6 Things Apple Did Not Invent


Apple receives — and deserves — a lot of respect. They’re absolutely incredible innovators… But were they really the first to envision, manufacture, or sell many of the tech products we take for granted today?

An Apple-loathing friend told me over the weekend that my favorite tech company “ripped off” loads of other tech companies with all of their most popular products. He said they weren’t really the “first” to market with much of anything. I was riled, and certain he was wrong. So I did some digging. Much to my surprise… it turns out, he was right.

That’s not to say that Apple doesn’t deserve its accolades. Where Apple’s many competitors preoccupy themselves with function, Apple is equally concerned with form. Other companies have never put much emphasis on the user experience, Apple’s approach to everything it does is to design software and hardware with the user in mind. The competition may have gotten there first in many cases, but Apple refined and perfected the entire product class.

There’s a reason every tech company in the world follows Apple’s lead, rushing new products to market to compete with Apple’s latest and greatest products. But as my friend pointed out… We shouldn’t assign more credit to Cupertino than they deserve.

Personal Computers

Micral N

Who was first: Depending on who you talk to and who you believe, there are several claims to the throne of the “first personal computer.” There were “microcomputers,” BASIC computers, even computers that came in kits that you had to assemble yourself. My research indicates that the Micral N, from French company R2E was the earliest commercial, non-kit PC to be based on a microprocessor. It was used in niche markets for “process control,” but was never intended for public use.

Apple II

What Apple did: Most historians seem to agree that the Apple II was the first truly successful personal computer to be mass produced, though some will argue that the Commodore PET, which preceded the Apple II by five months. Sales figures are hard to come by for the Commodore PET, but they don’t appear to be anywhere close to the Apple II’s cumulative sales, which topped out at six million before it was discontinued in 1993.

Portable Digital Music Players

Audio Highway's "Listen Up"

Who was first: A company called Audio Highway was the first to manufacture a portable digital music player. Dubbed the “Listen Up” player, it hit the market in September of 1997, but Audio Highway never mass produced them, making only 25 units. The first digital music player to be mass produced was the “MPMan” player by South Korean company Saehan Information Systems. It became available in April 1998, but it could only hold about six songs. Several other companies subsequently introduced digital music devices, including Diamond, Compaq, Creative, and more. Apple’s first-generation iPod didn’t come along until 2001.

iPod

What Apple did: Apple created a product that was significantly smaller and sleeker than its competitors, with a minimalistic user interface that encapsulated the company’s design philosophy for the next decade and beyond. The “click wheel,” in true Apple fashion, made navigating one’s music collection easy and even fun. (It could be argued that the click wheel was a precursor to the modern touchscreen interface.) Once iTunes came along, Apple became the first company to have an integrated ecosystem for both purchasing digital media and then easily transferring that media to a dedicated device. The iPod became such an enormous success that its name is now synonymous with an entire product class.

Online Music/Media Store

Ritmoteca.com

Who was first: It’s easy to assume that iTunes was the first online music store because it was such an enormous success. But the first true online music store was Ritmoteca.com, which debuted in 1998. Although it initially specialized primarily in Latin music, it eventually grew to encompass a much larger library of music, with a catalog of more than 300,000 songs. Ritmoteca.com lays claim to a number of firsts — all of which Apple would later use in iTunes. Among them: it organized songs by album; it sold individual songs for $.99 and full albums for $9.99; it offered 30-second preview clips; it allowed customers to download songs and burn them onto a CD; and it was the first to sign distribution deals with major music distributors like BMG, Sony, Universal, and Warner. It’s also remembered for being the first online store to utilize a GUI (graphical user interface) for browsing and purchasing digital media files. Sadly, Ritmoteca.com was hit hard by the dotcom bubble crash and the rise of Napster. It closed in 2005.

