Its their soldered and proprietary hardware that I am talking about, as well as the removal of functions like Optical Drives, Wired Ethernet, and non-flash affordable large storage. Thats a start....
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Graphene May Be Next Area of Innovation for Apple and Samsung
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Its their soldered and proprietary hardware that I am talking about, as well as the removal of functions like Optical Drives, Wired Ethernet, and non-flash affordable large storage. Thats a start....
From 2000-2001 and on till now: Aqua. Mac OS X, the best desktop OS up until now. A GUI so vastly superior to whatsoever else that one had to be blind or hopelessly tasteless to buy another Windows OS -operated thing.
From 1997-'98 and on (replaced by MacBook Pro): PowerBooks (G3, later - G4). Logic board (and other components set up to self-destroy once the guarantee was over, and extremely slow even by the standards of the time, but still beautiful design and an excellent OS).
From 1998 on: iMacs. Various iterations through the years, but all the pinnacle of design of their respective production era.
From 1999 and on (replaced by Mac Pros later): the Power Mac.
2002 - 2005: eMacs.
1999 and on: iBooks. Apple Cinema Displays.
2003 - 2006: iSight
2001 and on: iPod. I do lament the demise of the MiniDisk, but fact is iPod was still rather revolutionary, or at least better than its direct competition.
2001: Apple Pro Speakers
2000: The Cube.
2006-2007: iPod HiFi (alas, discontinued a year after its inception).
1999 and on: AirPort.
Finally, 2007: iPhone (at the time quite revolutionary, but now outdated. Ever overpriced. Lacking in hardware and software features).
from then on, I see little innovation. Yes, Intel Processors (2006 and on) - a considerable jump forward in my book (PPCs were crawlers). Idem Retina Displays. MacBook Air is interesting, though quite unimpressive (not even a Retina Display in this year's model). The same goes for the Mac Pro 2013 (costs an arm and a leg, but is less powerful than the competition. It does look lovely and runs OS X by default, but still too expensive and not sufficiently powerful). All-in-all, I see little progress in Apple's strides since 2007 or thereabouts.
Where is water resistance for the iPhone? Larger screens are yet to come this fall. Digitiser technology? Will we ever see it? Swype? yet iOS was the first platform its predecessor was made available for (as a standalone app, once downloadable from iTunes Store) iPhone first.
Graphene is a good conductor, but we already have good conductors in electronics - silver, aluminum, gold, etc. Similar substances could also be used for comparably small interconnects (to carbon nanotubes) called nanowires. What we need are better semiconductors. Graphene has no naturally occurring bandgap, so you have to engineer one by layering sheets in different configurations or mixing other materials. This is another challenge on top of making mass production cheap and one of the reasons it's probably still a decade out from mass consumer electronic use.
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It's like Thanksgiving, and iPhone media event day is Christmas. I have taken off work all but one year for the last 5 years for WWDC.
Oh my god! I actually thought that. 3D Printer + Graphene. Carbon can do more complex molecules than silicon and I think a 3D Printer suits nano technology. Imagine what Apple can do with these technologies, carbon-based super-small chips, super-rapid-charging batteries 
Graphene is also important for future processors (higher clock rate, less wasted energy), batteries (higher energy density) and power supplies (nearly 100 % efficiency).
That is if they are left open to the elements. What if it is sandwiched between two thin layers of protective film?
Mac OS X prior to Tiger was really fairly lacking. Panther wasn't bad, but Jaguar was pretty buggy/borderline and 10.0 was sort of a joke. They were all pretty slow, too. They also dropped a lot of features from Mac OS 9.
*facepalm*
Mac sales didn't really take off until the switch to Intel.
What on Earth are you talking about?
#1 they were extremely fast-- they were basically just laptop versions of the desktop machines... two exceptions being the somewhat odd 250 MHz and 292 MHz variants running on an 83 MHz bus instead of a 66 MHz bus (same XPC106 Grackle memory/bus chip, just clocked higher).
And none of the components "set up to self-destroy..."? They still have many of these on eBay fully functional. Mac OS 8.0 sucked, by the way. Buggy as hell, and other than a facelift, wasn't much of a step in the right direction from 7.6.1. 8.1 was much better and introduced the HFS+ filing system.
