I have this cartoon in my head in which one caveman is stood at a stall selling round wheels, surrounded by eager punters desperate to buy them for their stone age carts, whilst a bunch of other cavemen stand around with square wheels that no-one wants to buy complaining that they invented the wheel first and that they can't see why the round wheel is so much of an improvement.
Ok, now is time for those flashy details.... I'd like one of those trendy expensive flashy wheels ... I'm sure it will fit in perfectly in my new large white-walled sexy cave...
Jobs invented none of them, but they represent a few things that would either not exist or be radically different (i.e., far worse) today without his contributions.
Do you really think we would be swimming in a sea of technological shit if Apple didn't come up with its own technological innovations ?
I don't think so... Of course look and feel would be slightly different... but that would also have happened in case one "Orange" company had existed too.
Probably the main differences would be 1) less instagram pics 2) podcasts not called podcast but audio files 3) you got me...
Take fonts. The Macintosh came out in 1984. It took over a decade for WYSIWG and fonts to catch on. By 1995, Wordperfect for DOS was still massively popular.
We think the desktop metaphor with on-screen typesetting just "makes sense" today. Why shouldn't we just be typing on a virtual piece of paper, working directly with fonts of the desired type and size?
But that is an entirely new metaphor. Writing and publishing never worked that way. You'd write a draft on paper or a typewriter, then give it to some layout guy who would work with the typesetter to get the press set up.
The early text-mode-only word processors extended this metaphor is a natural way - you became the layout guy and the typesetter using markup inside your draft, and the software and printer would work to get you the output you wanted. This was a big deal, and to many, was the way it was going to work forever.
The iPhone is "obvious", and that's how all phones work now, but there was nothing like it in 2007 and there were plenty of skeptics that predicted failure because of its lack of a stylus and physical keyboard.
If we could be shown the world without Steve Jobs, it wouldn't surprise me at all today if we all had to drive over to our local IBM "Computing Center" where we could pay to send people "Electronic Mails", and we'd all think we were living in a futuristic wonder world.