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.
and i think in general, their attempt to really focus on user experience first always seemed to define their business… trying to make things that people would WANT to use was what made Jobs and Apple stand out… other brands were better known for performance, for example…
Exactly. They innovated
I could probably go on for a while. The thing is that everything in tech is an iteration: almost nothing is completely new. Apple has consistently applied design and usability to revolutionize many different areas of tech. It is true innovation with real change and huge impact
The iPod wasn’t very special. Lots of competitors in that space.
Their phone wasn’t very special. It lacked a lot of features like enterprise email for 1-2 years. It was also slow and locked to a slow carrier in the US for that time.
They managed to sell it though. Their ads and marketing is always been great even if the devices weren’t.
Sure, but none of them in such a small size with such a relatively big capacity, and certainly none that were as easy to use and easy to sync. Apple absolutely rewrote the book on how a portable music player should be, then did it all over again with the iPhone.
Creative had an mp3 player that was small and had large capacity. I think they released ahead of the iPod. There were a lot of mp3 players in this space and Apple didn’t rewrite anything.
Windows media player had all of the same features as iTunes.
The Nokia n95 was a better phone than the iPhone in every comparison in 2007. If Apple did anything, they ignored how slow 2g/2.5g speeds were, and how cumbersome touchscreen keyboards were and marketed it as a better device. I think a few other companies tried this too but got out-marketed by Apple.
Prior to the first iPod, Creative’s only hard drive based portables were the Nomads, both of which were roughly the same size as a portable CD player, and heavier. Don’t get me wrong, they were cool, but they were literally twice the size of an iPod.
In '03, two years after the first iPod came along, Creative released the Zen, which was a similar physical size to the iPod. It was nowhere near as cool to use an an iPod, and was nowhere near as beautifully designed.
There were, and they all used some kind of low capacity removable storage. You can shout and holler all you like, but the fact is that Apple were the first company to make a pocketable, high capacity (for the time) music player. As with so many other of their products, they didn’t invent the market, but they refined it down to something that people would rush out to buy, or wish they could afford.
Yeah, I get where you’re coming from. The N95 was a beast of a phone. But don’t forget that Nokia had been banging out phones for 20 years by that point, they’d nailed their market and knew a thing or two. The first iPhone was Apple’s first foray into the market, and while the thing wasn’t perfect (only had GPRS/Edge, no apps, limited features, weird headphone jack) it hit the ground running and was a platform for bigger things. Apple innovated.
And yeah, touchscreen keyboards were cumbersome. On resistive screen phones. I remember using an iPod touch shortly after they came out, and was blown away by how much better the keyboard was on that beautiful capacitive screen, and how shoddy my HTC Kaiser felt by comparison.
Windows Media Player 9 only ripped CDs to WMA files because it didn’t include a licensed mp3 encoder. It didn’t support MP3 ripping directly until WMP10 in 2004.
Jobs really wanted to make tech usable for the mainstream. Just look at the first iPod all the other MP3 players at the time were for the geeks and music nerds. They were clunky, had ugly geek esthetics and the software was hard to use for most people. And the non techies had no idea where to get mp3s. The iPod together with the iTunes Store really sold the MP3 player to the masses.
Wrong wrong wrong. It was never about ease of use. It was always about taking control away from the user, and hiding authority for control. This kind of deceptive practice has led to what we gave today - cars selling subscription hearing seats. The truth is, the gui was always buggy and a product unfit for its purpose from day one. Apple sold it as a means to get consumers to accept a defective product from the start, perpetuating their ability to always sell updates, forcing consumers to pay for things THEY DO NOT NEED.