Submitted 11 months ago by ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Genuine question.
I know they were the scrappy startup doing different cool things. But, what are the most major innovative things that they introduced, improved or just implemented that either revolutionized, improved or spurred change?
I am aware of the possibility of both fanboys and haters just duking it out below. But there’s always that one guy who has a fkn well-formatted paragraph of gold. I await that guy.
There’s an old saying in computing. “you improve usability by taking away options and features” apple didn’t necessarily invent this mindset. But they perfected it.
They took BSD, a security focused, but not very user friendly, offshoot of Linux/unix and made it “popular” by adding several layers of polish and doing a lot of the configuration work for you and made it osx. This was a time when Linux usability/management on the personal/newbie scale was garbage. If you wanted to install a certain distro of *nix, you better make sure you have supporting hardware and the right up to date tutorial, which is managed by an unknown volunteer, which was usually some person bored on the weekend a few months ago and never updated, they’ve made *nix installation and management a lot better though recently.
They also did this with music. People used to have large collections of unorganized mp3s in the early 00s, unless you were really anal and had a lot of time in your hands, because you were likely downloading them from several different illegal places, and legally buying mp3s were all over the place. You could buy the album off this weird obscure website that you didn’t want to trust with your CC information, because there were a lot of mom and pop music stores online. Then apple brought out iTunes and allowed both buying and managing (and eventually upgrading, traveling around with) music to be dead simple.
For smartphones, they stole a LOT from BlackBerry, but they took it to the next level. Blackberry had email, a private messaging network, and mobile web scrolling waayyyy before anyone. And so many people loved it so much that even Obama famously didn’t want to give his up when he took office. Then apple came out with the iPhone, and blew it away with a bigger screen and again, a lot more polish.
Innovation happens in small steps over years. Apple didn’t invent mobile phones, smart phones, tablets, or computing, they didn’t invent security, encrypted audio/video calls, or music management. They’ve done a lot of crappy stuff, and they charge super high amounts of money for less than state of the art hardware. Their innovation could be summed up by this profound statement I remember a friend said to me once around 2003/4.
“Osx, because making Linux pretty was easier than fixing Windows”
Came here to say something similar about touchscreens on phones. It’s probably the most impactful innovation they’ve had, and ever will have imo. I can’t ethically support Apple as a company and I haven’t owned an apple product since the first iPod touch, but they absolutely deserve credit for this one.
Even if they didn’t invent the touch screen, or even the touchscreen phone, they certainly figured out how to perfectly integrate touchscreens into mobile devices a fluid and intuitive user interface which served as a canvas on which to build pretty much anything you wanted in the form of a mobile app (a $200B+ industry which the iPhone absolutely catalysed the explosive growth of).
It arguably even began a significant change in the course of modern human interaction, due to how much more versatile and therefore more commonly used mobile phones with a similar UI basis became since then; because of that, increasingly popular social media platforms now had a new way to provide use for their platform (via mobile apps) on a device that pretty much everyone now had with them all the time. I don’t think it’s coincidence that social media use saw such substantially explosive growth soon after the iPhone and subsequent “copycats” were on the market.
So their innovation here was really the first step in a number of global paradigm shifts. It was just such a monumentally impactful step forward. Because of this I genuinely think that the iPhone is almost guaranteed to be in history books for centuries, like the printing press or the light bulb.
They’ve also excelled at seamless integration across devices. I can start an iMessage conversation on my iPhone, switch to my laptop for a while, then to my iPad.
Same thing with phone calls. If my phone is on the other side of the house and starts ringing, then both my laptop and iPad ring as well. I can grab whichever device is closest and answer the call on it.
You’re giving way too much to Apple. The important part of the touchscreen was cost. It wasn’t viable as common tech until the cost came down. Apple was just riding that curve down and decided when to have a product.
Apple purchased their touch screen division from people who had been working on touchscreens for decades before them.
