8 ms·

Maybe not a putdown, but it's silly to view Apple's defining characteristic as their ability to assemble a device from available parts. If that ability is what

by H_L 14y ago

Maybe not a putdown, but it's silly to view Apple's defining characteristic as their ability to assemble a device from available parts. If that ability is what makes them successful, then their rival phone manufacturers should be even more successful since they often use faster processors and bigger screens and more RAM than Apple.

corin_ 14y ago
It's not about the ability to put them together, it's about deciding what to put together, when to do it, how to market it and of course a big part: what software to put on it. I'd never say "all Apple do is" about this, just that it is what they do, and they do it better than anyone else.
- nirvana 14y ago
  Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them. And having seen them, other companies can't replicate them well at all because they don't do the research. Calling them a lego assembler ignores all the real innovation they do.
  - antidoh 14y ago
    "a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them." Hmmm. I'm still using my Palm Centro phone, which used to be a Treo, which used to be a Palm PDA, which used to be a Palm Pilot. All of those have a touch oriented UI, and most if not all of them pre-date iPhone by years. So now I guess we can watch the debate about whether Newton or its competitors pre-date each other.
    - nirvana 14y ago
      None of those have a touch based UI. Touch means finger touches. Very different from a stylus which is only touching one or two pixels at a time. This is very easy to sense because the stylus pushes two layers together physically and effectively is closing swithces. A touch is much difeferent, a finger is an amorphous blob over many pixels of a varying shape, and Apple had to figure out how to resolve that into a single pixel you intended to touch (so not the center) and ignore other things like knuckles on the screen, etc. This is a major invention and a major difference, and that is just one part of what made the iOS touch UI. This is the fundamental problem- you and others say nonsense like this, and I don't know if you're simply not well informed about the nature of these technologies, or you don't care and are making arguments because of ideology that you think will work propagandistically. I mean, I guess ofr many people they don't care that they aren't the same thing, they can just pretend like they are in debates like this, right? I really don't know which. I keep hearing people claim that Apple stole from Xerox[1] and here you imply that the palm might have come before the newton and that it is up for debate. What's next? The Mac stole from windows? Seriously, what level of basic understanding of the history and nature of these technologies can I expect here on Hacker News? And do you get off the hook for repeating this nonsense simply because it fits your anti-apple ideology? [1] I shouldn't need this footnote, but due to the aforementioned ignorance or dishonesty, I do. Apple licensed Xerox's early research into what later became the GUI by selling them pre-IPO Apple stock which made Xerox a pretty penny and would be worth over a billion now if they had never sold it.
      - eropple 14y ago
        None of those have a touch based UI. Touch means finger touches. This is dishonestly revisionist, given how common it was to see people thumbing through applications on Palm devices. That Palms came with styluses doesn't mean that they weren't touch-friendly in a lot of ways, and that should be taken into account.
        tomjakubowski 14y ago
        Since I don't know, I thought I'd ask -- were Apple the first to create a multi-touch UI for a phone? That would seem to me to be the major innovation in touch UI if that's the case.
        vlisivka 14y ago
        No. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch
        catch23 14y ago
        I believe so, according to wikipedia, no other multi-touch phones existed before the iphone.
        eropple 14y ago
        Apple was neither the first to create a multi-touch user interface (the first consumer multitouch device I know of was the Lemur, but I'm sure that was predated) nor the first to put it in a handheld PDA-ish device or a phone (LG beat the iPhone to market with the Prada--which, incidentally, also used very few physical buttons in favor of software buttons). The entire argument in favor of Apple's patents is bullshit, and nirvana has a history of bad-faith fanboyism on the topic.
        corin_ 14y ago
        I could be wrong (?) but I think the first Prada was capacitive but not multi-touch.
