Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did | Hacker News Reader

Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did

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246 pointspmarin73 comments

The record of vastly overstated and false claims of innovation around Apple has become ridiculous. Nobody doubts they have innovated in many areas, but largely they are excellent at integration and polish (which is worthy of praise in its own right). And being a full-stack company they often match their sails to the wind before anyone else, but it doesn't mean they made the wind. It's not all Apple themselves doing this, much of it is bad journalism and fans saying things that the company has no reason to correct. But it's gotten so bad now that I approach any new claim of innovation from Apple or their cheer squads as probably false.

I can't see why Apple enthusiasts can't be like luxury car enthusiasts. Most of the time new luxury cars don't have much innovation in them, but it's the fit and finish, attention to detail and integration which make them great. You don't need to claim some divine spark of innovation to say that something is better, or that you prefer it. To make another analogy a well done dish at a nice restaurant isn't usually innovative, it just takes the best of breed components and presents them well in a good atmosphere with good service. Nothing wrong with that, just don't claim the chef is making vast strides in chemistry or forget that the chef is drawing on tons of home cooking going back a long time which some people have had in their homes well before it appeared on your menu. It's pretty sad that as I click "add comment" I expect this to get vigorously downvoted (even on HN).

I fully agree with you. It seems the louder somebody shouts "Apple is the best, they invented x" the more you can be sure that

- the person has not much background in computing - often hated/never could get PCs to do what they wanted/is scared of computers

But they don't realize that Apple's great computers are standing on the shoulders of decades of PC innovation (partly done by Apple, but also many others).

Downvoters: Try to read the comment and understand that this is not attacking people who like Apple, but fanboys who shout "Apple is the best because..." Don't turn voting into a popularity contest based on the products YOU like.

An example of such a user, right here on HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3510806

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3510342

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3512102

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3512126

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3262181

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3535333

There's much more, but I guess you get the point. When there are similar people in most Apple, Gruber, Google and Android threads, there are obviously flamebait conversations.The smug superiority and abject hate of of other companies/platforms from Gruber, Marco, 37 Signals, Roughly Drafted, MG Siegler etc. can sometimes be really overwhelming and the labeling of anyone that doesn't share in the worship beaing called a hater causes even worse discourse.

Many fans are not below sending death threats if they feel Apple has been wronged or it's image can be damaged.

http://www.overclockers.com/how-i-pcd-an-apple-g5/

Apple seems to tending to attract such a crowd because of it's cult type of branding, ads and secrecy.and anyone questioning their or their fans outlandish claims seem to be vilified as haters.

Doesn't many luxury cars have innovations way before normal cars do, simply because these innovations have yet to come down in price? I think there will always be some features you can get on an Audi that you can't get on a Volkswagen.

And there's even holy flamewars between BMW, Audi and Mercedes supporters on car forums :)

Good examples: magnetorheological damper shock absorbers (filled with magnetic fluid, can be tuned to different road conditions - available as a build option on Audis, but only as aftermarket parts for most other brands), heads-up displays (for navigation or low-light vision), run-flat tires (actually used to be more popular, but now mostly used by BMW).

Often these innovations didn't necessarily originate at the car company in question - they were developed by a third party then sold or licensed to the car manufacturer. Gorilla glass might be a good analogue in the tablet world - it's made by Corning, but is famous due to its use by Apple.

> "Nothing wrong with that, just don't claim the chef is making vast strides..."

I take it you don't watch much cooking channel.

Also, while the linked article mentions a variety of related power supply information, it only speculates on what the claimed innovation might have been. He looked at, and later ruled out, a couple things, but that doesn't mean there wasn't some other unique aspect. I would have liked to see research on the claim of uniqueness, rather than research on what else was available at the time. Perhaps the unique thing was missed.

It's interesting that whatever one thinks about the Apple II claim, the most innovative consumer power supplies shipping in a ubiquitous product this past decade have been Apple's laptop and cell phone chargers.