iTunes Store

What Apple did: As with most of its products, Apple may not have been the first to market with its digital media store, but Apple was the first one to get it right. After Ritmoteca.com, all of the major music publishers attempted to create their own digital media stores, but every one ended in disaster — mostly due to DRM issues and outrageously high prices (Sony famously priced singles on its store at a whopping $3.50 per song!). And then came Napster. We all know what happened next: the music biz panicked in the face of “file-sharing” downloads that went around them and cost nothing, Napster was sued out the wazoo and forced to shut down, and music lovers were left without a reliable source of music downloads. Until iTunes came along. Initially it was available only to Mac users, but Apple wisely opened it to Windows users as well just five months after launch, and the rest is history. Steve Jobs told the world in one of his signature keynote moments that it turns out that most people really do want to pay for and download songs legally — they’d just been waiting on someone to make it possible. As he often did, Jobs saw the future before anyone else did, and seized the moment. Apple became the world’s leading music vendor in 2010, iTunes changed the entire music industry forever, and the success of the powerhouse combo of iPod and iTunes transformed “Apple Computers” into “Apple, Inc.”

Smartphones

IBM Simon

Who was first: The word “smartphone” was coined in 1997 to describe a concept phone by Ericsson called the GS88, but the first true smartphone came four years earlier. IBM’s Simon, released in 1993, was the world’s first real smartphone, running not only mobile phone technology but also an address book, calendar, calculator, email client, fax, games, note pad, and world clock. Remarkably, it also featured a touchscreen, albeit a primitive one by today’s standards.

iPhone

What Apple did: After Simon, other companies like Palm, Nokia, and RIM got into the smartphone game. In 2007, the first iPhone debuted, and it rocked the world with its huge touchscreen, sexy steel-and-glass design, and all-in-one features (it also incorporated the ability to listen to music, watch videos, etc.). It was the first smartphone to use a multi-touch display, bringing loads of innovations along with it that still influence handheld devices of all kinds. When the App Store arrived a year later, it marked the first time that apps could be purchased from and installed directly onto a handheld device without the need to sync with a computer. Android devices hit the market about a year after the iPhone, and instantly the two smartphones became the leading contenders for the smartphone throne — and bitter rivals. (The debate rages on about whether Android or iOS came first; it’s difficult to say because their earliest “drawing board” origins date back to around the same time in 2003.) But the iPhone’s arrival was the magic moment that Apple had been waiting for since its birth, a convergence of everything that makes Apple stand out — its design philosophy, its innovation, Jobs’ uncanny knack for predicting the future, and more — in a single device. It inspired fan devotion on levels that Apple had long desired but never been able to achieve. Put simply, the iPhone was the first consumer gadget outside of a video game console to cause wrap-around-the-block lines of customers to wait hours or even days on end because they were so eager to get their hands on it.

Touchscreens

G. Samuel Hurst, inventor of the touchscreen

Who was first: Touch-sensitive screens have become a fairly common part of our everyday lives. Apple certainly deserves its share of the credit for leveraging them as a feasible user interface, but would you believe the first touchscreen was created all the way back in 1965. An inventor named G. Samuel Hurst created the first touchscreen and published his work in 1967. It was never manufactured for consumers. The first touchscreen consumer device worth mentioning was the Nintendo DS game console in 2004. But even that device’s screen was rather old-school, as it could only sense a single point of contact. Multitouch arrived early in the 21st Centur in the form of table-sized devices like Microsoft’s Surface.

John Elias and Wayne Westerman, founders of Fingerworks

What Apple did: One of the great modern pioneers of multitouch technologies was a company named Fingerworks, founded in 1998. They manufactured multitouch input devices like keyboards and “gesture pads.” Probably sensing the potential in blending multitouch technology and display screens, Steve Jobs had Apple purchase Fingerworks in 2005. The first product to come out of this innovation was the original iPhone. Apple has gone on to make multitouch displays a cornerstone of its “post-PC” devices. By the way… Seven years after that acquisition, the two men who founded Fingerworks are still senior engineers at Apple.

