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The innovation was bringing a screen with that high of a DPI to millions of users without an incredibly high cost, and pushing their competitors to follow suit.

The innovation was bringing a screen with that high of a DPI to millions of users without an incredibly high cost, and pushing their competitors to follow suit. "Innovate" and "invent" are not synonyms.

azakai 14y ago
It's still pretty expensive. But even if it were cheap: reducing the price of something is not "brilliant innovation", unless it involves some amazing under-the-hood new technology - which this does not.
snogglethorpe 14y ago
> The innovation was bringing a screen with that high of a DPI to millions of users without an incredibly high cost, and pushing their competitors to follow suit. Such high DPI displays were actually quite common in Japanese cellphones way before Apple started using them, even in the lowish-end "free" phones. The main thing Apple did differently was to give it a catchy name ("retina display" is great marketing) and talk a lot about how "innovative" it is...
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  ...and made it standard on a widely selling phone, and got app developers to make their apps with high-res art so users could actually take advantage of it, and decided to push it to their other devices also, repeating the process in other markets. Now there is fire on Microsoft to do the same, and I wouldn't be surprised if the whole industry doubles DPI on tablets and PCs within a couple of years. I'm sure Apple wasn't the first manufacturer to get rid of floppy disk drives and standardize around USB with the iMac, but they surely had a huge impact in their choices.
  - snogglethorpe 14y ago
    Apple certainly has an out-sized influence, and no doubt pushed the state of the art hard in the U.S. (where phones have traditionally been sort of on the trailing edge). But such high-DPI phone displays were not niche items in Japan, pre-"retina", they were common to the point of being essentially standard. Granted, HN is basically a U.S. site, so maybe non-U.S. practice isn't considered significant. [I think the iphone, retina or no, is overall better than pre-iphone Japanese phones too, but its advantages are pretty much completely in software; Japanese phone makers make astonishingly good hardware, but their software is at best, very quirky. The iphone and android are changing that.]
    - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
      Japanese phones were (are?) kind of a mess, diverse, lots of esoteric features (tv tuners), and when I was there, very WAP based. No one provider had much clout to set industry standards, so each phone was its own island beyond the (admittedly excellent) online services that every phone could access. Now...why iPhone was so popular in Japan while the bleeding edge Japanese headsets were relegated to the home market? Surely it wasn't just marketing on apples part.
      - snogglethorpe 14y ago
        > why iPhone was so popular in Japan while the bleeding edge Japanese headsets were relegated to the home market? Surely it wasn't just marketing on apples part. [Not sure what you mean by "relegated" to the home market -- Japanese phone makers have never shown much interest in foreign markets, because their attention was pretty fully occupied with the huge Japanese domestic market which they understood well.] Of course the iphone wasn't just a marketing success. As I noted, it really did offer a vastly improved experience over previous (and current non-smartphones) Japanese phones, which were often very functional, but confusing, inconsistent, etc. [This isn't really just a phone thing... Most Japanese software, especially that written by hardware manufacturers, has pretty much always been like that.] Worse, there was a tendency to try to nickel-and-dime the user to death, attempting to charge for all sorts of little services and features one could access from phones, often without a good indicator of how much the actual cost would be. The iphone/android's concept of mostly limiting such payment to a well-defined place (the app-store) is pretty refreshing by contrast. Until the iphone showed up, makers concentrated mostly on adding new "functionality," without putting much effort into actually improving the base experience. There was little incentive for them to do differently, because everybody else was doing the same thing, and Japanese companies tend to have both a laser-like focus on constant incremental improvements and an aversion to riskier large scale changes. The iphone upset this cozy little arrangement, and android has allowed other makers to react to it pretty quickly. Still, smartphone adoption in Japan is only half that in the U.S. or the U.K., which I suppose is due to the more functional nature of Japanese non-smartphones compared to those in other countries. But, anyway, yeah, the iphone changed things; my point was only that Apple's innovations were mostly in software, and less so in hardware.
  - azakai 14y ago
    Impact on the industry != innovation. Making something popular and widespread is popularization. It's very important! But making something hugely popular is not a "brilliant innovation".
- lotsofpulp 14y ago
  No, the main thing Apple did was make it available to me (and hundreds of millions of people around the world). To buy and use, in a great form factor, with great battery life, and accompanying software.

