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Comment by sreekotay | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, people complain about the impact of FANG on the crushing effect on the market. The counter balance has always been the consumer good and innovation they provide -- but it's been a LONG time since we've since anything that isn't just incremental from Apple (others too - but not relevant here). Good on Epic and Tim S sticking hard to it. I hope they prevail.

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You’ve positioned this argument to make everyone who could counter you sound like an Apple fanboy.

But let’s be clear here: Apples “innovation” is usually around usability and accessibility.

Even with that said: the Apple Watch does not have an equal. It is the absolute king of smart watches.

Or we could mention that their CPUs (on mobile) are usually 2 generations ahead of other mobile devices.

You can fault them for many things, but they are innovating even if they oversell the little innovation they make.

I prefer the Garmin Fenix Sapphire to the Apple watch. I absolutely can't stand the 18 hour battery life. I actually laughed out loud during the Apple event when they mentioned you could monitor your blood oxygen levels while you were sleeping. How is a dead watch the next day usable?

I have an Apple Watch that I have been using for sleep tracking for the last 2 years. I use Sleep Cycle and charge my watch for 1 hour while I shower and get ready for work. I have never, in that 2 years, had a dead watch the next day. Since installing iOS 14, nothing has changed in that regard.

Yeah, it's doable if you try or have a daily ritual. Camping trips or simply being away from home for a day, business travel and leaving the charger in a hotel etc, that constant upkeep is what keeps mine in the drawer. It would be much easier if it used the same lightning connector.

I charge my Garmin once a week. Also it has full offline navigation (though using it constantly will bring the battery life to only 2-3x the Apple watch battery life.)

Well, how else can we see such posts as yours except as writings of a fanboy? The quality of the Apple Watch has NOTHING TO DO with the juvenile bully tantrum Apple is throwing here over a company daring to question their abusive practices.

Nothing.

Not to mention that the Watch has multiple good competitors which really makes your point even weaker - even their god given right to command you what content you're allowed to see on your device does not result in a single most superior device on the market.

And yet every point you made was a personal one and established on your POV which quite frankly does make you sound like an Apple fanboy. "It is the absolute king of smart watches." LOL

Depending on how you want to measure that, Apple Watch is the single most popular health tracking device and smart watch and that statement can be objectively supported by usage, satisfaction surveys, and sales figures.

Rest in peace Pebble, in my opinion producer of the best smartwatches. A 1 or 2 day battery life is a drain!

I guess. Buttttt its all extremely incremental.

All accesories, feauture copying, and solid but boring improvements?

Here's a test. How many non-iPhone users own Apple Watch?

Apple Watch is a good example of a recent "blue ocean" innovation. FaceID is a recent usability innovation of the kind Apple has historically been known for. I think they're still doing good work.

Microsoft release Windows Hello (Passport) with Windows 10 on July 2015.[1] Apple copied it as "FaceID" into their smartphone devices on November 2017.[2]

A marketing innovation certainly, but calling this a usability innovation is quite a stretch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#System_security

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_ID

Android had trusted face unlock since 2014

Worth noting is Apples face id is not just face recognition but depth scan for security.

Many devices dont have the depth scan making it all pretty unsecure when you can unlock with someones photo.

So Apples inmplementation is probably top.

Android actually did depth from movement for a while. Or at least many Android vendors.

Android’s face unlock was so terrible that they removed it afterwards.

From a security standpoint yes, but but the usability wasn't that bad.

This feature even existed on smartphones. I had a lumia 950 in 2015 and it used retina IR scanning to unlock. Worked pretty well, although the angle of detection was narrow.

That's not the same thing at all. Hello uses the webcam on your computer to try and recognize which user is signing in to the computer. FaceID uses a combination of camera, IR, and depth mapping to determine whether the user is a live person signing into the system and paying attention to the device. You could trick Windows Hello with a piece of paper with a picture printed on it.

How is the apple watch a blue ocean innovation when smart watches existed before that? It might be better but it's not a new product, similar to how the ipod wasn't the first mp3 player. Is faceid a usability innovation over previous face recognition systems or is just more secure?

One can argue that almost nothing is a new product then. Everything is build upon previous work. The iPod wasn't the first MP3 player but it was the best one out there and it changed the entirely industry. The same can be said about the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and pretty much all of Apple's products. They don't always come out with a feature first because they generally don't believe in releasing half baked products (Apple Maps withstanding).

