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On the other hand, how many of these companies would have faded away and never been heard of again if Apple hand't stepped in? Was Samsung or Huawei about to in

by simonh 6y ago

On the other hand, how many of these companies would have faded away and never been heard of again if Apple hand't stepped in? Was Samsung or Huawei about to invest in these technologies? Even on this thread I see people saying phones are commoditised now and the new models aren't interesting. Apple's competitors believe this, they aren't about to invest millions on these small technical innovations and improvements that by themselves are incredibly niche. Instead Apple brings these incremental innovations, which otherwise would be relegated to specialist parts if they survived at all, to hundreds of millions of customers all over the world. If Apple hadn't done this the chances these advanced technologies would be in so many people's hands right now would be close to nil.

Jetrel 6y ago
This. This right here. If it didn't get forcibly put into people's hands, it probably would have died on the vine. One of the things apple's always understood is the idea of "across-the-board" availability. Take some specialist part, like, oh, say, a mouse, or a sound card, and make it so that all of your machines ship with it, period. It's the new "lowest common denominator". We had mice back in the DOS/Apple II era; good mice, even, it's just that nobody wrote anything that supported them (outside of a few specialist apps like some art programs), because only a few really rare people had them. When apple made the mac, they'd learned this lesson, and made it mandatory - this is actually why they initially refused to put a CLI into the thing, even though their own MPW dev tools had one: they wanted to make it more difficult to do cheapass ports of stuff like VisiCalc than it would be to build a new, gui-based program to solve the same problem from scratch. (Amongst other things, this open-field helped a certain company launch a new gui-based spreadsheet app called Excel, which has done rather well for itself.)

by simonh 6y ago

Jetrel 6y ago

This. This right here. If it didn't get forcibly put into people's hands, it probably would have died on the vine. One of the things apple's always understood is the idea of "across-the-board" availability. Take some specialist part, like, oh, say, a mouse, or a sound card, and make it so that all of your machines ship with it, period. It's the new "lowest common denominator". We had mice back in the DOS/Apple II era; good mice, even, it's just that nobody wrote anything that supported them (outside of a few specialist apps like some art programs), because only a few really rare people had them. When apple made the mac, they'd learned this lesson, and made it mandatory - this is actually why they initially refused to put a CLI into the thing, even though their own MPW dev tools had one: they wanted to make it more difficult to do cheapass ports of stuff like VisiCalc than it would be to build a new, gui-based program to solve the same problem from scratch. (Amongst other things, this open-field helped a certain company launch a new gui-based spreadsheet app called Excel, which has done rather well for itself.)