5 ms·

I made this case last week. "Apple products are like a good classy restaurant or hotel chain. They take ingredients everyone has and put a lot of work into fit

by drats 14y ago

I made this case last week. "Apple products are like a good classy restaurant or hotel chain. They take ingredients everyone has and put a lot of work into fit and finish, they make the customer feel special for a slightly higher price."[1] And I stand by it. I'll go even further actually, I think Apple is one of the least innovative big companies. Look at all the big research labs at Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM or Google. Anyone who seriously follows this stuff knows a) Apple doesn't have a profile in the academic world and b) knows enough computer history to know Apple is claiming things invented decades ago. [1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4435504 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4435504

stephencanon 14y ago
It's clear that you didn't actually read the linked article, since it argues precisely the opposite.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
klawed 14y ago
in·no·va·tive/ˈinəˌvātiv/ Adjective: (of a product, idea, etc.) Featuring new methods; advanced and original. (of a person) Introducing new ideas; original and creative in thinking: "an innovative thinker". This definition does not tie innovation to invention. I think it would be hard to argue that Apple's work is not original relative to their competitors. Apple out-innovates their competitors in marketing, in supply chain management, in product lifecycle management and in design. It's impossible to invent every (or even most) components of a general purpose computer. But to select the right pieces, assemble them in a way that maximizes user experience and market them in a way that makes them stand apart from competitors' products made with almost the same components - that's innovation, just the same way that Netflix' model for mailing DVDs (they didn't invent the mailbox, the postal service or the DVD) was extremely innovative.
- 001sky 14y ago
  Perhaps another example of original innovation: the swiss army knife. Look at a victorinox. Look at a knife, a corscrew, a scissor, a toothpick, and a tweezer sitting on the desk. Sometimes an act of integration is enough to be transformative. iOS is a great example of radical originality, even if not a breakthrough technically. The Concept of the ap - a litewight, bandwidth efficient, modular, reconfigurable element integrated into the OS - was certainly original. It was also thus, highly innovative. It was reductive smaller, lighter, less complex. Edit: clarity
  - eckyptang 14y ago
    No iOS has been done before, as has the iPad. It's nowhere near original. http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Computers/NC.html#NewsPAD http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Computers/NC.html#NewsPAD Note the features here: ARM CPU, Touch screen, Contextual media app, "Apps" button down the bottom, self contained apps which were modular, integrated into the OS. I know the OS well (RISC OS) and I've had my hands on an actual device. It was smaller and lighter and less complex than anything else technologically possible at the time. The basis was an EU funded project to build something like an iPad. Notes here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_computer#NewsPad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_computer#NewsPad Arthur C Clarke innovated this particular nugget of technology. Apple has invented or innovated precisely bugger all there. Their only innovation is how to make it look pretty and extract money from people.
    - gnaffle 14y ago
      So I guess with your insight Apple could have saved lots of money by not buying FingerWorks, PA Semi etc and just launching a Newton with a color display and make it look pretty. Right? If you don't see any software innovations in iOS, you're either blinded by Apple hate or unable to see further than checkboxes on feature lists.
      - eckyptang 14y ago
        I don't see how you managed to draw that conclusion. I didn't mention anything about money etc. I see it more like...well: Sony have been doing this sort of shit for years. Someone invents something, Sony adds turd polish and a decent supply chain and manufacturing capacity, then takes the market share. Apple just got better at it than Sony. There is no more story. For ref, I neither hate nor like iOS devices - I've owned a couple and they've been pretty ok but nothing special. I can't see a single feature or innovation that didn't exist already somewhere else. The same applies for my current Windows Phone (the only innovation there is abysmal battery life - no wait my Treo 180G pioneered that in 2002). Also, if a feature isn't a checkbox on a feature list, why do they market it like that? http://www.apple.com/iphone/ios/ http://www.apple.com/iphone/ios/
gnaffle 14y ago
