this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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It's not that surprising. Despite Job's lies about "patenting" multi touch or whatever, they never developed tech. Most of these silicon valley companies don't, they staple together tech that's developed in the public sector and take all the credit and profit.
Edit: I forget that people don't generally know about this:
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/82/3e/f0/823ef0be785ee604eccea26ff6583156--mariana-ux.jpg
All of the actual tech is public sector. The form factor is a rectangular mini computer around a touchscreen. That wasn't special either, there were lots of devices that were the same. The thing that made the iPhone "special" was the capacitive touchscreen, which wasn't a design innovation, but a technological innovation. They put it in a shiny box and sold it to you. The other thing they did was the app store, which was a software repo with a shiny coat of paint that charged money (most software repos up to that point and to this day are free).
The other thing they did was take billions in government grants to start silicon valley. All the big tech giants are a product of goverment spending on private companies to sell us public sector innovations.
If you think the iphone or anything sold to you by a company is special, you've been duped by marketing. It's understandable because they will spend billions of dollars to figure out the best way to make you want their crap, but you were still duped.
Edit 2: Lots of people saying I'm wrong, but nobody actually explaining how. I think you just don't like being told you were duped.
Devil's advocate would say "okay, then just go make your own iPhone if apple isn't actually doing anything" but I don't really want to be defending apple, lol
You can hate on Apple all you want (and I really do) but they made the right device at the right time. Tech might all have been there but the combination and usability of the first iPhone was groundbreaking.
It's not that Apple makes amazing stuff, it's that other companies really put out barely shiny turds.
Look at the zune, the tech was fine, or so I have heard, but it looked like an ugly brick. Seriously, a regular red brick looks better, even a yellow brick does.
I have a Subaru, and while I love it, the infotainment system is garbage. Clearly there was no effort to make it look good and usable.
UX is hugely undervalued, I wonder if one of the reasons is because you don't notice good UX, it's not in the way, but you noticed bad UX. So good UX without a lot of marketing is invisible.
I absolutely agree. It's especially underestimated how hard it is to make actually good UX because what feels intuitive can be highly individual. In addition the typical techie nerd that does the programming is more interested in technical puzzles than trying to view the program with the eyes of an end user (which feels pretty schizophrenic at times since you know how the thing works but need to dissociate from that knowledge).