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"I really don't understand the need to denigrate Apple."

Me either, but I also don't really understand the need to sanctify them, and I don't see how anyone could read this article as a denigration of Apple unless they've already made them sacrosanct in their heads.

Also, I don't think your history of Pixar is really correct. Lucas sold Pixar pretty much solely because he needed the money because of his divorce. It isn't that he thought Pixar making features was not viable, it is that he thought Pixar making features in 1986 was not viable, which clearly it wasn't. What makes you think he would have been opposed to them making features once the world was ready for it? George Lucas, for better or for worse, is one of the biggest proponents of all-digital movie making. One could easily make the case that Pixar features with Lucas as the CEO would have suffered from his meddling in ways they didn't with Jobs as the CEO, but that is purely speculation.

The answer to your question is a quote from Lucas that I read in a hardback book covering the history of Pixar from around that time. He essentially said as much. Also, at that time, Industrial Light and Magic was a practical shop, they were not doing "digital filmmaking" and Lucas wasn't yet a proponent of digital filmmaking, as this really didn't exist yet. So, Pixar was very much an odd duck there, they didn't have shared backgrounds with the other groups and operate in a way that was difficult for the existing management to manage.

For the past 30 years I've been reading people denigrating Apple based on innumerable falsehoods and misrepresentations. Ever since the Apple II had competition, there have been fans of competing systems who felt the need to attack Apple, at that time, because it was the dominant system. During the windows era, because Windows fans felt vaguely insecure about the computer they were talked into by a salesman, and nowadays, by google fans because they want to believe that it is ok for google to rip off the iPhone and give away a counterfeit operating system. All of these people have both a motivation to denigrate Apple and, since they know that Apple is one of the few genuinely innovative companies in the industry, they end up having to make up stories to try and make Apple's innovations less significant than they are.

One of the ways people denigrate Apple is to pretend like there is really no difference in usability or performance of Apple products, while also claiming that they are more expensive (even when they aren't) and thus that anyone who buys them is obviously a victim of a Reality Distortion Field. For these people they cannot debate the purely pragmatic reasons that people choose Apple products, and so they attempt to portray Apple users as part of a cult, and often speak using religious terminology.

Ironically, it is those who talk about the "Reality Distortion Field" who have actually substituted ideology for pragmatism, otherwise they'd have pragmatic arguments to make.

...by google fans because they want to believe that it is ok for google to rip off the iPhone and give away a counterfeit operating system.

Here you go too far. You don't have to like Android, MeeGo, or any other non-Apple OS, but calling any of them counterfeit is highly inaccurate. Google isn't stealing Apple's software and repackaging it as their own.

In the form of the oft-used car analogy: you're accusing Hyundai of selling "counterfeit" cars because they slightly resemble a Jaguar.

Google is, in fact, stealing Apple's patented inventions and repackaging it as their own. Hence the sudden flare up in "patents are all bogus and a bad idea" propaganda.

Before the announcement of the iPhone the Android phones looked a whole lot like blackberries. Google didn't spend 7 years coming up with a multi-touch operating system, and the underlying technology. They spent one year copying what Apple did, right down to the icon placement, and then started licensing it to manufacturers who sell it to consumers who genuinely think they are getting iPhones.

I know google fans don't like to admit this, and so they claim that because in the past there was a touch screen somewhere, therefore, Apple didn't invent anything, but the standards of law are much higher and disprove this claim.

Hi, welcome to the 90s, when patents were already "bogus and a bad idea." Remember GIF? JPEG? LZW? RAR? S3TC? MP3? MPEG-2? AAC? MPEG-4? h.264?

I'll understand if you've forgotten all of these. After all, when a software patent only inconveniences people making Free Software, it doesn't really count as "bogus and a bad idea," right?

I'm always at a loss as to whether I should try to parse thru these snide comments to try and figure out what the argument you're trying to make is, or if I should just ignore them.

At the very least, your putting words in my mouth so I don't have to defend them.

You have implied that patents have only recently been something seen as problematic, and that patent warfare is something invented by Google and Android vendors to attack Apple. The reality, however, is that there have been several highly litigious patents in computing which have been used to threaten people. Let me expound on some of the more infamous ones.

The modern GIF format, GIF89a, used a compression algorithm called LZW. This algorithm was patented by a company named Unisys. Unisys threatened ISPs and large websites with legal action if they didn't agree to license the patent. This directly led to the creation of the PNG format as a free and open alternative.