It could be argued the latest iPhone cube charger and the Macbook MagSafe chargers are "fit and finish", but to me that's like arguing the difference between a UPS truck and a Prius is fit and finish.

I am not an expert on power supply design at all, but to my untrained eye, http://oldcomputers.net/pet2001.html shows a more traditional power supply for the contemporary PET (the blue round thing looks like a huge capacitor; behind it, I think I see a traditional transformer) I googled for TRS-80 internals, too, but could not find them.

So, it _could_ be that having a switching power supply in a personal computer was innovate at the time.

Even magnified it's hard to tell from that photo, but I agree that honking big blue electrolytic capacitor indicates filtering of traditional low frequencies rather than the smaller caps you'd expect for a switcher.

Still, if you're shipping PET computers with a heavy glass CRT display on top, you're presumably not as concerned with weight as you would be with smaller form factors. So this evidence doesn't bear on the article's thesis. Given that the IC controllers introduced the year before the Apple II, the chip vendors would likely have already been sending out sample chips and application notes for some time, although their target engineering applications would be for products where cutting weight was a bigger concern than cost. (Hence Boschert's company having 650 employees in 1977 and having developed products for "satellites and the F-14 fighter aircraft".

I agree that the difference may be due to that CRT.

However, there are lots of other options:

- Steve was intentionelly lying.

- Steve was misinformed.

- Steve was misunderstood.

- the innovate part was getting out better quality DC than other solutions that did not use such an IC, and not using the IC was a serious advantage, cost wise.

- the innovative part was getting good enough power out at an insanely low price.

I guess we will never know. Archaeology is hard, even when talking about 35 years ago.

But it should be a lesson to hackers everywhere - marketing trumps innovation. Learn to read the sentiment and persuade that what you do is the best/the truth.

marketing trumps innovation

I think more importantly is that in business marketing and innovation go hand in hand. I could be making the most amazing innovations the world has ever seen, but if no one knows about it who cares. Long term business is about innovating and getting the product in front of people.

With respect to Apple, I get tired of people who say they are all marketing. Marketing may work for a single pump and dump product, but that is not Apple. There has to be some innovation behind the marketing to keep consumers coming back. Of course Apple markets themselves very well, but they also have stylish products that for a majority of consumers do just work and work well. For all the articles I read about how SJ straddled the world of technology and the humanities, I think Apple the company was just an extension of how he viewed himself.

I agree with you. The thing is, Apple haters need to read your comment just as much as the Apple lovers. On one side you have people thinking Apple invented everything while on the other people think Apple invented nothing and has done nothing for the world of computing.

I think the attitudes do show how powerful the Apple brand has become though. The worst thing a brand can do is become ho-hum and boring. People either love or hate Apple, which at the end of the day keeps both camps always thinking about Apple.

>The worst thing a brand can do is become ho-hum and boring. People either love or hate Apple

Just like Marmite. Marmite actually took that love-hate thing one step further and created an entire advertising campaign based on people who hate it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoRcU0Ul7tU), as well as a duplicated website themed around "I hate Marmite" (http://marmite.com/hate/).

I find it interesting that Apple promoted a culture of insular product development from soup to nuts, and greatly valued what most would consider small successes in execution, rather than have their product managers play it safe and go with off-the-shelf solutions.

Perhaps that's helped them keep a wealth of talent in-house throughout their span, ones able to do the heavy lifting required to pull off what might be considered truly innovative products from time to time. By employing their hot shot engineers like Rod Holt in "revolutionizing" power supplies, they have him around later to help design the Lisa and Macintosh hardware.

Those small little detailsa all added up to things people really liked when they got them.

When we say apple "innovated X" or "invented Y" - I think most of us know that Steve Jobs, or even his engineers didn't necessarly invesnt the technology - in fact they probably didn't. What they did do was put them together and package them up in a way nobody else had before, even if only visually, and make it part of a whole product lineup.

I'm sure there were tons of inventions that let these cool apple power supplies exist.... ebtter electronics. plastic with better thermal designs.... and someone came up with a good way of attaching an extention cable or plug to the thing that's mechanically stable...... all these things matter. Putting it all together into one package and shipping it then selling it is what matters.