For example the Motorola Atrix was the first smart phone with a finger print scanner, but if you actually owned one of these you'll know that it was awful. It wasn't until Apple put Touch ID on the iPhone that people actually were interested in using finger print scanners, and the rest of the industry followed suit and copied Apple, not Motorola even though Motorola was first.

Another example is app stores. Apple didn't invent app stores. But after the iPhone added an app store, it changed the entire industry because of how easy Apple made it for anyone to develop for iPhone.

Right, very few products are entirely new. That's especially true with apple devices which is why I didn't agree that the apple watch is a blue ocean innovation. They are good at taking ideas and making them better.

I would argue that the app store became popular because the iphone was already popular due to being the newest product from apple that had built a following with the ipods and keynotes where the journalists where applauding everything Steve Jobs said. It's easy to forget how bad the iphone was when it was first released.

Apple is like Microsoft, they’re successful not because they were first, but because they were the first to get it right and then commercialize it successfully. That matters as much as the original idea. Not that either haven’t made original contributions, but that’s not why they’re successful.

Aaand then the COVID-19 mask situation happened. Having TouchID back would be much appreciated.

Why are you expecting something other than incremental from Apple (or others)?

We are all standing on the shoulders of giants.

Everything is synthesis. Nothing is original.

Everything is incremental.

Iteration is everything.

There's a difference in innovative quality between releasing the first iphone and the next iteration of the iphone. There's a similar difference between building the first PC and building an improved version of the first PC.

Thats just straight up reductionism. You can describe every progress as an iteration, but obviously some steps are much bigger than others, the prime example being the iPhone. Some company-cultures enable or incentivize innovation, others don't. Apples entire branding is about "revolutionizing [area]", therefore one expects them to do more than the stuff everyone else gets done

It's normal for huge innovations like that to only come around once in a blue moon even in companies that foster it. That's nothing new.

Sure, yet still we're right to expect more from a company fostering innovation than from one that doesn't, no? Because that was the original question

I don't think so. There was no claim that other companies are out-innovating Apple, only that Apple is not innovating fast enough for their opinion of how fast Apple should be innovating.

People expect more from Apple because Appled used to do more than small incremental changes.

For a while Apple was coming out with products on a regular basis that redefined the industry, changing or increasing both consumers and the entire industry's focus. I don't consider things like the "camera notch" to be in that class of product development.

Sure, everyone stands on the shoulders of giants, but not everyone is a giant. For a little while though, Apple was.

Now I look at things like the Oculus Quest, which has gone a long way towards democratizing VR, and wonder "Where is Apple? Why aren't they here?"

Their prior track record had them revolutionizing such things with an uncanny ability to understand UX at the same time that they dumped a ton of upgrades on their products compared to competitors. Sure, I guess if you break down each individual thing they did, then each one is incremental. But what we came to expect from Apple was that they'd release products with so many of those things that they changed the entire industry. Now we get a bezel that's 0.3mm smaller, the addition of an "ultra wide" camera lens, and a sprinkling of OS changes.

> For a while Apple was coming out with products on a regular basis that redefined the industry

That sentence is carrying quite a heavy load! Can you list some Apple products you consider redefining, and what year they were released?

It seems like the strongest cases are for "they are still doing that," or "they've done that literally four times ever, in 30+ years," so I'm curious how your list differs from either of mine.

Here's mine:

1. The original Macintosh, 1984 (desktop metaphor GUI for the masses)

2. Newton, 1993 (the original PDA, but not commercially successful--so "redefined the industry" is arguable)

3. The iMac, 1997 (industrial design matters for computers. You could argue SGI got there first, but PCs didn't notice until the iMac)

4. iPod/iTunes, 2001/2003 (capacitive-touch interfaces, buying music online)

5. iPhone, 2007 (too many things to list)

6. Apple Watch, 2015 (the Right Stuff to make smart watches popular)

7. FaceID, 2017 (depth-sensitive facial recognition that is actually secure)

AirPods, 2016. iPad, 2010.

Note that they’re virtually unassailable in the tablet market, the watch market, and the mobile CPU market.

Apple has almost never made products that were completely unprecedented, which is the bar people always seem to hold them to for some reason. They do, however, excel at finding a way to build a complete product that has dramatically more appeal than its earlier or contemporary competitors.

