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Comment by davidkatz | Hacker News Reader

Beautiful. One thing though, I believe the OP is mistaken when he implies that Steve Jobs didn't affect how computers work on the inside:

"On the one hand, I can imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Jobs did and the people he inspired: probably a bit less shiny, a bit more beige, a bit more square. Deep inside, though, our devices would still work the same way and do the same things."

Ultimately, computer architectures serve real world use cases. Innovation in use cases results in innovation in architectures. There are countless new technologies that exist because of the products that Apple invented.

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Example?

Not the OP but I assume he ment something like HTML was created using a NEXT machine http://inventors.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sd...

The entire ultrabook category can be credited the Macbook Air.

The iPhone drove the creation of the modern smartphone market. Before 2007, only businessmen carried Blackberries. Now pre-teens have smartphones. There's a really powerful image NBC posted comparing the Papal Conclave in 2005 and 2013[1] that tells the whole story. Similarly, the iPad is driving the tablet market.

And that's just 3 recent consumer-facing categories. The list goes on as you dig deeper or farther back. If you're using Chrome, guess who started Webkit?

1: https://twitter.com/neilgupta/status/312317589432971264

Edit: I should have said, guess who popularized Webkit. We can debate semantics on whether forking KHTML to Webkit makes Apple the author of Webkit or not, but I think we can agree Apple popularized it.

> If you're using Chrome, guess who started Webkit?

The developers of KDE. Webkit comes from a fork of KHTML, the engine used for Konqueror. Apple came to the picture 3 years later.

The macbook air is just a small laptop. In what way is making things smaller an Apple technology? Laptops have been getting steadily smaller for decades now.

The iPhone may have created a market, but that was because of how it worked. The question was whether anything Jobs did influenced the technology of the device. The iPhone was an early (but not the first) user of capacitive touchscreens, but virtually everything else in the device was an off-the-shelf part.

And FWIW: I know who started WebKit. It wasn't Apple. :)

Apple pressured Intel to design the smaller chipsets that made the Macbook Air, and subsequently other ultrabooks, possible. Without Apple's influence, we might not have ultrabooks.

Similarly, Apple pressured Corning to make Gorilla Glass. I would also argue the iPhone's UI has heavily influenced modern smartphone OS's to be more user friendly.

I'll cede the WebKit point, though I do think we can credit Apple for popularizing it.

Sure, Intel had to offer something to Apple to make them switch from PowerPC to x86. But you could also argue that Intel's ultra efficient CPUs and chipsets are actually a result of the competition from companies like Transmeta. It's not at all obvious that without Apple there would be no utra efficent CPUs. (But without Apple we might well live in a world full of ugly netbooks.)

> It's not at all obvious that without Apple there would be no utra efficent CPUs.

That's a very slippery argument. It's pretty obvious that without Darwin, there still would have eventually been a theory of evolution (as seen be Alfred Wallace's work), but Darwin gets credit for being first. Similarly, it's not at all obvious that without Dennis Ritchie, there would be no C. I'm sure eventually somebody would have created a similar language, but Ritchie made it happen first, so he deserves credit.

Sure, Intel may have eventually come up with ultra-efficient CPUs without Apple, but the point is that Apple helped make it happen.

To be clear, I'm not comparing a CPU design to the works of Darwin or Ritchie. I'm simply saying that arguing that an invention would have occurred even without the inventor could be said for anything.

I think you got that one wrong. Transmeta happend way before ultrabooks at a time when Apple was still shipping notebooks with a very power hungry G4. Because of Transmeta (and because of a funny thing called the power wall) Intel had to reconsider their entire processor lineup and to start to focus on low power. IBM never produced a low power CPU for Apple, so Apple eventually switched to x86. To claim that Apple coerced Intel to focus on low power is not correct. Just look at the timeline.

How does Gorilla Glass even come close to enhancing the state of computing technology like Dennis Ritchie did?

Unlike C it was a net benefit even if a small one. Pascal was often the direct competitor to C and for low level tasks it's a much better language that lost out due to UNIX / tool chain support.

Apple pressured Intel to design the smaller chipsets that made the Macbook Air, and subsequently other ultrabooks, possible. Without Apple's influence, we might not have ultrabooks.

