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> Jobs called Android a "stolen product," but theft can be a tricky concept when talking about innovation. This article is heartily missing the point. Android

• nextparadigms 15y ago
  Look around in any industry you want. How would you define competition, if nothing but very similar products to the original product of that type in that particular market? This video describes very well how inventions get created and then evolve for the benefit of everyone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq5D43qAsVg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq5D43qAsVg
• wvenable 15y ago
  > Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple That's blatantly false. Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone. Smartphones of the day either resembled the iPhone or they resembled the blackberry but both designs were out there in number. After the iPhone was released almost everyone dropped their blackberry-like designs (except for RIM). Apple's innovation was the capacitive multi-touch screen and finger-friendly interface. I'm not even sure that's a revolution just an evolution of existing designs.
  • nwjsmith 15y ago
    > That's blatantly false. Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone. Which phones?
    • cma 15y ago
      Even in 2001 there was the "iPaq". ARM processor, etc. Even used a similar name. No 3d chips were widespread yet, lack of white led tech meant the display sucked too much power, compact flash was tiny, had a resistive screen that was somewhat poorly calibrated, etc.
      • YooLi 15y ago
        How did you dial phone numbers on the iPaq?
    • jerhinesmith 15y ago
      Mine didn't have "phone" capabilities, but the Compaq iPAQs resemble the iPhone. This is pretty close to the one I owned around 2002: http://img.tomshardware.com/us/2002/04/04/comparison_of_six_pdas/compaq.jpg http://img.tomshardware.com/us/2002/04/04/comparison_of_six_...
      • YooLi 15y ago
        Looks nothing like the iPhone and shockingly wasn't even a phone.
        • iamdave 15y ago
          I believe when people are saying the "looks like the iphone" they're referring to device where the primary input method is the screen, with less emphasis on physical buttons.
        • wvenable 15y ago
          The first Windows Mobile phones were just WinMo PDAs with cellular radios in them. So while the iPaq isn't a phone it's the direct predecessor to many of them.
  • jrockway 15y ago
    Indeed. Remember the Palm Pilot? Those things eventually ended up quite advanced; I remember buying one in Japan in 2002 with a camera, keyboard, swiveling screen, and so on. The only difference was that it didn't have a 3G radio. Ah, here we are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sony-CLIE-PEG-NZ90.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sony-CLIE-PEG-NZ90.jpg The iPhone is a fine product. The ground it broke was making people want a PDA, not actually inventing the PDA.
    • YooLi 15y ago
      Except that looks nothing like the iPhone, while most smartphones now look a heck of a lot like an iPhone.
      • deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      • arjn 15y ago
        The iPhone looks a lot like the LG Prada mentioned in the article and it predates the iPhone.
        • Apple-Guy 15y ago
          Not in reality. http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/72B08E9A-D467-45EA-B214-28D3A340C3E5.html http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/72B08E9A-D46...
          • aaronblohowiak 15y ago
            The Prada phone is as similar to the iPhone as the android phones people claim are rip offs of the iPhone. Given the short difference in time between their announcements, it is. Lear they were developed concurrently. Therefore, the android devices are derivAtive more of the Prada phone than the iPhone or the design decisions in common to the iPhone and Prada phone are "obvious"
        • jdq 15y ago
  • yannickt 15y ago
    "Apple's innovation was the capacitive multi-touch screen and finger-friendly interface." Which is exactly why it resembled none of the smartphones that preceded it. That innovation was a monumental game changer.
    • wvenable 15y ago
      That's silly. There were more touch-screen smartphone models than non-touch screen models before the iPhone was released. If anything, Apple copied those designs and improved on them.
  • tzs 15y ago
    > Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone Do you have specific smartphones in mind? The only ones of that era I'm more than passingly familiar with are the Palm phones, and they were nothing at all like the iPhone.
    • wvenable 15y ago
      http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3626383 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3626383 http://files.myopera.com/Yorch/blog/p800.jpg http://files.myopera.com/Yorch/blog/p800.jpg Palm smartphones were the minority (in terms of total number of models).
  • ricardobeat 15y ago
    "Smartphones" of 10 years ago (or PDAs) only resembled anything like an iPhone if you consider that a MacBook resembles an 80's terminal.
• infiniteburp 15y ago
  Well Remember ... Apple "advocates" always said: apple invented the gui, apple invented mp3 players, apple makes the fastest PC, apple's not the "big brother" company, etc. etc. Every claim usually turns out false. The Rep for "reality distortion field" has firm basis in trugth. We can't always take Apple's claims at face value. This article just exposed, once again, another pro-Apple fallacy: that they own mini-tablet-phones and everyone stole the idea from them. nonsense.