For clarity, BlackBerry devices still loaded “mobile” websites, aka “WAP” sites. The iPhone’s innovation was figuring out a way to allow browsing of full, normal web pages. By displaying the full page and using the touchscreen features to zoom in and out, it made every page out there almost instantly usable on mobile.
Also they basically invented software keyboards. People didn’t think you could have an efficient software keyboard, even the android prototypes still had a physical keyboard for typing.
Also standardizing hardware. Part of the iPhones success was that developers had to develop for A phone, singular. There were a lot of cool palm programs and whatnot, but having a single hardware set to bug-smash had to be a big part of making the app-market go into hyper drive.
I don’t own a single apple product, but credit where credit is due.
Ahh, no. The window where existed only one iPhone and you could develop for it was very narrow. And then you need not only develop for different hardware, but software as well. Yes, different versions of iOS are different. Source: developers for mobile for three years.
Not only for iPhone, but for Mac as well. It’s easy to install bsd on a machine when you have access to the best hw engineers and documenters on the planet.
Perfect description, they made very complex functionality accessible by the general public.
Steve Jobs in particular was extremely anal in removing whatever he deemed “not needed”. The first mac nearly didn’t have arrow keys for its keyboard. He hated the function keys of keyboards so much he once personally removed the keys from a person who asked for an autograph
Thank you, exactly
I don’t even think making Linux pretty is that hard.
You just have to cut out all the retards who think average people want to use a terminal. Once you start thinking pragmatically, practical solutions come to you on their own.
Lots of insecure people like to overcomplicate things they don’t understand to cover up their lack of knowledge rather than just admitting they don’t know.
Was bsd an offshoot of linux? I thought it was the other way around. Honest question.
BSD and Linux are offshoots of Unix.
Polish.
It useless to be first if that product isn’t reliable, sustainable, practical. Apple adds polish to other concepts to make them usable by the vast majority of people.
Laptops existed……with weird keyboard layouts and mice that were afterthoughts. PowerBook pioneered the keyboard forward design that every laptop now has.
Smartphones existed……incredibly limited, weird UI, awkward input, targeted at businesses instead of regular people. iPhone changed everything so much that every other design died.
Collecting different innovations and figuring how to combine them in a way that is practical and sellable is their continuous innovation.
I’m sorry but this is kind of horseshit. Apple has legitimately brought some new polish to areas that hadn’t seen them before, but LMFAO at Apple inventing laptops that don’t have weird keyboards.
Apple had great trackpads with multi finger gesture support before anyone else, their keyboards have been nothing special compared to ThinkPadsa and business grade laptops that sold for the same price as them. Their difference was marketing and convincing consumers to pay business grade prices for consumer laptops.
LMFAO at Apple inventing laptops that don’t have weird keyboards
They weren't saying the keyboards themselves were particularly good, they were saying their keyboard placement was a step forward (and it was). This page has a couple of pictures of early laptops - note where the Powerbook keyboard is compared to the others.
No kidding huh. The fanboys are rewriting history.
Agreed. They didn’t really “innovate” anything. They stole ideas from other people, and just marketed it better.
The document-centric model of desktop applications largely originates from the early Mac. How do you open a document in a desktop OS? You double-click on the document, and the OS finds the correct application to open it with. That was a Mac thing. On PC systems at the time, you run your application program (from the command line) and then tell the program to load a file.
Applications as “bundles” of code and data was a Mac thing too, starting with the resource/code division in the classic Mac System. Rather than an application coming with a mess of directories of libraries and data files, it’s all bundled up into a single application file that can contain structured data (“resources”) for the GUI elements. On a classic Mac, you could load an application program up in ResEdit and modify the menus, add keyboard shortcuts, and so on, without recompiling anything.
The Apple Newton had data persistence of a sort that we now expect on cloud applications like Google Docs. Rather than “saving” and “loading” files, every change was automatically committed to storage.
