MacWrite was released 5 years after WordPerfect, which itself is predated by WordStar. I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things.
Apple refines what others have attempted before, that's what they're good at. Part of the reason people are disappointed with Apple these days is because of this fantasy image of Apple as an inventor.
I mean, look, WordStar was a huge step up from a typewriter. It (and programs like it) made it possible for people like me to write.
WordStar let you get the words right. WordPerfect let you do "you asked for it, you got it" layout, which was a step up. But MacWrite and programs like it let you do WYSIWYG layout, which was huge. It was like going from typewriter to WordStar, but for layout and appearance. (The words are still more important, but the presentation also matters.)
By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had electronic memory. They had error correction "tape" so you could erase mistakes. You could set them to center or right justify text. You could create tables of justified text.
Early word processing software was amazing because it gave you more memory to work with, and didn't force you to keep so much of what you previously wrote in your head. But it was only a large step forward compared to typewriters of the time.
WYSIWYG blew all of that out of the water.
I went from a mechanical typewriter which had the whiteout tape as it's only "advanced" feature, directly to a WYSIWYG editor. It was absolutely night and day. I only saw an "advanced" electronic typewriter later in life at my grandparents house, which was used rarely and only for her accounting business as it was so expensive when they first bought it.
As far as I know my experience was pretty much normal for my peer group - as my school had a similar setup. As a kid in school, it was amazing going from having to totally re-type a rough draft to being able to make some casual edits and hit print. Hours saved for each paper, especially with the typing skills I had back then!
Word processing software was to writing as smartphones were to photography, or as the book press was to writing. Perhaps not transformational on a per feature basis, but transformational on grounds of the possibilities and market it unlocked.
Sure, there were electronic typewriters where you could type an entire line or two into memory before printing it. And, as you say, typewriters with whiteout reels that allowed you to backspace.
But if you've started a new paragraph, and you realise you want to go back and edit the previous one, and everything else needs to move down a line to accommodate? Good chance you're throwing the page away and starting from scratch.
Or you're cutting and pasting in the literal sense, using scissors and glue.
Typewriters were difficult enough that "typist" was a professional job - and many workers wouldn't do their own typing, instead recording messages onto tiny tape cassettes for a typist to type up later on. There were even foot-pedal-controlled cassette players, so typists could type with their hands and control the dictaphone tape with their feet!
WYSIWYG software was an entirely new paradigm, and changed everything.
I wrote a bunch of papers using a typewriter. Standard operating procedure was to plan out the complete paper, basically as a tree of bullet points (I used index cards), and then turn those into sentences at the typewriter. All the writing/reorganization had to happen before you sat down to type.
Keyboard templates were pretty ubiquitous.
It wasn't a Selectric, though, so mostly you just used it as a typewriter. Selectrics were expensive and mostly used in business rather than by individuals.
Even the IBM Selectrics were nothing like as good as having a word processor, which is why the transition was so fast. A friend of mine was in commercial real-estate in that period (mid-1980s) and discovered that with a computer, he could type his own offer letters and not have to bother with a secretary. My brother's law firm went through something similar. In a handful of years, there was huge adoption.
Grad school (starting 1979), there was a mainframe with DecWriter terminals and that was a big improvement but still nothing like terminal GUIs.
You might be blessed with a brain for written communication.
If I did not allow myself revision and improvement to my written text, everything I write would read like a spoken monologue, and be multiple times longer than necessary to convey my message.
I have another article about AI coming out about how we could use generative AI to make art that we've never seen before, but it's mostly used for AI slop. I'm in the middle of ranting it out into the typewriter. It's bad currently, but I make it bad first so I can remake it better later. Here's an excerpt of the intro that I'm going to be rewriting. This is the "raw clay" that I mold in editing.
> I like creating things. There's a lot of joy in being able to sit there, think about a thing, and then make that thing come into existence. This is something I really enjoy doing and I'm blessed to be able to do that as my job in DevRel.
> One of the core conflicts that i end up having with the stuff I create is that I am a bit more artistically minded than people would expect out of the gate. I mean, I get it. Tech isn't really known for *art*, it's a lot more known for being the barrier between you and artists you want to follow.
