I will say I haven't seen too much "innovation" from Apple in recent years. Progression, yes, but innovation no.
Agreed. The iPhone was groundbreaking. The iPad somewhat. Since then they've done some great work on their laptop line, but that's about it. They were even late to the game with smartwatches.
Of course, the problem with complaining about things like this is that I have no idea what I actually want Apple to do, except surprise me.
I'd say that things like the integrated fingerprint reader (2012) on the home button was pretty innovative/bleeding edge. It was a bit of a gimmick, but ultimately they pushed the boundaries of what anyone else had done. Ditto with Siri (2011), while Windows Vista had basic speech recognition in 2006, Siri was able to merge the latest speech recognition with the user's data, to give the user compelling results.
So I don't think Apple needs another iPad/iPhone to be called innovative, it can be new software features, or little hardware features. I just genuinely cannot remember the last time I've legitimately been jealous of an Apple exclusive feature. Maybe Lightning's reversible-ness in 2012? What since then? That was three years ago.
The Atrix had a fingerprint sensor, but it didn't really do anything other than unlock the phone. The sensor on iOS allowed for far deeper integration into the system. That was innovative.
It seems obvious to me. Perhaps it's hindsight, but Apple's full-stack control of hardware and software make it obvious.
It's non-obvious on Android/pre-Android because software developers won't care much about an API for a fraction of an OS's market. Which is why I'd venture to guess most Android apps still don't take advantage of fingerprint sensors.
Siri was a big step forward when it was first released, but it has since been passed by both Google and Microsoft. It's not even close anymore. Like you said, it's been several years since I've been truly impressed with anything Apple has done. Maybe it's just unreasonable to expect that kind of thing so consistently.
I switched back to the iPhone for a bunch of reasons, but once I got used to TouchID, in hindsight, I would've switched just for that. Apple still seems to know how to add features that are surprisingly new and useful. I just wish they did more of that with their software too.
I sometimes feel Google really doesn't know how to market their stuff properly. I'd say their new Photos app is a computational wonder, but its jaw dropping features are not communicated well to common public.
Sure, but Apple has invented a way to drive theirs directly from a heavily modified Radeon GPU - for that Dell monitor you need to connect two DisplayPort cables at once to show 5K content. And like others have pointed out - that monitor costs as much as the 5K imac.
Actually I agree that the fingerprint sensor was innovative. I wish my Android phone had one. Siri, on the other hand... eh.
Siri still doesn't seem to be able to do that much of note (though I haven't read through today's announcements) and a straw poll of my iPhone using friends suggests that none of them really use it anyway. I'm the same with the voice functionality on Android, though I do use the cards provided by Google Now a lot.
On the other hand, Google Now on Android (voice commands/voice search) is extremely handy and useful for me and many of my friends here. They seem to do it all the time.
> I'd say that things like the integrated fingerprint reader (2012) on the home button was pretty innovative/bleeding edge. It was a bit of a gimmick, but ultimately they pushed the boundaries of what anyone else had done.
I'm not super familiar with TouchID and its capabilities, but is this true? According to Wikipedia, Apple announced its fingerprint reader in late 2013, not 2012, and this feature was available on a high-end Android phone (I forget which) a couple years before that (2011 if I recall correctly). I understand that "having a touch button" isn't quite a binary feature, and TouchID could have some novel elements as a product, but as I said I'm not super-familiar with TouchID. Is there something in particular about TouchID that was innovative/bleeding-edge?
TouchID is reliable in a way that previous fingerprint readers were not. I use it to unlock my phone and it just works. Every. Single. Time. Well, more like 95% of the time, but it is good enough. I used to not lock my phone because it was too annoying to unlock, so for me this relatively small improvement means that an important feature that wasn't available to me before suddenly is.
Ah, if the reader is truly better quality than earlier ones, then of course "first fingerprint reader that consistently works" would be a definite step forward.
That being said: I didn't have the Atrix et al (my first fingerprint reader is on my S6, and Samsung didn't even pretend they weren't borrowing heavily from Apple with this phone's design), but from what I had read, it performed pretty consistently as well. Looking up a random review of its performance:
"The Atrix prompts you to set up the fingerprint reader by swiping your left and right index fingers over it, and also asks you to provide a back-up password in case you go into the witness-protection scheme and have your fingerprints erased. In our tests, the biometric sensor responded to a quick swipe from either finger, so we found it fun and convenient to use. It seemed secure enough too, denying access to all of the interlopers we roped into our tests."
