7 ms·

Popularizing walled gardens? Yah I'm never going to forget that. ever.

ekianjo 13y ago
And going "nuclear" on Android because they felt that their iOS was soooo original it should be protected by all patents, trademarks and laws in place. Apple is the Disney of IT, seriously.
- Steko 13y ago
  Presumably they went nuclear on Android because they felt betrayed when a close partner of their came out with a clone of their product, something Apple had a history with that nearly killed it.
  - ekianjo 13y ago
    What do you mean a "clone of their product" ? Desktop PCs had big icons on screen for years, there was nothing new or even remotely original in having big icons on a screen for an mobile OS. That should be declared an obvious invention and not worth of protection at all. The main new thing that they did was to use a touch screen that can be operated with fingers and gestures, but hey, even that idea was not new either. Frankly, no matter how highly you think of Apple's products, nothing of what they do is really, truly original.
    - eknkc 13y ago
      Once you see / use them, they become obvious inventions. You know, lightbulbs are so boring right now. Nothing original about them. Before Apple came up with iPhone, I had a freaking Ericsson brick thingy. None of Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung were innovating. None of those old, non original ideas were in any of those devices. Nokia had a webkit browser with a ridiculous cursor that you operated with that joystick thingy. I'm glad that Apple actually pushed them forward. So yes, I think Apple has original products and they are innovating.
      - girvo 13y ago
        Bollocks, Sony Ericsson was innovating, and I still feel that the M600i that I owned was one of the most innovative phones ive ever used. Still to this day no phone comes close in keyboard ability (seriously, go google the M600 or P1i), and UIQ3 was this wicked blend of smartphone power with a dumbphone-esque interface: something the iPhone did but improved on massively. I use Apple everything. I love Apple products. But to say there wasn't any innovation happening before it in the phone sector misses some really cool things. PS. I would pay all the money in the world for an updated P1i, same qwerty rocker keyboard, capacitive 3" touchscreen @ 720p running Android. One can dream, right?
    - Joeri 13y ago
      Palm had the grid icon layout for years before apple did it, but nobody would confuse an old palm device with an iphone when actually using it, and palm in fact had to throw it out and start all over with the pre to deliver an iphone competitor. There's a big difference between a good concept and a good execution of a concept. Apple have always been brilliant at execution, even if they don't have many original concepts (they don't do basic research). Is it not innovative to take a good idea and execute it better than anyone before? I find that a hard thing to dismiss. However, now that they are on top of the world, it would be nice to see them invest in open basic research to give back to the community where they got all their ideas and technologies from, like microsoft does with microsoft research.
      - sbuk 13y ago
        Palm was influenced by the Newton, the device that coined the term PDA (actually coined by John Scully) which came out before the Palm Pilot. Computing didn't stat in the 21st century, neither did it start in the 1990's. RE giving back to the community; FreeBSD, CUPS, WebKit, LLVM and Clang to name a few. Notice I haven't claimed that any of these were directly invented by Apple, but all have varying levels of investment and contribution from Apple. This is all out there on the internet. It takes a couple of seconds to look up with whatever search engine fits in with your ideology.
  - tonyhb 13y ago
    iOS 1 was an inevitable jump from Palm OS and the early days of touch screen. The tech had been in demos before, but there was such a lack of UX work beforehand that it never took off. That, and capacitive screens/advancing tech.
    - GFischer 13y ago
      The thing is, Android copied most of the UX (and I say that as someone that likes Android a lot more than iOS, and I had a Palm before). I agree that Apple's UX was a significant advance. (See this 2007 review talking about "paradigm-shifting interface" http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/03/iphone-review-part-1-hardware-interface-keyboard/ http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/03/iphone-review-part-1-hard... )
  - annnnd 13y ago
    I presume you mean Google - were they close partners? I admit I wasn't following Apple (at all) before iPhone.
    - mkesper 13y ago
      Or maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electronics_Co.%2C_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electron.... ?
    - Steko 13y ago
      The iPhone is really where they started to work closely together. Here's Eric jokingly proposing a merger at the iphone launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9hUIxyE2Ns8#t=3021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9h... Steve comments again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnkXa3eTV88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnkXa3eTV88 The Mac's 30th anniversary a few weeks gave the original Mac launch videos a lot of recent play where Gates and Microsoft basically played an eerily similar role to Google with the iPhone launch. Of course MS, like Google did want to do everything. It's clear as day why Steve felt betrayed by Google. As he said in the internal town hall: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake teams at Google want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. "Don't be evil is a load of crap" {I've edited in the two updates/corrections from the bottom} http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/01/31/jobs-town-all http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/01/31/jobs-town-all