S3TC, the S3 Texture Compression algorithm, is patented by a group of graphics vendors known as S3, and licensed to Microsoft under terms which let MS sublicense it under the name DXTC, (DirectX Texture Compression). The patent holders have been very mean about enforcement, and the patent is broadly written, so it applies to nearly every possible S3TC implementation, software or hardware. To this day, MS still makes money off of every graphics card sold, from licensing fees, and free 3D libraries, like Mesa, cannot safely ship S3TC decoders for fear of legal repercussions.

h.264 is covered by a big portfolio of patents, held by MPEG-LA (Motion Picture Experts Group Licensing Authority). They have been very proactive about getting licensing fees any time they can, and using fear tactics to suppress free codec libraries like x264. One member of MPEG-LA is Apple, by the way. That's right, Apple has been conducting patent warfare since before the conception of Android. (Since I'm expecting a [citation needed]: x264 development started in 2004 at the latest; Android was acquired by Google in 2005.)

Please don't make snide comments and then complain when others reply in kind.

Patents were reviled by geeks even in a pre-9/11 world. ;)

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

>consumers who genuinely think they are getting iPhones.

Are you delusional or just trolling? If the latter, I'd suggest a more subtle approach in the future.

Remember when ReadWriteWeb was the first hit on Google for the term "Facebook" for a few days and they got thousands of people hitting their page posting comments about how they couldn't log into google? Because they were goggling for Facebook in order to get on Facebook, and the first result was no longer Facebook for that period.

That's something you'd probably never do, but for millions of people, that's how they know how to get to Facebook.

I'm neither delusional, nor am I trolling. I'm just making an argument you don't like. I don't think its appropriate that you would characterize me in a derogatory way like that, because you're engaging in attacks to the person, rather than to the point, and I think that Hacker News should have a higher level of debate than that.

> "I don't think its appropriate that you would characterize me in a derogatory way like that"

I'm not sure how you can say that with a straight face immediately after characterizing me in such a derogatory way in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2934973

You really need to quit while you're far, far behind.

"They spent one year"

This, in and of itself, is a sign of how innovative Android is, under-the-hood. Google and everyone else saw the iPhone at the same time. Google took one year to have a baseline-credible iPhone competitor ready. Palm took two (and they had the advantage of starting over from scratch). Microsoft took three. Nokia took four (so long they eventually killed the platform and have embraced Microsoft). RIM still hasn't gotten there.

Even though most people don't realize it, being a fast follower isn't easy. The Android team planned for their OS to be flexible and retargetable from the start. You can see it in their architecture, some of their lower-level features (e.g. Intents, input frameworks) and you can see it in the speed of their "iPhone pivot".

>[Google fans] want to believe that it is ok for google to rip off the iPhone and give away a counterfeit operating system

I love how in one breath Apple fanboys call Android a copycat and in the next claim it's so much harder to use than iOS. Which is it?

Where's the contradiction? Google didn't spend 7 years working out the kinks to get the usability right. Also, since they license to anyone, most of the hardware is crap hardware, thus the pointing accuracy is way off. Also, Apple takes a 72 pixel, roughly, finger contact area and turns it into a touch point with pixel level accuracy. That's not easy and that's not easy for Google to copy (probably because Apple hasn't patented it, or the patent didn't give enough away.) That right there is probably a large reason why they don't work as well.

I find the notion that Android is a copycat silly, given the significant differences between Android and iOS. Apple has liberally incorporated the ideas of others throughout its history: everyone from Xerox Parc to Braun... and that's a good thing because it has helped consumer computing evolve. If Android is a copycat of iOS then iOS is a copycat of PalmOS. The real underlying issue seems to me that Apple is bitter about anyone competent daring to compete with them.

Figuring out the precise centroid of a 'blob' has been around for at least 20 years - this calculation was used in optical research to determine where the centroid of the pupil was in video taken of someone's eyes.

To suggest that this kind of algorithm is something special and new that Apple invented for the iPhone is just plain insulting.

Not to argue but you can imitate something poorly. I'll leave it up to others to argue which OS is better.

Depends on what metrics; iOS definitely isn't the most open of the two, for instance.

Apple invented the GUI (using some ideas they licensed from Xerox), as part of a project that Steve Jobs led. The NeXT cube inspired the web to some extent and made the first browser much easier to write. Apple invented the touch UI. Hell, just listing the significant inventions of Apple is almost embarrassing because any list is going to leave so many of them off.

This is why people feel the need to "denigrate" Apple -- people have serious misconceptions about the history of computing, resulting in a new history in which Apple is penciled in as the creator of everything. Their contribution to the history of computing is significant, but claims that they "invented" all these things give too much credit to Apple and too little to the companies and researchers who had the same ideas but lacked the resources, capitalist desire, or business acumen to profit from them.

See raganwald's comment regarding execution: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2934813

No, people denigrate Apple because they are invested, emotionally, in a competing product and they do not want to believe that Apple did innovate as much as they have.

