The record of vastly overstated and false claims of innovation around Apple has become ridiculous. Nobody doubts they have innovated in many areas, but largely they are excellent at integration and polish (which is worthy of praise in its own right). And being a full-stack company they often match their sails to the wind before anyone else, but it doesn't mean they made the wind. It's not all Apple themselves doing this, much of it is bad journalism and fans saying things that the company has no reason to correct. But it's gotten so bad now that I approach any new claim of innovation from Apple or their cheer squads as probably false.
I can't see why Apple enthusiasts can't be like luxury car enthusiasts. Most of the time new luxury cars don't have much innovation in them, but it's the fit and finish, attention to detail and integration which make them great. You don't need to claim some divine spark of innovation to say that something is better, or that you prefer it. To make another analogy a well done dish at a nice restaurant isn't usually innovative, it just takes the best of breed components and presents them well in a good atmosphere with good service. Nothing wrong with that, just don't claim the chef is making vast strides in chemistry or forget that the chef is drawing on tons of home cooking going back a long time which some people have had in their homes well before it appeared on your menu. It's pretty sad that as I click "add comment" I expect this to get vigorously downvoted (even on HN).
I fully agree with you. It seems the louder somebody shouts "Apple is the best, they invented x" the more you can be sure that
- the person has not much background in computing
- often hated/never could get PCs to do what they wanted/is scared of computers
But they don't realize that Apple's great computers are standing on the shoulders of decades of PC innovation (partly done by Apple, but also many others).
Downvoters: Try to read the comment and understand that this is not attacking people who like Apple, but fanboys who shout "Apple is the best because..." Don't turn voting into a popularity contest based on the products YOU like.
There's much more, but I guess you get the point. When there are similar people in most Apple, Gruber, Google and Android threads, there are obviously flamebait conversations.The smug superiority and abject hate of of other companies/platforms from Gruber, Marco, 37 Signals, Roughly Drafted, MG Siegler etc. can sometimes be really overwhelming and the labeling of anyone that doesn't share in the worship beaing called a hater causes even worse discourse.
Many fans are not below sending death threats if they feel Apple has been wronged or it's image can be damaged.
Apple seems to tending to attract such a crowd because of it's cult type of branding, ads and secrecy.and anyone questioning their or their fans outlandish claims seem to be vilified as haters.
I agree with you. The thing is, Apple haters need to read your comment just as much as the Apple lovers. On one side you have people thinking Apple invented everything while on the other people think Apple invented nothing and has done nothing for the world of computing.
I think the attitudes do show how powerful the Apple brand has become though. The worst thing a brand can do is become ho-hum and boring. People either love or hate Apple, which at the end of the day keeps both camps always thinking about Apple.
>The worst thing a brand can do is become ho-hum and boring. People either love or hate Apple
Just like Marmite. Marmite actually took that love-hate thing one step further and created an entire advertising campaign based on people who hate it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoRcU0Ul7tU), as well as a duplicated website themed around "I hate Marmite" (http://marmite.com/hate/).
Doesn't many luxury cars have innovations way before normal cars do, simply because these innovations have yet to come down in price? I think there will always be some features you can get on an Audi that you can't get on a Volkswagen.
And there's even holy flamewars between BMW, Audi and Mercedes supporters on car forums :)
Good examples: magnetorheological damper shock absorbers (filled with magnetic fluid, can be tuned to different road conditions - available as a build option on Audis, but only as aftermarket parts for most other brands), heads-up displays (for navigation or low-light vision), run-flat tires (actually used to be more popular, but now mostly used by BMW).
Often these innovations didn't necessarily originate at the car company in question - they were developed by a third party then sold or licensed to the car manufacturer. Gorilla glass might be a good analogue in the tablet world - it's made by Corning, but is famous due to its use by Apple.
I agree, but I think that is a double edged sword.
Let me give you an example: some people write off Apple by saying they didn't "invent" the tablet. Right, they "only" make the first one anyone was willing to buy. They "only" caused a seismic shift in the PC business doing so, sending shockwaves through every PC vendor out there. They "only" changed the direction and the conversation about personal computing.
Like you said, "innovation" is extremely over hyped, actually creating products, with fit and finish that people want to have, is probably more valuable than inventing a poorly made concept that nobody looks twice at, like smartphones and tablets of yesteryear.
I guess it's easy (for some of us) to remember when Apple was a niche player, with only a few loony fans. I jumped on the bandwagon with a first gen Intel Macbook (switching from an Ubuntu PC), so while I'm not a hardcore Apple fan I've had a few rough moments dealing with stupid companies (and government departments) who don't give a toss about people who don't have ActiveX. People would be "wow, nice computer ... pity it's useless".
The reality is, Apple is doing quite well now, and doesn't need so much defence. People kind of understand that it's not just a pretty white (or aluminium) brick that can't do anything but play Carmen Santiago.