    - clarky07 13y ago
      Eric Schmidt was on the board at Apple.
- mattmanser 13y ago
  It was so original. I can't believe anyone contests this. I remember seeing an iPhone for the first time. Compared to all other phones it was 10 years ahead in vision. All other phones were suddenly ludicrously laid out, with stupid designs. Even the settings section for the iPhone blew every single other phone in existence out of the water. Something that simple, that essential, had been revolutionised by this thoughtful new way at looking at phone interfaces. Android, on that very day, looked like every other phone. 10 years behind, old, tired, pathetic, no vision what so ever. In less than 6 months the android team lifted every single iPhone design element, added very little of their own and unveiled what is possibly one of the biggest design rip-offs in tech history. I can understand why Jobs was pissed.
  - joelthelion 13y ago
    I agree 100% with you. It was very original and a very good product. That doesn't mean they shouldn't have competition. Competition is a basic requirement for a functional economy. Which is why the patient system is broken.
  - sixbrx 13y ago
    Yeah I remember also there was so much gnashing of teeth that it didn't HAVE A TACTILE KEYBOARD! It's just for show OMG! Japanese phones have had more gizmos^H^H^H^H^H^H features like FOREVER!! Besides the interface, I thought it was interesting that it had a real unix based OS underneath, which would pay off in the future as phone processors became more powerful. It's sortof funny looking back. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I guess.
  - ikurei 13y ago
    It blew every other phone, but it wasn't that original over PDAs. I had a Windows 6.5 pda then, and I thought the iPhone was way cooler and well-designed. Of course it was inmensely superior to my PDA, but not so incredibly original. It didn't do anything at all I wasn't already doing with PDAs, it just did some of them (chiefly, web browsing) way better, most of them in a cooler way (pinch to zoom, animations), and even a few, slightly worse (browsing while listening to music). Apple has this fame of original crazy geniouses that have invented X or Y. They have mostly taken other's ideas and perfected them. Perfected them a lot, admittedly; even may be taken them to a new level of awesomeness with a great vision of on which details it was better to improve. I love apple products, don't take me wrong. They deserve a lot of credit for the iPod, the iPhone, iOS, the iPad... I think it was extremely childish of Jobs to get so pissed.
xentronium 13y ago
What about LLVM and Webkit?
- sho_hn 13y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Origins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Origins
  - eropple 13y ago
    That's great, but nobody used it before Apple made it a thing.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - sho_hn 13y ago
      Well, I used it every day. Apparently it was enough of a thing for Apple to notice it, too (or let's face it, the Mozilla people - like David Hyatt - they hired to gain the knowledge).
      - eropple 13y ago
        Did they notice it because it was good or did they notice it because it wasn't GPL?
        sho_hn 13y ago
        Gecko wasn't GPL either. And Gecko was actually originally meant to be embedded by others, before the community decided to productize and do Firefox (originally Phoenix). I'd like to think they noticed it because it was good. KHTML at the time had quite strong CSS support compared to its competition (not necessarily the best, but it competed well), had done some important advances in l18n support compared to others (e.g. strong support for bidi text layout), and the design of its render tree which e.g. allowed for hardware-accelerated layer compositing was later adopted by competitors like Gecko. It was a pretty good codebase. Sure, it's been a decade since those events, and the majority of the engineering effort by now lies chiefly on the WebKit side of things. Apple employees working on WebKit have done a ton of good work, as have other stakeholders. Apple was an important factor both in terms of workforce increase and popularity increase for the project. But I think it's very legitimate to continue to credit the KDE community with its inception.
tomasien 13y ago
Popularizing... like who else is doing that?
noarchy 13y ago
Apple can't popularize anything in the way they've done without millions of accomplices, who line up to hand over their money to Apple. What is Apple doing right that promoters of other platforms are not?
- lgas 13y ago
  In my opinion they simply produce a better overall owner experience. All products/platforms have their warts, but warts and all, I find my life is easier and generally more pleasant when I use iphone instead of android and OS X instead of Windows or Linux for my desktop/laptops.
yaeger 13y ago
I bet you a majority of the customers don't even see those walls and yet still get to enjoy the positives that come from that approach. Yeah, why would a business continue to operate that way? Let's just make everything open as fuck and stand back to watch what happens.