I think it's better to compare Apple to a high-end restaurant. You don't get three Michelin stars just by making the customer feel special and having lots of fit and finish, the food also has to be something special. Yet still, of course there are lots of people that will claim that those restaurants can't possibly be worth the price, and _has_ to be mostly about making the customers feel special, after all they use the same basic ingredients as the restaurant around the corner.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  "the food also has to be something special" "those restaurants can't possibly be worth the price" First off, there is more to a dinning experience than the quality of the food, so even if the food is the same a price increase can be justified. You could serve me a McDonald's hamburger for 20USD and leave me satisfied with the transaction provided the burger was not all that I was getting... That burger would not be worth 20USD, but that would not necessarily say anything about the worth of the establishment itself. Regardless, the question is not if the expensive food at high quality restaurants is particularly good, but rather "What is the relationship between quality and price?" In the case of high class establishments, the food is certainly good and the price is certainly high. Is that a linear relationship though? The 50USD burger is undoubtedly better than many 5USD burgers, but is it 10x better? Furthermore, does higher quality food always cause the same sort of price inflation? Or is it possible that similarly superb food sold at undoubtedly higher prices at a restaurant without the other things that high class establishments offer would likely be cheaper? I would even dare state that, to some extent, high price can actually be one of the desirable services that a restaurant can offer. If you happen to be more concerned with appearances than (in the grand scheme of things) a small amount of money, then being expensive for expense's sake can be a feature.
  - gnaffle 14y ago
    Of course, all of what you say is true. But I think it's difficult to quantify quality differences like that. For instance, when watching the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi, I had a hard time thinking that a sushi meal could be worth more than $400 (starting price). It would certainly be wasted money on me, since I'm not a big sushi fan. But to the reviewers, apparently it was worth a dedicated trip to just eat there, so they would probably say yes if asked if it was 10x better than a $40 sushi meal.
chimmy 14y ago
I do not fully agree with no-innovation comment. Many of their products, such as the iphone were indeed innovative. I however, do agree with the latter that it has no footprint of its contributions. Research, and computing in general, builds on others work and in that sense apple comes as across as a douchebag - no white papers, publications or even blogs from employees. Only public documentation is usually served by an army of lawyers. Until a year ago, they had steve jobs to justify this selfish behavior. And now there is no steve jobs and such behavior will create a huge PR hit for apple. Unless they can create a fantastic product record pre-jobs, it will be very hard. For example, the first feature sans jobs was Siri and it wasn't an universal success by any means. Good time to buy microsoft stock.
potatolicious 14y ago
UI and UX are innovations. The silly notion that only hard, technical inventions with academic papers attached are innovative is the reason why Apple has eaten everyone's lunch up till now. "Fit and finish" is as innovative as a new algorithm, it's shocking how much of the industry still treats it as a footnote and a detail, despite the entire history of the tech world since iPhone 1 would indicate.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  > The silly notion that only hard, technical inventions with academic papers attached are innovative is the reason why Apple has eaten everyone's lunch up till now. No, the reason why Apple has eaten's everyone's lunch up till now is because they're interested in being profitable, not innovative. The GP is correct in stating that Apple isn't innovative - they just take other people's innovations and monetize them by polishing things up and running effective ad campaigns to gain marketshare among the masses. And there's nothing at all wrong with that - if your primary interest is making money.
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    > "take other people's innovations and monetize them by polishing things up" The devil is in the polishing up, evidently. Your post is almost scarily indicative of the industry attitude that has allowed Apple to take over to the degree they have. Only hard, technical inventions are given any respect, and when we talk about UX we call it "polishing up", almost spitting those words out of our mouths in condescension. Are you seriously going to hold up a clickwheel and say it wasn't innovative? Or the iPhone? Or the iPad? The fact that these products look and behave almost nothing like their progenitor technologies doesn't indicate innovation to you? It really disturbs me how little respect us geeks have for the people who consume our products. When the general public votes with their wallet in a landslide victory for Apple, we blame them for being easily manipulable by slick ad campaigns and shiny baubles. The notion that Apple has actually satisfied a long-standing demand is somehow not allowed to enter this discourse.