> Howeever I've ended up seeing kind of a disturbing pattern with AI tools that are meant or at least intended to aid people in the creation of art: they're almost always used to create infinite slop machines without a lick of art in the process. Today I'm going to talk about this fundamental conflict between two categories: art and content. Art is that which conveys, inspires and tells stories. Content is what goes between the ads so that media moguls can see their profit lines go up. I want to argue that a lot of what AI tools are actually being used for is content that is gussied up as if it is art.
If you want to see what the entire writing process looks like after it festers for a while in my head, I wrote out the holy grail article on Twitch: https://youtu.be/N_KNpVujAL8
I have only recently learned that I have ADHD, and have been trying to iron out all the implications of that (well, that and autism, which I also only recently learned about) -- I cannot help but wonder if a workflow like this would help me in my writing....
The big breakthrough was editing. WYSIWIG didn't solve a problem in that space. College papers didn't need different fonts, and it was sufficient to let the computer take care of formatting, like using Markdown.
I'm not dismissing the Apple, but it was priced out of my reach in 1984.
The point was that later typewriters had a features like memory, automatic indentation and erasing that were not available in 1950s era typewriters..
Hence why I had to wait until university to actually see them outside computer magazines, and only one room had them on the computer labs, versus the whole campus filled with PCs and UNIX terminals.
I bought my typewriter around 1990, a plain classical one, where I threw lots of paper away, learn to use corrector tape and ink to save them.
The early computerized typewriters kinda sucked - you could do line level edits but the print quality was dot matrix or worse.
Were such fancy machines actually common? I never saw one. For me, it was all "CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK oops! damn", until it was a whole new world with MacWrite and the ImageWriter.
Boy, oh boy were the early gen word processors a godsend!
Then Charles went to Microsoft where he started and led Microsoft's applications group, where he built the first versions of Microsoft Office
I don’t think cross-platform UI code really took off on the Mac until maybe 20 years later. Plenty of Mac apps were built that way before that point, but they tended to be ones in the “you’re stuck using this, so it doesn’t have to be very nice” category, like Word ended up being. It doesn’t really seem to have tipped until Electron came along, and somehow web apps that use half a gigabyte of RAM to show some text became totally accepted as good enough.
Incidentally, the Cocoa UI framework that macOS uses was originally a cross platform framework that could deploy to Windows and various other OSes, back when it was made by NeXT. Apple. Apple killed that off and it became Mac-exclusive. I wonder what the world would look like if they kept support for other OSes. Maybe we’d have a good selection of cross platform apps that actually look nice and perform well.
It's horrendously tough to target for a cross-platform application when you have to bring the entire GUI toolkit along and adapt it individually to every target, even the 95% of the market gorilla that is whatever versions of Desktop Windows are the most recent 3.
- Pages.app by Pages --- amazing DTP tool which was bought by Anderson Financial Services, but then killed off when Rhapsody went away
- Macromedia Freehand --- unfortunately, they continued with their in-house toolkit to make the Mac/Windows versions, since it would have been too much work to revive the old Altsys Virtuoso code
- Quantrix Financial Modeller --- at least this still survived, but be sure to take a seat before looking up the cost per seat
- FrameMaker --- the NeXT version was the nicest one I ever used, and with Display PostScript, was far nicer to work with
- WordPerfect --- the NeXT version was far nicer than the Windows, would have been nice to see that come back
- Stone Create (and the other Stone apps) --- nice assortment of various tools which would have been quite nice to have
Lots of other way cool NeXT apps which should have done better in the market.
I never used Word in the DOS days so I can't compare, but it was obvious that Word for Windows was written natively for Windows and it "felt" much more natural in the Windows of that time.
Never really loved Word for Windows to be honest, though I used it a lot over the years. Though liked the DOS version.
WordStar and WordPerfect were for DOS. They were not WYSIWYG. Sure they were powerful word processors for professionals, but they were not “like” MacWrite. MacWrite was a tool for regular people.
I don't think I'm alone in that judgement, as Wiki says:
"WordStar was the first microcomputer word processor to offer mail merge and textual WYSIWYG." [1]
So... You might need to expand why you think that this is not true.
[0] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/words...
You said it.
WordStar did not have fonts. MacWrite did.
WYSIWYG without fonts is ... I don't know ... "textual WYSIWYG"? Whatever that is.
The Macintosh system software shipped with about 12 distinctly-different fonts. Most of which also had italic, bold, outline, etc styles.
These fonts could also be rendered at different point sizes.
