You Can't Innovate Like Apple

[Sporkman]

Good article on Apple's design process...


You Can't Innovate Like Apple

When what you teach and develop every day has the title “Innovation” attached to it, you reach a point where you tire of hearing about Apple. Without question, nearly everyone believes the equation Apple = Innovation is a fundamental truth. Discover what makes them different...

http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/magazine/6/4/you_cant_innovate_like_apple

[Dustin2128]

Skimmed the article, that's basically what I guessed apple's research method to be; intensive prototyping, maxing out stability at the expense of locking everything down jobs style.

One thing that always bugs me though; while apple's products are usually much more.. polished than the rest on release day, they are not innovative. I'm sorry, there were tablets for a couple of decades before the ipad, there were smart phones before the iphone and there were PMPs before the ipod. All of their devices are significantly less powerful than the competition's- look at the evo versus the iphone- its just the large amount of finishing that gets done beforehand that makes them 'feel' innovative. That, plus SJ's reality distortion field are what cause the masses to forget that most of what apple releases has been available from other companies and communities for years.

Simply put, apple != innovation.

That said, apple does make fairly solid products, they're just not for me.

[era86]

It isn't who can get there first, it's who can get it right. Apple isn't leading technological innovation, but it sure can polish the rough drafts of others...

[Warpnow]

The guy is crazy if he thinks even a decent size of the world thinks of Apple as innovative...

[del_diablo]

The guy is crazy if he thinks even a decent size of the world thinks of Apple as innovative...

But they are, but not in the actual sense of the word.
Basically a lot of companies makes breaktroughs, but they never manage to get a "good enough" product out on the marked due 2 reasons:
*Lack of publicity
*Lack of a finished product
In most cases, the innovators lacked both.
Apple has fought for every inch of their publicity, along with the fact everything they make "works" in contrast to other companies.
Microsoft would never have pushed trough so many broken solutions and standards if it where not for the fact they had a defacto monopoly.
The reason Linux never gets on and grabs a piece on the desktop is because nobody is doing a good job on selling Linux computers to anything more than the niche marked. Some might even do a good job, but those again are never selling it to the anything more than the minimal niche. Image if one of the major vendors suddenly decided to screw all logical sense of risks, and just put out one well done 14-15 inch laptop running with a ARM cpu and a fitting battery meaning it would have SEVERAL days worth of battery time, along with actually shipping a working Linux distro that is not completely weird and broken(image them shipping the Linux Mint using Debian Unstable as base, and fixing a few minor gripes). And that would advocate it properly: A decent laptop, outperforming the battery life of everything on the marked, ultra-portable, working GUI, and actually sells it to the consumers? Then it would have been a "innovation", even thou the actual product has existed for ages.

Look at it the other way: The ancient Egyptians had WORKING steam-powered technology, but it never got used for anything other than opening large doors on tombs and similar.