Tablet Computers

Microsoft Tablet PC

Who was first: Apple’s old rival, Microsoft, was the first company to mass produce a tablet computer, with its Microsoft Tablet PC back in 2002. This new class of product ran a specialized version of Windows XP, sometimes converted between a laptop and a tablet with a swiveling screen, and always came with a stylus. Try as they might to lead the tablet revolution, Microsoft’s tablets never caught on outside of niche markets like hospital workers or designers.

iPad

What Apple did: Apple learned a lot from Microsoft’s mistakes, and basically succeeded in every area where Microsoft failed. The Windows devices were focused mainly on content creation, where the iPad is largely dedicated to content consumption. Apple ditched the stylus, doggedly in favor of finger input (though styluses can be purchased from third-party vendors). These two factors put the focus on intuitive human interaction; manipulating virtual objects on Apple’s touchscreen was just like interacting with objects in real life. This simplicity, elegance, and ease-of-use (Apple doesn’t ship the iPad with a user manual, because “you already know how to use it”) made for a far more appealing device. Sweetening the deal was the iPad’s price; it started at just $499, a drastically lower price point than Microsoft’s expensive tablets. In the end, using an iPad literally felt like playing with technology from the future. Microsoft’s tablets may have been decent tools, but Apple’s were more like cool toys. But that was only the beginning. In the last year or so, the public has embraced the iPads as a real productivity device, implementing them in offices, hospitals, schools, and much more.


Kokou Adzo

Kokou Adzo is a stalwart in the tech journalism community, has been chronicling the ever-evolving world of Apple products and innovations for over a decade. As a Senior Author at Apple Gazette, Kokou combines a deep passion for technology with an innate ability to translate complex tech jargon into relatable insights for everyday users.

58 Comments

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  1. “But were they really the first to envision, manufacture, or sell many of the tech products we take for granted today?”
    I don’t think it’s commonly held that Apple _was_ the first. I’m afraid you must’ve been under the influence of the Reality Distortion Field. šŸ™‚

    1. No, he isn’t.

      Apple wasn’t the first to manufacture.
      But Apple was the first to produce good products, and to make a commercial success.

    2. And just as Apple took one innovation and improved on it so did Samsung. And in a hypocritical fit of rage Apple sued Samsung for patent infringement, and due to the overwhelmingly biased environment, won a case that shouldn’t have even been determined by a jury

  2. Inventing is over rated and up there with Elephant hunting and victorian area. What matter is can you make a product people want and understand and Apple is good at that. Considering the guy who invented the Color TV died broke. Or Tesla which we tend to read and know as well as some of the incredible things he invented was basically destetute by the time he died. Inventing is fine if you can make money from it, but useless if its just to have a patent no one cares about.

    1. Samsung literally admitted to telling their designers to copy the iphone in wvry way possible

    2. It appears that you equate importance to the wealth it generates. How do you feel about Bill Gates? How would you feel about the guy who creates a cure for the common cold?

  3. Great article!

    Apple is proof that being the first to employ a new technology is not as important to success as being the first to do it right. Apple controls the whole widget which means that its products integrate numerous cutting edge technologies so that the whole is greater that the sum of its parts. Apple sells a complete user experience and not just not collection of specs and bullet points.

    1. Excellent point. Invention and implementation are two very different things, and Apple does the latter better than anyone.

    2. Improvisation & Marketing. I don’t believe any company does it better than Apple. Having said that, it all remains to be seen how this trend progresses in this (post-Jobs) era.

    3. No way, the only way apple even sells their product is good marketing it only sells because its popular not because it is good.Sony invented the first touchscreen smartphone,along with OLED screens,and Android is superior to IOS.

      I rest my case.

    4. Mr. Parrish, there’s one more thing I forgot to mention earlier. It’s rare to see an Author respond to comments. Keep up the good work. Happy Easter šŸ™‚

  4. You know, the Wright Brothers didn’t invent flight, either. There were lots of others. Balloons. Lighter than air craft. Many attempts were made.