  • tejaswiy 15y ago
    I don't agree with this. Lets flip it the other way round and compare it with technology today. Lots of research labs have made AR Goggles and they've been featured in lots of movies / sci-fi. But lets say the google goggles are a hit and Apple starts making goggles, I believe Google can rightfully claim that Apple "copied" them.
  • ceejayoz 15y ago
    Apple "advocates" rarely, if ever, say those things. Apple made the GUI, MP3 players, etc. usable for the general public.
  • eridius 15y ago
    Apple "advocates" never said any of those things. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you actually did read this stuff, so let me just say, you need to learn how to recognize a straw man argument when you see it.
    • fpgeek 15y ago
      It is a very fine line, though. Apple "advocates", including some in this very thread, do routinely dismiss as unimportant, sucky, etc. every pre-Apple contribution in some of these categories (especially smartphones and tablets). I generally think they're trying to emphasize the importance and originality of Apple's contribution, but I can see how someone else might interpret that as saying "Apple invented X".
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• mcantelon 15y ago
  >Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple, but now everyone is trying. Palm was making touchscreen smartphones before iPhone.
• huggyface 15y ago
  Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple Years before the iPhone I was carrying around an iPaq. Now it isn't quite the same, most notably because the original device didn't even function as a phone. Yet I would argue that the phone part of smartphone is by far the least important part (and the only reason it is so prevalent is that carrier subsidization allows people to stomach $700 iPhones). Really these things are ultra-portable computers and the phone thing is ancillary. The iPaq wasn't multitouch. But here's the thing -- Apple bought that multitouch sensor. They didn't invent it. They didn't specify it. They didn't even initiate its creation. Their software used it brilliantly, but by the common narrative you'd think they had invented it. Capacitive touchscreens evolved. Embedded processors evolved. GPUs evolved. Wireless technologies evolved. Batteries evolved. Makers like RIM pushed much of that evolution. Apple stepped in at the perfect confluence of technologies and made the iPaq v2.0. Better in every way -- largely owing to those hardware improvements, all of which came from outside Apple -- but did it really invent an industry? It's actually a bit sad how little credit RIM gets, given that they were the ones who pushed a lot of the innovation in mobile that made the iPhone possible. A distributed messaging, application platform, camera, etc...everyone just focuses on the damn keyboard as if it defines the platform. Already I'm seeing many ascribing the iPad as inventing the tablet, forgetting so many products that came before (both real, such as Archos, and conceptual like the Crunchpad). Apple executes amazingly well, but their creations are seldom as out of left field as people imagine. They say that the victors write history, but it is sad if we're blinded into confusing commercial success with innovation.
  • Anechoic 15y ago
    Apple stepped in at the perfect confluence of technologies and made the iPaq v2.0. And isn't the iPaq v1.0 just the Newton v2.0?
    • bane 15y ago
      And wasn't the Newton v2.0 just the Palm Pilot v2.0? And wasn't the Palm Pilot basically just an overgrown Psion personal organizer? So is it just Psions all the way down?
  • 15y ago
• orbitingpluto 15y ago
  Just to add to the list of previous art: The Nokia 770 from 2005/11 and the N800 which was released (2007/01) around the same time that Jobs was announcing the development of the iPhone. (These were Internet tablets with the hints of the telephony stack already included. Eventually the N900 phone did come out, too little too late unfortunately.) Android has much more in common with Maemo than Apple iOS.
  • orbitingpluto 15y ago
    Odd to see this comment get downvoted. Apple fanboism attempting to reassert the reality distortion field?
  • gnaffle 15y ago
    ..and sadly, the 770 and its user interface just shows too well why the iPhone won, and why the other companies had to go back to the drawing board with their operating systems. I used the 770 and actually got wrist pain from using it too much with the crappy plastic stylus that was included. (And at the time, the 770 had a pretty amazing screen and user interface compared to most other mobile devices. If only Nokia had known that capacitive touchscreens existed and started porting the Hildon UI to multi touch in 2005..)
• zmmmmm 15y ago
  You say "Android is basically a stolen product" and then "We don't need to get all emotional about this". If you don't want people to get emotional then stop using highly pejorative, emotionally charged words like "stolen". Aspects of Android were inspired by the iPhone. The iPhone itself was inspired by the Blackberry, Palm and Windows Mobile series of devices before it. There really is no such thing as "stolen" when it comes to knowledge. Everything is built upon other things, emerging from the context where they are conceived. It is utterly impossible to not "steal" when you create because your creations are a direct response to the environment in which you create them, which by necessity is a result of creations that came before.