“Jobs called Android a ‘stolen product’, but theft can be a tricky concept when talking about innovation. The iPhone didn’t emerge fully formed from Jobs’s head. Rather, it represented the culmination of incremental innovation over decades – much of which occurred outside of Cupertino.” Nothing particularly new in there for regular OSNews readers, but still handy to have it in one place.
You’re right. There’s plenty of instances where Apple has used other’s ideas. I do think a lot of his anger stemmed from Rubin being on the board and then telling Google what he learned. I’d feel slighted too, but that’s business.
People keep making this argument but Rubin was never in the iPhone meetings because of a very clearly expressed conflict of interests.
[edit]
ignore me. I think we’re / I’m getting Rubin mixed up with Schmidt
Edited 2012-02-23 20:54 UTC
First it was Schmidt that was on the board and you failed to mention that Schmidt was excluded from any board meetings that included secret products including iPhone. Please stop repeating John Gruber’s lies here. People on OSnews know better.
As somebody on Ars pointed out:
In other words, it usually works like this:
1. Some companies will come out with a thing that ranges from craptastic to mildly popular
2. Apple comes along and shows them how to do it properly – geeks laugh at it, but Apple sells millions
3. All the copycat devices come out about a year later
4. People will claim that Apple deserves none of the credit, because after all… they were doing tablets back on Star Trek, and there were a few shitty touch-based smartphones before the iPhone came along. I don’t know who was doing GUIs before the Mac came along, but I’m sure somebody had released something.
Apple is the ‘Street Fighter II’ in a world full of ‘Street Fighter I’s.’ Not to say that somebody won’t come along and release something better than Street Fighter II (I have a Galaxy Nexus phone and think it is superior to the iPhone), but everybody knows who the real pioneers were.
Edited 2012-02-23 22:49 UTC
Not really, although that’s the usual fanboy history of things. Apple not having MMS, multitasking, copy & paste, proper notification, a half-decent camera, etc etc etc, and you guys will pretend it’s either 1) unneccesary 2) comes with negative impact on Apple’s holistic design philosophy, battery life, ease of use etc etc or 3) something they’ll come along with once they do it properly since they always do it properly and superior right at the beginning.
Apple is in fact a follower in almost all areas, but with a fan base that will overlook all their shortcomings for the few things they do right, which are the only ones that count. Which makes them the best by default.
Yeah, Apple doesn’t throw every imaginable bell & whistle into their products, and that’s why I have an Android phone
But they said, ‘Hey, if you want to build a capacitive touch smartpohone, here’s how to do it’, and their competitors obviously listened.
How did the 2007 version (both products release year) of Android and iOS compare?
Apple was a product that came from a well known cult brand.
Android came almost from nowhere.
The brand then had no hype value.
Edited 2012-02-24 00:07 UTC
The first wave of Android phones were like the first wave of Android tablets… good on features, bad on polish. Generally, it takes the copycats at least one generation to get the ‘fit and finish’ right. In the case of MS, it took about 15 years with Windows
hehe
I had one of the 1st wave of Android phones and I absolutely loved it. In fact I actually walked into the shop to buy an iPhone and walked out with a G1. I wont pretend it was perfect: battery life was pretty poor (particularly pre Android 1.5, IIRC) and the phone itself wasn’t pretty. But as a real world functional device, the G1’s were actually really nice handsets.
I guess that’s the beauty of technology: there’s enough variations to suit most peoples needs.
Yeah, but didn’t LG get there first?
I wont pretend to have used the LG Prada, but from all accounts I’ve read, it sounded very much like the first iPhone before the iPhone.
They were probably developed at the same time. And besides, from all accounts, the LG Prada was a piece of crap
You mean like how Android and iOS were developed at the same time too. But obviously many Apple fans prefer to ignore that little fact
Was it really that bad though? I mean the original iPhone wasn’t that great either: lack of MMS, multitasking, copy/paste and even 3rd party app support made for a pretty crappy “smart” phone.
Granted these things did (eventually) get fixed, but I honestly think if anyone other than Apple had released a the original iPhone, it wouldn’t have sold even half as well.
