Has Apple, the computer manufacturer, actually invented anything? It seems that they just take other people’s ideas and make them, possibly, better.
It’s like the late 20th century Thomas Alva Edison. A person who claimed to have invented everything but it seems that the only thing he did was to get his engineers to make things and then take credit for them.
Let’s look at the “invented” products that Apple could claim to be theirs.
Let’s first go back 30 years to the Apple Mac. With a pointing device invented in the late 60s with a “point-and-click” interface that they discovered on a tour of Xerox PARC. They liked it so much they licensed it from them. Not as what a lot of people think that they stole the idea.
From now on, they have seemingly taken an existing product and put their own design spin on it.
With multiple product flops in the early 1990s after the company fired Steve Jobs, the company made a comeback in 1998 with both the colourful iMac range and Steve Jobs back at the helm of the company he helped to found. The iMac came in multiple colours and a “hockey puck” mouse. Not only that, it was Jonathan Ive’s innovative design skills that made this product the new “iconic Apple product”. Possibly one of the most important computers in the whole of the company’s history.
Before the 1998 launch of the iMac, the company tried to launch their own personal organiser, the Newton, with little success as it was plagued with bugs that gave it the inability to correctly decode handwritten notes. Amstrad, the UK computer company, had also released a similar product at the time but at a fraction of the price. This one did actually decode handwriting a lot better than the expensive Apple product.
Today, well from the early 21st century, we see the two products that saved the company and made it the powerhouse of the industry it is today. The iPod and iPhone. Without the success of these two products the company would, probably, have had to file for bankruptcy.
