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.
The graphical user interface.
They don’t invent it (xerox PARC did), but Apple correctly identified that the user experience of existing computer systems was holding it back from being a thing everyone owns, and made computers a bad fit for many types of work that seem extremely obvious now (digital media creation particularly)
They did this more or less again with the smartphone: business folks and super nerds were the smartphone market before Apple. Now it’s the average person’s computer.
A million times this. Not only did they popularize the ideas, but MacOS’s UI design was so ahead of its time that it’s barely changed since then. It was by far the most polished operating system at the time. Old Apple actually was innovating while the market was kind of stagnant.
This screenshot was in 2007. The competition was Windows Vista. It’s a night and day difference. I had this version of the iMac at the time and was super impressed, even if I did switch back to Windows a couple of years later. Looking back at it, it still looks quite “modern”.
Just to piggy back on this comment, OSX was released before 9/11 and windows XP, so Microsoft was still selling Windows ME at the time! Aside from the desktop backgrounds looked very similar.
I’ve got an '08 iMac with this version of MacOS, El Capitan I believe. Going from that to my 2019 M1 MBP running Sonoma is really no different. Sure there’s features missing but I can still sync my notes and the few other Apple things I actually use between the two.
Plus my iPods can still sync with both devices, they just moved iPod into Finder in the new versions.
It still blows my mind that Apple are so happy to drop OS support on iPhones and iPads that are considered too old, but I can still sync my 4th gen iPod with my M2 Air. There’s damn near 20 years between those two devices, but aside from needing a USB A>C dongle, they work together without any trouble.
Well, I will say it’s a little different. Your iPod doesn’t get software updates or apps. From a functional standpoint it’s about as supported as any old iPhone or iPad is.
Yes, that’s very true.
It does make me laugh when it tells me that my iPods’ various softwares are up to date, and that it’ll check again next time. You can check, but you’ll not find anything…
I feel old.
Time to schedule your colonoscopy gramps
Well, KDE3 could look cool too.
I’ll admit, back then I really wanted a Mac.
Just after trying to use them a few times I know that behavior is more important than appearance on screenshots. Also such looks exhaust you emotionally.
Wrong wrong wrong. Macontoshs gui was crap and buggy as hell. Every seasoned it expert knew it was a shit lousy interface designed to dupe people into believing it was secure when in fact it proliferated viruses and security holes, and drove the control of computing into an avaricious humanity destroying company culture known as apple. DO NOT EVER PROMOTE THE GUI AS GOOD. ITS CRAP.
No it wasn’t
That has nothing to do with GUI
OSX 10.0 in general actually was. Jobs offered 10.1 for free as an apology, and it fixed a lot of things.
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.
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.
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.
This is a very ignorant take. MP3 players before the iPod sucked for most people. Obtaining music that was properly tagged or ripping CDs with command-line apps was out of reach for the majority of people.
Saying that the iPhone wasn’t special is also crazy. The best-selling smartphone of all time wasn’t special?
Unbelievable…
At the time of release it it wasn’t. Palm was better. Blackberry had advantages in data speed and email. The iPhone couldn’t take advantage of its browser because of how slow mobile internet was.
The iPod at release was up against a number of players that were nearly identical.
Apple marketed its products better than everyone else, and by 2008 had definitely come up with winning products, but to say its stuff was unique or better at release is revisionist history.
Nonsense. Palm was not better. I sold Palm, Treo, and Blackberry phones at the time and the sudden drop in confidence was palpable. Your second statement is completely wrong too. The entire difference between the iPhone was that it didn’t use mobile web. Safari was a desktop-class browser, unlike the others (minus Flash, obviously). Even Windows devices like PocketPCs didn’t have full browsers.
Again, the iPod statement is just flat-out false. The alternatives at the time were Walkman devices, Creative Labs devices, and devices from Diamond, and crap like the RCA Kazoo. All of them had tiny LCD displays, 256MB of memory max, and transferred music like glorified flash drives. Tags had to be managed manually. Playlists weren’t a thing unless you created them in separate software. There was nothing “identical” about them.
Steve Jobs pulling out a 5GB iPod from his pocket broke the industry and started the whole market, changing the field from a niche for nerds into music for everyone. On top of that, it started the podcast revolution and that is undeniable. To say that it wasn’t unique or better is revisionist history.
You don’t remember how slow the iPhone browsing experience was when it came out? Speeds were capped at 128knps. Or how bad AT&T was in providing bandwidth? Granted other phones besides blackberry had bandwidth issues too, but 2007-2008 was effectively not usable without wifi. It wasn’t until iPhones could work on Verizon’s network that mobile iPhone browsers were usable.
Large capacity mp3 players existed when the iPod came out. Comparing the iPod to the cheap, low-capacity ones is disingenuous.
Granted, the market needed a kick in the ass and Apple did do that, but it’s not like they were the only ones doing it.
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.
Fucking everyone except Xerox BOD figured that out.
Wrong wrong wrong. The graphical user interface is crap and will always be crap. The whole matter of popularity is marketing bunkum. Console command interface was al ways faster and better than any gui for general computing tasks. The gui is fine for office tasks, but shit for everything else. The popularity of the gui today has driven a massive upscale of cruddy bloated virus infected software. The fact that most people now only know gui has meant that control of viruses has slipped away. Had console commands been the mainstay for computing, viruses and security holes would never have been allowed to proliferate as they do today.
Bud, you sound like a technophile geek. The kind of person who custom built his own computer. You’re not the target customer. Apple builds products for people that don’t care about technology, they just care about what the technology does and want it to be easy and seamless. And that is a vast majority of the people.
I built my own computer but as a working laptop there is nothing close to a decked out MacBook Pro. Yes, I’m aware of the price, but my company paid it, and it was a good choice from every angle.
Bingo. Apple builds appliances.
Let me guess, you use arch?
If this guy isn’t rolling his own distro he’s basically a scrub like the rest of us.
While you may be correct I think you’re still missing the point. CLI is for super nerds. While you and I may know how to use it, the average person doesn’t, and is unlikely to put in the effort to learn. That is the innovation that Apple made in bringing computing to the mainstream. It was precisely because people didn’t have to learn how to navigate the CLI environment and instead got an easy point-and-click interface that computers caught on with the public at large, and that gained Apple an absolute ton of cash money and noteriety.
OS X has a decent terminal app and has zsh included as default shell. Mac OS 9 effectively had no CLI at all.
The first virus was made in 1986 for IBM personal computers. Nothing is free from computer viruses. Not macOS, not iOS, not Android, not GNU/Linux, not freeBSD, not even an IBM PC from the 80s. All software can be exploited. The only reason GUI software is the most exploited is because it is what people use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_(computer_virus)
GUI is not only intended for office tasks. In fact, I would argue that many office tasks are better suited for command line, but I’ll agree that nobody knows how to do that anymore.
GUI was always best suited for artists. Apple has, for a long time, especially since OSX, been explicit about catering to artists. Can you imagine editing video in a terminal? Or editing a layered image? Or producing music?
I genuinely can’t. How atrocious would that be?
telnet telehack.comThen run
starwarsOn Mac:
nc -c telehack.com