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The iPhone is not a groundbreaking innovation, it's a product. Like many modern products, it is extremely complicated with thousands of different components. Di
by chongli 7y ago
The iPhone is not a groundbreaking innovation, it's a product. Like many modern products, it is extremely complicated with thousands of different components. Did Apple invent all of those components from scratch? No. Did Apple invent the key components that made the iPhone different from its competitors at the time? No.
The capacitive touch screen was invented by Bent Stumpe at CERN [1]. The software technology that arguably made the iPhone possible, multi-touch, was developed by U of T, Bell Labs, and CMU. Steve Jobs visited CMU in 1985, though that obviously didn't translate into much back then.
The actual multi-touch software that went into the iPhone was developed by FingerWorks founders John Elias and Wayne Westerman at the University of Delaware [2]. Apple bought FingerWorks and incorporated the technology into the iPhone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch#History
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks
- agumonkey 7y agoI think it's too strict of a definition. Assembling a tons of known knowledge into something that wipes a market (and zero history in it..) is not a normal event either. Maybe it's innovation at the consumerism layer.