Other systems did have double-click, and app bundles (which I still think are just fantastic) were a NeXT thing. (which of course became Apple, but they weren't at the time). But yeah, Apple way refined and brought those to a mass market.
which of course became Apple, but they weren’t at the time
Apple and NeXT had all the same people working for them.
The first Mac came out in 1984; NeXT didn’t have a product until 1988.
NeXT was later bought by Apple and their tech became the foundation of Mac OS X in 2001.
But I was referring to the original '80s Macintosh System, not OS X. :)
On most other systems of the mid-1980s, you run your application program (from the command line) and then tell the program to load a file.
Kinda funny that iPad/iOS has sort of gone in reverse on this, by virtue of not really having an open file system. You now open the app, then open the document within it.
There’s also the Files app too that Apple added that does give you a filesystem view, where you can tap files to have them opened in their associated application.
The document-centric model of desktop applications largely originates from the early Mac.
Originates from Xerox PARC. I see you discuss this below, it was Xerox BOD that couldn’t see beyond their nose and sold it to Apple. From Jobs own description of being blown away by Xerox, it sounds like he would have never thought of it.
Didn’t they steal most of that from X? As in Xerox’s graphical desktop environment? It was around long before Apple grabbed it.
Xerox’s prototype desktop computer was called Alto, not X, and had some of these features in a very early form. It was never made into a product for the open market; it was used internally at Xerox and at some research universities.
Apple didn’t “steal” from the Alto; Xerox invested in Apple and allowed Steve Jobs and Apple engineers to tour their facilities for product ideas.
You might also be thinking of the X Window System for Unix, whose modern descendant most Linux systems are still using. It’s pretty different from the Mac approach.
The iPhone. It was revolutionary when it came out.
It literally created the modern smartphone market. The Palm Pilots and Blackberries of the day couldn’t compare: the iPhone had a FULL BROWSER. It was insane. The team developing Android saw the iPhone and had a real “holy shit” moment, they had to go back to the drawing board and completely start over in order to compete.
Full browser might be an overstatement. It was still a web full of Flash at that time. And it caused a pretty major limitation on the browser. If there wasn’t an app available, you were often SOL. I do think it sped up the demise of Flash on the web considerably.
In what aspect? There were mobile devices with installable applications. And Samsung already had a phone with that form factor.
And who bought them before iPhone came out? There were tablets before the iPad. Nobody bought them either.
I had several Symbian/WinMob phones prior to getting my first iPhone, and I never, ever want to return to those days. Sure, they were fine for the time, but using iOS for the first time was a revelation.
Nope, there was a lot of Windows Mobile smartphones before iPhones and Androud devices. WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, phone, thousands of apps, “full browser” (I don’t know what a commenter meant by that, but I could use internet normally)
When iPhone appeared, it was sooo limited. A couple of my regular customers (I was selling qtek/htc smartphones) bought them, but then came back to me: “uhhh, this thing doesn’t allow attachments in emails”, “uhhh, do you have normal maps app for that? can’t drive with that”
These comments are from people who wouldn’t care about PDAs before iPhone.
I have big clumsy sweaty fingers and struggle even with today’s big smartphones.
I was a kid back then, but those PDAs would have normal keyboards and a stylus and an OS with a UI not feeling as if it were made for asylum patients.
But that’s not important, why would one even defend against really functional systems something the main features of which were “look how I can zoom pictures with two fingers on that thing”, “look how cute it looks, shiny” and “look, nice icons, you’ll wanna lick 'em”.
I miss my old Nokia.
You could write custom apps and load them onto it over Bluetooth.
Them building a smartphone around a capacitive touchscreen with a software keyboard was the primary innovation of the iPhone.
A full browser that rendered webpages is not an innovation, that’s a result of increased processing power letting them port more browser code over. Pinch to zoom interfacing on a browser might be an innovation, but a web browser on a mobile phone was not innovative, just iterative.
Apple is good at making existing tech usable by people who don’t have time to bother learning the new tech.
Hard disagree. Android user here. The number of times if had to show iPhone users how to use their shit is annoying.