I agree, but I think that is a double edged sword.

Let me give you an example: some people write off Apple by saying they didn't "invent" the tablet. Right, they "only" make the first one anyone was willing to buy. They "only" caused a seismic shift in the PC business doing so, sending shockwaves through every PC vendor out there. They "only" changed the direction and the conversation about personal computing.

Like you said, "innovation" is extremely over hyped, actually creating products, with fit and finish that people want to have, is probably more valuable than inventing a poorly made concept that nobody looks twice at, like smartphones and tablets of yesteryear.

And Apple is amply rewarded for doing so.

I guess it's easy (for some of us) to remember when Apple was a niche player, with only a few loony fans. I jumped on the bandwagon with a first gen Intel Macbook (switching from an Ubuntu PC), so while I'm not a hardcore Apple fan I've had a few rough moments dealing with stupid companies (and government departments) who don't give a toss about people who don't have ActiveX. People would be "wow, nice computer ... pity it's useless".

The reality is, Apple is doing quite well now, and doesn't need so much defence. People kind of understand that it's not just a pretty white (or aluminium) brick that can't do anything but play Carmen Santiago.

That has got to be one of the most complete treatises on the development of the Switch-mode power supply unit (SMPSU) that I have ever read. Excellent work Ken.

That being said, I don't really resonate with the hating on Steve Jobs because he believed something that wasn't true. C'mon there are a lot of things people believe that aren't true. I expect Holt (or maybe Holt's manager) was selling his work as really really excellent and Jobs, who was not an EE by training, really didn't have a way to know if it was true or not. He chose to believe it, and apparently believed it up until the day the biographer wrote it down.

I've noticed the sometimes person A will do something for person B because they believe something about A that isn't true. That makes them at least partially invested in that thing that isn't true being true, and so convincing them that it isn't true is made quite difficult. The recent article posted here about how Teller tricks people into believing something validated my intuition about people sometimes really want to believe something.

So Steve believed Holt was God's Gift to power supply design, and it turns out he was just another capable engineer who could build a switching power supply. The world isn't changed.

Life goes on, but now you know a bit more about how complex building power supplies has become, so its a win.

Right, we shall never attack the beliefs of those that, cmon, "believed something". Ignorance really is bliss for you.

The problem is when others start to believe the "untrue" believes of others, especially such charismatic persons as Steve Jobs. You see this very often, people don't getting their facts right and taking believes for facts.

I'd like to know more about your thoughts on this. In this case the error was simply reputational, which is to say Steve had a high opinion of Holt which was in part based on something that wasn't true.

Now if you were a co-worker's of Holt and passed over for promotion I could see how this would bug you.

If you were an engineer (like Ken the author of this point) you might say "I don't think that is true" and quickly discover that the 'boss' was wrong on this particular point. Depending on how much you cared you might share it with your boss you might not.

If this mistaken belief got out of hand and Steve had directed Apple to sue say Delta Electronics for patent infringement. It wouldn't because the lawyers would have done their diligence and they would have realized the outcome would be the invalidation of Holt's patent.

People who are mislead by the charismatic person become disillusioned when they discover the truth is not as it was told to them. That is 'bad' for the charismatic person and potentially embarrassing for the person who didn't check their facts. But I'm still not getting the source of wrath.

Disclaimer I'll be the first to admit I'm a bit clueless when it comes to these sorts of emotional battles, they don't make a lot of sense to me.

Tangential: when I saw the iPhone power supply, I was blown away. Here was this little white box, about 1-inch cube, able to convert 120V AC into low-voltage DC. No tranformer; no big capacitors; nothing. Just some solid-state electronics, and bam! Out comes some sweet DC juice.

I wish all DC equipment came with such power supplies. Heck, while I'm at it: here's a great idea. Establish 2-way communication with the solid-state power supply, so that the equipment can tell the power supply what it wants, and the solid-state supply can then give it out. Then you won't need a separate power supply for every piece of equipment!