  - mark_integerdsv 14y ago
    Just like to add that there are innovations in terms of manufacturing that affect the marketplace at large that are solely due to Apple requirements. I'm talking about Gorilla Glass (factory funded by Apple so the inventor of the substance could churn it out for iPhones) and now Retina displays. Did Samsung build their own Retina production plant? I also don't buy that essentially saying: "go find your own way to do this." Stifles innovation. Quite the opposite IMO.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - SimHacker 14y ago
    Oh bullshit. We were doing finger operated gesture user interface on the Palm in 2000 (pie menus on virtual buttons for consumer electronic IR remote control interfaces). Lots of people were using touch screens with finger gestures. The Palm included a stylus, but if the interface was designed correctly you could certainly use it with your fingers, and pie menus (self revealing gestures) worked just fine, and there is lots of older prior art and research about touch screen pie menus and gestures.
    - vidarh 14y ago
      It didn't take much to allow using the Palm with fingers - I used to write on it with my fingers rather than the stylus because I found it more convenient and still accurate enough.
    - nirvana 14y ago
      Yes, and the telephone existed before cellphones, but that doesn't mean the cellphone wasn't innovative. Your argument doesn't address the point, and is a bullshit rationalization for a claim you can't support. I refuse to believe you are so stupid as to think that is a rebuttal.
      - lilsunnybee 14y ago
        At least (s)he wasn't resorting to ad hominem. How about you keep things on topic when debating?
  - georgemcbay 14y ago
    Microsoft developed the "old" Surface (now called PixelSense) at the same time Apple was working on the iPhone. Both were released in very early 2007 after years of R&D work. Both had multitouch UIs of the type you seem to think are so innovative. Both arrived at these solutions at the same time because the wide availability of capacitive touchscreens (which neither MS nor Apple invented, mind you -- capacitive and multitouch tech was being done in lab environments back in the late-70s/early-80s by CERN, Bell Labs and others) made such UIs an obvious next step to anyone paying attention to the field. Apple made billions off the iPhone while MS made peanuts off the Surface solely because of how each tried to bring their respective takes on the product to market. I give Apple all the credit in the world for knowing how to package technology up for mainstream use and bring it in at a price point the masses can afford, while Microsoft was dicking around with giant table size systems (primarily because being burned by the stylus-touch tablet market early, they had stupidly convinced themselves that general consumers didn't want touch at all) but you're totally wrong about this tech being completely innovative and non-existing before Apple came down from the mountain and presented it to us, because that isn't how it went down at all. For someone who seems to have so little grasp on the real history behind all this stuff you should be careful about calling other HN readers out as you do in a post below this one.
    - GHFigs 14y ago
      Both arrived at these solutions at the same time because the wide availability of capacitive touchscreens Strange conclusion, given that the original Microsoft Surface does not use a capacitive touchscreen.
      - corin_ 14y ago
        His parentheses made you miss the rest of his sentence. > Both arrived at these solutions at the same time because the wide availability of capacitive touchscreens (...) made such UIs an obvious next step to anyone paying attention to the field. He was saying that capacitive was inspiration to both, not used by both.
        14y ago
  - ktizo 14y ago
    Bespoke touch oriented UI systems have been around for a very long time, some of them surprisingly sophisticated and innovative. A mate of mine used to do interfaces for touchscreen information kiosks, for instance.
    - joezydeco 14y ago
      100% agree. I used a touchscreen kiosk back in 1982 at EPCOT. It wasn't resistive, could have been capacitive, probably was infrared or surface-wave.
      - nirvana 14y ago
        And thus it is completely irrelevant to this discussion. You're making the "graham invented the telephone so there was nothing invented to make the cellphone" error.
        regularfry 14y ago
        Except it's not irrelevant, because the user doesn't care whether it's capacitive, infra-red, or little gnomes perched on top of the screen translating your finger movements into magic spells. Apple didn't invent capacitive screens, nor did they invent multitouch. They packaged them cleverly and used what leverage they had at the time to force the price down.
    - nirvana 14y ago
      Right and Graham invented the telephone so there was no inventions going into making the cellphone.