Edited 2012-02-27 09:30 UTC
I don’t know, as I didn’t own one. But the comparison articles back from early 2007 indicate that the iPhone was a significantly better experience. In pretty much every respect, the LG was just another phone, and wouldn’t have been any kind of game changer, even if the iPhone hadn’t been released.
Yeah, just like Windows Phone, I don’t think it was all that great in the features department. But design-wise, it was a significant step ahead from anything that had come before it.
Edited 2012-02-27 22:22 UTC
Hmmm. You might be right. I guess we can only speculate.
Windows Phone was only a step ahead of anything before the portable Windows range. In terms of it’s position in the market – it was very much a mediocre release. Certainly less of a significant step forward than Prada was in it’s time given that Prada was pioneering a number of new technologies and concepts (even if, arguably, they didn’t do the greatest job on the final release). Where as MS were just reverting back to basics with heavy influences from established products.
Edited 2012-02-28 14:34 UTC
Yeah, I meant that the iPhone was a step ahead, not Windows Phone
I only brought up Windows Phone because it was lacking features such as copy/paste when it first launched, but has since added them. Actually, I think Windows Phone has a chance of being a real contender in the smartphone race, especially if they set it up so you can run Metro apps on phones, along with tablets and desktops.
“We consider that Apple copied the Prada phone after the design was unveiled when it was presented in the iF Design Award and won the prize in September 2006.” – Woo-Young Kwak, head of LG Mobile Handset R&D Center.
Even if their implementation left somewhat more (it’s not like iPhone 1 didn’t) to be desired, it still showed how to do a capacitive “smarpthone” (yes, we can easily say Prada really wasn’t one – but then, if using any sort of rigor in our definition, iPhone 1 also wasn’t).
Huh? Are you agreeing with WorknMan or disagreeing with him? It sounds like you’re trying to disagree with him, but you’ve just mostly repeated what he was saying. (Which I agree with.)
That’s the geek’s perspective. People who haven’t worked in teaching technology have no idea about the value of usability. It trumps everything. Seriously. Having a system that just works is worth dozens of features.
The old argument of “well it’s those crazy apple fanboys” may have been plausible 10 years ago when there weren’t many Apple users. You can’t seriously believe it’s all because of the gullible fans when Apple are putting up the sales numbers of today. But that’s a common “geek” perspective, that everyone else must be dumber than you are and that’s why they make the choices they do.
Edited 2012-02-24 02:30 UTC
The “just works” myth of Apple products is just a myth. And if it really existed and really trumped everything, it would have real-world consequences which in fact it does not have. Apple users would be more efficient in the workplace (they are not), they wouldn’t need support (they do, often for the most trivial things), in short using Apple would be more economical and efficient, which it is not.
Your “argument” is that people who aren’t geeks magically “just know” that it is so, and since geeks just “don’t get it”, it’s simply impossible to discuss these things. I say you’re full of shit and cliched marketing tricks.
Do you have any hard facts? TCO or productivity studies? Anything?
Based on my personal experience I can safely say that due to Apple there are more people able to successfully use complex devices like computers, smartphones and tables without or with only minor tech support.
E. g. I worked in a company having about 50% PCs and 50% Macs. Mac support was done by a single person, PC support needed a team of four. Your point was?
Of course there are those horrible examples where Windows supporters try to do / have to do Mac support without any knowledge and support costs starts to get ugly expensive due to that.
The fact remains: Since Apple’s iPhone there are hugh numbers of users now able to surf the web, doing e-mails and stuff without the “friendly neighbor” doing PC support and reinstalling Windows now and then. This is a hugh productivity gain (you can always quarrel about the usefulness of what people to with their devices) not seen before with Symbian, Windows, Linux, etc.
Right. Anecdote, hyperbole and bullshit. That’s what makes Apple fanboys so much more productive. There’s a reason why I despise you guys.
You don’t seem to realise how this works, you have it backwards.
You make an extraordinary claim, you have to provide “hard facts” – but all the metric you give is some personal anecdote.
While the dynamics you imply would need to be seen in a larger picture.