Workflows agree no better on a fruit phone than an Android device half the price.
If you define innovate as invent something from scratch, then they did not innovate anything. Everything they’ve done has existed prior to them doing it. But under Steve they took those inventions and made them more usable and appealing to the common man.
That’s their strength really. Make stuff easier and more enjoyable to use.
Unfortunately that has led to lock-in in order to hold onto customers. Yes, they give you convenience but you’re bound to their products.
I first realised this when I had an Apple Watch and iPhone 7, then sold my iPhone and got an Android phone and the Watch became useless. Even though I had 3 Mac’s and an iPad Pro, they couldn’t work with Watch. You HAD to have an iPhone.
So I sold the Watch.
Then I paved over MacOS with Linux and I’m happy. Free to use whatever, whenever, however I want to, and added YEARS to the life of my mac’s which both had come to the end of support of MacOS.
My 2015 MacBook Pro and 2012 Mac Mini would be useless now if I was running OSX/MacOS and many apps wouldn’t be supported or even work. New apps definitely wouldn’t be supported because Mac Devs love to drop support for older versions.
On Linux they run great! Fast, fluid, can run any latest app no problem. I think Linux has probably added at least 10 years into the life of these machines.
I had never thought of wiping an old mac and putting Linux on it to give it a new life. That’s a great idea! Thank you.
“it just works” always struck me as such an odd adage for apple because so many things don’t work on their platforms.
Hmmm. Distro?
interesting, i find generally woman are more into apple products (or at least equally) in my experience. Does the data indeed show that only men found Apple products appealing at first or something?
Marketing.
What’s dumb about marketing is that people pay more… to be marketed to.
Designing phone ui for fingers first. While there were many other touch phones, many of which could be used with your finger(especially if you were a hipster, you could modify them to be more finger friendly), their ui was primarily designed for stylus use. This is a huge point that basically defined the OS and app design for the next 15 years.
Making capacitive screen popular. Before iphones, almost all(all?) phones had resistive touch screen, which required you to actually push your finger on the screen to do stuff. This was fine with stylus, less fine with finger. Capacitive worked with the lightest touch, which gave a smoother user experience.
Made multitouch mainstream and a core part of touch interface. Again, older touchscreen phones were mostly made to be used with a stylus, so multitouch wouldnt make much sense.
It is important to note that one of the reasons apple succeeded was because nokia was too stubborn and late to adopt and promote touchscreen phones. Thats why while nokia was the phone bid dog of that day, users had turned to sony ericsson(SE) for their flagship, touchscreen phones.
And for 5 years before the iphone, people were using phones like the p800, that had a large touchscreen and even a removable keyboard for that full touchscreen experience. SE had taken nokia’s symbian OS and made it more touch friendly. Nokia continued releasing super capable(great cameras, video, fm radio, etc) but non touchscreen phones or with a small touchscreen for years after that, allowing SE to dominate that market. For example nokia released the 6600, which was a great phone but didnt have a touchscreen and its screen was small in comparison to SE’s touchscreen flagships.
First iphone had a terrible camera and couldnt even film videos. Something that other “smart” phones could do for many years. The first iphone didnt have third party apps. Competitive smart phones had had apps for over a decade. First iphone wasnt even 3g, couldnt share stuff over bluetooth, etc. It was a pretty but pretty stupid phone in comparison to the competition.
But over time, apple kept improving, catching up and often surpassing competition by every aspect. Nowadays, iphones are the best or almost the best in everything. Now if only apple gave 120hz refresh on base iphones and a faster charging rate. And werent closed garden assholes.
The “fingers first” part is ironically why the Apple Pencil took so damned long to come to fruition. Steve Jobs outright refused to allow a stylus for the iPad, because his whole marketing thing with the early iPhones was that you didn’t need a stylus. So he refused to allow development of the Apple Pencil.