      - ktizo 14y ago
        There were phone handsets with buttons on before cordless phones, so as far as the UI goes, there was little major invention initially. The main inventive requirement in touchscreen phones is in making small, thin, cheap touchscreen modules. The UI concepts that then run on those kinds of devices have however been the subject of design studies for decades before that, and have been implemented in various forms on commercial touchscreen installations. Also, much of the graphic polish of many of these devices seem to draw a direct lineage to stuff like the old praystation series of websites by Joshua Davis and his experiments with tsunami menus and inertial scrolling elements.
  - nivla 14y ago
    >Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them. Umm... I guess you never used a kiosk before the Iphone then. Calling someone lego assembler is not necessarily a bad thing. You can put two and two together and create great things but people are bound to copy great things and make it better. That is how innovation drives forward. Ever heard of the phrase "Reinventing the wheel"? Well, if everybody had patents on their "wheel", then everyone else has to waste their time and resources on reinventing the wheel. Like, Reddit was 4chan and Digg put together with better improvements. Putting two and two might make u a lego assembler but the end result isn't that bad!
    - nirvana 14y ago
      So, you're claiming that Apple licensed their touch UI from a koisk manufacturer? Do tell? Because if you're not saying that you're not being honest about what I said.
      - lotharbot 14y ago
        > "you're claiming that Apple licensed their touch UI" Obviously nobody in this thread is claiming such a thing. Perhaps they misunderstood your earlier point (or perhaps you made it poorly) and thus their counterpoints are irrelevant, but that is not the same thing. You should be more charitable and less trollish in the way you choose to disagree with others.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - vidarh 14y ago
    > Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them. I worked on a tablet in '99. I wrote the widget library (we used Nano-X plus a custom widget library and font loader to keep memory usage down - this was a unit with 32MB RAM...) and managed the developers who wrote the apps that are featured: http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/Linux-For-Devices-Articles/FreePad-Norways-alternative-to-Swedens-Screen-Phone/ http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/Linux-For-Devices-Article... (the names on the people in the phone book are names of actual employees of Screen Media at the time, actually - I'm there too) Notice how it is described: Not as something new, but as another entrant up against another product. Even in '99/'00 our touch based tablet was not a new idea. In fact, one of the companies that Screen Media was co-located with was a touch screen importer and distributorship that served as our major go-to guys for ideas and information about what the touch screens of the time were capable of - we didn't invent any of the ideas of this type of touch screen UI because we could go to our local touch screen distributor and ask what was common practice in the market already. The only remotely new thing (and at least Ericsson, and probably others, beat us there too) was to apply it to a tablet type device rather than a kiosk. We did use resistive touch screens, not capacitive, but the UI was most definitively "touch oriented" - there were no hard keys on the standard unit at all. Web browsing, phone functions, address books, e-mail, was all done via touch. The tablet used a port of Opera, and Opera subsequently introduced gestures in 2001, but while gestures was then new to browsers, that was not considered anything revolutionary either - just applying existing, known technology in a novel way. The idea that a "touch oriented UI" didn't exist before Apple developed it is fiction.
    - nirvana 14y ago
      The device you linked to has a touchscreen and a UI, but it is simply a desktop widgets and metaphors with the minimal adaptations necessary to make it work with a touch screen. None of the key metaphors or widgets Apple developed for iOS are present in that device. To claim that Apple didn't invent anything in iOS, and use that device as an example is to claim that there was nothing new in the iPhone because Alexanger Graham Bell had phones before. It is absurd. And to me, all it says is that you're desperate to rationalize this belief that Apple never invented anything. Remember: I'm rebutting the claim that Apple just assembled off the shelf pieces, like legos.
  - eropple 14y ago
    Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them. How does the LG Prada exist in this strange world of yours, then?
