Original iPod: 2001. Completely destroyed the walkman/cd player industry.
iPhone: 2007. Redefined the mobile phone.
iPad: 2010. Defined what tablets look like.
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How often do you expect one company to completely shake up an entire ecosystem?
What? How many computers are there out there other than the iMac with "fancy physical designs"? The iMac had virtually no impact on the industry.
Your other points are dubious at best. Apple are never first to market with new products, they only ever tweak existing markets and set up hype and an ecosystem around them.
The question is, are there any other markets out there right now that are just on the edge of taking off, that Apple can sneak into?
http://www.crews.org/curriculum/ex/compsci/7thgrade/intel/ho...
Yeah, and how long did that "trend" last?
USB was fairly mainstream before the iMac. I don't think I ever saw an iMac in the wild that didn't have an external floppy drive sitting next to it. I've seen computer labs with banks of iMacs and external floppy drives sitting next to them.
That trend lasted for a while, until case manufacturers started copying the G-whatever tower, and then eventually the Mac pro tower. The Shuttle small-form-factor PC I bought in the early 2000's had a Mac-like "candy" design.
>> USB was fairly mainstream before the iMac.
I was Windows 9x user (I left Macs right before Jobs came back) when the iMac came out, and most of the peripherals I was buying were still parallel devices. It wasn't until a lot of peripheral makers realized that one hardware version could sell to multiple platforms that USB really took off.
>> I don't think I ever saw an iMac in the wild that didn't have an external floppy drive
That's not the point. I didn't say that the need for a floppy was obviated by the iMac design, because you always have legacy users. Apple has a history of dropping legacy features in their hardware (VGA, mini-DVI, optical drives, the soon-to-be EOL'ed dock connector) before PC vendors do.
Sure you don't mean Zip drive? They were all the fashion at the time. Oh the joyous days when the Click of Death decided to pay a visit!
AlienWare and case mods...
Tell me with a straight face that mp3 players would never have taken off without the ipod.
Apple have had a big impact on the market, but most of the time they just release products at a time that the market is changing anyway and then claim to have "invented" all the technology that goes into it.
Dell laptops c. 2000:
https://www.google.com/search?num=10&hl=en&site=&...
Dell c. 2012:
My computer still looks like it did back in 1995. The monitor is thinner. The mouse is a little more ergonomic. The keyboard looks the same.
Tablets look like they did when Moses was holding up the Ten Commandments.
So, a revolution every six years. We are due for one next year.
I think you're not looking very closely. Sure, it's all about small details, but a quick and highly unscientific Google image search shows precisely what computers used to look like at the turn of the century:
You never know what happens :)