Then once he died, Apple quickly pivoted and began developing the Pencil, so they could start marketing the iPad towards digital artists. Because the company had recognized the large void in the digital art world years prior, but Jobs had refused to allow the Pencil the entire time. Once he was out of the way, the company’s leadership was free to begin development.
It’s notable because it was one of the first big examples of Apple veering away from Jobs’ wishes after his death. It proved that the company wasn’t going to simply remain in his shadow forever.
Before iphones, almost all(all?) phones had resistive touch screen, which required you to actually push your finger on the screen to do stuff.
I remember the resistive touchscreens! My dad had bought a BlackBerry (oh man I miss them) for his business work and it had those screens. It definitely took work to get used to because my mom was using a Samsung Galaxy Y at the time… Smallest screen ever but that capacitive touch screen 🤌🏼.
As for the rest of your comment, the multi-touch was definitely insane. I can’t find this anywhere atm but I remember reading that they introduced pinch to zoom, which is definitely a flex. Maybe not the first, but on capacitive smartphones, probably yes.
Are you the fabled “well-formatted paragraph guy” I was told about? 😂
The LG Prada was the first capacitive touch-screen phone. March 2007 release compared to iPhone’s July 2007 release.
Samsung also fought a patent war with Apple when Apple sued Samsung for creating a similar phone to the iPhone in 2008. The court docs had examples of Samsung’s first touchscreen phone.
Apple are very good at marketing and had a powerful personality that people worshiped (Jobs).
Spend 5 mins watching videos by Louis Rossman fixing Macbooks and you’ll realise they are shitty products.
I don’t think I’m going to be that guy, but also not one of the fanboys/haters.
Apple were pretty significant in the development of both FireWire and USB. They were also pretty crucial in driving the adoption of USB with the iMac. Most PC motherboards at the time had a set of jumpers for USB, but you had to buy the actual ports, which took up an expansion slot on the back, and connect them to the motherboard. It was a huge pain in but as the jumpers were censor-specific so had to look at all the specs and buy the right connector. Some aftermarket cases had USB ports on the front/back, but again you had to buy the right connector for your mobo. So everyone kept using serial/PS2/parallel. So peripheral makers weren’t making any devices either. When Apple released the iMac, they got rid of all of those other ports and only had USB. All of a sudden you started seeing USB keyboards, mice, CD/DVD drives, etc…
Apple invented the USB-C connector.
They took KHTML, a niche rendering engine that nobody had heard of which didn’t work for major websites… and made it into the foundation that backs every browser except FireFox.
The ARM CPU architecture was technically an independent company, but Apple provided nearly all their funding in the early days, provided ongoing funding for decades before they did anything interesting, and ARM’s founding CEO was an Apple employee.
Most of the best programming languages in the world, especially modern ones but even some old ones that have been re-architected, depend on LLVM which, while it’s an open source project, for many years was exclusively worked on by Apple (who hired the university student that started it as a side project and gave him an unlimited budget to make it what it is today).
They figured out how to make touch screen phones work. It existed before, but it was shit - in particular typing was unusable and while it wasn’t as good on the first iPhone as it is today it was Apple who was the first to find a way to make it “good enough” and that was some seriously innovative stuff. It looks like a tiny keyboard with touch buttons but that is not what’s going on under the hood. It’s far more complex.
Going forward - the Vision Pro headset has some pretty awesome innovations.
USB-C for example was designed by Apple. Only a little bit.
They took KHTML, a niche rendering engine that nobody had heard of which didn’t work for major websites… and made it into the foundation that backs every browser except FireFox.
KHTML wasn’t so bad. “Major websites” at that time meant less than now. It wasn’t Facebook/Reddit/Google/Twitter time with everything important being on those platforms.
They did lots of dick moves to prevent their changes from going back to upstream. I’m not sure taking someone else’s work and then behaving as if that’s a divine blessing is a good thing.
Chromium now is really far from Webkit, and of course from KHTML, which died as its own project relatively recently.
