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Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

Portable music players existed before the iPod, and were quite popular. Unless you're too young to have heard of the Walkman? (Here's a hint at to how long portable music players have been around: they're an important part of the plot for the current season of Stranger Things...set in the 1980s.)

People used to call the iPhone the Apple Blackberry when it first came out.

Fitness watches were big before the Apple Watch (remember FitBit?).

ARM Mac is not the revelation that Apple fans think it is. It has literally zero impact outside of the Apple echo chamber, and the products based on the Apple chips are underwhelming, considering that Apple has full control of the hardware and software.

I guess if you're doing that weird Apple revisionist thing where you just ignore history, yes, Apple has "created" product categories that existed before Apple got into them, s the same way that Elon Musk "founded" Tesla and Al Gore "invented" the internet.

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> literally zero impact outside of the Apple echo chamber

I expected this to be the case 2 years ago, but since then it seems like Apple Silicon is legitimate competition. I don't think it's irrelevant. If they continue to pull forward, it will have an effect on the market outside of where Apple currently does business.

> products based on the Apple chips are underwhelming, considering that Apple has full control of the hardware and software

I can't speak for anyone else. I find them to be very impressive though, and it looks like they've started on an impressive trajectory. The hardware is exceeding my expectations by a wide margin.

I agree that the software could be better, but it could have been with or without their move to their own silicon. It's been in gradual decline for a while, I think.

Aren’t you just proving my point? For each of these categories, Apple’s entry massively expanded the entire category and redefined the form of all future post-Apple products.

No, you're missing the point entirely.

Portable music players were huge before Apple got into the category. (And note that Apple copied the Creative Zen player form; Apple's "innovation" was the annoying scroll wheel it has long since abandoned.)

Smartphones were big before Apple got into the category. (Apple's innovation was marketing. Literally every other feature was copied from existing Blackberry, Palm, and Windows Mobile dvices.)

Fitness watches were popular before Apple got into the category. Apple's innovation was making them cool again, in the same way that Timex made calculator watches and G-Force watches cool for a few years in the 1990s.

Low-power ARM chips were heavily used and gaining traction before Apple got into the category. Microsoft has supported ARM for almost half a decade now.

The only category that Apple actually made popular was the standalone tablet, which didn't meaningful exist because it was considered useless for creation/productivity and only good for consumption. (But on that note apparently Apple users excel at mindless consumption and don't care much for creation.)

It's only within the Apple echo chamber that these categories didn't exist, or weren't popular, before Apple entered the category.

I have a few qualms with this app:

1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.

3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

We live different lives. No one I know carries a usb drive. Way too dangerous.

It's a famous quote in response to the introduction of Dropbox.

I'm always confused by fanboys. Yes, there are things that Apple did first, but it is never the list they write. There are also many things that Apple simply popularized or used their weight to push on people (Bluetooth headphones wouldn't be as popular if Apple didn't remove the headphone jack, but I'm still salty about it). You can, in fact, be ahead of your time as well as just not have the userbase to make a revolutionary product... revolutionary. There are also plenty of things that Apple introduces that people go "wait, you didn't have that?" There's at least one every WWDC. People (including Android users) are so locked into their frameworks (less so than Apple users) that they typically aren't aware of the other things out there.

There's a lot to be excited about with Apple. There's a lot to be excited about with Google. There's lots to criticize about both. We should be encouraging competition and that requires being critical of whichever side you land on. Not inventing some fake metrics.

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