azakai 14y ago

It's still pretty expensive. But even if it were cheap: reducing the price of something is not "brilliant innovation", unless it involves some amazing under-the-hood new technology - which this does not.

snogglethorpe 14y ago

> The innovation was bringing a screen with that high of a DPI to millions of users without an incredibly high cost, and pushing their competitors to follow suit. Such high DPI displays were actually quite common in Japanese cellphones way before Apple started using them, even in the lowish-end "free" phones. The main thing Apple did differently was to give it a catchy name ("retina display" is great marketing) and talk a lot about how "innovative" it is...

seanmcdirmid 14y ago
...and made it standard on a widely selling phone, and got app developers to make their apps with high-res art so users could actually take advantage of it, and decided to push it to their other devices also, repeating the process in other markets. Now there is fire on Microsoft to do the same, and I wouldn't be surprised if the whole industry doubles DPI on tablets and PCs within a couple of years. I'm sure Apple wasn't the first manufacturer to get rid of floppy disk drives and standardize around USB with the iMac, but they surely had a huge impact in their choices.
- snogglethorpe 14y ago
  Apple certainly has an out-sized influence, and no doubt pushed the state of the art hard in the U.S. (where phones have traditionally been sort of on the trailing edge). But such high-DPI phone displays were not niche items in Japan, pre-"retina", they were common to the point of being essentially standard. Granted, HN is basically a U.S. site, so maybe non-U.S. practice isn't considered significant. [I think the iphone, retina or no, is overall better than pre-iphone Japanese phones too, but its advantages are pretty much completely in software; Japanese phone makers make astonishingly good hardware, but their software is at best, very quirky. The iphone and android are changing that.]
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    Japanese phones were (are?) kind of a mess, diverse, lots of esoteric features (tv tuners), and when I was there, very WAP based. No one provider had much clout to set industry standards, so each phone was its own island beyond the (admittedly excellent) online services that every phone could access. Now...why iPhone was so popular in Japan while the bleeding edge Japanese headsets were relegated to the home market? Surely it wasn't just marketing on apples part.
    - snogglethorpe 14y ago
      > why iPhone was so popular in Japan while the bleeding edge Japanese headsets were relegated to the home market? Surely it wasn't just marketing on apples part. [Not sure what you mean by "relegated" to the home market -- Japanese phone makers have never shown much interest in foreign markets, because their attention was pretty fully occupied with the huge Japanese domestic market which they understood well.] Of course the iphone wasn't just a marketing success. As I noted, it really did offer a vastly improved experience over previous (and current non-smartphones) Japanese phones, which were often very functional, but confusing, inconsistent, etc. [This isn't really just a phone thing... Most Japanese software, especially that written by hardware manufacturers, has pretty much always been like that.] Worse, there was a tendency to try to nickel-and-dime the user to death, attempting to charge for all sorts of little services and features one could access from phones, often without a good indicator of how much the actual cost would be. The iphone/android's concept of mostly limiting such payment to a well-defined place (the app-store) is pretty refreshing by contrast. Until the iphone showed up, makers concentrated mostly on adding new "functionality," without putting much effort into actually improving the base experience. There was little incentive for them to do differently, because everybody else was doing the same thing, and Japanese companies tend to have both a laser-like focus on constant incremental improvements and an aversion to riskier large scale changes. The iphone upset this cozy little arrangement, and android has allowed other makers to react to it pretty quickly. Still, smartphone adoption in Japan is only half that in the U.S. or the U.K., which I suppose is due to the more functional nature of Japanese non-smartphones compared to those in other countries. But, anyway, yeah, the iphone changed things; my point was only that Apple's innovations were mostly in software, and less so in hardware.
- azakai 14y ago
  Impact on the industry != innovation. Making something popular and widespread is popularization. It's very important! But making something hugely popular is not a "brilliant innovation".
lotsofpulp 14y ago
No, the main thing Apple did was make it available to me (and hundreds of millions of people around the world). To buy and use, in a great form factor, with great battery life, and accompanying software.