    - 14y ago
arrrg 14y ago
In the first two paragraphs you seem to say that they innovate while you deny that in the last paragraph. Perfecting fit and finish is quite obviously innovation.
- zizee 14y ago
  Perfecting fit and finish is quite obviously innovation. But is it patentable?
  - arrrg 14y ago
    That’s a simple question for me. I think all patents should be abolished.
- kybernetikos 14y ago
  The way I use the word, I usually intend it to mean covering a completely new idea. For me, execution, no matter how superior can never be innovative. It can of course be important, world changing, profitable, etc. If I say that the ipad is not innovative, I mean precisely that there was no element of it that was an implementation of a completely new idea, but I don't mean to suggest that what Apple did with it is not amazing and transformative. So yes, for me, innovative is usually a very high bar. Jobs saw the mouse at Xerox and knew it was an idea whose time had come. The first mouse was innovative. The first optical mouse was innovative. The first mouse that reduced the number of buttons to one or reduced the cost to $30 was pragmatic and clever but not innovative.
  - lttlrck 14y ago
    what about the magic mouse? If you think making mice optical was innovative it'll be hard to say that wasn't....
smartkids 14y ago
Yes, but perhaps _making things easy to use_ and _sexy hardware design_ might have something to do with their success? The problem with the research labs at those example companies you cited is that those businesses have little incentive to introduce innovation that would compete with "yesterday's ideas" that are driving their profits. This is why Bell Labs was so unique. They could basically do whatever they wanted (you might try to make the same claim with your example companies, perhaps) _but_ ... they also managed to release these ideas into the market. And not always to the satisfaction of AT&T. People once had to pay for UNIX. Not anymore. Xerox PARC is another well-known case where people were "set free" to work on whatever they wanted. But their ideas did not manage to trickle out to the market very well. Instead, Microsoft got one of their key people, Excel was born and the rest is history. Apple is _not_ an idea factory. If someone called them two-timing thieves and told us to watch our backs, I would be inclined to take it seriously. (The fact that Apple is not the idea factory is why the lawsuits are so offensive to anyone who knows anything about the history of computers. If these sort of broad patents should go to anyone, it should be people like the ones who worked at Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. But maybe patents were not their priority. Maybe they were more interested in research, or playing computer games, than money. [How many UNIX patents? 1?] Go figure.) But, Apple is a design house. An within IT, they do not have lots of competition in that area: e.g. design of hardware casings. In addition they go to great lengths to make the great ideas (namely the flexibility and stability of UNIX-like systems) easy to use. Another area that is lacking in IT: making the good stuff (like UNIX) easy to use. Unfortunately Apple feels the need to abuse the patent system to stay on top. It makes me think if they didn't they might be in for a big fall. Maybe they are surprised at their own success? And nervous about losing the top spot? Incidentally you could argue IBM started all this software patent nonsense. Not sure many programmers would agree with you, but the number of filings and issued patents by IBM, most of them before Microsoft even had a patent department, tells the story quite clearly. You are not going to see much innovation released from "research labs" at the likes of Microsoft or those other companies. They will not keep their patent department in the dark. Those guys want to keep their jobs, not take risks. "Microsoft Research" or "Google Labs" are not Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. It's a wonder that something like Kinect was even made into a product. And you could see how nervous they were about it. Today, the "labs" and the idea factory is the world wild web. That's where the risks are taken.
mtgx 14y ago
I think you're referring more to invention than innovation. I think innovation is more about bringing something new and good to the market. The last part "to the market" is the most important part in the whole "innovation" process. There are a lot of inventions, especially in those R&D labs you mention, but they rarely come to market, or are good enough for the regular consumer to use.
podperson 14y ago
It's a heck of a lot more than "fit and finish". This is just another way of dismissing what Apple does as frippery. A Mont Blanc pen is prettier than a bic biro, but it doesn't really write any better. A fabulous meal is probably not as good for you as plate of boiled vegetables.