I remember taking a tour of an Iomega production facility when I was in high school. The tour guide explained how Toshiba (or someone) was demanding a Zip drive that was 2mm thinner so they could include it in their latest slim laptops. Sony has been making tiny, powerful, expensive laptops for longer than the Air has existed.

All manufacturers have been pushing for smaller, better, faster, stronger components. If it wasn't Apple, it would have been someone else. Apple was just the best at taking credit.

> The macbook air is just a small laptop.

Let's simplify:

The laptop is just a small computer. It has a form factor which conveniently houses the components of a full-sized desktop plus a mobile power supply, the engineering of which is largely due to CAD.

Exactly. The distinction you missed is that I wasn't trying to credit the inventor of the laptop with being a technological innovator along the lines of DMR.

Sure, Apple popularized many disrupting technologies like GUI (curtesy XEROX PARC), Laser-printer+Postscript (curtesy Adobe/XEROX). They also pioneered desktop computing, smartphones etc. building on technology made by Intel, IBM, etc.

But where are the "countless new technologies that exist because of the products that Apple invented"? I don't follow that argument. I think it's rather the other way around: the great products that Apple invented exist, because of the countless new technologies that already existed.

Apple and Jobs stood on the soulders of giants. And one of these giants was Dennis Ritchie. Stating that fact does not diminish Apple.

I am not the GP so I can't know for sure what he meant, but nobody is denying that Apple stood on the shoulders of giants. The argument is that people have also stood on the work Apple has done.

Apple created great products thanks to the countless technologies that existed. Likewise, other companies have created great products thanks to the countless technologies that exist, including those created by Apple. To claim that Apple has had 0 influence on the industry is just silly.

Sure, I don't claim they have zero influence. I just agree with the original post on google+ that non-technical people tend to overestimate Apples influence on core technology because they lack technical understanding...

Isn't that the biggest sign at the amount of influence Apple has had? Technology is important, but without practical applications, it's useless. I could have a revolutionary nuclear reactor inside my laptop capable of powering a small country, but if I can't do anything with it, there's no point to all that tech. Apple has heavily influenced how technology is used, which in turn, has influenced how the core technology itself evolves.

I recognize that it was a typo, but solders of giants is so much more appropriate, somehow. Even if it doesn't really rhyme. :D

> The iPhone drove the creation of the modern smartphone market. Before 2007, only businessmen carried Blackberries. Now pre-teens have smartphones.

That's a very US-centric view of it: European "lambda consumers" were already heavily drawn to smartphones by the time the iphone arrived, mostly via Nokia's "N" series, the N95 was a rather popular phone at the time for instance).

Speaking as someone who owned both back in 2007, the original iPhone was still a quantum leap forward from the Nokia N95.

You could bullet-point the capabilities of each device and end up with surprisingly similar lists, but the functional superiority of the iPhone was still remarkably unambiguous. It was like holding an artifact from the near future.

> Speaking as someone who owned both back in 2007, the original iPhone was still a quantum leap forward from the Nokia N95.

Absolutely, I wasn't trying to say the smartphones of the time were fantastic and there's clearly a pre-iphone and a post-iphone, my post was simply that the consumer world was not a smartphone-less vacuum before the iphone, the US were.

The Nokia N95, a series-60 device with a numeric keypad, can't possibly be seriously taken as a smartphone. Such a claim wouldn't have even passed the sniff test back when it was released -- it was just a riotously expensive feature-laden feature-phone. Compared to the Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices of the time, it was pretty weak.

I'll take you way back and go with desktop publishing, which was pretty much kicked off with Apple's LaserWriter, which integrated PostScript and the laser printer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserWriter).

You could dispute any given example, because there's always a precursor (even if only visible in hindsight, http://booksofnote.blogspot.com/2012/10/kafka-and-his-precur...).

Still missing the point I think. The argument was that Jobs didn't influence any of the funamental technology. PostScript was a rendering language from Adobe, and really not the first path-based rasterizer, but could broadly be called "technology" I guess. Laser printing was a technology. Integrating them by putting a computer running PostScript into a box containing a laser printer is not a technological development in any real sense.

That's not saying it doesn't have value. But it's not the kind of thing JBQ was talking about.

Disagree, but not arguing, because as I said, there's always a precursor.

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