    Innovations are dreamed of first by a whole culture. Various people make attempts. The Wright Brothers made huge contributions, and were most likely the first to take flight in a heaver-than-air craft. And of course, we now all fly on the Wright Airlines– oh, no, we don’t.

    Apple’s got a long history of making something that is the first to come close to the initial idea of a personal computer, or a music player, or a GUI, or a touchscreen smartphone. They’re rewarded by commercial success.

    I say the Apple haters are a lot like people who insist that flight was invented by the Soviet Union, or Britain or France, not by the ugly Americans. What they mean is, “we thought of it first.” Yes, and then brought out a truly ugly phone like the one in the picture.

  5. I don’t think Apple has claimed to be first to market with any of these, except the personal computer.

  6. Im a diehard Commodore aficionado, and I’ll be first in line to tell you it was the Tandy TRS-80 that “primed the pump” for the personal computer revolution in the united states. The Commore PET/CBM line (the entire series) , while a distant third in the US, reigned in the UK for business.

    Arguably, the most successful pre IBM PC personal computer, in terms of sales and number of households it introduced to the world of personal computing, is the Commodore 64. It outsold in its lifetime every Apple II model by an order of magnitude.

    Sales information is available at my website.

    1. But the Commodore 64 debuted 6 months after the IBM PC so it wasn’t pre-IBM PC. I was in to computers in those days an the Apple II ruled.

  7. Innovation is similar to design… you gather, find and allow things around you to inspire that concept into reality; building on many parts – piecing together influences and advancements that occur from New Technologies – borrowed at key moments in time and used in harmony within that special idea – to become realized and alive. And ultimately mass-produced and commercial for the public.
    That is innovating. Invent is a rather different process.

  8. I am sure that Fujitsu mass produced a tablet before microsoft did back in the 486 days as i had one and one of its replacement pentium models . it had a screen which responded to my finger (and the pentium one didnt oddly!) and the supplied stylus, came with changable batteries and a customised version of windows!
    https://pencomputing.com/features/fujitsus.html
    What has made the ipad a much better tablet is the advancement of technology to make a smaller faster tablet with a better screen! Apple just seem to know when the technology is at the right level to bring out a pretty good product which has a good consumer user experience.

  9. Mass market?
    The Apple Newton was a hand held, touch screen computer portable post pc – far before the PC Tablets. And I believe Apple sold enough Newtons to suggest it was mass marketed.

  10. @ Robin Parrish,

    Apple uses Multi-touch – not the basic single touch or pen press. Apple never claimed to have invented that and nor did Apple claim they invented the screens or the touch input.

    Apple patented the gestural inputs for the UI in accordance to the device they had developed and the new OS which ran it. Patents cover the gestures which came from FingerWorks who Apple bought out before the iPhone came alive. The Screen technology for Muti-Touch just so happened to become a breakthrough around the same the time iPhone OS was finished.

    Apple innovated these key processes and produced the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad from which adopted many other key technologies that Apple never invented also.

    1. I never meant to suggest that Apple invented these things or not… The point of the article was that these things are commonly attributed to Apple because they’ve had so much success with them.

    2. Actually Apple did claim to invent multi-touch. When presenting the iPhone in 2007 Steve Jobs said “”We have invented a new technology called ‘multi-touch’ which is phenomenal. It works like magic.” “Boy, have we patented it!”

      This is the issue. Most will agree Apple is exceptional at implementing technology better than anyone else. But they are patenting ideas and concepts that have been well developed by others (multi-touch, slide-to-unlock etc) and then aggressively trying to enforce those patents. They do indeed claim to invent things that they have no real right to. Also the patent system is broken and Apple is capitalizing on that with their vast financial resources.