I find it interesting that Apple promoted a culture of insular product development from soup to nuts, and greatly valued what most would consider small successes in execution, rather than have their product managers play it safe and go with off-the-shelf solutions.
Perhaps that's helped them keep a wealth of talent in-house throughout their span, ones able to do the heavy lifting required to pull off what might be considered truly innovative products from time to time. By employing their hot shot engineers like Rod Holt in "revolutionizing" power supplies, they have him around later to help design the Lisa and Macintosh hardware.
Those small little detailsa all added up to things people really liked when they got them.
When we say apple "innovated X" or "invented Y" - I think most of us know that Steve Jobs, or even his engineers didn't necessarly invesnt the technology - in fact they probably didn't. What they did do was put them together and package them up in a way nobody else had before, even if only visually, and make it part of a whole product lineup.
I'm sure there were tons of inventions that let these cool apple power supplies exist.... ebtter electronics. plastic with better thermal designs.... and someone came up with a good way of attaching an extention cable or plug to the thing that's mechanically stable...... all these things matter. Putting it all together into one package and shipping it then selling it is what matters.
> "Nothing wrong with that, just don't claim the chef is making vast strides..."
I take it you don't watch much cooking channel.
Also, while the linked article mentions a variety of related power supply information, it only speculates on what the claimed innovation might have been. He looked at, and later ruled out, a couple things, but that doesn't mean there wasn't some other unique aspect. I would have liked to see research on the claim of uniqueness, rather than research on what else was available at the time. Perhaps the unique thing was missed.
It's interesting that whatever one thinks about the Apple II claim, the most innovative consumer power supplies shipping in a ubiquitous product this past decade have been Apple's laptop and cell phone chargers.
It could be argued the latest iPhone cube charger and the Macbook MagSafe chargers are "fit and finish", but to me that's like arguing the difference between a UPS truck and a Prius is fit and finish.
I am not an expert on power supply design at all, but to my untrained eye, http://oldcomputers.net/pet2001.html shows a more traditional power supply for the contemporary PET (the blue round thing looks like a huge capacitor; behind it, I think I see a traditional transformer) I googled for TRS-80 internals, too, but could not find them.
So, it _could_ be that having a switching power supply in a personal computer was innovate at the time.
Even magnified it's hard to tell from that photo, but I agree that honking big blue electrolytic capacitor indicates filtering of traditional low frequencies rather than the smaller caps you'd expect for a switcher.
Still, if you're shipping PET computers with a heavy glass CRT display on top, you're presumably not as concerned with weight as you would be with smaller form factors. So this evidence doesn't bear on the article's thesis. Given that the IC controllers introduced the year before the Apple II, the chip vendors would likely have already been sending out sample chips and application notes for some time, although their target engineering applications would be for products where cutting weight was a bigger concern than cost. (Hence Boschert's company having 650 employees in 1977 and having developed products for "satellites and the F-14 fighter aircraft".
I agree that the difference may be due to that CRT.
However, there are lots of other options:
- Steve was intentionelly lying.
- Steve was misinformed.
- Steve was misunderstood.
- the innovate part was getting out better quality DC than other solutions that did not use such an IC, and not using the IC was a serious advantage, cost wise.
- the innovative part was getting good enough power out at an insanely low price.
I guess we will never know. Archaeology is hard, even when talking about 35 years ago.
But it should be a lesson to hackers everywhere - marketing trumps innovation. Learn to read the sentiment and persuade that what you do is the best/the truth.
I think more importantly is that in business marketing and innovation go hand in hand. I could be making the most amazing innovations the world has ever seen, but if no one knows about it who cares. Long term business is about innovating and getting the product in front of people.
With respect to Apple, I get tired of people who say they are all marketing. Marketing may work for a single pump and dump product, but that is not Apple. There has to be some innovation behind the marketing to keep consumers coming back. Of course Apple markets themselves very well, but they also have stylish products that for a majority of consumers do just work and work well. For all the articles I read about how SJ straddled the world of technology and the humanities, I think Apple the company was just an extension of how he viewed himself.
I can't see why Apple enthusiasts can't be like luxury car enthusiasts. Most of the time new luxury cars don't have much innovation in them, but it's the fit and finish, attention to detail and integration which make them great. You don't need to claim some divine spark of innovation to say that something is better, or that you prefer it. To make another analogy a well done dish at a nice restaurant isn't usually innovative, it just takes the best of breed components and presents them well in a good atmosphere with good service. Nothing wrong with that, just don't claim the chef is making vast strides in chemistry or forget that the chef is drawing on tons of home cooking going back a long time which some people have had in their homes well before it appeared on your menu. It's pretty sad that as I click "add comment" I expect this to get vigorously downvoted (even on HN).