WordStar had full support for the PC-8 Graphic set. It is pre-TrueType Fonts, but so was the software. By the time WordStar landed on Windows, it had support for everything you'd expect from anyone else.
Obviously WordStar was limited by what DOS could render, so the variety of fonts available had to work in a drastically constrained bitmap. I could also not find samples of the PC-8 graphic set.
But for comparison, here are the original 1984 Macintosh system fonts:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Original...
I don't have a CP/M emulator on hand to fire up the original to show you an example, as WordStar pre-existed DOS.
But this is a quote from v3, the first DOS version, from the manual:
---
Screen Fonts for Preview
At the Add or Remove a Feature screen, you can install three different types of screen fonts for Preview. The screen font options are Code page 437, Code page 850, and PostScript fonts. If you want to install PostScript fonts, install both PostScript and code page 850 fonts. (Be sure to set the code page to 850 in DOS. See your DOS manual for instructions.)
Now, you could argue that WordStar anticipated WYSIWYG editors, because it did its best to faithfully reproduce margins, indents, line spacing, justification, etc. in its text editing mode -- but that attempt came from the era when printers could only output monospaced type, usually just one typeface, no italics, etc. Once printers got better, WordStar really wasn't WYSIWYG anymore, just "best effort within limitations". IIRC, the only major DOS-based word processor to actually attempt a WYSIWYG editing display was WordPerfect 6.2 in the late 1990s.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/IBMCouri...
But the AppleWriter printer was high DPI and could render fonts.
And then of course the Apple LaserWriter came a few years later.
This is what enables you to do proper typesetting and page layout for a document, and using a PostScript printer such as the Apple LaserWriter you could do desktop publishing [1]. Desktop publishing was invented by Xerox PARC but the revolution began when Apple made it available to the masses with the Macintosh and LaserWriter.
Apple didn't invent any of these technologies but they were the first to put them all together into a package for the mass market and made them incredibly easy to use. Suddenly, grandma had a tool she could use to write and typeset the weekly church newsletter from home, and even print it on her LaserWriter at home. If she wanted to do a newsletter like that just two years prior she would have had to hire the services of a print shop to do both typesetting and layout as well as printing.
She could still have used WordStar or WordPerfect and printed with a dot matrix printer, but that doesn't get you large, proportional fonts or layout.
WordPerfect for Windows was released in 1991. Prior versions were MS-DOS and not graphical.
WordStar for Windows was released in about 1991. Prior versions were MS-DOS and not graphical.
What made MacWrite special, is that it was graphical, highly WYSIWYG (especially when paired with an Apple printer), had a lot of great fonts, and the software was intuitive.
Of course Apple didn't invent any of it, but they made one of the best word processing products at the time.
MacWrite was the best in a niche market of personal newsletters that wanted graphical elements. More professional desktop publishers used Aldus PageMaker. And big publishing houses didn't use PCs or software, they used offset lithography presses.
MacWrite begat Microsoft Word 3.01, which is when Word overtook MacWrite on Mac and became truly competitive with WordPerfect on DOS.
If you said MacWrite was an innovative word processor, I would not have replied. Most innovative is not always the best product at the time.
I am the actual OP. If you're concerned by my use of the word "best", please replace that word with "innovative for consumers". If you have an issue with this new wording, then we'll have to agree to disagree.
While MacWrite may or may not have been "niche" as you said, it most definitely heavily influenced another "niche" word processor available today: Microsoft Word. Word for Mac (1985) was the first graphical version of Word and it was heavily inspired by MacWrite.
You realize there were other systems besides PC and Mac?
Signum for the Atari ST came out in 1986. It was a fully fledged WYSIWYG text processor with special printer drivers for regular dot matrix printers. Even with a 9-pin you could create great looking output, if you had the patience (a single page took minutes to print). Signum was way ahead of MacWrite and was very popular with people needing special fonts in science/math and the humanities (you could quite easily design your own fonts). Also, it allowed for Right-to-left text, and of course the Atari ST was way cheaper than the Mac.
*> You realize there were other systems besides PC and Mac?*
But in terms of influence, MacWrite had more (eg. Microsoft Word for Mac).
For general consumer use, I found MacWrite much better than Signum. But I can see your point in terms of academics and non-English speakers.
BTW, if anyone's curious, I believe the actual first WYSIWYG word processor was probably Bravo[1]. And Bravo somewhat influenced MacWrite.