Hey, not to shoot you down but there is definitely a transformer in the iphone supply. Second, building switching supplies that can supply an arbitrary output voltage/current isn't practical or economical. Third, don't you want a power supply for every piece of equipment? You don't really want to have to unplug one thing to plug another thing in do you?

I agree with you it probably isn't economical, at least not yet. But the reason for wanting it is for the power supplies to be arbitrarily interchangeable.

One of the big advantages of the move towards micro-USB charging cables for phones, for example, is that in my house we now have several adapters spread around the house, and both my wife and I can now charge our phones at any one of them, despite having different brands.

I can see the advantage, but I still would argue that just having some DC power standard like USB will always be more economical and practical than trying to build "do it all" supplies to work with all gear despite the absence of a standard.

I'm not sure what problem variable voltage is supposed to solve.

This is a great idea. Unfortunately, I think I remember one of my electronics lecturers at uni telling us that generally communication/feedback with power supplies is dangerous because you introduce the possibility of unexpected power surges propagating in the other direction. It's apparently very hard/expensive to have both communication and protection against this. I'd love for someone to correct me, especially as this might not apply to the newer designs.

An optocoupler will isolate the communications themselves, but perhaps he was referring to the fact that the overvoltage 'crowbar' circuit would need to be software controlled. Overvoltage protection shuts down the power supply when the output voltage rises too high - say if the FET gets stuck on.

OTOH one could put additional protection downstream in the load itself, and the PS would just need a well-known fixed overvoltage. If the "5V" PS started outputting 15V (but still under the PS max), the device would just shut down. However, don't expect manufacturers to do this on their own - as the article says, $1 is "expensive".

Gladly the industry seems to be (slowly) standardizing on micro-USB plugs, except for laptops. That means nowadays I only have to carry two bricks with me (MicroUSB + Macbook charger).

Personally I'd really love if everyone moved to a common MicroUSB MagSafe form-factor. But apparently there are some patents in the way...

> Gladly the industry seems to be (slowly) standardizing on micro-USB plugs, except for laptops

Largely because the EU pretty much threatened the cell phone manufacturers with heavy regulation unless they came up with some sort of standard. Since they "have" to do micro-USB for the EU, they might as well do it everywhere.

China required this in 2007. EU didn't move on this until 2009.

Unfortunately power is still a problem. While there is part of the standard for power, Apple went the other way so high power chargers have to support Apple or open standards but not both. Todays tablets have very high capacity batteries (and they keep getting bigger) so various manufacturers have been going proprietary again in order to increase power from the charger (Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is an example).

Here is a post showing someone trying to get a standards following USB charger:

https://plus.google.com/117091380454742934025/posts/5suTrJrp...

> Establish 2-way communication

The middle pin on a magsafe power supply is used to send data two ways. It uses the 1-wire protocol and passes along (among other things), the serial number of the charger, the amperage of the charger, the power type (so the computer won't try and charge using an airplane adapter). Negotiation happens between the charger and computer for power and the LED color.

Are you sure the iPhone power supply has no transformer? I haven't cracked one open but I'm guessing it has one. Increasing the switching frequency allow a reduction in core size, and with frequencies in the 1 MHz range these days the transformers are pretty small. (Further increases are not recommended due to increased hysteresis loss.)

The 2-way communication is already there, your wish has been fulfilled. Okay, not all DC equipment has it, but that's how USB works. You plug into a USB port you get up to 100 mA free, you can negotiate to increase the limit up to 500 mA. Apple's iPod/iPhone/iPad chargers put nonstandard voltages on the data pins to indicate to the device that they can supply some larger amount of current, like 1A or 2A or whatever. Different voltages on the data pins correspond to different current limits. (So for the chargers it's one-way communication, not two-way like USB, but the two-way communication isn't needed for chargers that only plug into one device.) This isn't the first time Apple messed with the USB power specs, if you had a G4 cube back in the day you'd notice that the speakers would only work if plugged directly into the Mac, which supplied 800 mA from its USB jacks.