  11. It just goes to show that with the right leader and teams in place, with imagination, tenacity, hard work and being visionary, that Apple figured out a way to make all of these things the right way, make them unique, desirable, something that people wanted and things that “just worked”. LOL

  12. The newton wasn’t a tablet computer but an organizer designed to compete with the psion one, but they chose to use a phrase which was coined later for all similar devices, PDA personal digital assistant, so not even claiming to be a computer more of a digital calender and note taker. so as far as i can see it cant be cited as the first tablet computer, i cant so far see any one older than about a pc 486 which would class as a tablet computer or even marketed as such. windows for pen computing released at the very beginning of the 1990s was an add on for windows 3.1 and these are the first systems which i would class as a true tablet computer. not organizers or pda’s, due to the fact that they were multi-functional and complex, although they did have a couple of the functions which would later be included in tablet computer

  13. A few other points Sony Ericsson using the Symbian software had a touchscreen phone (I800, I900 & I910) all came out before the iphone.
    The ipod & iphone also uses the same connector as the Creative devices
    Iphone name had to be purchased from another company before Apple could even consider launching the device.
    Apple stole the company name from Beatles and then busted the agreements they then setup with regards to music.

    Apple is very good at advertising and design and re-inventing technology/history

  14. How can anyone claim that a box w/toggles & switches that required an operating system be written & installed be called a personal computer? Wozniak’s wooden box w/typewriter keyboard implementation is the first design that deserves the title.

  15. I’ve been thinking why no company patented a portable personal computer (laptop) that has a monitor one side and a keypad on the other side, that can be opened and use as a computer and closed by folding into a briefcase? If a company does win such a patent, a table may be invented earlier. But we may need to pay a lot more for each.

  16. this is so stupid. Apple invented many things that your’e saying they didn’t invent.
    read they’re history before you post this kinds of stupid things.

    1. Ignorance, ladies and gentlemen, at its finest. Clearly you need to read a little more history, not the OP. You think Apple invented the personal computer, the smartphone, the tablet, the touchscreen, the media store, the portable music player? Prove it. You can’t without rewriting history. Go read a book, please, preferably one about sentence structure and grammar in the English language.

      Apple doesn’t “invent”, they innovate. They even say so themselves. Although I’m sure you were too distracted by the shininess of their products to actually listening to anything they said.

  17. When the App Store arrived a year later, it marked the first time that apps could be purchased from and installed directly onto a handheld device without the need to sync with a computer.

    Are you sure about the above? I have not researched it yet, but I think Symbian was able to purchase and download apps directly to the smartphone quite sometime before Apple implemented it. Nokia is a good example of what stands opposite Apple. A Giant (since fallen) with vast resources it used to innovate and invent new technologies but less skilled at applying and marketing those ideas and patents.

  18. A lot of crap. Seems like people forgot about Napster already, when they went from sharing to selling. And it was quite a large music shop with software pretty much.

    About tablets, I think comparing Tablet PC with tons of functions with an giant ipod is not much to say. I don’t think an oversize iPod can play games like a nice tablet PC can. The big difference is that you own a laptop for just web browsing, no dvd playing, installing heavy software, then get an iPad, otherwise get a laptop. For Tablet PC, I got one for drawing, as many did for the same purpose and others for using a digital signature. Not for just clicking with a pen on neopets and emails.

    They have applied technology that other people were making, and made but never got around getting patented as many don’t know, it is hard, due people at the patent office stopping you from, but take a look at the patent and documents and guess where do they end up with.

    They are a bunch of companies made out of thieves.

  19. There are too many Apple fanboys here. Apple isn’t the best and they’re NOT innovative. They release the same product every year and people grab their tents and rush to the closest Apple near them. I’m not an Apple hater, but it’s agitating watching you people think you have the absolute best that money can buy when you don’t.

    I meant look at Samsung’s latest phone: the Note 2. Now look at Apple’s latest phone: the i5. Apple consistently advertises the charging size, noise cancelation, 4 inch screen, and 4g LTE on the iPhone 5.