And, BTW, what I would call “productivity of nations” (that’s decently large) isn’t exactly coming with adoption of Apple products (yeah, it might seem so at first sight, but this correlation appears because Apple targets virtually only affluent places, openly states as its goal to ignore “lesser” and not profligate enough people).
But it’s clearly not a rule – for example, Israel (a place which I would definitely consider among most productive / innovative, great per capita) has very low OSX adoption for some reason (I’m sure some would say it’s due to their stereotypical frugality & thoughtfulness with spending ;p ): http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-IL-monthly-200812-201203 (a level also typical throughout the world).
South Korea would be another such example that I’m aware of.
And Symbian is still at the top BTW ( http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-200812-201203 ), it actually regained some of the lead and keeps it steady, but I guess you wouldn’t know this spewing anecdotes instead of actual metrics.
Blablabla.
This was not his point at all. The iPhone was not about being better by putting even more stuff into a phone (with this kind of thinking, there is never any ground braking device ever because there is always a device somewhere that “has feature X” which the new device does not support. In fact, I’m glad that superfluous dinosaur tech like SMS and MMS are about to die due to the smartphones success).
You totally miss the fact that:
1) user friendlyness is not about putting any possible hardware extension or protocol into a device (I know because I still use the Nokia N95 which was legendary for having “anything”. But the N95 is horrible to use so most features are not used at all).
2) that all smartphone devices nowadays are heavily influenced by the iPhone. Calling Apple a “follower” obviously misses the point. While they are not always the inventor, they are definitively better at then others as innovators (=bringing invention to market success).
E. g. http://iphonefizz.wordpress.com/tag/tablets-and-smartphones-before-…
If Apple’s success is only because of their die hard followers, then please explain me why Linux – having at least as many fundamentalistic followers – never materialized in masses on the desktop.
SMS is still alive and well, It’s the biggest mobile revenue source:
http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats#…
It’s everywhere and just works unlike coverage/pricing problems with 3G/4G connections.
+1 for pointing that out again so I don’t have to.
If we listen to what Gruber would say, “stealing” an idea, which is what he thinks Apple is doing, is different from “borrowing” it, which is what he thinks Android is doing. In order to “steal” it, you have to make everyone think that you came up with it in the first place.
So I think that means if Android becomes so good that we forget the iPhone then Jobs won’t be so angry at Android any more.
Let’s try and bring his soul some peace people!
He’s quoted as saying that he wanted to destroy Android, even if he had to spend all of Apple’s money to do so.
That doesn’t seem particularly smart, particularly in this current economy, that he was potentially willing to bankrupt Apple over a personal vendetta.
Its called “being passionate” about what you do.
The problem is that in this quote, he was not passionate about what *Apple* do but about what *Google* do.
Not the way to go when you run a business. You only attract people’s attention on your competitors. Better quietly take inspiration* from competitor’s good features… Then put them together in a product that you feel is better without mentioning it !
* No, I won’t use that “steal” word. It has received too much abuse over the last few years. Removing an item from someone’s property is stealing, but taking someone else’s idea to put them in your own product is taking inspiration.
Edited 2012-02-25 07:47 UTC
Another way to describe would be smth in vein of egotistical maniac like personality. Such people do act in fairly similar ways – if they feel threatened by what you do (worse if it’s somewhat similar to what they are doing, and similarly good or better), expect temper tantrums of a severity loosing maybe only to those by small children.
I really don’t understand why people don’t understand the argument that Apple is innovative. Yes, they took most of their paradigms and design cues from others; yes, their design process is more iterative and evolutionary than they want consumers to think. But there is really no comparison whatsoever between the predecessor products and what Apple puts out. I don’t even mean in terms of quality, and I *definitely* don’t mean in terms of features, but Apple’s products are almost always far more polished than those of their competitors.
It’s precisely for that reason that I don’t buy Apple, leaving aside their crummy corporate tactics and walled garden approach. I don’t like that much polish in my software. I actually like like Sony’s products in their entirety: the crappy software only emphasizes the brilliance of their hardware (some products, anyhow, and I don’t buy Sony anymore either because they’re an even worse company than Apple!)
