The innovation was bringing a screen with that high of a DPI to millions of users without an incredibly high cost, and pushing their competitors to follow suit.
"Innovate" and "invent" are not synonyms.
"Innovate" and "invent" are not synonyms.
Such high DPI displays were actually quite common in Japanese cellphones way before Apple started using them, even in the lowish-end "free" phones.
The main thing Apple did differently was to give it a catchy name ("retina display" is great marketing) and talk a lot about how "innovative" it is...
I'm sure Apple wasn't the first manufacturer to get rid of floppy disk drives and standardize around USB with the iMac, but they surely had a huge impact in their choices.
But such high-DPI phone displays were not niche items in Japan, pre-"retina", they were common to the point of being essentially standard.
Granted, HN is basically a U.S. site, so maybe non-U.S. practice isn't considered significant.
[I think the iphone, retina or no, is overall better than pre-iphone Japanese phones too, but its advantages are pretty much completely in software; Japanese phone makers make astonishingly good hardware, but their software is at best, very quirky. The iphone and android are changing that.]
[Not sure what you mean by "relegated" to the home market -- Japanese phone makers have never shown much interest in foreign markets, because their attention was pretty fully occupied with the huge Japanese domestic market which they understood well.]
Of course the iphone wasn't just a marketing success. As I noted, it really did offer a vastly improved experience over previous (and current non-smartphones) Japanese phones, which were often very functional, but confusing, inconsistent, etc. [This isn't really just a phone thing... Most Japanese software, especially that written by hardware manufacturers, has pretty much always been like that.]
Worse, there was a tendency to try to nickel-and-dime the user to death, attempting to charge for all sorts of little services and features one could access from phones, often without a good indicator of how much the actual cost would be. The iphone/android's concept of mostly limiting such payment to a well-defined place (the app-store) is pretty refreshing by contrast.
Until the iphone showed up, makers concentrated mostly on adding new "functionality," without putting much effort into actually improving the base experience. There was little incentive for them to do differently, because everybody else was doing the same thing, and Japanese companies tend to have both a laser-like focus on constant incremental improvements and an aversion to riskier large scale changes.
The iphone upset this cozy little arrangement, and android has allowed other makers to react to it pretty quickly. Still, smartphone adoption in Japan is only half that in the U.S. or the U.K., which I suppose is due to the more functional nature of Japanese non-smartphones compared to those in other countries.
But, anyway, yeah, the iphone changed things; my point was only that Apple's innovations were mostly in software, and less so in hardware.
So yes your point is us right about feature, but apple (and consumers) doesn't care, and you just can't call that good marketing.
What is the state of the Japan phone market today? Is it becoming more Korean? Or are the local companies adopting android cold turkey and not messing it up? I haven't been to Japan for a couple of years now.
Making something popular and widespread is popularization. It's very important! But making something hugely popular is not a "brilliant innovation".