And going "nuclear" on Android because they felt that their iOS was soooo original it should be protected by all patents, trademarks and laws in place. Apple is the Disney of IT, seriously.

Steko 13y ago
Presumably they went nuclear on Android because they felt betrayed when a close partner of their came out with a clone of their product, something Apple had a history with that nearly killed it.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  What do you mean a "clone of their product" ? Desktop PCs had big icons on screen for years, there was nothing new or even remotely original in having big icons on a screen for an mobile OS. That should be declared an obvious invention and not worth of protection at all. The main new thing that they did was to use a touch screen that can be operated with fingers and gestures, but hey, even that idea was not new either. Frankly, no matter how highly you think of Apple's products, nothing of what they do is really, truly original.
  - eknkc 13y ago
    Once you see / use them, they become obvious inventions. You know, lightbulbs are so boring right now. Nothing original about them. Before Apple came up with iPhone, I had a freaking Ericsson brick thingy. None of Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung were innovating. None of those old, non original ideas were in any of those devices. Nokia had a webkit browser with a ridiculous cursor that you operated with that joystick thingy. I'm glad that Apple actually pushed them forward. So yes, I think Apple has original products and they are innovating.
    - girvo 13y ago
      Bollocks, Sony Ericsson was innovating, and I still feel that the M600i that I owned was one of the most innovative phones ive ever used. Still to this day no phone comes close in keyboard ability (seriously, go google the M600 or P1i), and UIQ3 was this wicked blend of smartphone power with a dumbphone-esque interface: something the iPhone did but improved on massively. I use Apple everything. I love Apple products. But to say there wasn't any innovation happening before it in the phone sector misses some really cool things. PS. I would pay all the money in the world for an updated P1i, same qwerty rocker keyboard, capacitive 3" touchscreen @ 720p running Android. One can dream, right?
  - Joeri 13y ago
    Palm had the grid icon layout for years before apple did it, but nobody would confuse an old palm device with an iphone when actually using it, and palm in fact had to throw it out and start all over with the pre to deliver an iphone competitor. There's a big difference between a good concept and a good execution of a concept. Apple have always been brilliant at execution, even if they don't have many original concepts (they don't do basic research). Is it not innovative to take a good idea and execute it better than anyone before? I find that a hard thing to dismiss. However, now that they are on top of the world, it would be nice to see them invest in open basic research to give back to the community where they got all their ideas and technologies from, like microsoft does with microsoft research.
    - sbuk 13y ago
      Palm was influenced by the Newton, the device that coined the term PDA (actually coined by John Scully) which came out before the Palm Pilot. Computing didn't stat in the 21st century, neither did it start in the 1990's. RE giving back to the community; FreeBSD, CUPS, WebKit, LLVM and Clang to name a few. Notice I haven't claimed that any of these were directly invented by Apple, but all have varying levels of investment and contribution from Apple. This is all out there on the internet. It takes a couple of seconds to look up with whatever search engine fits in with your ideology.
- tonyhb 13y ago
  iOS 1 was an inevitable jump from Palm OS and the early days of touch screen. The tech had been in demos before, but there was such a lack of UX work beforehand that it never took off. That, and capacitive screens/advancing tech.
  - GFischer 13y ago
    The thing is, Android copied most of the UX (and I say that as someone that likes Android a lot more than iOS, and I had a Palm before). I agree that Apple's UX was a significant advance. (See this 2007 review talking about "paradigm-shifting interface" http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/03/iphone-review-part-1-hardware-interface-keyboard/ http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/03/iphone-review-part-1-hard... )
- annnnd 13y ago
  I presume you mean Google - were they close partners? I admit I wasn't following Apple (at all) before iPhone.
  - mkesper 13y ago
    Or maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electronics_Co.%2C_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electron.... ?
  - Steko 13y ago
    The iPhone is really where they started to work closely together. Here's Eric jokingly proposing a merger at the iphone launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9hUIxyE2Ns8#t=3021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9h... Steve comments again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnkXa3eTV88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnkXa3eTV88 The Mac's 30th anniversary a few weeks gave the original Mac launch videos a lot of recent play where Gates and Microsoft basically played an eerily similar role to Google with the iPhone launch. Of course MS, like Google did want to do everything. It's clear as day why Steve felt betrayed by Google. As he said in the internal town hall: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake teams at Google want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. "Don't be evil is a load of crap" {I've edited in the two updates/corrections from the bottom} http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/01/31/jobs-town-all http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/01/31/jobs-town-all
  - clarky07 13y ago
    Eric Schmidt was on the board at Apple.
mattmanser 13y ago
It was so original. I can't believe anyone contests this. I remember seeing an iPhone for the first time. Compared to all other phones it was 10 years ahead in vision. All other phones were suddenly ludicrously laid out, with stupid designs. Even the settings section for the iPhone blew every single other phone in existence out of the water. Something that simple, that essential, had been revolutionised by this thoughtful new way at looking at phone interfaces. Android, on that very day, looked like every other phone. 10 years behind, old, tired, pathetic, no vision what so ever. In less than 6 months the android team lifted every single iPhone design element, added very little of their own and unveiled what is possibly one of the biggest design rip-offs in tech history. I can understand why Jobs was pissed.
- joelthelion 13y ago
  I agree 100% with you. It was very original and a very good product. That doesn't mean they shouldn't have competition. Competition is a basic requirement for a functional economy. Which is why the patient system is broken.
- sixbrx 13y ago
  Yeah I remember also there was so much gnashing of teeth that it didn't HAVE A TACTILE KEYBOARD! It's just for show OMG! Japanese phones have had more gizmos^H^H^H^H^H^H features like FOREVER!! Besides the interface, I thought it was interesting that it had a real unix based OS underneath, which would pay off in the future as phone processors became more powerful. It's sortof funny looking back. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I guess.
- ikurei 13y ago
  It blew every other phone, but it wasn't that original over PDAs. I had a Windows 6.5 pda then, and I thought the iPhone was way cooler and well-designed. Of course it was inmensely superior to my PDA, but not so incredibly original. It didn't do anything at all I wasn't already doing with PDAs, it just did some of them (chiefly, web browsing) way better, most of them in a cooler way (pinch to zoom, animations), and even a few, slightly worse (browsing while listening to music). Apple has this fame of original crazy geniouses that have invented X or Y. They have mostly taken other's ideas and perfected them. Perfected them a lot, admittedly; even may be taken them to a new level of awesomeness with a great vision of on which details it was better to improve. I love apple products, don't take me wrong. They deserve a lot of credit for the iPod, the iPhone, iOS, the iPad... I think it was extremely childish of Jobs to get so pissed.