The fingerprint reader is something that's been in every ThinkPad laptop since time immemorial. Apple just wants you to think they invented it because they were the first to put it on a phone.
Fingerprint readers on laptops of old were the swipe type. These existed on smartphones before Apple added it to the iPhone. The trick of it was that the iPhone uses a touch sensor instead of a swipe, which works better. Of course, Apple didn't invent it. Another company did. Apple bought that company in an anticompetitive move so that no one else could use the tech. Interestingly enough, that's why the sensor didn't make it into the Nexus 6.
> Agreed. The iPhone was groundbreaking. The iPad somewhat. Since then they've done some great work on their laptop line, but that's about it. They were even late to the game with smartwatches.
They were late to the game with smartphones (Palm, BlackBerry), tablets (Gates was pushing them in the 1990s), and MP3 players ('No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.'), too. Seems to be their MO.
I'd disagree. I had a smartphone before I got an iPhone and the difference was astounding. Every phone I had before had a wealth of options (a SNES emulator was my favourite) but was an utter mess. I could never have given one to my parents to use.
The iPhone was a triumph in proving that smartphone software can make a very real, very huge difference to a device, and that hardware does not rule all.
Because it was a featurephone with a fancy interface, not a smartphone. But media tried to claim that because you touched the screen to do stuff, it was a smartphone...
They're never the first but they've always been take huge leaps forward with their products. The iPod and iPhone were light-years ahead of the competition at release. The iPad was as well though to a lesser extent. The Apple Watch is the first big product they've announced that wasn't clearly better than the competition.
The weird thing with the Apple Watch is that they're pretty early to the game.
iPod, iPhone, and iPad all followed the same basic template. Lots of companies built products in some product category (MP3 players, smartphones, tablets). The technology got to the point where they were decent, and people recognized them as something desirable albeit niche, but nothing really appealed to the masses. Then Apple took what was out there, refined the crap out of it with an eye to making it useful for regular people, and sold boatloads.
Smartwatches, in contrast, are still very much in the early days. Apple is the first big company to really push smartwatches. This is really unusual for them, and makes me wonder if they aren't seriously jumping the gun.
> Apple is the first big company to really push smartwatches.
That's completely inaccurate.
Samsung has released tons of smartwatches, as has Sony, Acer, LG, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Toshiba. All before the Apple Watch was even announced, so unless you expect us to believe that none of these are "big companies" your point is provably and factually wrong.
This is yet another example of "Apple invented it" from Apple fans well after the industry had been well established and Apple jumped in late (see e-payments for another great example).
I mean for crying out loud the Samsung Gear 2 and Moto 360 have been out almost a year ahead of Apple's watch and one has a camera and the other actually has the same physical dimensions and shape of a traditional mechanical watch. It is absurd to ignore how far this sector has come.
I'll admit that this is vague, but I don't see those companies "pushing" smartwatches. They're making them, sure, but they're niche products out of the gate. None of them are trying to reach the masses the way Microsoft was trying to popularize tablets, Nokia was trying to popularize smartphones, or a number of companies were trying to popularize MP3 players.
Not really sure what you're looking for when it comes to "pushing", then. Beware the echochamber, maybe. All the android watches have been pushing out quite a few versions, ads on tv, I've even had one of the people at an AT&T store try to sell me on the samsung watch he happened to be wearing at the time and they conveniently had on sale.
I don't really know what I'm looking for either, I just know that these product categories looked like they had lots of companies that tried to make it big and failed (or somewhat succeeded in the case of companies like Blackberry, but not on an Apple scale), while watches look like they haven't really tried.
I saw almost nothing of smartwatches before Apple's. I think I saw one two or three times in the world, and always at technical conferences. MP3 players and tablets, while far from ubiquitous before Apple's entry, were things I saw at least semi-occasionally out in the world. Smartphones were relatively common, although of course nothing like how they ended up being after Apple came in.
Neither have I, but I haven't seen a single Apple watch commercial either. It is the media frenzy about anything Apple. Other OEMs cant compete with that even by making superior products. I guess this more than anything completely puts me off anything Apple.
I don't watch TV so I can't judge commercials, but I've seen friends I'd never peg as being Apple followers or hardcore techies ordering and wearing them.
I agree here. Apple is indeed early to the game with the Apple Watch, and they're putting more clout behind it than other OEMs.
Remember, Apple was incredibly late to market with the product that saved them from eventual bankruptcy: the iPod. There was no shortage of MP3 players when the iPod launched.