by drats 14y ago

stephencanon 14y ago

It's clear that you didn't actually read the linked article, since it argues precisely the opposite.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

klawed 14y ago

in·no·va·tive/ˈinəˌvātiv/ Adjective: (of a product, idea, etc.) Featuring new methods; advanced and original. (of a person) Introducing new ideas; original and creative in thinking: "an innovative thinker". This definition does not tie innovation to invention. I think it would be hard to argue that Apple's work is not original relative to their competitors. Apple out-innovates their competitors in marketing, in supply chain management, in product lifecycle management and in design. It's impossible to invent every (or even most) components of a general purpose computer. But to select the right pieces, assemble them in a way that maximizes user experience and market them in a way that makes them stand apart from competitors' products made with almost the same components - that's innovation, just the same way that Netflix' model for mailing DVDs (they didn't invent the mailbox, the postal service or the DVD) was extremely innovative.

001sky 14y ago
Perhaps another example of original innovation: the swiss army knife. Look at a victorinox. Look at a knife, a corscrew, a scissor, a toothpick, and a tweezer sitting on the desk. Sometimes an act of integration is enough to be transformative. iOS is a great example of radical originality, even if not a breakthrough technically. The Concept of the ap - a litewight, bandwidth efficient, modular, reconfigurable element integrated into the OS - was certainly original. It was also thus, highly innovative. It was reductive smaller, lighter, less complex. Edit: clarity
- eckyptang 14y ago
  No iOS has been done before, as has the iPad. It's nowhere near original. http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Computers/NC.html#NewsPAD http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Computers/NC.html#NewsPAD Note the features here: ARM CPU, Touch screen, Contextual media app, "Apps" button down the bottom, self contained apps which were modular, integrated into the OS. I know the OS well (RISC OS) and I've had my hands on an actual device. It was smaller and lighter and less complex than anything else technologically possible at the time. The basis was an EU funded project to build something like an iPad. Notes here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_computer#NewsPad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_computer#NewsPad Arthur C Clarke innovated this particular nugget of technology. Apple has invented or innovated precisely bugger all there. Their only innovation is how to make it look pretty and extract money from people.
  - gnaffle 14y ago
    So I guess with your insight Apple could have saved lots of money by not buying FingerWorks, PA Semi etc and just launching a Newton with a color display and make it look pretty. Right? If you don't see any software innovations in iOS, you're either blinded by Apple hate or unable to see further than checkboxes on feature lists.
    - eckyptang 14y ago
      I don't see how you managed to draw that conclusion. I didn't mention anything about money etc. I see it more like...well: Sony have been doing this sort of shit for years. Someone invents something, Sony adds turd polish and a decent supply chain and manufacturing capacity, then takes the market share. Apple just got better at it than Sony. There is no more story. For ref, I neither hate nor like iOS devices - I've owned a couple and they've been pretty ok but nothing special. I can't see a single feature or innovation that didn't exist already somewhere else. The same applies for my current Windows Phone (the only innovation there is abysmal battery life - no wait my Treo 180G pioneered that in 2002). Also, if a feature isn't a checkbox on a feature list, why do they market it like that? http://www.apple.com/iphone/ios/ http://www.apple.com/iphone/ios/

gnaffle 14y ago

I think it's better to compare Apple to a high-end restaurant. You don't get three Michelin stars just by making the customer feel special and having lots of fit and finish, the food also has to be something special. Yet still, of course there are lots of people that will claim that those restaurants can't possibly be worth the price, and _has_ to be mostly about making the customers feel special, after all they use the same basic ingredients as the restaurant around the corner.