xentronium 13y ago

What about LLVM and Webkit?

sho_hn 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Origins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Origins
- eropple 13y ago
  That's great, but nobody used it before Apple made it a thing.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - sho_hn 13y ago
    Well, I used it every day. Apparently it was enough of a thing for Apple to notice it, too (or let's face it, the Mozilla people - like David Hyatt - they hired to gain the knowledge).
    - eropple 13y ago
      Did they notice it because it was good or did they notice it because it wasn't GPL?
      - sho_hn 13y ago
        Gecko wasn't GPL either. And Gecko was actually originally meant to be embedded by others, before the community decided to productize and do Firefox (originally Phoenix). I'd like to think they noticed it because it was good. KHTML at the time had quite strong CSS support compared to its competition (not necessarily the best, but it competed well), had done some important advances in l18n support compared to others (e.g. strong support for bidi text layout), and the design of its render tree which e.g. allowed for hardware-accelerated layer compositing was later adopted by competitors like Gecko. It was a pretty good codebase. Sure, it's been a decade since those events, and the majority of the engineering effort by now lies chiefly on the WebKit side of things. Apple employees working on WebKit have done a ton of good work, as have other stakeholders. Apple was an important factor both in terms of workforce increase and popularity increase for the project. But I think it's very legitimate to continue to credit the KDE community with its inception.

tomasien 13y ago

Popularizing... like who else is doing that?

noarchy 13y ago

Apple can't popularize anything in the way they've done without millions of accomplices, who line up to hand over their money to Apple. What is Apple doing right that promoters of other platforms are not?

lgas 13y ago
In my opinion they simply produce a better overall owner experience. All products/platforms have their warts, but warts and all, I find my life is easier and generally more pleasant when I use iphone instead of android and OS X instead of Windows or Linux for my desktop/laptops.

yaeger 13y ago

I bet you a majority of the customers don't even see those walls and yet still get to enjoy the positives that come from that approach. Yeah, why would a business continue to operate that way? Let's just make everything open as fuck and stand back to watch what happens.