this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Genuine question.

I know they were the scrappy startup doing different cool things. But, what are the most major innovative things that they introduced, improved or just implemented that either revolutionized, improved or spurred change?

I am aware of the possibility of both fanboys and haters just duking it out below. But there's always that one guy who has a fkn well-formatted paragraph of gold. I await that guy.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Apple is one of the companies behind the USB standard. There are other major companies (especially Intel) but they often make really stupid decisions and I don't think the world would be using USB today if it wasn't for Apple coming on board and doing some really awesome work. USB-C for example was designed by Apple. And Thunderbolt - another Intel project - was pretty much exclusive to Apple hardware... and it's rumoured that Apple pushed intel hard to make serious improvements such as using copper instead of fibre optic and including it modern USB standards (thunderbolt, if you don't know, is basically PCI-E over a USB cable - it works so much better than a regular USB connection the only drawback is it costs slightly more).

They took KHTML, a niche rendering engine that nobody had heard of which didn't work for major websites... and made it into the foundation that backs every browser except FireFox.

The ARM CPU architecture was technically an independent company, but Apple provided nearly all their funding in the early days, provided ongoing funding for decades before they did anything interesting, and ARM's founding CEO was an Apple employee.

Most of the best programming languages in the world, especially modern ones but even some old ones that have been re-architected, depend on LLVM which, while it's an open source project, for many years was exclusively worked on by Apple (who hired the university student that started it as a side project and gave him an unlimited budget to make it what it is today).

They figured out how to make touch screen phones work. It existed before, but it was shit - in particular typing was unusable and while it wasn't as good on the first iPhone as it is today it was Apple who was the first to find a way to make it "good enough" and that was some seriously innovative stuff. It looks like a tiny keyboard with touch buttons but that is not what's going on under the hood. It's far more complex.

Going forward - the Vision Pro headset has some pretty awesome innovations.

I could go on, but you get the picture. A really common theme is they took something that already existed (e.g. the mouse) and figured out how to actually make it good enough for people to adopt it. It takes a lot of R&D to develop something as comprehensive as, for example, the HIG:

Could someone else have achieved those innovations? Sure. If ARM/Apple didn't do it... I'm sure someone else would have figured out how to make a fast processor that could run all day on a battery small enough to wear on your wrist. But with that and so many other things, Apple's work was critical (a lot of that was software, not hardware - for example technology like ARC was critical to reach acceptable levels of efficiency). Somebody else would have done it eventually, but I'd argue Apple made it happen decades earlier than it otherwise would have. And once they proved it could be done, others coped them. Which is awesome - as Steve Jobs loved to quote Picasso "good artists copy; great artists steal" and said they do it shamelessly and expect their competitors to do the same... as long as they don't steal branding. That's when Apple's legal team gets fired up - as they did with the early Samsung phones where everything, even the icons on the home screen which could have easily been unique, looked like an iPhone.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

USB-C for example was designed by Apple.

Only a little bit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

They took KHTML, a niche rendering engine that nobody had heard of which didn’t work for major websites… and made it into the foundation that backs every browser except FireFox.

  1. KHTML wasn't so bad. "Major websites" at that time meant less than now. It wasn't Facebook/Reddit/Google/Twitter time with everything important being on those platforms.

  2. They did lots of dick moves to prevent their changes from going back to upstream. I'm not sure taking someone else's work and then behaving as if that's a divine blessing is a good thing.

  3. Chromium now is really far from Webkit, and of course from KHTML, which died as its own project relatively recently.