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Electronics (physical things) require prototyping shops, which require physical space. Unfortunately land is at a premium in the Bay Area. As rents rise beyond

• Camillo 9y ago
  Oh, for sure. They're absolutely going to keep squeezing more and more rent out until they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. It's politically inevitable.
• reaperducer 9y ago
  >Electronics (physical things) require prototyping shops, which require physical space. This is true. Look at any of the 70's and 80's computer magazines on archive.org, and you'll see only about 20% of the ads are from companies in SV. All the others are scattered in cities big and small from coast to coast. It's amazing to think that small towns in Illinois and rural Virginia used to have big players in the hardware industry. Now, with the exception of the increasingly rare spark from Apple, it's not about building innovative and interesting physical things anymore. It's about taking other people's money and shuffling it around trying to make more of it through half-baked startup ideas. Silicon Valley is just banking in slow motion.
  • Spooky23 9y ago
    My favorite story of computer companies was Coleco, which was a former leather company turned into a pool manufacturer to a video game and computer company. HQ in Connecticut and Amsterdam, NY of all places. It was a cool computer too — to this day their super action controllers are my favorite game controller.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • bitwize 9y ago
      Yeah, I remember the ColecoVision and the Adam (which could wipe your tapes if powered on/off with the tapes in the drive iirc). Unfortunately, many of my computers came from that OTHER leather turned electronics company -- Tandy.
  • rxhernandez 9y ago
    > innovative What was the last thing Apple made that wasn't just a marginally polished version of someone else's invention?
    • wpietri 9y ago
      This might be a bit hyperbolic, but I agree with the general thrust. Their watch was a pretty clear response to Pebble. The iPhone was an impressive achievement, but smartphones had been available for 6 years when it was released. The iPod was certainly the best MP3 player, but it was far from the first. That's not really a knock on Apple; they've been very successful jumping in to proven markets with incredibly polished versions of existing products. But I agree it's been a long while since they've done anything as innovative as their early days. They got a nice injection of innovation when they brought back Jobs's other company, NeXT, including the foundation of all their current operating systems. But even that stuff is almost 30 years old.
      • Someone 9y ago
        Innovation doesn’t have to happen at the product level; it can also apply to manufacturing. For example, Dell innovated the supply chain of desktop computers. For Apple, there’s lots of innovation in the way they create hardware at scale with previously unheard of tolerances. For example, when they thought “let’s make a laptop chassis from milled aliminium” they couldn’t just send the design out to a company used to making millions of milled aluminum bodies of that size. Apple also innovated by bringing 64-bit CPUs to mobile phones (not a surprising innovation, but they managed to do it earlier than many people suspected were possible)
      • rbanffy 9y ago
        > smartphones had been available for 6 years when it was released. I had a Sony Ericsson P-800 when the iPhone was launched. It was the first smartphone that didn't look like something out of Star Trek (and I mean it in a bad way). When you compare an iPhone with my P-800, it looks like the iPhone is something that actually came from the future.