3 ms·
Okay, so your list, like mine, includes a steady series of new products with huge impacts, and the most recent is just a few years old. You seem to be making t
by pwinnski 6y ago
Okay, so your list, like mine, includes a steady series of new products with huge impacts, and the most recent is just a few years old.
You seem to be making the argument that one of the previous products (iPhone) must somehow deliver the same impact as an entirely new product, because... I guess I'm not getting that part.
I mean, draw the parallel for the other products you mention.
Apple II... was replaced completely by the next generation.
Mac has reinvented itself a few times, but they've been spaced out a bit. They're currently in the process of transitioning to entirely new CPUs for the third time (68000 -> PowerPC -> Intel -> Apple Silicon), and have gone through a couple of complete overhauls on the OS side as well.
Newton was innovative, ahead of its time, and...
iMac is also Mac, but okay, specifically the candy-colored all-in-ones shifted the industry in some interesting ways and the current iteration is very nice, but essentially unchanged in a long time. I mean, using the same lens you seem to be using for iPhone, they haven't really changed the body style since 2004 when they replaced the half-melon with the currently style, or maybe since 2007 when they switched to aluminum. I mean, sure, they updated the screen quality, and there have been some minor tweaks, but put a 13-year-old iMac next to a new one, and they haven't changed that much.
I think that's my point. You've picked iPhone specifically and insist that iPhone alone must somehow bear the fruits of Apple's history of delivering industry-changing products, but since 2007 they've delivered substantial iterations in iMacs, PowerBooks, Apple TVs, and iPhones, while also launching iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPods, as well as new record-setting CPUs every one of the last ten years.
So I dunno. I think somehow you've convinced yourself that there is some new world-shaking innovation possible in the phone space, that Apple not having delivered it yet is somehow a failure, and yet I suspect you wouldn't recognize it if they launched it tomorrow. I mean, set a 2007 iPhone next to the phone they'll launch this year and aks yourself: is it the problem that they ship something every year? If they skipped a few years, and only delivered every three or four years, would they seem innovative, or just iterative?
iPhone, iPhone 4 (Retina), iPhone 5S (TouchID), iPhone 6 (5.5" screen), iPhone X (FaceID). I think each of those is a substantial bundle of innovations over the previous, and I'm not even considering the CPU inside them, or many, many, many smaller things that we take for granted today.
My iPhone X might as well have been a completely different phone, it was so different from everything that came before. That was announced three years ago.
To recap: I think one can either say that Apple's only real innovations are the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, or that they've released innovations every 2-3 years for the past couple of decades, but saying that iPhones are a single innovative product rather than a series of at least 5 and probably closer to 8 real game-changers is mistaken.
- labcomputer 6y agoI think I don't understand your argument here. ineedasername listed about a dozen industry-redefining products, which span a 40 year period. You seem to be arguing that, because the innovative product continued to be sold with incremental improvements Apple is not innovative. * The point isn't that the 1995 Quadra is innovative. It's that the 1984 Mac brought the desktop metaphor to the masses (where it was previously a research toy with each seat costing as much as a house) * The point isn't that the 2020 iMac is innovative. It's that the 1997 iMac changed how the computer industry thought about the industrial design of home computers. * The point isn't that the 2020 iPhone 12 Max Excess is innovative. It's that the 2007 iPhone completely changed what a smartphone was, with multi-touch, on-screen keyboard, data plans that actually made sense, desktop-quality graphics and more. * The point isn't that the 2023 AirPods are going to be innovative. It's that the 2016 AirPods created an entire sub-industry of "totally wireless" headphones. The original point was the people hold Apple to a higher standard because Apple has a track record of introducing something every 3-6 years that makes people say "wow". That Apple continues to make incremental improvements after the "wow launch" doesn't diminish the track record of major innovation. Where I disagree with ineedasername is that I think it only looks like Apple isn't innovative right now because the next big thing hasn't been announced yet, and innovations don't happen on a fixed cadence.
- pwinnski 6y agoYou've really misread the thread. I was making exactly the point you're making. I am arguing that Apple continues to innovate, in response to ineedasername's claim that Apple has ceased to innovate like they once did.