And there was Blackberry and Palm long before the iPhone.
So, yeah, Apple is early here even if a year late. And they're taking their smart watch more seriously than any of their competitors.
Samsung's watches reminded me of Steve Ballamer's conspicuous announcement of a Windows 7 HP tablet the week before the first iPad announcement: little more than a sad, technologically and culturally inept attempt to buy relevance. Sure, there was a ridiculously outsized ad campaign to tout their innovation, but everyone knew that the OS it ran (Tizen) was dead in the water. Did anyone really believe that Samsung was building a wearables platform that wouldn't be quickly usurped by Google and Apple?
Samsung was the only company that really made an attempt to push a smart watch -- i.e., they paid for a big ad campaign. The others are just also-ran nerd gear.
Huh? Sony back when it was still called SonyEricsson pushed at least two models of watches that look surprisingly similar to Android Watch in operation. Never mind that they also produced a number of analog watches with notification strips (the watch part ran on a separate battery).
You're setting up a straw man. Nobody is saying Apple invents these devices — instead, Apple typically reinvents them in ways that make them both more useful and more appealing to consumers.
I responded to a point they made verbatim. I even quoted that point from within their post. How is that "setting up a straw man?"
> Apple is the first big company to really push smartwatches.
You're trying to redirect discussion away from what they actually said (in so many words) to some other point that has nothing to do with anything (invent Vs reinvent).
I would argue Samsung copied the Apple Watch before it even existed, considering the Apple Watch is a tiny iPhone and Android is just an iPhone rip-off. So Samsung made an inelegant copy of a yet to exist Apple product that everyone knew was coming already.
What Apple did truly do first in the space, however, is make a smartwatch that's as much a watch as it is a mobile device. The Gear does not compete in the watch space from a fashion perspective, whereas the Apple Watch clearly does.
You're right, but you may also be missing the OP's point. Nearly all the reviews of the Apple Watch -- even the ones that are rather conflicted (which is also nearly all of them) -- suggest that it's the best smartwatch on the market, and I suspect watchOS 2.0 is going to increase that lead. I suspect there's a very good chance that by the end of 2015, more Apple Watches will have been sold than all other smartwatches put together.
Complaining that Apple doesn't invent things is a red herring. They didn't make the first MP3 player or digital music store, but for practical purposes they created the market for them, along with the market for per-track/album digital downloads. They didn't make the first smartphone, but nearly every smartphone that came after the iPhone looks way more like an iPhone than like anything else. They didn't make the first tablet computer but they made the first tablet computer that had mass-market success, and again, it's impossible to look at Android tablets and the Surface and deny the iPad influence. They've been doing this for going on three decades now -- as much as the Mac was a relative failure in pure commercial terms, it set a template for How User Interfaces Work that we're still largely following today.
Last but least: yes, the Moto 360 is circular. Yes, that makes it look more like a watch. We get it. :) But it's not a watch. It's a smartwatch. You know what kind of thing smartwatches have to display an awful lot? Lists. You know what kind of shape is better for displaying lists than a circle? A rectangle.
You can extend that template ("... and make it not suck") back to the original Macintosh, arguably even to the Apple I/II. In the case of the Watch they do seem to be pushing the pace, jumping in before the hardware allows them to combine obvious usefulness and that perception of a no-compromises experience. (To an extent that happened with the Macintosh, and they paid the price for it.) Part of the issue for Apple is that they're running out of gadgets to apply the template to: it seems the only things left are TV and radio, VR/AR and maybe one or two other non-watch wearable devices. Then all that's left are things like DSLR cameras or automobiles: things that tend to have nasty UIs but haven't reached the point where hardware specs are largely secondary to UI.
they were the first to capitalize on the pretentious side of smart watches. the other manufacturers were trying to sell function in the form where as Apple put the function well behind the form. I figure once they did the gold iPhone all bets were off on how far they would exploit this audience
The iPhone was not much of a smartphone at launch. Only with jailbreaking did we get the whole app thing going. At launch Jobs was all hot and bothered about "web apps" that was nothing more than fancy bookmarks.
Damn it, the phone was basically impossible to use outside of the Californian weather.
Agreed. The iPhone was groundbreaking. The iPad somewhat. Since then they've done some great work on their laptop line, but that's about it. They were even late to the game with smartwatches.
Of course, the problem with complaining about things like this is that I have no idea what I actually want Apple to do, except surprise me.