That polish is called innovation, my friends.
Polish is Polish ! And Inovation is Inovation !
Apple just cannot rewrite the dictionary just to sell more !
So… if i copy Iphone, but make it a little bit more polished … i just inovated a little
EDIT :
But i do understand you, i know that Apple fanboys think that way ( and some non fanboys also ).
BUT ITS WRONG !
Its like saying : there were no linux before Ubuntu !
Your friends
Edited 2012-02-24 02:40 UTC
Yes, precisely. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Geeks don’t seem to understand this.
You mentioned something about a dictionary. Unfortunately, that’s the attitude about Apple that most geeks have: “this is the ‘definition’ of innovation and Apple is not conforming to that definition!” I think it’s a very narrow (and arrogantly self-serving) way of thinking about innovation.
No…it’s like saying that desktop Linux was not so polished before Ubuntu. But I would never say that (how easily people forget about Knoppix and MEPIS). I specifically acknowledged that Apple is taking a lot of its paradigms from preexisting products (and research).
I should reiterate that I use the most unpolished software on earth and have never bought an Apple product.
as i wrote on a post in the thread , i admit my mistake of the definition of inovation. so i do agree with your original post. sorry for the mistake.
but i do not agree with : ” I think it’s a very narrow (and arrogantly self-serving) way of thinking about innovation.”.
i think that we should stand by the correctness of things and just not say inovation or invention just to conform with what the media or companies say.
but then again, i stand by the gnu/linux slogan and not just linux, so you see from what kind of geek i come from
They’re not rewriting the dictionary. You just didn’t read the dictionary.
Here’s what Wikipedia says about innovation:
Almost everyone in this thread confused invention with innovation. Apple did not invent the smart phone. However they certainly innovated by creating the iPhone.
ok, fair enough. i admit my mistake.
although is up for arguments the ammount of innovation on the iphone, usually when i think of innovation if think of new things.
since it seems that inovation only means “better, polished” ways to do the old thing, i guess its fair enough.
i stand corrected !
But I don’t think the article is trying to claim Apple doesn’t innovate. It’s saying that by Apple’s own definition of theft, the iPhone is a stolen product. It’s got nothing to do with how others define innovation or theft; it’s trying to hold Apple to their own definition.
In other words, if Android is a ‘stolen product’, then by the same definition, so is the iPhone. Both have borrowed heavily from those that came before it.
Personally, I think the article makes a good point, and I think it’s a good thing. Apple builds on others’ ideas. Others build on Apple’s ideas. This is sometimes referred to as progress.
Oh absolutely. It’s definitely a “stolen product” by the standards that Jobs laid out. I have always maintained that Apple is an evolutionary and, in many cases, creatively reactionary company. There is very little in terms of features or functionality or even design paradigms that come out of Cupertino that are revolutionary; the level of polish is, however, revolutionary, time and time again.
I’m just trying to be objective–at least, by my own principles, which I think most people here would disagree with. Few on OSNews would agree, I believe, that “level of polish” is something that can be defined as “revolutionary”, which is perfectly fine. But when people start bashing Apple left and right for not being innovative because they took this and that design paradigm from somewhere else, they totally miss the point of why other people call the company innovative.
My comments was more directed at above commenters who decided to turn this into a tribunal judging Apple’s innovativeness, a fracas stemming from a misunderstanding of the word “innovative” which I gladly joined in 🙂
P.S.: To be clear, I agree with everything the article says; but as evidence of my point, take a look at what it has to say about the slide to unlock feature. Click on the YouTube link and watch the feature in action on that older phone. There is really no comparison whatsoever in terms of how polished the feature is on that phone and on the iPhone. Is Apple’s feature stolen? Of course. Is Apple’s implementation revolutionary and innovative because of how polished it is? Yes.
Edited 2012-02-26 17:30 UTC
I don’t disagree with what you’ve said here.
Apple generates polarised views. As you quite rightly point out, Apple has created lots of innovative products and features, yet others see them as being evolutionary or derivative.