You're right that there are a lot of serious misconceptions about the history of computing, but they are all on the side of the people who claim that products that came after Apple's products are proof that Apple didn't invent the category, etc.

As for companies that lacked the "desire", or "resources" to invent these things, well, they don't deserve any credit because they didn't invent them.

You seem to be operating under the misconception that inventions are just ideas... and you would do well to read the ragenwald comment you link to, where he notes that ideas without execution are nothing. Apple did invent these things because they took them from ideas-- which are easy-- thru the hard part of solving all the problems with the idea-- to fruition. All those people who didn't bring anything to fruition didn't earn any credit.

Just as those people who copied Apple's products didn't invent them either.

Frankly, I find it kind of amazing that people who clearly have very little knowledge of this history of computing will repeat these myths-- myths debunked over 30 years ago!-- and patronizingly claim that people who are debunking the myths are operating under "misconceptions".

It's like trying to talk to a non-technical person who heard someone from some pimply kid over at Best Buy and therefore they think he's an expert and you, with the CS degree don't know nearly as much about computers... but of course, they don't know anything either, so they just see him as an authority figure because hell, he's 17, and he works at Best Buy, right? Sigh.

If Apple "invented" the GUI by commercializing some ideas that started at Xerox, how is it that the Xerox Star was released before the Lisa?

Now, the Macintosh was a far more impressive execution of those ideas than either of its predecessors, but to say Apple "invented" the GUI, and to downplay Xerox's contribution, is unfair.

I'm not saying this because I'm "invested" in any product or company; I owned a 512-K Mac, I covet my wife's MacBook Plus, but I don't find identification with any particular company's fictional narrative a useful way of discussing technology or history.

I like my Macbook as much as the next guy, but this is way too frothy:

> Apple invented the GUI

No, they didn't. Xerox invented the GUI. You seem to be aware of Xerox's role, so I can't figure out why you'd assert that Apple making use of those ideas later would then constitute them "inventing" the GUI.

> NeXT cube inspired the web

That's stretching things, to say the least. The early web was a fairly incremental step from Gopher. Sure, Tim Berners Lee used a NeXT machine, but it's not like CERN wouldn't have had networked, GUI-based UNIX computers if it weren't for NeXT.

> Apple invented the touch UI.

Huh? Touch interfaces have been used for ages. The restaurant that I worked at in high school in the mid-90s had one on its cash register. Apple didn't even produce the first touch-screen phone.

Similarly, Google's "invention" of PageRank was pretty incremental. It was a refinement of Jon Kleinberg's idea for using link-based search ranking.

Most innovations, when looked at under a magnifying glass, turn out to be more or less incremental. Apple's had some really impressive instances of refining, marketing and popularizing. That said, most innovation is really just refinement.

Have they been the most influential company of the last decade? I think it's too early to tell, but I seriously doubt it. That's something that's clearer in the history books. We're probably looking in the wrong places completely. It seems totally plausible to me that the human genome being sequenced in the last decade will trump e.g. mobile internet in its long-term effects on society.

If any of Apple's innovations will pan out as having been truly disruptive to society, I'm pretty sure it will have been their first. Their role (along with their contemporaries, most notably Commodore) in popularizing personal computing is one of those truly game changing moments in history. My life was radically changed when my family got a computer. In contrast, when I got my first smart phone (considering the fact that my non-smart phone already had Google maps, Skype, a web browser and IMAP client) virtually nothing changed in my life.

(As a side note, there hasn't been anything that Google's done thusfar that I'd nominate for being society changing. Web search was already prevalent and the research that led to PageRank was already out there. Google Books, Street View and their work on autonomous vehicles seem like they might be some of those things in retrospect.)

Some minor nitpicks

> Xerox invented the GUI

Not really either. Engelbart has show mice and windows before the PARC folks. I remember people dragging stuff with light-pens on IBM's 2250's and other similar GUI-like behavior on high-end CAD and image manipulation software. Was the Star close to what Apple offered? Yes. Was Star clunky in comparison? Yes. It was also 3 times more expensive. I think the single most meaningful innovation in Lisa was the mouse drag actions and the clipboard metaphor. They made a convenient bridge between physical and virtual objects that took windows & icons one step further.

> The early web was a fairly incremental step from Gopher

It reminds me more of local-based hypertext and SGML. From that to HTTP, it's a very easy jump.

> Apple didn't even produce the first touch-screen phone.

Indeed. I owned a Sony Ericsson P-800. It was multi-tasking, had a huge touchscreen and, when I first saw the iPhone, I felt it was very "meh". Nice animation, beautiful icons but I had a more functional phone. And the honor of the first touch-screen smartphone belongs to the IBM/BellSouth's Simon. Unless you count Esslinger's concepts (they show a touchscreen desktop phone that predated the Simon).