I read your whole comment, but I still don't understand what this means. E.g., why does relying on Quickdraw for on-screen rendering not make it a "true WYSIWYG editor"?
Microsoft Word for Mac was released in 1985. It was comparable to MacWrite.
Also Microsoft Write for Windows was released in 1985, but it was clunkier.
Thanks for the correction.
Claiming that Apple does not invent is as gobsmackingly wrong as claiming that Apple invented everything.
For example, you could claim that nothing new in CMOS manufacturing exists because it’s all just the existing idea of a transistor. Or the transistor is just a quantum mechanic version of the vacuum tube. Or the vacuum tube just an electric version of the Babbage machine. Repeat for Internet vs packet switching.
Basically come up with a definition that doesn’t require a “I know it when I see it step” and I’ll easily fit many things Apple did in there unless it’s such a restrictive definition that no one invents anything.
“If I have seen futher, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”
But if we accept "patentable" as a proxy for "invented", then obviously Apple invents a lot.
All these fuzzy lines behind this "who invented what" is a major reason I consider patents to be evil -- the entire system sets up artificial and harmful barriers keeping ideas from fertilizing each other and growing beyond our wildest imaginations.
(And as someone who strongly dislikes all things Apple -- but not quite as much as all things Windows -- I cannot help but observe that both Apple and Microsoft simultaneously deserve both more and less acknowledgement, all depending on how one looks at things, for their inventiveness).
We had this system for most of human history. It sucked. A decade and a half of exclusivity is a fair trade to avoid it.
This is entirely tangential and probably a pointless gripe in this thread, but...
For some reason, it's always really annoyed me that Apple took MP3 players, called them an 'iPod' and suddenly everyone ate them up like they were the second coming of christ and we'd never had them ever before.
To be clear, there were good non-Apple MP3 players, but they were either marketed poorly, or late arrivals (e.g. the Toshiba player that got rebadged into the Zune). By the time those existed (and tech companies started hiring UI/UX people), Apple was doing a complete reset of another product category: smartphones.
I suspect history would have been different had, say, MiniDisc hadn't failed horribly in America[0]. Pre-iPod, portable music in the US was either compact cassettes with all the downsides of tape, or CD players that could just barely fit in your pocket. The iPod was such a step up from either that it all but became a genericized trademark. Had we had a competing technology from not the 1980s, we probably wouldn't have thought the iPod was so great. Or at least, people I knew who had MiniDisc looked at the iPod like I look at all the e-waste that was trying to compete with the iPod.
[0] Yes, I know that Sony was basically trying to avoid a repeat of DAT getting banned
The iPod is the only Apple product I have ever purchased. I could easily operate the iPod without having to looking at it constantly which was great for bike rides or car rides. No fiddling and taking eyes off road.
The iPod cam with a large screen and a click wheel. I could find songs on it. That was a revolution for me.
MP3 was the enabling technology (if you can't fit many songs on a small device, then this is moot).
As others have eluded to, MP3 only didn't seem to be enough. I remember passing on early mp3 players because they only had 32-64mb of storage, not even really enough to store a single album. Snatching up those tiny 1.8" hard drives right away and integrating them is probably as important as the UI improvements because it solved that problem.
As soon as I had the funds I quickly moved onto a variety of CD/HDD based players, although I've only recently bought (and modded) an iPod - there's definitely reasons they were so popular. I can appreciate why they went to the common platform with the phone and were later phased out entirely, but as a task-dedicated non-smart device they would be last-man-standing.
That 1G of flash storage at the time was huge for a phone. This was before everybody had an iPod Touch or iPhone, of course. iPhones came out the next year but in my area hardly anyone had AT&T, so because of the exclusivity the iPod Touch became popular way before the iPhone in my area.
Flash based players were smaller but limited in size and expansion media was expensive. Hard drive players were hobbled with USB 1.1 connections and an obsession with drag and drop for management.
The iPod by default just synched with your iTunes library. The FireWire (and eventually USB 2.0) did so quickly. The navigation was as good as the metadata which iTunes made easy to edit. The UX on the device made scrolling through long lists of songs very easy.
The iPod made using an MP3 easy and approachable for normal people. The Rio, Nomad, and a multitude of others did not. They included a bunch of checklist features but didn't focus on usability until Apple dominated the market.
