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Comment by hcarvalhoalves | Hacker News Reader

> It is unclear whether the spread-sheeting-loving, consensus-oriented, even-keeled Cook can successfully reshape the cult-like culture that Jobs built. Though Cook has deftly managed the iPhone and iPad product lines, which continue to deliver enormous profits, Apple has yet to launch a major new product under Cook; talk of watches and televisions remains just that.

It bothers me everybody ignores the already announced Mac Pro. It's more niche than an iPhone or iPad but an important one for many Mac users, and the specs and design really push innovation forward on a market that is almost dead (desktops).

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Not only that, but the press seems to have a very myopic view on "innovation." It doesn't happen overnight. It was 6 years between the iPod and the iPhone, another 3 before the iPad, and they're still arguably refining both. If Apple still hasn't released something interesting in another 3 years, maybe (maybe) then it'll be worth agonising over.

And I couldn't agree more about the Mac Pro by the way.

Except every year there for quite awhile, there were innovations on the iPhone and iPad. There haven't been, for two years running.

Really? Let's look at diffs.

iPhone -> iPhone 3G: Addition of 3G, GPS. enclosure became plastic.

iPhone 3G -> iPhone 3GS: Video camera

iPhone 3G -> iPhone 4: Retina, significantly improved camera, new enclosure, addition of front facing camera

iPhone 4 -> iPhone 4S: Siri, better camera

iPhone 4S -> iPhone 5: New screen form factor, significantly improved enclosure, lightning connector, LTE

iPad -> iPad 2: thinner and lighter, cameras

iPad 2 -> iPad 3: LTE, Retina

iPad 3 -> iPad 4: lightning connector

I don't see any significant decline in diff quality over time.

edited for correctness

4S doesn't have LTE, and Siri is very debatable as requiring the new hardware, so that one was a pretty weak update.

As it is, 4S was developed under Jobs.

No, it really wasn't. Did he have some idea the 4S was the direction it would take? Sure. But for God's sake, that phone was released a week and a half after he died. He hadn't been at work very much for a year before that.

not to mention, each product iteration is much faster than the previous

The 5's screen form factor hasn't been taken advantage of at all, the new enclosure, while nice, you literally cannot call innovative, LTE isn't innovative, it would've been 4 years ago but last year it was old news. And the lightning connector isn't innovative in a world where it's getting clocked hard by USB 3.0, which was a done-deal standard by the time Lightning was announced.

The 4S, while having a better camera, it wasn't a huge jump, and Siri was software they removed(which had more features) from the 4's app store.

The 4 was the last truly innovative iPhone- no one was talking screen density, and they nailed it. The new camera was a gigantic step up, the front facing camera was as well.

Also, you missed with the iPhone->3G that the App Store came into existence.

As to the iPad, the iPad 2 was commonly referred to the moment it came out as "The iPad that Apple meant to release." because of all of the small, but numerous, improvements. Adding Retina to the 3 is arguably a similar jump, though admittedly I don't have a lot of room to really know, as I don't own one.

It doesn't happen overnight.

Maybe not, but that's how Steve Jobs made it seem. When he was creating the iPod, nobody was looking (except hard core apple geeks) and the bar was low. After the iPod became a huge hit, it still seemed like every year Jobs was introducing some breakthough feature. He was very good at manipulating public perception. Cook isn't as good at it, he started with the bar ridiculously high and everybody is looking now.

I completely agree with everything you and the parent said about innovation and the Mac Pro. But this is a perception issue, through and through, and something Cook is going to have to deal with if he's going to be successful as Jobs's successor.

The Mac Pro is a significant redesign, but not a new product line.

Apple has often (in recent years) been in a position where significant portions of their revenue are from product categories which did not exist 2 years ago. There is a fear that they will not continue to invent/expand into new categories.

I don't know. MP3 players, smartphones and tablets already existed for a while by the time Apple announced it's products. But the products were so successful that they are now credited as having (re)invented the market. I don't see why this can't happen, for instance, with workstations, this market has been stagnant for a while.

Looking at the MacBook Air, and retina MBP, and their success, Apple seems to have done a fair job of reinventing the laptop market. Quite possibly, the desktop will follow.

MBA was a better netbook. Retina is just catching up to where displays should be had they not stopped improving this century.

These are incremental, not reinventing. These are successes, but they shouldn't be held up as reinventing when they aren't.

