Apple stopped innovating with the iPhone. You’re welcome. | Hacker News Reader

Apple stopped innovating with the iPhone. You’re welcome.

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12 pointsfedxc16 comments

Yeah, that iPad thing was no big deal. Never mind the 25M units sold. Never mind that everyone is furiously trying to imitate it.

Syncing everything to the cloud and back to all your devices and actually making that work, and signing deals with all the record companies so you can do this with your music collection without it being a prohibitive pain, also no big deal.

Some people are awfully demanding. :)

of course man :) it's the catch-22 of taking something complicated and making it feel simple. the people that don't know what goes on under the hood will never understand what it took to make it feel like butter.

"Yeah, that iPad thing was no big deal."

Since when was the iPad a cellphone? He said right up front "Apple's innovation in the mobile sphere"...

Are you from the UK? In context, mobile computing includes laptops, tablets, and smartphones (and maybe even games on dumbphones).

People seem to forget that not all innovation is disruptive. There's room for incremental innovation, too. A lot of room.

Taking great features from others should be nothing to be ashamed of. It’s what made Android great (among other things, obviously).

I always hate it when companies are unwilling to copy great ideas because of, well, I don’t know, maybe pride? It’s bad for the user. Mobile OS A has great feature X, mobile OS B has great feature Y, but no OS has features X and Y – and that just plain sucks for the user.

It goes without saying that sometimes it’s good to copy a little less and do things your own way a bit more. That was the situation in 2007. Recently, Microsoft also went that route (and they should be admired for that). But sometimes it’s not. Polishing iOS seems like the right thing to do right now – and that includes looking elsewhere for inspiration.

agreed. I did the very first implementation of one of the things everyone was cheering about, all the way back in 2008. I certainly don't feel robbed; if anything I'm pleased to see they did what I thought was obvious when the first iphone came out and their product will be better for it. Consumer win.

Not invented here (NIH) syndrome is poisonous to innovation. It's always embarrassing to watch companies like MS implement a particular "mainstream" feature in their own way just to make it different. This usually ends up awkward.

It's not the first time JB apps are implemented on new iOS releases.

I.e.: MobileNotifier, CameraButtons.

I think Apple actually needs jailbreakers.

One suspects that Apple wink at jailbreakers.

They can't encourage them overtly without damaging their relationship with the music and film cartels -- without which they lose the most successful commercial music market on the internet. And the MPAA, RIAA and their members hate the idea of uncontrolled access to machines that host their media. (EDIT: Also, the cellcos presumably don't like the idea of uncontrolled smart devices talking to their base stations ... as witness the periodic crackdowns on un-authorized tethering.)

But on the other hand, jailbreaking isn't impossible. And it ought to be -- if Apple seriously wanted to design a machine that couldn't be jailbroken, then some combination of a trusted platform module with remote activation (which Apple indeed enforce) should be sufficient. (Kernel isn't signed by Apple corporate? Boot loader say bye-bye!)

So my conclusion is that Apple are doing "due diligence" -- enough to propitiate the copyright absolutists, but dragging their heels enough to permit a deniable halo of JB developers to generate new ideas, which can then be bought in-house if they work or disowned if they don't.

I'd argue that the only true innovation Apple made with the iPhone was with the App Store, which didn't even happen until a bit after the launch. Apple gathered what they thought were best technologies, honed them, and made them work together.

Are there phones that predate the iphone that are entirely controlled through a large, multi-touch touchscreen?

Not multi-touch, but HTC had been making large, touch screen devices based on Windows Mobile for a while before the iPhone was announced.

http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_p3600-1694.php

Clearly not taken to the degree Apple did, but what Apple did was evolve it to the point where it was consumer-friendly, not invent the concept itself.

Thanks for the link, I hadn't known about those phones. It's a resistive touchscreen instead of a capacitative multitouch screen, but it's certainly fair to count it as a predecessor.

While that might certainly be what people like to call its "killer feature," the iPhone redefined what we expect of smartphones. The gold standard before 2007 was the Blackberry. Look at the Android prototypes before 2007 and the phones released after that: they are fundamentally different devices.

ah bless. Apple product announcement and all the websites and bloggers and journalists are scratching their heads.

"How can I turn this into page views. Gee the overview of what he said - been done a million times. What about slagging it all off - well it is pretty interesting stuff though. I know. I'll come up with a trolling headline and use some tricksy language making myself look cool so it's not really slagging them off at all. hmm. got it. Redefine innovate to mean first one ever to think of an idea. Bingo. "

"Damm. Better start thinking about the next release......"

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