Apple’s Inventiveness

[DrMariano2]

Here’s a good essay by Jean-Louis Gassée:

Apple Never Invented Anything

For thirty years, the industry had tried to create a tablet, and it had tried too hard. The devices kept clotting, one after the other. Alan Kay’s Dynabook, Go, Eo, GridPad, various Microsoft-powered Tablet PCs, even Apple’s Newton in the early nineties….they didn’t congeal, nothing took.

Then, in January 2010, Chef Jobs walks on stage with the iPad and it all becomes obvious, easy. Three decades of failures are forgotten.

This brings us to last week’s animated debate about Apple’s talent for invention in the Comments section of the “Apple Tax” Monday Note:

“…moving from stylus to touch (finger) was a change in enabling technology, not some invention by Apple – even gesture existed way back before the iPhone. Have an IPAQ on my desk as a reminder – a product ahead of the implementing technology!
Unfortunately Apple have run out of real innovation…”

In other words: “Nothing new, no innovation, the ingredients were already lying around somewhere…”. The comment drew this retort from another reader:
“iPaq as a precursor to iPad?
Are you on drugs? Right now?”

Drugged or sober, the proud iPaq owner falls into the following point: The basic ingredients are the same. Software is all zeroes and ones, after all. The quantity and order may vary, but that’s about it. Hardware is just protons, neutrons, electrons and photons buzzing around, nothing original. Apple didn’t “invent” anything, the iPad is simply their variation, their interpretation of the well-known tablet recipe.

By this myopic logic, Einstein didn’t invent the theory of relativity, Henri Poincaré had similar ideas before him, as did Hendrik Lorentz earlier still. And, come to think of it, Maxwell’s equations contain all of the basic ingredients of relativity; Einstein “merely” found a way to combine them with another set of parts, Newtonian mechanics.

[Author]

Posts