Apple didn't necessarily invent new categories, they offered revolutionary products in existing categories. Even back from the start. Mac (obseletes CLI) iMac, iPod, iPhone

As I do ~ 40% of my work from Terminal.app, I'm not sure how the introduction of the Mac obsoleted the CLI.

GUI. I suppose GUI is an entirely new category of pc, but its still a personal computer.

It obsoleted the CLI for 99% of computer users, just like PCs obsoleted minicomputers and mainframes for 99% of server operators.

If only Apple would make the Terminal.app user interface not suck donkey balls. How about a way to resize the property window profile title scrolling list width so it doesn't clip every title after the first few characters and make them extremely difficult to identify and edit, and stop wasting so much of the width on a huge useless icon instead of the title? Is it so hard to make the whole dialog resizable? Didn't Apple invent a way to do that a few years back? Oh and maybe a fucking border around the window edge so overlapping windows don't all merge together? And a way to drag a window with only one tab (which collapses to zero tabs) into another window with only one tab to make one window with two tabs? And figure out why emacs gets confused about the screen width/wrapping and corrupts the display? Maybe fix a few critical usability bugs before wasting time on bullshit like transparency and background images?

...Well at least it's not as bad as the XView cmdtool.

Have you tried iTerm?

Any new product category didn't exist 1 day ago when it's launched, but we don't expect new product categories every day. In the 15 yars since Jobs re-joined apple to the time he died he's credited with introducing three new product categories: iPods, iPhones and iPads. Arguably iPads are actually just a scaled up iPod Touch and nobody ever lists the touch as a new category. From a technology point of view it was a modest revision of an existing product.

So personally I'd list the new product categories as only two - the iPod and iOS. It's just that iOS' revolutionary impact hasn't completely played out yet. I expect any new 'product categories' to be further extensions of the iOS family into new markets. e.g. Apple TV is an existing product running iOS, but if it grows an app store and games ecosystem, will that make it an entry into a new category?

You're right that the Mac Pro is an existing product line, but it's so radically different from it's predecessors that I do think it has a chance of being used in ways and contexts the old Pro never was. For starters it's tiny. It's agressive use of Thunderbolt is interesting, but also the emphasis on GPU utilisation via CUDA and OpenCL - one of it's GPUs isn't even wired up to be used to drive displays - is a bold move.

This is why everyone is speculating about a watch or TV.

Apple will continue to expand into new categories it thinks will do well. They're traditionally concerned with a product either being the market leader in terms of quality, rather than being the inventor of a category.

Plus this whole inventing new categories things is silly, you'd have to go back a long way for Apple to have created a category, they excel at being more refined than existing players.

I wouldn't really say it pushed innovation forward. It's a mac with heavy specs. The only thing innovative about it is the enclosure -- which, while novel, isn't terribly noteworthy.

I have to disagree. There's a couple of things that drive innovation, like the storage on PCI-Ex bus, and the fact they cram 12 Xeon cores and 2 high-end GPUs in a can and still manage to air cool it. The fact there's a good amount of high-end specs in a totally new form factor is what makes it interesting for me.

You can make the argument that Apple's biggest triumphs haven't been hardware innovations but commercial and usability ones. People aren't necessarily concerned that Tim Cook can't make a better desktop, but that he can't concieve products that leapfrog entire markets and industries like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad did.

Some of the biggest innovations that Apple made, IMHO, were pricing related.

The push to mandate unlimited data with every iPhone (and make that data plan $20 with 200 SMS) was critical to the iPhone's success - for me, coming from the Palm platform, it was simply amazing, while one the road, to go to the App Store, download an app, and in seconds be using it. Wouldn't be possible for most if they had to have a conversation with AT&T for 30m to add a data plan prior to doing the above.

Also, the innovation with the iPad to allow you to sign up for the 3G anytime pre-paid was incredible.

PCIe storage has been available for PCs for quite some time.

12 Xeon cores on air.. do you think servers liquid cool these chips? Of course they cool them with air, that's how they're designed to be cooled.

I am impressed they crammed it all into a package that's only 10inches tall - but this is completely at the expense of modularity and expandability. You can't easily throw a new hard drive or GPU in this new configuration.

Yes, and the iPod was just a Nomad with less space.

(The problem with talking about innovation is that the goalposts are so easily moved.)

The reason people ignore the Mac Pro is because it doesn't move the needle revenue/profit wise. At this point, all of Mac barely moves the needle. The Mac Pro is a tiny niche product that is cool and very much needed, just for a very small subset of people.

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