    - nirvana 14y ago
      You're claiming the LG Prada runs an OS that Apple licensed from LG for the iPhone? Do tell. Apple didn't invent iOS? Really? By the way, the LG is not multitouch, it isn't even a smartphone. IF Apple had licensed it -- necessary for the claim that Apple just assembled lego blocks-- the iPhone would not work the way it does. %99 of the features would be missing.

by H_L 14y ago

corin_ 14y ago

It's not about the ability to put them together, it's about deciding what to put together, when to do it, how to market it and of course a big part: what software to put on it. I'd never say "all Apple do is" about this, just that it is what they do, and they do it better than anyone else.

nirvana 14y ago
Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them. And having seen them, other companies can't replicate them well at all because they don't do the research. Calling them a lego assembler ignores all the real innovation they do.
- antidoh 14y ago
  "a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them." Hmmm. I'm still using my Palm Centro phone, which used to be a Treo, which used to be a Palm PDA, which used to be a Palm Pilot. All of those have a touch oriented UI, and most if not all of them pre-date iPhone by years. So now I guess we can watch the debate about whether Newton or its competitors pre-date each other.
  - nirvana 14y ago
    None of those have a touch based UI. Touch means finger touches. Very different from a stylus which is only touching one or two pixels at a time. This is very easy to sense because the stylus pushes two layers together physically and effectively is closing swithces. A touch is much difeferent, a finger is an amorphous blob over many pixels of a varying shape, and Apple had to figure out how to resolve that into a single pixel you intended to touch (so not the center) and ignore other things like knuckles on the screen, etc. This is a major invention and a major difference, and that is just one part of what made the iOS touch UI. This is the fundamental problem- you and others say nonsense like this, and I don't know if you're simply not well informed about the nature of these technologies, or you don't care and are making arguments because of ideology that you think will work propagandistically. I mean, I guess ofr many people they don't care that they aren't the same thing, they can just pretend like they are in debates like this, right? I really don't know which. I keep hearing people claim that Apple stole from Xerox[1] and here you imply that the palm might have come before the newton and that it is up for debate. What's next? The Mac stole from windows? Seriously, what level of basic understanding of the history and nature of these technologies can I expect here on Hacker News? And do you get off the hook for repeating this nonsense simply because it fits your anti-apple ideology? [1] I shouldn't need this footnote, but due to the aforementioned ignorance or dishonesty, I do. Apple licensed Xerox's early research into what later became the GUI by selling them pre-IPO Apple stock which made Xerox a pretty penny and would be worth over a billion now if they had never sold it.
    - eropple 14y ago
      None of those have a touch based UI. Touch means finger touches. This is dishonestly revisionist, given how common it was to see people thumbing through applications on Palm devices. That Palms came with styluses doesn't mean that they weren't touch-friendly in a lot of ways, and that should be taken into account.
      - tomjakubowski 14y ago
        Since I don't know, I thought I'd ask -- were Apple the first to create a multi-touch UI for a phone? That would seem to me to be the major innovation in touch UI if that's the case.
        vlisivka 14y ago
        No. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch
        catch23 14y ago
        I believe so, according to wikipedia, no other multi-touch phones existed before the iphone.
        eropple 14y ago
        Apple was neither the first to create a multi-touch user interface (the first consumer multitouch device I know of was the Lemur, but I'm sure that was predated) nor the first to put it in a handheld PDA-ish device or a phone (LG beat the iPhone to market with the Prada--which, incidentally, also used very few physical buttons in favor of software buttons). The entire argument in favor of Apple's patents is bullshit, and nirvana has a history of bad-faith fanboyism on the topic.
        corin_ 14y ago
        I could be wrong (?) but I think the first Prada was capacitive but not multi-touch.