    The Note 2 has a small charger, two microphones (instead of i5’s one) for noise cancelation, has 5.5 inch screen, and of course 4g LTE. The Note 2 also also offers a plethora of features iPhone will never touch like NFC, split screen, motion controls, sense-eye, pop-up play, etc.

    iPhone 5 has a clear screen.

    Apple is quite behind in technology these days and the sooner you fanboys wake up, the sooner Apple will be forced to start making GOOD products. I feel sorry for all of you.

    1. There are too many Apple fanboys here.

      If only that were true, my work here would be done. šŸ˜‰

  20. You are an apple fanboy undercover. The greatest proof is the mp3 player.Mp3 players existed long before apple and until a few years ago there where like 300% better and nicer than any ipod. I know because I bought some. You only mention the first mp3 players without saying that a crative or iriver mp3 player not only gave you the same amount of songs (and more) than an ipod, but the sound quality was and is so much better. There are many such things, but this is the one I will comment because I had the opportunity to play with mp3 players and an ipod. The iPod sucks in every way. From the time that it takes for the battery to discharge, to the fact that you cannot use reserve batteries on it, to the fact that it does not hold so many songs as they say , to the fact that the sound quality is poor. Also tested at full volume a creative or an iriver gives twice as much decibels without destroying the quality of the sound. Also the fact you claim about they inventing that wheel system, many mp3 players already had that for a while.

    1. You are an apple fanboy undercover.

      That’s probably true. Except for the “undercover” part.

  21. I would describe Apple as a ā€œrecipe companyā€ ā€“ they exciting technology and add a little more flavour. Iā€™m an owner of a few Apple products and to be honest, and I know Iā€™m going to get slack for this; itā€™s all a bit overrated ā€¦and they do give the impression they have invented things, when they havenā€™t. There are a lot people out who think that Apple do innovate, because give that impression.

    Theyā€™re the best at marketing and generating interest around their products. Iā€™ve seen most people buy their products because itā€™s a fashion statement as much as anything else.

    The one thing Iā€™m not happy about as a consumer is them patenting everything. Some of the things they are just ridiculous. For example, patenting rectangles with rounds corners?? And wedge shaped laptops?? Come ā€˜on you got to admit thatā€™s just silly. This is only going to push other to do the same and as consumers, we miss out.

  22. Your historical perspective does seem to be somewhat slanted/blinkered.

    For example, you discuss smartphones, yet omit to make any mention of Windows Mobile. There were already WM units with screens far larger than the iphone. Apps could be downloaded directly to the handset in the form of cabs, or via a pc as exe files. Indeed WM was far more feature rich than the iphone. Some even had finger gestures and tap to zoom.

    It is true that (pre the iphone) they used single point resistive screens and that the iphone was the first to adopt multi-touch capacitive screens but perhaps Apple owe far more to the likes of JazzMutant than they care to admit. JazzMutant looked at the advances made by fingerworks and decided to use capacitive screens in the music controllers long before apple. Doubtless JazzMutant took a degree of inspiration form Jeff Hann and his ground breaking pinch to zoom work.