The Mac had prior art, the iPhone had prior art, AirPods had prior art, but all of their breakout products were so because they figured out how push the right areas of technology to overcome the things holding that product category back. And then they iterate hard.

Whereas other companies seem to use vertical integration to cut costs and retain more profits, Apple appears to be better at using vertical integration to achieve things that competitors can’t, the most recent example of which is acquiring PA Semi to push forward on performance and power consumption, but also to make specialized coprocessors that improve their other features and products (TouchID, FaceID, AirPods, as some examples).

Can't believe I forgot AirPods!

Agree with all your points--but my interpretation of the phrase "redefined the industry" means something more than just being the dominant seller. I don't know exactly how to define it, but I think it should include things like creating a new product category, or changing how other participants act.

So, for that reason, I almost didn't include Apple Watch, and I feel like iPad is iffy.

iPad certainly got the Right Stuff for tablets... but it doesn't feel that different than what came before. Tablets already existed and the iPhone already existed, and Apple "just" put iPhoneOS on a tablet. Part of what probably drove iPad sales over other tablets was the existing ecosystem of iPhone apps that would run in scaled mode.

In both the Apple Watch case and the iPad case, it's interesting because Apple is the industry. Nobody else has figured out how to compete here for the time being, and Apple is taking almost the entire profit margin from the product market.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but I'm honestly not sure if you are trolling me here. Apple's track record for industry-defining products is fairly basic industry knowledge.

I may be leaving something off here but with 10 entries below + 4 honorable mentions. That's an average of redefining some industry or another once every 3-4 years. Over 40 years, I think it's fair to say that represents enough of a trend to expect that sort of thing from Apple. But we've had about 13 years of small annual incremental changes in iPhones.

--Apple II

--Mac

--Newton (though a market failure, its functionality was copied and gave rise to a new generation of smarter PA's similar to how the iPhone gave rise to the new generation of smart phones)

--iMac

--Physical Apple stores (strongly influenced retail store designs and had Apple's competitors like Microsoft & Sony scrambling to create their own retail presence)

--iPod

--iTunes

--iPhone

--iPad

--Apple Watch

--Honorable mentions would include voice control assistants, air pods, power mac pcs, and apple tv.

Okay, so your list, like mine, includes a steady series of new products with huge impacts, and the most recent is just a few years old.

You seem to be making the argument that one of the previous products (iPhone) must somehow deliver the same impact as an entirely new product, because... I guess I'm not getting that part.

I mean, draw the parallel for the other products you mention.

Apple II... was replaced completely by the next generation.

Mac has reinvented itself a few times, but they've been spaced out a bit. They're currently in the process of transitioning to entirely new CPUs for the third time (68000 -> PowerPC -> Intel -> Apple Silicon), and have gone through a couple of complete overhauls on the OS side as well.

Newton was innovative, ahead of its time, and...

iMac is also Mac, but okay, specifically the candy-colored all-in-ones shifted the industry in some interesting ways and the current iteration is very nice, but essentially unchanged in a long time. I mean, using the same lens you seem to be using for iPhone, they haven't really changed the body style since 2004 when they replaced the half-melon with the currently style, or maybe since 2007 when they switched to aluminum. I mean, sure, they updated the screen quality, and there have been some minor tweaks, but put a 13-year-old iMac next to a new one, and they haven't changed that much.

I think that's my point. You've picked iPhone specifically and insist that iPhone alone must somehow bear the fruits of Apple's history of delivering industry-changing products, but since 2007 they've delivered substantial iterations in iMacs, PowerBooks, Apple TVs, and iPhones, while also launching iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPods, as well as new record-setting CPUs every one of the last ten years.

So I dunno. I think somehow you've convinced yourself that there is some new world-shaking innovation possible in the phone space, that Apple not having delivered it yet is somehow a failure, and yet I suspect you wouldn't recognize it if they launched it tomorrow. I mean, set a 2007 iPhone next to the phone they'll launch this year and aks yourself: is it the problem that they ship something every year? If they skipped a few years, and only delivered every three or four years, would they seem innovative, or just iterative?

iPhone, iPhone 4 (Retina), iPhone 5S (TouchID), iPhone 6 (5.5" screen), iPhone X (FaceID). I think each of those is a substantial bundle of innovations over the previous, and I'm not even considering the CPU inside them, or many, many, many smaller things that we take for granted today.