Personally, I think it's pretty dumb that USB only supplies up to 500 mA -- that's just 2.5 W. Meanwhile, Firewire could supply up to 45 W, which is why Firewire hard drives don't need to plug into the wall.

"Further increases are not recommended due to increased hysteresis loss."

This is why I am REALLY hoping the materials revolution everyone keeps talking about takes off and we get some decent high frequency, high permeability, low loss, high flux density ferrites out of it (not too much to ask huh?). You can do lots of cool stuff with magnetics, even beyond just power conversion but the materials to do it really well just dont exist.

I said hysteresis loss, but that's just the first barrier. Higher frequencies are also subject to the "skin effect" which requires thinner wires, therefore more wires or ones with lower resistivity (e.g., superconductors). Then you need to get transistors capable of handling the increased switching frequency, and you need to be able to deliver the increased drive current to the transistors.

You don't need superconductors to get around the skin effect. It's actually interesting that you mention superconductors, as the skin depth in a perfect conductor is actually zero. (Anyone know what happens at DC in theory in a perfect conductor? I originally thought it was zero at DC as well, but to me skin depth seems like it becomes undefined.)

Even without superconductors, at 100 MHz the skin depth is still around 2 thousandths of an inch. Litz helps too. High power RF transistors exist. All the things you mention are limiting factors, but I still say the lack of good magnetic materials is the dominant barrier to higher frequency converters.

The power supply that really blew my mind was this even smaller one for iPhone:

http://storeimages.apple.com/2106/as-images.apple.com/is/ima...

Is it just me or is that actually bigger than the US one?

http://www.empetel.es/WebRoot/StoreLES/Shops/17205045/4CB1/B...

http://images.apple.com/support/usbadapter/exchangeprogram/i...

The UK one is also pretty incredible:

http://www.handtec.co.uk/shopimages/products/normal/Apple_Ma...

I like how the UK one directs the cord in a direction that avoids unnecessary bending (compared to the europlug-one)

It's small in volume but including the rigid piece of the usb connector, it can become quite a lever when the cord is pulled up or down. I wonder whether that causes mechanical problems. Edit: For comparison, the slightly larger iPad power supply supports itself against up/down motion by resting on the outside of the plug.

I've got one of these: http://www.avalontest.com/e-store/media/prod_full/hp_6236b.j...

It's terribly useful.

What you do is read the voltage you want from the device, turn the knob to the voltage you want and plug it in!

It was made in 1977. It works like the day it was bought i.e perfectly. I don't imagine a cheapy switch mode supply making it to 35 years old.

With regards to the "sweet DC juice" - it'll be full of noise if it's a switch mode supply. They're horrible devices that cause all sorts of local RF interference, noise and transients on the mains. Sometimes more than chucking an inductive load like a hoover on the line.

The only positive things is that they are small and cheap. They are definitely not good.

Also a switch mode supply does have a transformer! Just a small one.

There's actually a tiny transformer and even tinier capacitors and inductors in these phone power supplies. The transformer is super-important, because it isolates the AC line from the output, which is necessary so you don't electrocute yourself on the power supply. AC switching power supplies from tiny cell-phone chargers to big computer supplies are split by the transformer into a primary-side connected to the line, and a secondary side connected to the output. For safety and by law, there can't be any direct electrical connection between the primary and secondary side, so even the voltage feedback control signals need to be isolated with small transformers or optoisolators. And even any circuit board traces between the sides are required to be separated by a couple millimeters.

P.S. Thanks everyone for the comments on my article.

Thanks for taking the time to do such a thorough write up.

> Just some solid-state electronics

Just so you are aware, the Palm V which came out in 1999 had just such a power supply. A bit bigger than 1 inch, but it's a switching power supply and doesn't get warm (i.e. it's efficient).

So did the Newton (1993 per Wikipedia). I remember it as my first-ever encounter with a (small) switching power supply — it seemed unreasonably light as “wall-warts” went.

