High resolution displays on laptops, SSDs in laptops.
Those are the two I can think of right now. I believe Linus (LTT) talked about this on WAN show not too long ago aswell.
this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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It's crazy to think that the original MacBook Air had a spinning hdd, which was 1.8".
It came from the iPods at the time.
It’s crazy to think that the portable, pocket really, music player had HDD.
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Marketing
Ayo fuck TekSyndicate but he did put it quite succinctly:
“Apple are not a technology company. They are a technology recipe company. They take innovations that other companies create and combine them to create compelling products.”
Sorry but that's bullshit. That would be like disregarding all the engineering that goes into developing a car, just because someone else invented the wheel.
Sure - without that invention they couldn't exist - but real innovation isn't just the foundational features of the product. 99% of the work is in small refinements - for example about two hours a day my Mazda is a horrible car to drive because the sun catches the chrome logo on the steering wheel and blinds the driver. The newer models? They have a slightly different shape on the steering wheel that puts the shiny logo in the shade at that time of the day. It takes real work over decades to figure out tiny details like that. Most of the job is things that aren't obvious when you first have an idea to build a product.
Someone else probably, probably millions of other people, likely had the idea long ago... the real innovator is the one that actually does the hard work to make it a product someone will actually want to use.
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most of the things they're known for, they didn't invent. but they've always been better at packaging these ideas and tech up, and marketing them well.
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Apple is incredibly well polished. It takes ideas that already exists and makes them work for the 90% of people.
It brought the smart phone to the masses. The ipod the iPad. It is the only smart watch manufacturer making profit.
All these existed and most server a function and niche community. Apple bought it polished it and server it up with a user friendly interface.
Can it reinvent the wheel with smart glasses ? This will be it's biggest test. This is a niche area. This is incredibly expensive and it's going to be a hard sell.
iPod. It was the first commercially available MP3 player that sported more than 512mb of storage. First model was 5GB. Second was 10GB.
I got in on the second model, as a Windows PC user. I had to buy a FireWire expansion card just to use it.
Literally nothing else was like it, and at the time, you could leave it on the seat of your car while you went shopping because that far back, nobody knew what the fuck it was and so would leave it alone.
They didn't create the first MP3 player, but they created the first massively commercially successful one.
Through this, they also pioneered the first digital storefront for music which in itself was a fucking feat considering there is already a music company named Apple. They threaded the fucking needle with that one. They had trademark disputes with Apple Corps (holding company for music by The Beatles) going back to the 1970's but put that all to bed with the release of the iTunes store.
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Apple does refinement a lot better than they do outright innovation, but refinement is a core part of the process: your average user doesn't want to be using things that feels like a chore to use.
They refined touchscreen phones, mp3 players, all in one PCs, laptops, peripheral connectivity, tablet computing, GUIs, UNIX, and so much more.
The smartphone case is one where I'd say they largely did invent the modern smartphone. I mean, they didn't design every component from the ground up, but so much of what went into that first iPhone was new and completely redefined things, to the point where these interfaces and design languages still define how virtually every smartphone still works 15 years later.
Similar.with essentially creating the modern tablet market, instead of just trying to sell a reskinnrd desktop OS like everyone was trying to do at the time. But even that was 90% influenced by the iPhone (and its original non-phone design)
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They took the GUI that Xerox invented and made it so ubiquitous that other companies copied it from them (GEOS, Windows, Amiga, etc. etc.)
They took the Bubble UI that Palm invented, and the PalmOS driven Handspring cell phones, and turned it into a full blown mobile operating system.
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Selling an aluminum strip for $60.