jlgreco 14y ago
"the food also has to be something special" "those restaurants can't possibly be worth the price" First off, there is more to a dinning experience than the quality of the food, so even if the food is the same a price increase can be justified. You could serve me a McDonald's hamburger for 20USD and leave me satisfied with the transaction provided the burger was not all that I was getting... That burger would not be worth 20USD, but that would not necessarily say anything about the worth of the establishment itself. Regardless, the question is not if the expensive food at high quality restaurants is particularly good, but rather "What is the relationship between quality and price?" In the case of high class establishments, the food is certainly good and the price is certainly high. Is that a linear relationship though? The 50USD burger is undoubtedly better than many 5USD burgers, but is it 10x better? Furthermore, does higher quality food always cause the same sort of price inflation? Or is it possible that similarly superb food sold at undoubtedly higher prices at a restaurant without the other things that high class establishments offer would likely be cheaper? I would even dare state that, to some extent, high price can actually be one of the desirable services that a restaurant can offer. If you happen to be more concerned with appearances than (in the grand scheme of things) a small amount of money, then being expensive for expense's sake can be a feature.
- gnaffle 14y ago
  Of course, all of what you say is true. But I think it's difficult to quantify quality differences like that. For instance, when watching the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi, I had a hard time thinking that a sushi meal could be worth more than $400 (starting price). It would certainly be wasted money on me, since I'm not a big sushi fan. But to the reviewers, apparently it was worth a dedicated trip to just eat there, so they would probably say yes if asked if it was 10x better than a $40 sushi meal.

chimmy 14y ago

I do not fully agree with no-innovation comment. Many of their products, such as the iphone were indeed innovative. I however, do agree with the latter that it has no footprint of its contributions. Research, and computing in general, builds on others work and in that sense apple comes as across as a douchebag - no white papers, publications or even blogs from employees. Only public documentation is usually served by an army of lawyers. Until a year ago, they had steve jobs to justify this selfish behavior. And now there is no steve jobs and such behavior will create a huge PR hit for apple. Unless they can create a fantastic product record pre-jobs, it will be very hard. For example, the first feature sans jobs was Siri and it wasn't an universal success by any means. Good time to buy microsoft stock.

potatolicious 14y ago

UI and UX are innovations. The silly notion that only hard, technical inventions with academic papers attached are innovative is the reason why Apple has eaten everyone's lunch up till now. "Fit and finish" is as innovative as a new algorithm, it's shocking how much of the industry still treats it as a footnote and a detail, despite the entire history of the tech world since iPhone 1 would indicate.

w1ntermute 14y ago
> The silly notion that only hard, technical inventions with academic papers attached are innovative is the reason why Apple has eaten everyone's lunch up till now. No, the reason why Apple has eaten's everyone's lunch up till now is because they're interested in being profitable, not innovative. The GP is correct in stating that Apple isn't innovative - they just take other people's innovations and monetize them by polishing things up and running effective ad campaigns to gain marketshare among the masses. And there's nothing at all wrong with that - if your primary interest is making money.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  > "take other people's innovations and monetize them by polishing things up" The devil is in the polishing up, evidently. Your post is almost scarily indicative of the industry attitude that has allowed Apple to take over to the degree they have. Only hard, technical inventions are given any respect, and when we talk about UX we call it "polishing up", almost spitting those words out of our mouths in condescension. Are you seriously going to hold up a clickwheel and say it wasn't innovative? Or the iPhone? Or the iPad? The fact that these products look and behave almost nothing like their progenitor technologies doesn't indicate innovation to you? It really disturbs me how little respect us geeks have for the people who consume our products. When the general public votes with their wallet in a landslide victory for Apple, we blame them for being easily manipulable by slick ad campaigns and shiny baubles. The notion that Apple has actually satisfied a long-standing demand is somehow not allowed to enter this discourse.
  - 14y ago

arrrg 14y ago

In the first two paragraphs you seem to say that they innovate while you deny that in the last paragraph. Perfecting fit and finish is quite obviously innovation.