However my guess is this polarisation is intentionally generated by Apple. Denying Apple’s innovation is primarily a response to the way Apple (and some Apple users) portray the nature of Apple’s innovation.
Apple has a tendency to emphasize how innovative its products are without acknowledging the innovation of others. In fact, it even goes further to dismiss others’ innovation (see e.g. the “stolen product” claim). This is particularly dangerous if your primary means of innovation is through something as intangible as polish (although I’d personally say there’s more to Apple than that).
The natural response to this is to play down Apple’s innovation, since it’s the only way to restore perspective. In my view, the consequence is that both sides end up in implausible positions.
+1
Or maybe it’s because Apple has a huge PR machine that the small competitors and innovators can’t match.
What does having a PR machine have to do with how polished your retail products are? Are you suggesting that the only reason why Apple’s consumers think that their products are polished is because they are fooled into thinking so by Apple PR?
Throwing in “only” there seems like a trollbait… but anyway, really, look at research showing how frighteningly large proportion of OSX users think they’re perfectly safe from online threats just because they use OSX, because Apple PR said them so.
Which in this case might very well still come back and bit them (unless the idea is to push people into iOS-like model anyway; but there, you had occasional “jailbreaks” via Safari – with people even more convinced about safety – essentially a root for any random website)
“Polished” is, yes, also a major part of that PR machine. While it was curious to see the evolution of responses to the silly flaw of iPhone 4 antenna (an expression of “polished” in a way, but not where it matters for an antenna); even the describing language curiously emerged …it wasn’t any “grip” or anything – “gentle touch” in the wrong spot tends to bridge it.
(BTW, I haven’t yet been on a Final Cut Pro Apple event presentation during which FCP wouldn’t crash less than two times)
PS. And that’s also coming from a culture which, in late 90s, went on “to help Apple” by mass-buying (and refusing to pirate) a clearly inferior, more expensive, flawed product (for better part of a decade) http://www.forbes.com/1997/08/08/column.html
…not directing such passion at some people in need & on hard times or smth – a company, one which deserved to fail (and essentially did, but MS needed at the time to be able to point fingers at some competition); that’s a bit insane.
Edited 2012-03-01 18:42 UTC
This is the stupidest argument if I ever heard one….
You might as well as say that NOBODY innovates anything as all ideas come from somewhere. How weak! Talk about being in true denial here. At least give credit where it’s due or go ahead and put your head back in the sandhole.
Edited 2012-02-24 18:28 UTC
While I agree that all companies (but B&N) involved in this clusterfuck behave pitiful, I want to point out that the article is NOT saying that Apple, LG or whoever is not innovating when they put old things together in new ways.
The article is saying that by Apple’s use of the word “theft” Apple is a thief also. It’s the old proverb of a kettle calling a pot black. Or, IOW, Apple’s accusations ring hollow because they do the same damn thing they want others to not do. Do as I say, not as I do. And that’s just sad.
The market before and after the iPhone: http://t.co/wz9TpipC
You do realize that your pictures on the right side is made of mostly 90% of feature phones who still looks very much like that ? (And still amount for the majority of the sales in the world).
+1 but I’d say left side instead
Not only “before” still dominates – it also includes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LG_KE850_Prada_Hauptmenü.jpg , one of fairly loud premieres quite some time before the iPhone
(so it could be “before and after LG Prada” as well; also, it’s a bit stupid 1) to include handsets spanning around a decade in the “before” category 2) miss the possibility that, perhaps, large touchscreens were hardly feasible for most of that time & Apple essentially waited for the tech enabling them, with the convenience of not having to support the baggage of ~legacy solutions …while (still) purposefully ignoring vast majority of mobile users)
Anyway, in the words of Woo-Young Kwak, head of LG Mobile Handset R&D Center:
“Nothing particularly new in there for regular OSNews readers”
If you believe in the holy flying groundhog, then the holy flying groundhog (http://jasonlawsonrants.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/holy-flying-ground…) is no surprise for you. That’s how religious fundamentalism works. I call that BS.
Edited 2012-02-26 11:57 UTC
“Jobs called Android a ‘stolen product’
Yeah right! Since Android development started at least 2 years before IOS.