Marketing for electronics is definitely a big one, nobody else really has the same cult following, and when somebody like Samsung gets close it feels like whatever the cult version of a knockoff is.
Modern day planned obsolescence.
The insane amounts of vertical integration that they’ve become known for. They can do really interesting and fascinating things with a bunch of very low-level/hardware-oriented optimization that simply isn’t possible unless you have full control of and visibility into ALL the hardware and software that goes into your devices.
I might be missing a lot but I feel the iPhone was a complete market segment they created themselves. Android followed a year later.
They also created the tablet market a year or two later.
They also set the trend of earbuds we have nowadays.
Removed headphone jacks.
Removed power adaptors.
There maybe something else that I might have missed.
Marketing
The concept of removing features and making people pay for them back.
I give Apple indirect credit for touch-screen keyboards. I don’t think they invented them, but their marketing of the iPhone resulted in mass adoption regardless of how good/bad the on-screen keyboard was. And that created market research that led to the significantly better ones we have now.
I remember using one on an original iPhone for a few minutes and thinking I’d never waste my money on it–it was so unpleasant to use that it sullied the whole experience for me. Finally gave in somewhere around 2013 when they had gotten usable and there were multiple options.
The Ipod interface. Making people move their fingers on a circle for explore menus was innovative.
Marketing, baby.
Nobody has mentioned the scroll circle thing on the iPod. Not sure if you’ve ever used one, but that made it so much faster to navigate.
Also, Apple started the touchscreen phones revolution.
Ayo fuck TekSyndicate but he did put it quite succinctly:
“Apple are not a technology company. They are a technology recipe company. They take innovations that other companies create and combine them to create compelling products.”
They seem to have a knack for taking something and making it palatable for the masses when it comes to UI and such. I don’t agree with a lot of it, but then again I am not “the masses” in the computing demographics.
The facts are that large companies rarely innovate anything major. They tend to buy up smaller companies that have taken the risk and succeeded. Look at Google and Microsoft and tons of others. It’s a problem with growing big. The forces that make a company a successful scrappy little startup die out in the name of organizational efficiency. If you want to know what Apple innovated you have to look at what they did in the 70s or extend your criteria to companies they have bought.
You might like this: Triumph of the Nerds. Covers early Apple, Microsoft, Xerox PARC.
High prices for people that have way too much money
Target display mode let you plug another computer into your iMac, hit a key sequence, and use your iMac as an external display.
Target disk mode let you hold a key sequence at boot and use your Mac like an external hard disk.
Force Touch is something I am not sure that was ever done outside the Mac. I still love how the trackpad isn’t really a click, but a haptic tap that can occur at a configurable pressure, and does not occur at all when the device is powered off.
LiDAR in a consumer device was unheard of when it came out with the iPad Pro. At the time it came out, I was working in a lab where we used $160k velodyne LiDAR devices. To have one in a $1k tablet was amazing.
Ease of use
I am not an Apple fan in the slightest but the Apple Watch is in like, it’s 10th generation? And I never see anyone wear any other type of smartwatch. And for good reason, pretty much everything else is garbage.
High resolution displays on laptops, SSDs in laptops.
Those are the two I can think of right now. I believe Linus (LTT) talked about this on WAN show not too long ago aswell.
darth_helmet@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
The graphical user interface.
They don’t invent it (xerox PARC did), but Apple correctly identified that the user experience of existing computer systems was holding it back from being a thing everyone owns, and made computers a bad fit for many types of work that seem extremely obvious now (digital media creation particularly)
They did this more or less again with the smartphone: business folks and super nerds were the smartphone market before Apple. Now it’s the average person’s computer.
simple@lemm.ee 11 months ago
A million times this. Not only did they popularize the ideas, but MacOS’s UI design was so ahead of its time that it’s barely changed since then. It was by far the most polished operating system at the time. Old Apple actually was innovating while the market was kind of stagnant.
MacOS Leopard screenshot
This screenshot was in 2007. The competition was Windows Vista. It’s a night and day difference. I had this version of the iMac at the time and was super impressed, even if I did switch back to Windows a couple of years later.