  23. Thanks for this list of Apple’s real versus mythological accomplishments. The major one is missing: the GUI (graphical user interface). As far as I know, it was Xerox document scanning which pioneered this on a large commercial scale. It was used in my office. And others (notably Wang, RIP). An Wang showed it to my father long before the Mac OS. From this myth we get the additional myth of the “user friendly” computer. No computer is UI; they are all built by engineers for engineers, even Apples. Or am I mistaken in thinking that much of Apple’s profit comes from its tech services? The famed Apple OS from the beginning was actually a DOS product licensed from … Microsoft! ProDOS and DOS 3.0 were some of the early ones the famed Apple II (and IIc used. Of course they were reengineered by Apple in some clever ways. But as a Mac Bigot and devotee– I only used Macs professionally and personally and swore by them– as we used to be called by the IBM crowd in those days, I used to defend all of this derivative technology by saying that at least they has Motorola design a proprietary CPU, which I admired. This really made them nearly virus free because they weren’t using … UNIX or off-the-shelf mass-produced processors. The CPU and OS were a labyrinth for the early hacker, even though there weren’t any really good anti-malware apps then. But of course they eventually made the cynical but inevitable decision to go with Intel standard processors which required some sort of UNIX-oid OS, which turned out to be a shabbily reengineered Linux. (Android is an example of a handsomely reengineered Linux). Result: overnight Mac OS 10 found itself on the FBI’s “most hacked applications” list out of five apps, which includes the ignominious Internet Explorer — the “most” hacked. Nevertheless, the Mac Bigot turned into the Mac Zombie, repeating in a trance that “Macs cannot get viruses, Macs cannot get viruses, Macs connot …” I mean, using an OS that was created in the 1970’s — two years after I used my first computer, an IBM mainframe using the ELIZA chatterbot — was a totally cynical decision which saved them enormous R&D in OS development and allowed them to use a mass-produced CPU. As we all know by their high prices, this was NOT an effort to pass on savings to consumers. In fact, Apple used this change in their original business plan as an excuse to increase prices and hype. As for the “smart phone,” thanks for the mention of Simon. Didn’t know about that. But of course we must all remember the Palm Pilot “personal digital assistant” which really was a pioneer “smart phone” device well before the iPhone in device years. It was widely distributed and popular, but the clunky term PDA and its stylus-based touch screen (never mind its weight and low-frequency antenna mast) killed an otherwise awesome device. So then what made the iPhone so popular at first? Lots of good things. But one of them was not so good and continued the tradition of Apple’s departing from its mission; the reason why iPhones (initially) were so much more smooth in operation than competitors at first was that they made yet another cynical decision and removed the router from the periferals architecture so that IRQ’s to the processor didn’t have to stop at what amounted to “customs” to have their passports verified. As a result, you could hack right into the kernel and take command of your neighbor’s device while sipping a latte at Starbucks. I could go on … DRM in songs that we buy from iTunes so our own purchases are treated as Apple’s property, deliberately making the bezels and cabinets impossible to open so we have to take them to the “genius” at the shop, laptop batteries that cost 10 times (no exaggeration) of those of comparable PC laptops but with no difference. Anyone remember the impossible-to-find long-stemmed screwdriver one needed to open an original Mac? But there is no doubt about it: Apple will go down in history as one of the greatest marketing successes of all time.

  24. “When the App Store arrived a year later, it marked the first time that apps could be purchased from and installed directly onto a handheld device without the need to sync with a computer.”

    Erm,4 years earlier, Windows Mobile allowed you to download apps from app stores and either install them directly or via your PC.

    My 2003 HTC BlueAngel had the same size screen as the 2007 iphone and could play MP3s and videos. My (early) 2007 HTC Athena had a 5″ screen, 3.5G and GPS. It had features such as, a front facing camera, that Apple didn’t introduce until 2010.

    The only thing that impressed me about the iphone was multitouch. For the record the first mass produced mutlitouch device was the 2005 JazzMutant Lemur

  25. This statement is incorrect “Appleā€™s approach to everything it does is to design software and hardware with the user in mind.” What Apple does do is design software and hardware that doesnā€™t let you do anything with their devices besides what they decide is how you should best use them. Apples” Genius” is that they figured out a way to capitalize on the blind worship of fan boys who have bought into the whole scam.

    1. I’ve always hated Apple. Not because they don’t make good products but because they are able to con non tech literate people into buying their products. Apple creates the need and stupid people buys into it. There are 100 of thousand of Apps in both the App Store and the Play store. But in reality how many of it does one person use daily on a regular basis. Plus their overpricing of devices because they are now holding a huge user base at gun point. People need to smell the sh.t and wake up.

  26. Listening to iLeadership book from Jay Elliot these days.
    Nowhere and nobody is saying there that they invented the idea as a brand new.

    They always improved the idea to the level nobody these days was capable of, or nobody else think it would have worked.

    So kind of a unnecessary article.