- mark_integerdsv 14y ago
  Just like to add that there are innovations in terms of manufacturing that affect the marketplace at large that are solely due to Apple requirements. I'm talking about Gorilla Glass (factory funded by Apple so the inventor of the substance could churn it out for iPhones) and now Retina displays. Did Samsung build their own Retina production plant? I also don't buy that essentially saying: "go find your own way to do this." Stifles innovation. Quite the opposite IMO.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- SimHacker 14y ago
  Oh bullshit. We were doing finger operated gesture user interface on the Palm in 2000 (pie menus on virtual buttons for consumer electronic IR remote control interfaces). Lots of people were using touch screens with finger gestures. The Palm included a stylus, but if the interface was designed correctly you could certainly use it with your fingers, and pie menus (self revealing gestures) worked just fine, and there is lots of older prior art and research about touch screen pie menus and gestures.
  - vidarh 14y ago
    It didn't take much to allow using the Palm with fingers - I used to write on it with my fingers rather than the stylus because I found it more convenient and still accurate enough.
  - nirvana 14y ago
    Yes, and the telephone existed before cellphones, but that doesn't mean the cellphone wasn't innovative. Your argument doesn't address the point, and is a bullshit rationalization for a claim you can't support. I refuse to believe you are so stupid as to think that is a rebuttal.
    - lilsunnybee 14y ago
      At least (s)he wasn't resorting to ad hominem. How about you keep things on topic when debating?
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  Microsoft developed the "old" Surface (now called PixelSense) at the same time Apple was working on the iPhone. Both were released in very early 2007 after years of R&D work. Both had multitouch UIs of the type you seem to think are so innovative. Both arrived at these solutions at the same time because the wide availability of capacitive touchscreens (which neither MS nor Apple invented, mind you -- capacitive and multitouch tech was being done in lab environments back in the late-70s/early-80s by CERN, Bell Labs and others) made such UIs an obvious next step to anyone paying attention to the field. Apple made billions off the iPhone while MS made peanuts off the Surface solely because of how each tried to bring their respective takes on the product to market. I give Apple all the credit in the world for knowing how to package technology up for mainstream use and bring it in at a price point the masses can afford, while Microsoft was dicking around with giant table size systems (primarily because being burned by the stylus-touch tablet market early, they had stupidly convinced themselves that general consumers didn't want touch at all) but you're totally wrong about this tech being completely innovative and non-existing before Apple came down from the mountain and presented it to us, because that isn't how it went down at all. For someone who seems to have so little grasp on the real history behind all this stuff you should be careful about calling other HN readers out as you do in a post below this one.
  - GHFigs 14y ago
    Both arrived at these solutions at the same time because the wide availability of capacitive touchscreens Strange conclusion, given that the original Microsoft Surface does not use a capacitive touchscreen.
    - corin_ 14y ago
      His parentheses made you miss the rest of his sentence. > Both arrived at these solutions at the same time because the wide availability of capacitive touchscreens (...) made such UIs an obvious next step to anyone paying attention to the field. He was saying that capacitive was inspiration to both, not used by both.
      - 14y ago
- ktizo 14y ago
  Bespoke touch oriented UI systems have been around for a very long time, some of them surprisingly sophisticated and innovative. A mate of mine used to do interfaces for touchscreen information kiosks, for instance.
  - joezydeco 14y ago
    100% agree. I used a touchscreen kiosk back in 1982 at EPCOT. It wasn't resistive, could have been capacitive, probably was infrared or surface-wave.
    - nirvana 14y ago
      And thus it is completely irrelevant to this discussion. You're making the "graham invented the telephone so there was nothing invented to make the cellphone" error.
      - regularfry 14y ago
        Except it's not irrelevant, because the user doesn't care whether it's capacitive, infra-red, or little gnomes perched on top of the screen translating your finger movements into magic spells. Apple didn't invent capacitive screens, nor did they invent multitouch. They packaged them cleverly and used what leverage they had at the time to force the price down.
  - nirvana 14y ago
    Right and Graham invented the telephone so there was no inventions going into making the cellphone.