Cort@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Just to piggy back on this comment, OSX was released before 9/11 and windows XP, so Microsoft was still selling Windows ME at the time! Aside from the desktop backgrounds looked very similar.
BigDaddySlim@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’ve got an '08 iMac with this version of MacOS, El Capitan I believe. Going from that to my 2019 M1 MBP running Sonoma is really no different. Sure there’s features missing but I can still sync my notes and the few other Apple things I actually use between the two.
Plus my iPods can still sync with both devices, they just moved iPod into Finder in the new versions.
Hyperreality@kbin.social 11 months ago
I feel old.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
Well, KDE3 could look cool too.
I’ll admit, back then I really wanted a Mac.
Just after trying to use them a few times I know that behavior is more important than appearance on screenshots. Also such looks exhaust you emotionally.
yesdogishere@kbin.social 11 months ago
Wrong wrong wrong. Macontoshs gui was crap and buggy as hell. Every seasoned it expert knew it was a shit lousy interface designed to dupe people into believing it was secure when in fact it proliferated viruses and security holes, and drove the control of computing into an avarucicuous humanity destroying company culture known as apple. DO NIT EVER PROMOTE THE GUI AS GOOD. ITS CRAP.
theodewere@kbin.social 11 months ago
and i think in general, their attempt to really focus on user experience first always seemed to define their business.. trying to make things that people would WANT to use was what made Jobs and Apple stand out.. other brands were better known for performance, for example..
AA5B@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Exactly. They innovated
I could probably go on for a while. The thing is that everything in tech is an iteration: almost nothing is completely new. Apple has consistently applied design and usability to revolutionize many different areas of tech. It is true innovation with real change and huge impact
IWantToFuckSpez@kbin.social 11 months ago
Jobs really wanted to make tech usable for the mainstream. Just look at time of the first iPod all the other MP3 players at the time were for the geeks and music nerds. They were clunky, had ugly geek esthetics and the software was hard to use for most people. And the non techies had no idea where to get mp3s. The iPod together with the iTunes Store really sold the MP3 player to the masses.
yesdogishere@kbin.social 11 months ago
Wrong wrong wrong. It was never about ease of use. It was always about taking control away from the user, and hiding authority for control. This kind of deceptive practice has led to what we gave today - cars selling subscription hearing seats. The truth is, the gui was always buggy and a product unfit for its purpose from day one. Apple sold it as a means to get consumers to accept a defective product from the start, perpetuating their ability to always sell updates, forcing consumers to pay for things THEY DO NOT NEED.
yesdogishere@kbin.social 11 months ago
Wrong wrong wrong. The graphical user interface is crap and will always be crap. The whole matter of popularity is marketing bunkum. Console command interface was al ways faster and better than any gui for general computing tasks. The gui is fine for office tasks, but shit for everything else. The popularity of the gui today has driven a massive upscale of cruddy bloated virus infected software. The fact that most people now only know gui has meant that control of viruses has slipped away. Had console commands been the mainstay for computing, viruses and security holes would never have been allowed to proliferate as they do today.
DuckOverload@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Bud, you sound like a technophile geek. The kind of person who custom built his own computer. You’re not the target customer. Apple builds products for people that don’t care about technology, they just care about what the technology does and want it to be easy and seamless. And that is a vast majority of the people.
simple@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Let me guess, you use arch?
skulblaka@kbin.social 11 months ago
While you may be correct I think you're still missing the point. CLI is for super nerds. While you and I may know how to use it, the average person doesn't, and is unlikely to put in the effort to learn. That is the innovation that Apple made in bringing computing to the mainstream. It was precisely because people didn't have to learn how to navigate the CLI environment and instead got an easy point-and-click interface that computers caught on with the public at large, and that gained Apple an absolute ton of cash money and noteriety.
someguy3@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Fucking everyone except Xerox BOD figured that out.