it. What made me want to read it was the original excerpt about how the iphone wasn't ready to show but they pulled it off (kind of like in the movie "Tucker"). The only other thing I found interesting was what is in this 2nd excerpt. If you've followed Macrumors or other sites about these devices there isn't much new in the book.
 
That was an amazing keynote. "An iPod, a Phone, and an Internet Communicator" The thing that changed things the most was actually the internet communicator aspect, getting rid of that awful looking mobile internet and bringing the actual internet onto a phone. Could you imagine if we still had this?

ti_android_prototype.jpg
 
While I agree...

Android is a fine OS, but no one can deny that the original iPhone was truly an innovative device and I mean that in the traditional sense of "innovative".

I agree with you that the word innovation is thrown around very loosely, and that the iPhone was a true innovation... the term "innovation" is to take something that exists and to improve upon it, whereas the word "invention" is something entirely new. I think the iPhone fits more into the the "invention" category and then everyone was set about innovating on top of that, at least once they caught up to the invention itself.

Just adding features to something does not, in itself make it innovative. Innovation is sometimes removing features that are necessary, or changing a feature to be more intuitive. I think Apple has both innovation and invention down pat.
 
come on. why do people constantly say this crap

Apple stood on the shoulders of those before them as equally as people have stood on the shoulders of Apple.
Dont get me wrong. Apple had the right product, at the right time, with the right design and the right marketting know how to change the game. nobody is denying that.

But the world was already moving towards smartphones with touch screens. There were many on the market before the iphone, albeit maybe not as fancy or pretty.

I was very early on the first iPhone. I think there are two things that people have forgotton:

(1) No stylus. Yes there were other touchscreen phones, and phones that had virtual keyboards, but they all had stylus input. Apple was the first one to do finger touch and have it work.
(2) Unlimited data plans. Data plans were ridiculously expensive before the iPhone, the iPhone made large amounts of mobile data actually practical for a consumer.
(3) Sleek and sexy. All screen, one button. Anybody remember the nexus one with the trackball, still a leftover of copying Blackberry? Android devices to this day still have those silly hard buttons.

Then there are the missing pieces to the story that a lot of people have forgotten or haven't paid attention to.

Like the first iPhone being EDGE only and not 3G. Or the absence of SMS. Or the fact that the app store wasn't there, you could only use the built-in apps, or that the jailbreak community/Cydia was the prototype for the app store that Apple would follow.
 
Apple were instrumental in getting the general public to accept that mobile phone business model though. They wanted control over the price points and presumably didn't want to fight AT&T over subsidies and profit sharing agreements. So much so that T Mobile now base their entire business model on transparently informing the customer of the true price of the handset.

Ah, OK, now I get what you're saying. :)
 
Steve Jobs was indeed pretty ignorant about technology. He was a dropout with no tech education. He never designed a circuit nor programmed a line of code in his life, nor did he know how to do those things... much less have any clue about how antennas work.

His lack of knowledge can be exemplified by the time that he ordered the Mac engineers to make the memory circuit lines go in a "pretty pattern", even though they told him that would cause cross talk. Sure enough, the circuits failed and they went back to their old layout.

In fact, it was partly Jobs' technical ignorance (on top of his being a total jerk) that got him pushed out of Apple to begin with. He didn't stop being a jerk, but he later realized he needed to listen to his engineers when they really pushed back.

It's good to have engineers though. We need someone to construct the ideas, innovation, and visionary sight of those that change the world. ;)
 
I was very early on the first iPhone. I think there are two things that people have forgotton:

(1) No stylus. Yes there were other touchscreen phones, and phones that had virtual keyboards, but they all had stylus input. Apple was the first one to do finger touch and have it work.

Kinda getting into the niggling details here, but you could use a finger with those old resistive touchscreen phones. The tracked touch by pressure, and anything that applied pressure would work.

The problem was the UIs of those old phones were designed with tiny little buttons that were easier to hit with a stylus.
 
Kinda getting into the niggling details here, but you could use a finger with those old resistive touchscreen phones. The tracked touch by pressure, and anything that applied pressure would work.

The problem was the UIs of those old phones were designed with tiny little buttons that were easier to hit with a stylus.

or just really pointy fingers ;p.

I rarely ever used a stylus with my devices. even thought hey all shipped with them.

Palm based devices were fairly easy to use without a stylus. Windows mobile was hit or miss. Lots of functionality worked fine, but scrolling without the stylus was questionable.


But hey, at least my old Windows Mobile devices came with Copy and paste already baked into the OS :p
 
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