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What DID Apple innovate? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

341 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Genuine question.

I know they were the scrappy startup doing different cool things. But, what are the most major innovative things that they introduced, improved or just implemented that either revolutionized, improved or spurred change?

I am aware of the possibility of both fanboys and haters just duking it out below. But there's always that one guy who has a fkn well-formatted paragraph of gold. I await that guy.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, there existed phones that were kind of what smartphones became. Blackberries and Palms get a lot of the attention as they were what executives used, but there were also PocketPC devices that were usually white label manufactured HTC devices that were branded after carriers or some other company like HP. They generally were much larger screened devices with a few buttons at the bottom. They were resistive touchscreens so using your fingers was pretty meh for responsiveness, and the UI was just not designed in a way that was pleasant to navigate. Picture a shrunk down desktop interface. I'd say the UI was the biggest shakeup that they did in the product category, followed by steadily raising the bar for hardware in a space that often would have cheap plastic components. Don't get me wrong, I think too much glass and aluminum is actually poorer than something like kevlar especially for dents and dings, but it doesn't look nearly as sexy.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I’d say the UI was the biggest shakeup

I'd say the biggest shakeup was the features Jobs pushed hard in the keynote.

It was a cellphone. A good cell phone. Everyone had a cell phone and nearly everyone hated them. The blackberry was decent if all you did was send text messages and make phone calls, but it was rubbish at everything else. PocketPC and Symbian and other flip phones were even worse, though each specific model had a different set of feature trade offs (did you ever try writing an email on a small PocketPC device? You had to press tiny keys with an equally tiny stylus and text was almost impossible to read (or alternatively so large that you couldn't fit enough text. Larger ones were a good experience but they were way too big for most people. Even the iPhone was considered huge at the time (it was much bigger than a blackberry for example).

It was an iPod. Everyone (who could afford one) owned an iPod and it sucked having two gadgets in their pocket all day and keeping two gadgets charged. That was the feature that made the iPhone a "must have" product. Combining your phone and music device was a massive improvement and an obvious one even if you weren't sure about the other stuff. Other phones could play music by then, but they were all still really terrible. I could only fit a single album on my Symbian phone and it took hours of stuffing around and reading manuals and installing buggy software to figure out how to load MP3s onto the device. Yuck.
It was able to browse the internet. The real, full internet. Everyone working a desk job was used to doing that all day every day, but now it was possible to do it away from your desk. That was a huge deal and I think by far the most meaningful feature of the iPhone... except it was a product nobody had ever used before, so it couldn't be the only headline feature.