zizee 14y ago
Perfecting fit and finish is quite obviously innovation. But is it patentable?
- arrrg 14y ago
  That’s a simple question for me. I think all patents should be abolished.
kybernetikos 14y ago
The way I use the word, I usually intend it to mean covering a completely new idea. For me, execution, no matter how superior can never be innovative. It can of course be important, world changing, profitable, etc. If I say that the ipad is not innovative, I mean precisely that there was no element of it that was an implementation of a completely new idea, but I don't mean to suggest that what Apple did with it is not amazing and transformative. So yes, for me, innovative is usually a very high bar. Jobs saw the mouse at Xerox and knew it was an idea whose time had come. The first mouse was innovative. The first optical mouse was innovative. The first mouse that reduced the number of buttons to one or reduced the cost to $30 was pragmatic and clever but not innovative.
- lttlrck 14y ago
  what about the magic mouse? If you think making mice optical was innovative it'll be hard to say that wasn't....

smartkids 14y ago

Yes, but perhaps _making things easy to use_ and _sexy hardware design_ might have something to do with their success? The problem with the research labs at those example companies you cited is that those businesses have little incentive to introduce innovation that would compete with "yesterday's ideas" that are driving their profits. This is why Bell Labs was so unique. They could basically do whatever they wanted (you might try to make the same claim with your example companies, perhaps) _but_ ... they also managed to release these ideas into the market. And not always to the satisfaction of AT&T. People once had to pay for UNIX. Not anymore. Xerox PARC is another well-known case where people were "set free" to work on whatever they wanted. But their ideas did not manage to trickle out to the market very well. Instead, Microsoft got one of their key people, Excel was born and the rest is history. Apple is _not_ an idea factory. If someone called them two-timing thieves and told us to watch our backs, I would be inclined to take it seriously. (The fact that Apple is not the idea factory is why the lawsuits are so offensive to anyone who knows anything about the history of computers. If these sort of broad patents should go to anyone, it should be people like the ones who worked at Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. But maybe patents were not their priority. Maybe they were more interested in research, or playing computer games, than money. [How many UNIX patents? 1?] Go figure.) But, Apple is a design house. An within IT, they do not have lots of competition in that area: e.g. design of hardware casings. In addition they go to great lengths to make the great ideas (namely the flexibility and stability of UNIX-like systems) easy to use. Another area that is lacking in IT: making the good stuff (like UNIX) easy to use. Unfortunately Apple feels the need to abuse the patent system to stay on top. It makes me think if they didn't they might be in for a big fall. Maybe they are surprised at their own success? And nervous about losing the top spot? Incidentally you could argue IBM started all this software patent nonsense. Not sure many programmers would agree with you, but the number of filings and issued patents by IBM, most of them before Microsoft even had a patent department, tells the story quite clearly. You are not going to see much innovation released from "research labs" at the likes of Microsoft or those other companies. They will not keep their patent department in the dark. Those guys want to keep their jobs, not take risks. "Microsoft Research" or "Google Labs" are not Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. It's a wonder that something like Kinect was even made into a product. And you could see how nervous they were about it. Today, the "labs" and the idea factory is the world wild web. That's where the risks are taken.

mtgx 14y ago

I think you're referring more to invention than innovation. I think innovation is more about bringing something new and good to the market. The last part "to the market" is the most important part in the whole "innovation" process. There are a lot of inventions, especially in those R&D labs you mention, but they rarely come to market, or are good enough for the regular consumer to use.

podperson 14y ago

It's a heck of a lot more than "fit and finish". This is just another way of dismissing what Apple does as frippery. A Mont Blanc pen is prettier than a bic biro, but it doesn't really write any better. A fabulous meal is probably not as good for you as plate of boiled vegetables.