Technology

Everyone absolutely thought the original click wheel iPod, the iPhone and the iPad were all doomed to fail. Hell, the Apple watch didn't exactly get off to a hot start for that matter.

And back at the beginning, the Mac OS GUI. Yes, Steve Jobs saw the idea of a graphical GUI at Xerox Park, but what his engineers turned out is something completely different. And at the time it was easily as revolutionary as the touchscreen interface of the iPhone.

Actual duds by Apple that I can think of off the top of my head:

• The Cube
• The Mac IIcx
• The Mac IIfx
• Whatever that ungodly massive Unix box was that they branded as Apple
• The liquid cooled G5 cheesgrater

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.”

Marketing

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.

most of the things they're known for, they didn't invent. but they've always been better at packaging these ideas and tech up, and marketing them well.

Apple is incredibly well polished. It takes ideas that already exists and makes them work for the 90% of people.

It brought the smart phone to the masses. The ipod the iPad. It is the only smart watch manufacturer making profit.

All these existed and most server a function and niche community. Apple bought it polished it and server it up with a user friendly interface.

Can it reinvent the wheel with smart glasses ? This will be it's biggest test. This is a niche area. This is incredibly expensive and it's going to be a hard sell.

iPod. It was the first commercially available MP3 player that sported more than 512mb of storage. First model was 5GB. Second was 10GB.

I got in on the second model, as a Windows PC user. I had to buy a FireWire expansion card just to use it.

Literally nothing else was like it, and at the time, you could leave it on the seat of your car while you went shopping because that far back, nobody knew what the fuck it was and so would leave it alone.

They didn't create the first MP3 player, but they created the first massively commercially successful one.

Through this, they also pioneered the first digital storefront for music which in itself was a fucking feat considering there is already a music company named Apple. They threaded the fucking needle with that one. They had trademark disputes with Apple Corps (holding company for music by The Beatles) going back to the 1970's but put that all to bed with the release of the iTunes store.

Apple does refinement a lot better than they do outright innovation, but refinement is a core part of the process: your average user doesn't want to be using things that feels like a chore to use.

They refined touchscreen phones, mp3 players, all in one PCs, laptops, peripheral connectivity, tablet computing, GUIs, UNIX, and so much more.

They took the GUI that Xerox invented and made it so ubiquitous that other companies copied it from them (GEOS, Windows, Amiga, etc. etc.)

They took the Bubble UI that Palm invented, and the PalmOS driven Handspring cell phones, and turned it into a full blown mobile operating system.

Selling an aluminum strip for $60.