Figure I'd chime in since I currently work in this industry. We make power supplies that have many thousands of lines of custom-written flashed firmware on a microcontroller that's a switching buck regulator. With it you can do all sorts of crazy tricks with the control loop to reduce the number of components and increase efficiency. I'd say most of the design meetings are about testing ideas about the control loop.

There have been a bunch of startups in this space over the past 10 years, although most eventually get acquired by a bigger IC vendor to deal with foundry sourcing.

Many computing companies have slowly been getting rid of power supply design engineers, and shouldering the burden onto the IC vendor's application's engineer to help with the design. Dealing with a giant company (like apple, dell, etc.) requires a lot of effort, as they'll negotiate down your margins heavily, have a backup design with your competitor, and require your field apps engineer to be waiting at your service if something goes wrong. It's not uncommon to have apps engineers dedicated to a really big customer and stay at their offices.

I really appreciate the work that power supply makers do to improve efficiency. Besides the direct costs of energy usage, the PSU is a major source of heat and noise in desktops, so better efficiency can also directly benefit the user experience.

Yeah, something stuck in my mind when I read "Fundamentals of Power Electronics" - I don't have the exact quote, but it basically mentions most efficency gains are primarily done to add features, not as part of any conservation effort.

As a power/software guy, i'm mostly looking forward the development of more non-backlit/outdoor readable screens, along with direly needed revolutions in hvac design.

Jobs was an idea person, not an engineer. You have to imagine the engineer getting excited about the ideas going into building something. Later, Jobs sees that same idea popping up everywhere, and his natural response is to claim that it was "ripped off".

I think the same thing happened with the iPhone/Android controversy. Many of the similarities are emergent from the technology that became available at that time (larger screens, accurate multitouch panels, faster processors), but all Jobs saw is the idea.

This has been bugging me for a while, too. Jobs is given (and quite frankly, claimed) credit for far more than he deserves. The sad part about that is that it actually detracts from the many tremendously significant contributions things he did make. But as far as invention goes, I don't think Steve Jobs actually invented anything other than, well, Steve Jobs.

This comes up all the time. Here's a quick way to put that argument to rest, an interactive feature by the New York Times showing the patents Steve Jobs is personally listed on: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/08/24/technology/ste...

"CLAIM The ornamental design for packaging, as shown and described."

really?

It's called a design patent. It explicitly covers only the ornamental, non-functional design of the object, and is subject to somewhat different terms than a utility patent.

In terms of IP law, it's actually quite reasonable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent

appreciated, however I don't think that people mean "design" as in aesthetic design when they say "invented"

for example, the spinning beach ball is patented... I think we have passed the point where "patented" has anything to do with what people think of as "invention"

How does this put the argument to rest?

While he did invent lots of stuff, I think it's pretty undisputed by the people close to him such as Jony Ive and Andy Hertzfeld, that Steve was famous for claiming other peoples ideas as his own.

[Edit: Jony Ive describes this in chapter 26 of the biography. See folklore.org for more examples.]

The CEO is on a lot of corporate patent applications for contributing" to the invention. I have seen two CEOs on my applications for patents.

Jony Ive mentioned this in the biography, and said it was especially annoying to him since he always remembered who came up with an idea.

It's the same "phenomenon" described by Hertzfeld here: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Reality_Distortion_Fi...

That said, this story is about an invention that Steve Jobs _doesn't_ take credit for. It's another example of how Isaacsons biography gets simple facts wrong by simply quoting people without doing research (just like the NeXT quote by Bill Gates discussed earlier).

Also, I think Steve Jobs comes off as belittling the accomplishments of Woz here, by saying that the power supply was just as revolutionary as the logic board, which apparently is clearly false.

Well, it's hard to say that other companies didn't rip off the "idea" of the iPhone. After all, all the hardware had been available for a number of years, including displays, CPUs, GPUs, capacitive touchscreens, batteries etc. Someone else could easily have come along with a multitouch phone two years earlier, but nobody did. Of course, the "idea" of the iPhone wasn't new either, but Apple was the first to make the idea into a working, usable product.