How so... and by the way, the iMac used the same logic board as the PowerBook G3s >_>
How was the eMac an innovation? They basically just took the iMac G4 and put a CRT in it. It was education-only.
Again, how is this innovation? The 22" $4,000 ACD was nice, I guess, but they didn't make it themselves. iBooks? Mkay.... iSight was just a webcam..
The iPod wasn't the first HDD-based MP3 player. I'll agree though it revolutionized the way we listen to music.
Speakers. Mkay.
Definitely cool, made a nice prop in Dark Angel, but was a huge flop. All the power of a Power Mac, some of the expandability, and a higher price tag.
2006-2007: iPod HiFi (alas, discontinued a year after its inception).
Apple's name for WiFi. How is this.... you know what, never mind.
2007 was not ten years ago.
PowerPCs were screamers for over a decade, they just didn't keep pace (IBM's fault, not Apple's, obviously).
You can actually pretty much thank the PowerPC G4 for making SIMD go mainstream.
Intel didn't catch up in speed until the Core architecture was introduced, especially the Core 2. The Pentium 4 was a bit of a joke towards the end.
What did we have 10 years ago? A 3 year old iPod release and an aging Mac lineup.
Since then there's been more innovation and creativity in existing and new products and services than ever before. Across the board.
But hey, nostalgia has to be used for something, right?
I wasn't saying that Graphene didn't have a future, merely that it's not ready for prime time.
No **** Macrumors. Graphene is the material of all future tech. It'll enable us to do 400 GHz CPU's and tons more powerful batteries. Graphene is the only actually interesting thing in tech right now. Everything else is just smaller versions of what we had before.
One can make graphene by simply placing taking a small sheet of pencil-led and applying it onto some tape. Then, apply the sticky side of the tape to the led until you have a thin sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal form.
Interesting point. What about nano coating materials intended to keep the phone safe from water damage?
I'd like Apple to allow the integration of Swype - something a teenager could do.
Yes, the repulsive forces when this graphene molecule is forced close to other molecules means it will buckle. As any material gets thinner it gets weaker. Graphene may be good in the strength:weight ratio, but it is not a miracle-worker. It won't be strong enough to do any "cutting" in a sheet that is only one atom thick.
The flaw in people making that assumption comes from imagining a thick iron bar cutting, compared with a scalpel blade. Because of its thin edge, a greater degree of pressure can be applied with a blade for a given force. (Pressure is the force divided by the area over which it acts). However, if you make the scalpel blade much thinner, its own rigidity is not sufficient to resist the pressure (which works in both directions) being applied, so it will buckle before forcing apart the particles of the thing you are trying to cut.
To cut with graphene one atom thick you would be pushing a single, thin molecule (albeit a big one) against a load of strongly attracted atoms, molecules or ions (depending on what you are trying to cut), and the graphene molecule isn't going to win. Bonds between the carbon atoms would bend. They probably wouldn't break because the structure is not strong enough to have the physical resistance to experience forces that would break covalent bonds if it were "used" in that fashion. However, the bonds would quickly break if you stretched it in the plane of the sheet (molecule) of graphene, rather like a plastic bag (where you pull apart covalently bonded carbon atoms if you stretch it to breaking point).
Incidentally, graphene shouldn't really be compared with diamond (original article) if we are thinking of a single sheet of it, because it is impossible to have a layer of diamond that is one atom thick; its tetrahedral structure makes that impossible.
Your point is aimed more at my wallet than their innovation. But something has to give. Do you really want netbooks, plastic tablets and power hungry towers around for decades just because they're affordable?
Or do we want to change the face of tech and bring those would-be technophobes into the fold to enjoy the friendlier side of computers too?
Some would say there's a happy medium between these two extremes and I think Apple makes concessions everyday to please both sides. But the point is that without Apple, we would be years or perhaps decades behind where we could be in tech. it's just that obvious. Capitalist market forces only drive profits, not innovation. It's up to each company to decide HOW they want to make their riches.
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Graphene is the new Superconductor headline from the 80s.
Is this sarcasm? I can't tell.
http://global.samsungtomorrow.com/?p=35576
Sadly Apple is taking the wait and see approach with graphene. Just like they are doing with NFC & larger screens. Just like they did with countless other things like mms, c/p, T-by-T directions, multitasking, etc.