And yes. I agree that Apple's most revolutionary product was the Apple II, but it must share the spotlight with Commodore, Atari and Radio Shack. The Apple II is (or, at least, should be) a source of inspiration for engineers: it's simple, small, concise and incredibly rich in functionality.

> there hasn't been anything that Google's done thusfar that I'd nominate for being society changing

An open-source post-PC OS seems quite impressive. Helping move data into web apps, dooming local storag, too.

Apple DID NOT invent gui. When Jobs visited PARC he saw three revolutionary ideas:

GUI Networked personal computers Object Oriented Programming

Source: http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Comp...

Seriously, that book is a must read for any person that reads this site. 3 dollars for a used copy. And Apple did not license anything GUI related from Xerox - there was a lawsuit involving the lack of licensing the technology.

You know what rubs me the wrong way? I am a geek - I love it when the geeks get the credit for making things work and the marketing people just get the credit for the shiny veneer. Woz is the geek here and I feel like he doesnt get the credit he deserves. Anybody know where Woz worked before Apple? HP - he took the risk of leaving a well established company and joined forces with Steve Jobs. I am not saying it didn't work out well for him but I think too many people forget about him and focus on the other Steve. Oh well. Oh yeah, I wrote this on my iPad and it took forever to compose. FWIW.

> But, what significant inventions can we credit to Microsoft?

They put a computer in every home.

An accomplishment, for sure. But, not an invention.

I think that's a pretty arguable point. I would argue, for instance, that it was Apple that put a computer in every home... as the Apple II was selling very well, before microsoft came onto the scene. Microsoft was successful in taking marketshare away from Apple, but it was apple who invent the home computer category.

At any rate, I don't deny Microsofts massive commercial success... but that success is not itself an invention. If you meant the personal computer, it wasn't microsoft that invented it.

...and on every desk, all running Microsoft software. For some time in the 90's that was reality. Even if you owned a Mac.

Microsoft? Enterprise software. They still own this area

HP Excellent quality servers and network hardware. It's hard for that to be sexy because it doesn't have a touchscreen, but just because the masses don't know about it doesn't mean that they're an also-ran.

Dell Perfected mass-marketing of PCs, bringing computing costs waaaay down for everyone.

Lenovo Meh, they bought IBM's line of laptops only a few years ago. I notice that you studiously avoided the "so, what has IBM invented that's significant?"

Samsung Dunno, I'm sure someone will come up with something.

Sony Yeah, Sony have never pushed the envelope with things like the Playstation. Combined with Microsoft's Xbox, these guys have pretty much created a massive market where previously there was none. Not to mention the bunch of other stuff that the multi-tentacled Sony has done.

The cell networks I was unaware that we were looking to service providers to change the way we use computers.

The reason why people denigrate Apple is because Apple fans invite it. They keep on about the company like it's something amazingly special and everyone else is somehow daft for choosing something else. I've seen this referred to as "the Apple Smug Field". You've done it here by saying (or strongly implying) "Apple is awesome, what have those other guys done? NOTHING!", which, of course, is monumentally self-centred and irritating.

While I know this is semantics, I'd argue that Sony (and the XBox) didn't create a massive market where there was none. Nintendo and Sega previously had the market in shackles. Sony expanded it immensely with the PS1 and the PS2. I say expanded because the market grew around the one that was already there. They certainly did affect the market though. The hardware proved capable of providing games that were previously difficult to impossible to make on Nintendo's and Sega's systems.

Given the context of the general argument involving Apple 'creating' versus 'expanding', your semantics are a good point. the PS and XBox massively expanded a nascent market - but there were also innovations like the development of online profiles and the like.

> But, what significant inventions can we credit to... the cell networks? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Discoveries_and_devel...

I believe you may be overstating your point, or maybe it's the wording, but I hope you are not implying that sony or hp or samsung, with almost 200 years of total company histories, have not invented much and have survived by sheer luck.

I believe Sony has some significant innovations in portable music players back in the 1970s, and certainly made major strides in transistor radios in decades prior. Samsung I'm not really aware of any innovations from, but I wouldn't deny that they may be there. HP was very innovative in test equipment, but not so much in personal computers, as far as I am aware.

But it is worth noting that I was genuinely asking a question. It is easy for me to think of the innovations I named (and many more) from Apple, and the ones I named from Google, but off the top of my head, in the areas of mobile phones, tablets and personal computers I can't think of any from those other companies... and wondered if I wasn't missing them... so, by all means, if you have some significant innovations to bring up, I'd be happy to hear them.