You just contradicted yourself: "it's hard to say that other companies didn't rip off the 'idea' of the iPhone." and "Of course, the 'idea' of the iPhone wasn't new either". If the idea wasn't new, then other companies weren't ripping off the iPhone's idea.

I'm not attempting to detract from the fact that Apple executed on the iPhone almost perfectly. Realizing that the market was ready, and then providing a product that delivers on that analysis is what Jobs should be known for, not this notion that he invented multitouch devices.

Maybe I should have written that they ripped off Apples _implementation_ of the idea. Or maybe they were just "inspired".

The right question to ask is this: Would multiple capacitive multitouch phones similar to the iPhone have been introduced in 2007 / 2008 if the iPhone had never launched? Some people seem to think so, but I see no evidence that other companies were working on similar technology / user interfaces at the time, and plenty of evidence that they were caught off guard.

There's a simple reason why Apple was often the first one to put something into a product: They could afford to sell high-end products for a high price and know that they still have lots of users who buy their stuff.

Most of the other companies had prototypes using those technologies available, but they didn't build products out of them because (at this point) they would have been too expensive for their target audience.

And even if those other companies built a product before Apple, Apple would still claim that it was first: Two examples: (1) LG Prada (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada) was there before the iPhone, yet (AFAIK) Apple claims that basically all the touchscreen phones are a copy of the iPhone. And (2) Netbooks and Subnotebooks have been on the market for nearly a decade now - I've used Thinkpad X-series laptops for years now (which weight about as much as a Macbook Air). Still, as soon as a company announes a new Subnotebook now someone will claim that it is a copy of the Macbook Air.

Sorry, but that's just wrong. Most other computer or consumer electronics companies have high-end lines with prices comparable to Apples products. Companies like RIM and Nokia had pretty nice margins on their high-end phones.

The main problem was simply that they had no incentive to innovate in that direction until competition showed up in the form of the iPhone. (And I'm not saying Apple is special here, I think they would probably have been in the same position if they had continued selling the Newton and tried making an iNewtonPhone out of it).

AFAIK, Apple claims various touch-related inventions through their patents (some of which are quite stupid, which is another story). I've never heard them saying "we invented touchscreen phones".

Apple never claimed to have invented subnotebooks either. But you would be right if you looked at many of the new "ultrabooks" and claimed that they have borrowed many design details from the Air (as opposed to, say, copying the form factor of the X-series or netbooks).

Your example of the Prada disproves your point. The Prada sold unlocked for roughly $775. Hardly a cheap phone. The Sony/Ericsson P990 also sold for $700. So the iPhone was not sold at a significantly higher price than its competition.

So, Apple is doomed when faced by your criticism. Either they sell the stuff with new technology at a high price because of their cult following, or they're really not introducing something new. That's a pretty effective attack, since you can basically switch both tactics interchangeably regardless of any actual validity.

Maybe you haven't heard of the LG Prada. Design was public in September 2006, several months before the first iPhone was released. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

Sonyericsson p800, released 2002, 5 years(!) before the iphone. Has a touchscreen covering the whole surface of the phone. You could even stretch it as far as R380, disregard that it's black and white and has no apps and you basically have the iphone form factor.

The iphone might be the first phone that put together all the elements in a really good way and raised the bar for UX on a phone but they certainly did not invent neighter smartphones, touchscreen-phones or phones with apps.

Steve Jobs didn't say others were stealing "Apple's revolutionary design", he said they all rip off Rod Holt's design.

All the machines he mentions were either not consumer products neither compact, or still had lots of fans for cooling (HP 21MX, TI 960B, HP 9825, etc), so I assume there is some measure of truth in that the one designed by Rod Holt was something new.

I wondered why you were ignoring the switching power supplies in consumer televisions in 1976, but then I discovered that I'd posted an older version of my article without that section. Oops. It's there now.

I'm honestly not sure why there was even a discussion along these lines. If you understand hardware, you'd get that it would be hard for Apple to revolutionize hardware before the hardware existed.

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