[sp332]

Imagine an engineer knowing there's less NAND flash available and it's getting more expensive. So they can focus on giving the software a smaller storage footprint. Now the product is the same, but because engineering and global-supply management worked together, the product is cheaper.

[pork]

That's not innovation, that's incremental optimization.

[niketdesai]

I'm sorry, but this is a highly naive point of view. You could have had an iPhone in 2005 for an amount of money you probably wouldn't be able to part with. These products still have to be produced in quantity and therefore supply chain innovation is just as critical as the design and engineering itself. Apple doesn't market it that way, but the disparity in cost to sell price is one of the reasons they have been able to do so well and fund their next endeavors.

Apple doesn't design and build buildings, which are expensive, time consuming, and generally done in small quantities.

They design products meant to reach millions of people and as such design and engineering of that feat is innovative in its own right.

Your statement, taken more broadly, would dismiss the work of companies like Tesla and SpaceX. Their goals are to bring their unique products to a wider market providing a next generation experience.

I mean, I guess it would be cool if it was just Elon Musk rolling around in his single space ship or Tesla Roadster. But it's much more exciting that this can be the case for many people.

[easp]

You think that innovation, whatever the hell that is, doesn't require a lot of incremental optimizations?

As has been endlessly observed, the Mac drew heavily on the innovative ideas at Xerox PARC, but it added many refinements, including affordability. Similarly, there were other mp3 players before the iPod, and other smartphones before the iPhone, but part of what set Apple apart was bringing all those capabilities together in a way that was greater than the sum of the parts. That doesn't mean that the parts are unimportant.

[sp332]

Well I said "the project is the same" but what if it wasn't? What if the engineers focus on building features that take less space instead of ones that requires multiple megs of new code? Or what if they can tell the global supply people years in advance what new hardware they'll need (more accelerometers, more accurate touch sensors, or different antennas for upcoming 5 GHz wifi support, etc.).

[bostonpete]

Either way, it's adding value.