Comment Apple, innovative? (Score -1, Offtopic) 559
Apple and innovation?
Apple is regarded by its supporters to be an innovative and forwardlooking company. They claim Apple innovated most things from the GUI to Desktop publishing. Almost always the supporters make the innovation claims with restrictions like "in the field of personal computing", "over the entire product line", "affordable solution" and "as a standard feature". They also like to blur your vision when equaling "popularized" and "introducing" with "inventing". Apple supporters always maximizes the importance of Apples involvment in an innovation (even if it's very slim) and at the same time downplay any other companies involvement.
Case in point "USB":
When the supporters speak about how innovative Apple is they talk about how iMac was the first computer utilizing USB. This is arguable, but if you tell them they counterattack with something like "over the entire product line". And now they are correct. In reality Apple had absolutely nothing to do with the technical creation of USB. Intel invented USB as an answer to Apples pay-per-port licencing of firewire. Apple was one of the first companies to use USB but strictly (or not so strictly) speaking that isn't innovation. They just used an of the shelf product that where innovated for the PC market.
The same can be said for a lot of products Apple supporters claim Apple innvented, of course with "additional restrictions" (see above). Some of these innovations are: Audio, SCSI, Ethernet, long file names and Floppy drives. In reality Apple innvovated none of those products.
A nice page for looking at these "innovations" is an older wikipedia page describing the Macintosh on which of course Mac users gone totaly mad in describing the Macintosh as a very innovative platform. Almost all of claimed innovations are in fact just off the shelf products licenced from other companies or already old products used in a slightly different manner by Apple. The wikipedia page has since been revised and is now more in line with what Macintosh actually brought to the table of computing.
It is however true that Apple are fast at picking up new technologies invented outside Apple and as a result the Macintosh is a faster evolving platform than the PC. This is a design decision made by Apple to keep the Macintosh computer intressting and "fresh". This however has some lowdowns. Every five year or so the Macintosh developers and users have to adapt to a completely new platform or a new operation system (68k->PPC, legacy MacOs->OS X, PPC->x86, soon x86->x86-64). In the PC world this would be suicide, too much money are tied up in legacy technologies. Macintosh are mostly used by home users and small companies who don't need a homogen environment, or have so few computers and programs they can invest in new technology every so often. The PC platform is used by everybody, small and large. It would be almost impossible to "twist and turn" the Apple way. Intel tried to introduce Itanuium for 64bit computing but in the end had to back down to a backward compatible x86 sollution.
Conclussion:
All in all, when the dust has settled. After decades of innovation and jumping beetween CPU families and platforms the Macintosh has transformed to nothing less than an ordinary PC, at least in hardware and mostly in software. Linux x86 booted within a month of the x86 Macintosh release using the standard EFI bootloader and Gentoo Linux distribution. Windows vista will probably boot out of the box on the Macintosh without Microsoft putting any effort in testing on the platform. On all important fronts the innovation by Apple has been nothing short of a straight copy of the PC platform. On the software side half of Apples operating system is also of the shelf available parts from different open source projects. Modern Mac OS is basically a proprietary GUI over standard open source components, running on PC hardware. The difference beetween Macintosh and the PC has been shrinkin over the years and now they are VERY close. It's entirely possible Apple will abbandon what's left of the Macintosh and go total PC, hardware and software. This isn't innovation and never has been.
Think different? No it looks like you are thinking exactly the same.
Apple is regarded by its supporters to be an innovative and forwardlooking company. They claim Apple innovated most things from the GUI to Desktop publishing. Almost always the supporters make the innovation claims with restrictions like "in the field of personal computing", "over the entire product line", "affordable solution" and "as a standard feature". They also like to blur your vision when equaling "popularized" and "introducing" with "inventing". Apple supporters always maximizes the importance of Apples involvment in an innovation (even if it's very slim) and at the same time downplay any other companies involvement.
Case in point "USB":
When the supporters speak about how innovative Apple is they talk about how iMac was the first computer utilizing USB. This is arguable, but if you tell them they counterattack with something like "over the entire product line". And now they are correct. In reality Apple had absolutely nothing to do with the technical creation of USB. Intel invented USB as an answer to Apples pay-per-port licencing of firewire. Apple was one of the first companies to use USB but strictly (or not so strictly) speaking that isn't innovation. They just used an of the shelf product that where innovated for the PC market.
The same can be said for a lot of products Apple supporters claim Apple innvented, of course with "additional restrictions" (see above). Some of these innovations are: Audio, SCSI, Ethernet, long file names and Floppy drives. In reality Apple innvovated none of those products.
A nice page for looking at these "innovations" is an older wikipedia page describing the Macintosh on which of course Mac users gone totaly mad in describing the Macintosh as a very innovative platform. Almost all of claimed innovations are in fact just off the shelf products licenced from other companies or already old products used in a slightly different manner by Apple. The wikipedia page has since been revised and is now more in line with what Macintosh actually brought to the table of computing.
It is however true that Apple are fast at picking up new technologies invented outside Apple and as a result the Macintosh is a faster evolving platform than the PC. This is a design decision made by Apple to keep the Macintosh computer intressting and "fresh". This however has some lowdowns. Every five year or so the Macintosh developers and users have to adapt to a completely new platform or a new operation system (68k->PPC, legacy MacOs->OS X, PPC->x86, soon x86->x86-64). In the PC world this would be suicide, too much money are tied up in legacy technologies. Macintosh are mostly used by home users and small companies who don't need a homogen environment, or have so few computers and programs they can invest in new technology every so often. The PC platform is used by everybody, small and large. It would be almost impossible to "twist and turn" the Apple way. Intel tried to introduce Itanuium for 64bit computing but in the end had to back down to a backward compatible x86 sollution.
Conclussion:
All in all, when the dust has settled. After decades of innovation and jumping beetween CPU families and platforms the Macintosh has transformed to nothing less than an ordinary PC, at least in hardware and mostly in software. Linux x86 booted within a month of the x86 Macintosh release using the standard EFI bootloader and Gentoo Linux distribution. Windows vista will probably boot out of the box on the Macintosh without Microsoft putting any effort in testing on the platform. On all important fronts the innovation by Apple has been nothing short of a straight copy of the PC platform. On the software side half of Apples operating system is also of the shelf available parts from different open source projects. Modern Mac OS is basically a proprietary GUI over standard open source components, running on PC hardware. The difference beetween Macintosh and the PC has been shrinkin over the years and now they are VERY close. It's entirely possible Apple will abbandon what's left of the Macintosh and go total PC, hardware and software. This isn't innovation and never has been.
Think different? No it looks like you are thinking exactly the same.