My iPhone X might as well have been a completely different phone, it was so different from everything that came before. That was announced three years ago.

To recap: I think one can either say that Apple's only real innovations are the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, or that they've released innovations every 2-3 years for the past couple of decades, but saying that iPhones are a single innovative product rather than a series of at least 5 and probably closer to 8 real game-changers is mistaken.

I think I don't understand your argument here.

ineedasername listed about a dozen industry-redefining products, which span a 40 year period. You seem to be arguing that, because the innovative product continued to be sold with incremental improvements Apple is not innovative.

* The point isn't that the 1995 Quadra is innovative. It's that the 1984 Mac brought the desktop metaphor to the masses (where it was previously a research toy with each seat costing as much as a house)

* The point isn't that the 2020 iMac is innovative. It's that the 1997 iMac changed how the computer industry thought about the industrial design of home computers.

* The point isn't that the 2020 iPhone 12 Max Excess is innovative. It's that the 2007 iPhone completely changed what a smartphone was, with multi-touch, on-screen keyboard, data plans that actually made sense, desktop-quality graphics and more.

* The point isn't that the 2023 AirPods are going to be innovative. It's that the 2016 AirPods created an entire sub-industry of "totally wireless" headphones.

The original point was the people hold Apple to a higher standard because Apple has a track record of introducing something every 3-6 years that makes people say "wow". That Apple continues to make incremental improvements after the "wow launch" doesn't diminish the track record of major innovation.

Where I disagree with ineedasername is that I think it only looks like Apple isn't innovative right now because the next big thing hasn't been announced yet, and innovations don't happen on a fixed cadence.

You've really misread the thread. I was making exactly the point you're making.

I am arguing that Apple continues to innovate, in response to ineedasername's claim that Apple has ceased to innovate like they once did.

>Oculus Quest, which has gone a long way towards democratizing VR

The irony of seeing this in a comment thread about how Apple is draconian and overstepping their boundaries is laughable. Oculus Quest is doing the exact opposite of democratizing VR. They're selling the people themselves.

If Epic prevails, it pretty much wrecks the idea behind contract law. This case is about Epic agreeing to a thing and then reneging on the agreement, then crying “look what the evil mean company did!”

Apple is no saint, but in this case, they aren’t in the wrong. From reading the filings, Apple has gone to some extraordinary lengths to support Fortnite, behind the scenes, only to have Epic shred the hand that’s helping them.

> If Epic prevails, it pretty much wrecks the idea behind contract law. This case is about Epic agreeing to a thing and then reneging on the agreement, then crying “look what the evil mean company did!”

Courts have invalidated parts of or entire contracts for ages, extortionary practices by a dominant entity being one of the chief reasons.

We are just unused to this sort of legal battles.

Not at all. Questions of unconscionability, undue influence, whether the contract formed a meeting of the minds, etc, are all up for discussion in court. As with any contract. Without undermining the validity of the idea of contracts as a whole.

Maybe you mean the specifics of this case, but until a court decides that, it hardly seems something one is qualified to weigh in on (even if you have a law background or similar).

I’m definitely an outsider on this. However, Epic surely didn’t enter into this contract blindly; they had to have lawyered this thing backwards and forwards and accountancied it up and down. They’re not some small developer doing a gut-check before rolling over and taking one for the team.

From where I sit, it’s looking like they planned to do this for a long time, which leads to the possibility that they entered into the contract in bad faith.

As for undue influence, etc. - those are immeasurable terms. Ultimately, if you can’t trust what’s on the paper, what’s the point? I have yet to see a filing where Epic shows that Apple didn’t deliver what they said they would. I have seen the filing where Apple lays out what they did do for Epic.

>If Epic prevails, it pretty much wrecks the idea behind contract law

TOS's have already wrecked the idea of contract law. A contract isn't a one sided agreement forced upon people with arbitrary changes allowed at any time by only one party at a whim.

Terms of services are an abhorrence in contract law.

One could argue that TOS for electronics and software are simply an extension of the “no shirt, no shoes, no service” mantra of yesteryear. Companies have always been able to have “shrinkwrap” contacts that decide who can visit their place.

The argument with smartphones hinges on whether the device is yours or Apple’s. It’s very clearly your device, but it was bought knowing that only iOS could be installed.

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