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Comment by azylman | Hacker News Reader

I struggle to think of Apple as innovative - I consider them iterative. They DO make amazing, fantastic products. With few exceptions, however, their products tend to be things that are iterative improvements over already existing technology.

For example, iPhone and iPad - both of these concepts (smartphone and tablet) already existed. Only, a lot of them were shitty before Apple came along. They basically swept through and fixed everything that was wrong with these devices, but it's not like they came up with the idea for a tablet or a smartphone.

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Apple doesn't create new product areas, it grabs an area and disrupts the status quo by offering significantly improved user experiences. In that pursuit they have really innovated in various areas, from UI design to manufacturing to logistics.

The fact they haven't created a new product area by themselves doesn't mean they don't innovate at all.

I would argue the iPad is a new product area.

Yes tablets had existed in the past but did any of them have scaled down, touch optimised UIs ? All I recall is full blown Windows which was probably the biggest reason they didn't succeed.

I guess it feels that way because tablets until the iPad were an insignificant stagnated market, whereas we did have markets for computers, phones, music players, etc.

So, I'd argue it's still a huge improvement over an existing product area, with the added bonus that it created a market. Products existed, but no significant market for them was available.

The iPhone's improvements over Blackberries and the like of the time were as impressive as the iPad's improvements over Windows tablets, for example, but one doesn't feel the iPhone a new product area.

Yes, true, Apple was the first one to put touch optimized, scaled down UIs on these tablets. But wasn't that exactly the original argument? Again, this is Apple taking an existing technology and polishing it to make create a great product.

Yes tablets had existed in the past but did any of them have scaled down, touch optimised UIs?

Yes. None of them were widely commercially successful though. Products that come to mind include the Crunchpad (which I'm not sure actually made it to market), the Always Innovating Touchbook and the Pepper Pad. Of these, the Crunchpad was most similar to the iPad.

So no, Apple didn't invent a new product area with the iPad. They were just the first to find commercial success in that product area.

Yes, I spent most of '99 writing a custom GUI system for a tablet. We were even considering ARM (StrongARM) for the CPU, but ended up with an x86 clone. The system was running Linux, NanoX and used Opera as the browser. The widget set was written from the ground up to make it light weight and touch friendly.

See e.g. http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/Linux-For-Devices-Article...

It wasn't as sleek as the iPad, of course - battery, LCD and touch technology has come a long way, but it worked quite well.

And we were not first with a custom tablet UI (the article above compares it to the Ericsson Screen Phone for example: http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/Linux-For-Devices-Article... )

Touch versus stylus wasn't iterative. It was revolutionary. "Swipe to unlock" wouldn't even have been practical in the prior resistive touchscreen/stylus paradigm.

Apple didn't invent the touch paradigm, not even for "swipe to unlock", as demonstrated by the Neonode N1 mentioned in the ruling.

They basically swept through and fixed everything that was wrong with these devices a.k.a. innovation.

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