Not to say MacWrite wasn't based on prior work (it was, though not actual products that I know of), but it isn't really comparable to prior text-based word processors.
I worked in a lab that used PCs while I owned a Mac Plus. There was no comparison.
Calling what they do as mere refinement may be equally understating it in some cases.
They get it right. For the masses. They create beginners.
Anyone can start with an Apple, because it’s what it’s designed to do.
I have my own biases that extreme usability started earlier with other movements like WebOS and Palm contributing to it as well.
Still, if we look for watershed moments where huge numbers of people in the mainstream adopt technology, whether it’s the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, watch, laptops, they don’t need to be the first, just the best for the most number of people.
Being able to integrate hardware and software closely creates a different and reliable result for the many, as much as I might not like having complete agency.
If anything, Apple helps invent beginners in the mainstream.
I used to think that about Apple which is why I got the iphone 4s when it came out assuming that I would be able to use it via voice while driving and have a good experience. I disabled it after the first day and never went back. It was not remotely ready for a wide release. I still use a mac as my main device, but I've been on Android since the 4s.
Im referring to the general trend of adoption of smartphones being a certain way with Apple.
Like others, I’ve spent time back and forth between iPhone and Android while using Macs more.
Android dialled in was pretty comfortable for me, iPhone was a lot more taps and swipes for the same, but the vertical integration is harder to ignore.
Happens all the time with the iPhone. Apple gets celebrated as an innovator for adding features that have existed for years on Android.
Um, hello, Wang OIS? WordStar and WordPerfect didn't invent anything. They were copies of terminal-based word processors.
But MacWrite was different in two important ways. First, like Bravo and Gypsy before it, it was WYSIWYG, a million times better than WordStar/WordPerfect. And it worked with the LaserWriter. But more importantly: it was free. This made MacWrite revolutionary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories
There's a certain power that comes when you can designate that something is a section header, or a title, or a paragraph, or an equation -- and that power is felt when you decide you want to change the style for all the titles and section headers, or change how you number and reference equations and theorems.
Word processors (to the best of my knowledge -- it's been years since I've used one) can't do this. This kind of power comes from markup languages, like LaTeX or HTML/CSS (if you organize your documents correctly).
Having said that, there are LaTeX editors that both provide a certain amount of "What You See Is What You Get" (I think one is called "LyX", and I think GUI Emacs provides this, too) but nonetheless allow you to use LaTeX directly when you need it; I guess this is equivalent to the "Show Codes" ability that WordPerfect provided. (I wouldn't know, though, because I prefer to use Vim to write my documents.)
Also, I would agree that when things become freely available, that can be a game-changer, but as someone who grew up with a terminal and a giant computer with 8-inch disks and an Atari 800XL, when a neighbor showed off his Macintosh, it would be out of the question for my family to think of that as "free".
In addition to Watson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson), there's also Cover Flow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Flow), Shortcuts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortcuts_(Apple)), Konfabulator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Widgets), Growl (https://growl.github.io/growl/), and of course my favorite LaunchBar (https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html, LaunchBar would be my pick as the most innovative app of the last 25 years), for apps that were incorporated into macOS.
While Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Lightroom, Premiere, and PowerPoint are all examples of software developed and released first for the Mac that then went on to become software behemoths in their own right (too big to Sherlock). (Well Sketch turned out differently, because Figma happened, but it's still a great example of third-party innovation facilitated by "a set of software development tools, a platform, and an audience".)
The point here being I think of Apple as more providing a platform for innovation rather than innovating themselves (but I'm aware that's probably a minority opinion).
> the new standard that companies like Samsung and Google would clone the same way they cloned the hardware and software design of the iPhone.
That's misrepresenting history in ways it's not even funny.
Stopped reading at that point. The article took too long to even sketch it's main point anyway.
They didn't clone everything, but they cloned a lot in the early days. Rounded corners was another one. Now it seems like Apple is cloning Google/Samsung more.
As far as the rounded corners, I remember seeing a reduced Google Reader view of Engadget later that year that had every device looking the same from the top third up. I really wish I had a screenshot.
There is now a lot of cross inspriation and features that are copied in both directions, as well as both implementing the same thing at around the same time (Intelligence and Gemini).
On the Android side, Pixel gets most new features first while Samsung offers their own take. Samsung is generally ahead of their direct competitors in terms of hardware.