    - ktizo 14y ago
      There were phone handsets with buttons on before cordless phones, so as far as the UI goes, there was little major invention initially. The main inventive requirement in touchscreen phones is in making small, thin, cheap touchscreen modules. The UI concepts that then run on those kinds of devices have however been the subject of design studies for decades before that, and have been implemented in various forms on commercial touchscreen installations. Also, much of the graphic polish of many of these devices seem to draw a direct lineage to stuff like the old praystation series of websites by Joshua Davis and his experiments with tsunami menus and inertial scrolling elements.
- nivla 14y ago
  >Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them. Umm... I guess you never used a kiosk before the Iphone then. Calling someone lego assembler is not necessarily a bad thing. You can put two and two together and create great things but people are bound to copy great things and make it better. That is how innovation drives forward. Ever heard of the phrase "Reinventing the wheel"? Well, if everybody had patents on their "wheel", then everyone else has to waste their time and resources on reinventing the wheel. Like, Reddit was 4chan and Digg put together with better improvements. Putting two and two might make u a lego assembler but the end result isn't that bad!
  - nirvana 14y ago
    So, you're claiming that Apple licensed their touch UI from a koisk manufacturer? Do tell? Because if you're not saying that you're not being honest about what I said.
    - lotharbot 14y ago
      > "you're claiming that Apple licensed their touch UI" Obviously nobody in this thread is claiming such a thing. Perhaps they misunderstood your earlier point (or perhaps you made it poorly) and thus their counterpoints are irrelevant, but that is not the same thing. You should be more charitable and less trollish in the way you choose to disagree with others.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- vidarh 14y ago
  > Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them. I worked on a tablet in '99. I wrote the widget library (we used Nano-X plus a custom widget library and font loader to keep memory usage down - this was a unit with 32MB RAM...) and managed the developers who wrote the apps that are featured: http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/Linux-For-Devices-Articles/FreePad-Norways-alternative-to-Swedens-Screen-Phone/ http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/Linux-For-Devices-Article... (the names on the people in the phone book are names of actual employees of Screen Media at the time, actually - I'm there too) Notice how it is described: Not as something new, but as another entrant up against another product. Even in '99/'00 our touch based tablet was not a new idea. In fact, one of the companies that Screen Media was co-located with was a touch screen importer and distributorship that served as our major go-to guys for ideas and information about what the touch screens of the time were capable of - we didn't invent any of the ideas of this type of touch screen UI because we could go to our local touch screen distributor and ask what was common practice in the market already. The only remotely new thing (and at least Ericsson, and probably others, beat us there too) was to apply it to a tablet type device rather than a kiosk. We did use resistive touch screens, not capacitive, but the UI was most definitively "touch oriented" - there were no hard keys on the standard unit at all. Web browsing, phone functions, address books, e-mail, was all done via touch. The tablet used a port of Opera, and Opera subsequently introduced gestures in 2001, but while gestures was then new to browsers, that was not considered anything revolutionary either - just applying existing, known technology in a novel way. The idea that a "touch oriented UI" didn't exist before Apple developed it is fiction.
  - nirvana 14y ago
    The device you linked to has a touchscreen and a UI, but it is simply a desktop widgets and metaphors with the minimal adaptations necessary to make it work with a touch screen. None of the key metaphors or widgets Apple developed for iOS are present in that device. To claim that Apple didn't invent anything in iOS, and use that device as an example is to claim that there was nothing new in the iPhone because Alexanger Graham Bell had phones before. It is absurd. And to me, all it says is that you're desperate to rationalize this belief that Apple never invented anything. Remember: I'm rebutting the claim that Apple just assembled off the shelf pieces, like legos.
- eropple 14y ago
  Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them. How does the LG Prada exist in this strange world of yours, then?
  - nirvana 14y ago
    You're claiming the LG Prada runs an OS that Apple licensed from LG for the iPhone? Do tell. Apple didn't invent iOS? Really? By the way, the LG is not multitouch, it isn't even a smartphone. IF Apple had licensed it -- necessary for the claim that Apple just assembled lego blocks-- the iPhone would not work the way it does. %99 of the features would be missing.