To be fair, it was a bit of a snarky question. You knew whether phones existed before the iPhone, so it's not like you could have been asking that in good faith. Similar with touchscreen tablets.

So, what general product do you think the iPhone was based on? The Blackberry, or perhaps the Treo, since that had a touch screen?

In order to say that Apple didn't come up with the idea behind the iPod or the iPhone, you have to generalize the category to the point that it was painfully obvious to anybody even remotely aware of what's going on in the industry. MP3 players are an obvious idea to anybody who has heard of the Walkman and knows that computers can store and play music. The idea of using a tiny hard drive in one is similarly obvious. So is the idea of making a phone that can surf the web and also be an MP3 player.

When people praise Apple's ingenuity with the iPhone and iPod, they are referring to the fact that almost everything other than the most fundamental idea was revolutionary or at least clever. In other words, every aspect of the product that actually affects its success in the marketplace was invented or re-invented.

He obviously meant that most of Apple's product line is less than 3 years old. The iPad, per se, did not exist three years ago, though of course the concept of a tablet computer is decades old.

One interpretation is being charitable to the intelligence of the community who chose to upvote it; the other presumes they were either fooled, or that the minority you refer to has infiltrated HN and is on a mission to block-upvote Apple propaganda. A combination of the Principle of Charity and Occam's Razor makes the latter seem improbable.

That is a very good point. But with your original question, you brought it up in the form of a instigating, snarky question.

There is some inherent value of the iPhone and iPad in them being phones and tablets, respectively. A portion of their sales has nothing to do with innovation. I would agree.

Apple has in fact created entire industries. Apple created the modern smartphone. Previous to the iPhone, all phones were feature phones, though of course many were advertised as "smartphones" because they had simple PDA functionality. The android phone was a copy of the RIMM phone with the keyboard which was much like a treo. Now they are all making touch screen phones with appstores, and aping all of the other features of this product. Sure, things with CPUs in them have existed long before the digital phone and before the laptop, etc. But the iPhone did create a new industry-- the touch based phone.

The iPad also created the tablet industry. Sure, people had tried tablets before, even Apple did with the actually quite successful newton (though this was stylus based like the palm pilot, and other copies.) But the computer tablet industry that is taking share away from laptops didn't exist before this year.

Apple created two industries. I'm a fan of apple because they are always innovative, always honest, and they always try to ship quality products. They're about the only company I can say that about.

I don't know why people should diminish that. This is a gold standard we should all attempt to emulate (And I don't mean by copying their products, but by copying their methods and standards.)