- No physical keyboard + touch keyboard
- Modern OS kernel (not embedded specific kernel)
- Desktop browser engine
- Capacitive touchscreen + finger instead of stylus - one or two phones had capTouch before, but they were far from standard, and they still had physical keyboards for typing
- Vertical by default orientation
- Short 1 day battery life in favour of more power/features (weird to list, but was a bold move everyone mocked then followed)
They totally took out the existing market (Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, a variety of OEM OSs). Android succeeded but came after, still had keyboards on its flagships the years after iPhone came out (G1, Droid), and took these design cues from iPhone.
The Mac GUI with mouse+keyboard+windows was also huge. Admittedly not first to invent it (Xerox PARC), but first to ship it as a package is still hugely impressive. Few people commercialize a new product before it existed in some lab.
- Modern OS kernel (not embedded specific kernel) (Blackberry had this first)
- Desktop browser engine (iOS didn't have a "desktop" browser engine, it had a stripped-down mobile browser engine. But on this note, Windows Mobile did support desktop browser engines.)
- Capacitive touchscreen + finger instead of stylus - one or two phones had capTouch before, but they were far from standard, and they still had physical keyboards for typing (LG Prada had the first capacitive touchscreen)
- Vertical by default orientation (Almost every smartphone at this point was vertical by default, with horizontal-by default being the exception.)
- Short 1 day battery life in favour of more power/features (weird to list, but was a bold move everyone mocked then followed) (Windows Mobile had this years before Apple)
Literally everything that Apple is credited for with the iPhone...others had it first. The true genius of the iPhone was the marketing...Apple still gets credit today for "inventing" features that Android phones have had for years (zoom cameras? AI? notes? custom emojies? embedded fingerprint readers? integrated payment?)
Apple has always been the follower: it copies what others have done, and makes minor improvements, then markets the hell out of those minor improvements to make them seem revolutionary.
I worked on WinMo at MSFT at that time. You are comparing devices with physical keyboard and a crappy virtual keyboard that required a stylus to modern smartphones?
I mentioned the LG Prada - yes had cap touch, but not touch typing (physical slide out keyboard).
Almost every WM, BB and Symbian SKU had horizon screens (over keyboards).
Blackberry integrated QNX post iPhone.
First iPhone had WebKit.
All of these facts seem to be incorrect.
Again: the combination of these was a huge shift, and every one followed it.
Also, you have your devices mixed up. The LG Prada first gen (2007) did not have a keyboard; the 2nd generation (LG Prada II, 2008) had the slide-out keyboard. And on that note, the iPhone shares so many design elements from the original mockup of the Prada from LG's initial announcement of the device that most tech reviewers thought Apple copied the Prada. It's a good thing for Apple that LG failed to file timely design patents.
So, it seems that all of your facts are the incorrect ones.
Re:LG Prada 1: I didn't realize there was an earlier model without keyboard (it wasn't released globally). Looked it up: it has T9 typing, no QWERT of any kind, only 8mb (mb!) of storage, no wifi, and a ported feature phone OS. It in no way resembles a modern smartphone.
You didn't mention the other 3 claims I debunked.
Read the comment you're replying to. I didn't say they were first to market with every single item on the list. I said "Nothing like this existed as a full package before the iPhone". The LG Prada has 2/6 (and is missing things which are required to be a "smartphone" at all). The HP IPAQ is another 2/6. Apple was genuinely were first with several of these big ones: non-embedded kernel, functional finger-typing (not stylus), desktop web engine, slate form factor. Now 99%+ of smart phones use the design decisions iPhone pioneered. Calling the iPhone "minor improvement" of what came before is wild. It was a brilliant both technically and for its design.
Given that the iPhone UI was based on the LG Prada, it would seem that LG Prada is the pioneer. And on that note, you haven't been able to mention a single that the Apple actually did first that it didn't just copy from an Android device (or other competitor).
As you keep moving the goal posts and ignoring things that prove Apple wasn't the inventor of everything, I'm going to bow out of this conversation now.
This is the famous "reality distortion field" you may have heard of. It's basically a form of tribalism taken to an absurd level.
Exactly. And often the first version is often kind of meh (iPhone, Watch, Vision Pro) but they keep iterating and later versions become really good. Sometimes it's a hit directly (M1), it's still very iterative on whatever came before.