[drats]

I made this case last week.

"Apple products are like a good classy restaurant or hotel chain. They take ingredients everyone has and put a lot of work into fit and finish, they make the customer feel special for a slightly higher price."[1]

And I stand by it. I'll go even further actually, I think Apple is one of the least innovative big companies. Look at all the big research labs at Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM or Google. Anyone who seriously follows this stuff knows a) Apple doesn't have a profile in the academic world and b) knows enough computer history to know Apple is claiming things invented decades ago.

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4435504

[potatolicious]

UI and UX are innovations. The silly notion that only hard, technical inventions with academic papers attached are innovative is the reason why Apple has eaten everyone's lunch up till now.

"Fit and finish" is as innovative as a new algorithm, it's shocking how much of the industry still treats it as a footnote and a detail, despite the entire history of the tech world since iPhone 1 would indicate.

[w1ntermute]

> The silly notion that only hard, technical inventions with academic papers attached are innovative is the reason why Apple has eaten everyone's lunch up till now.

No, the reason why Apple has eaten's everyone's lunch up till now is because they're interested in being profitable, not innovative. The GP is correct in stating that Apple isn't innovative - they just take other people's innovations and monetize them by polishing things up and running effective ad campaigns to gain marketshare among the masses. And there's nothing at all wrong with that - if your primary interest is making money.

[potatolicious]

> "take other people's innovations and monetize them by polishing things up"

The devil is in the polishing up, evidently.

Your post is almost scarily indicative of the industry attitude that has allowed Apple to take over to the degree they have. Only hard, technical inventions are given any respect, and when we talk about UX we call it "polishing up", almost spitting those words out of our mouths in condescension.

Are you seriously going to hold up a clickwheel and say it wasn't innovative? Or the iPhone? Or the iPad? The fact that these products look and behave almost nothing like their progenitor technologies doesn't indicate innovation to you?

It really disturbs me how little respect us geeks have for the people who consume our products. When the general public votes with their wallet in a landslide victory for Apple, we blame them for being easily manipulable by slick ad campaigns and shiny baubles. The notion that Apple has actually satisfied a long-standing demand is somehow not allowed to enter this discourse.

[_delirium]

I do think what Apple does is important, but I don't think profits are really distributed in proportion to contribution, because the final product is an accumulation of work done by different people and companies, but there's no real accounting mechanism to distribute the profits accordingly (patents are a largely failed attempt at one).

The best place to be in business for profitability is to do that last 10-20% that produces a finished product, and Apple is great at that. The worst place is to do the first 50%, basic science which may enable great stuff in 20 or 40 years, but won't do much for your profits today. Hence why much of Silicon Valley is based around mining uncommercialized academic and research-lab work for raw material that can be turned, with additional work, into successful products. I don't think that means the raw material wasn't necessary or important (sometimes even key) to those products, though, so just looking at profits doesn't tell you the story.

[001sky]

The last 20% of the work takes 80% of the Effort

--The 80/20 rule [Old saying]

Monetization does seem to be maximized at a bottleneck or stumbling block. Like bridge tolls. Or that final thing that makes the whole worth more than the sum of its parts. Apple does seem to do both.

[_delirium]

I would say that closeness in time to commercialization is more important than bottlenecks per se: doing research that will enable great products in 20 years is rarely lucrative, because it's difficult to capture any of that future value (especially if it's further out than the length of patents, and often even if it's within that length).

So it's smarter (if you want to make a profit) to let someone else do that, e.g. someone who's paid as a researcher and isn't trying to turn a profit, and instead look for things that are 1-3 years out. You even see it within academia; applied math pays a lot more than pure math, for example, even though both are quite important to mathematical progress.

[cliang]

> "Are you seriously going to hold up a clickwheel and say it wasn't innovative?"

No one's saying that. All that is said is it's not entirely Apple's doing. In this case it was Synaptics.

[upinsmoke]

They helped with the touch wheel, not the mechanical wheel from 1st gen iPod.

[gergles]

And that wheel isn't the "click wheel" which is the touchpad-surface for scrolling and the physical buttons for clicking. The first gen iPod had a mehanical scroll wheel and separate mechanical buttons.

[recoiledsnake]

I wholeheartedly agree that Apple's innovative in getting technology to actually work in a user friendly way and combining them with excellent design but is that process patent worthy is the real question at hand.

For example, how different is the homescreen of the iPhone from this? http://images.yourdictionary.com/images/computer/_PROGMAN.GI... Compared to that, Windows Phone with Metro is much more innovative.

Another problem is that many people attribute things to being invented by Apple because they first hear of it from Apple(and because they don't use non Apple products). For example, I remember when Apple introduced hybrid graphics with a way to switch between the integrated Intel gpu and a discrete Nvidia/ATI GPU. Sony had that working before Apple, but a LOT of folks thought it was Apple that innovated it. Perhaps Apple added more polish to it, but they certainly were wrong.

Polishing and going the last mile is very tough(see OEMs with half baked software and hardware) but does it deserve patent protection? Apple innovated and got awarded with becoming the most valuable company in the world with more than 100 billion dollars in the bank with which they can invest further in innovation instead of indulging in petty patent extortion over petty things like the bounceback effect or linking phone numbers in emails to the dialer.

[czr80]

Design is not how it looks, design is how it works. When you truly internalise that you'll see why that screenshot is irrelevant.

[recoiledsnake]

Design is both how it looks and how it works. If you take the Desktop WIMP UI, and try to come up with a way to redesign it work with only touch instead of mouse and keyboard, you'd roughly be already halfway to the iOS homescreen in terms of design. Instead of clicking on a icon, you touch it and the app opens, swipe to see multiple homescreens since desktop space is limited on a phone, add in a dock at the bottom. Contrast that with Metro. So that screenshot is NOT irrelevant.

[walterkim]

> No, the reason why Apple has eaten's everyone's lunch up till now is because they're interested in being profitable, not innovative. The GP is correct in stating that Apple isn't innovative

This is decidedly backwards. From the start, Apple's focus was creating great products (by their definition of great product), and only later did they learn how to maximize their profit from them. There's a pretty good and influential taxonomy of "value disciplines": product leadership, operational excellence, and customer intimacy. Historically, Apple was good at the first and not so great at the other two. Since Jobs' return, they've really ramped up on all three.

A classic way in which companies undermine themselves is by pursuing profit through cost-cutting rather than improving product/service quality. I don't have any hard data on this, but I suspect that's what happens to intiially innovative tech companies that have non-engineer/designer business types that take over.

[gnaffle]

So other companies are more interested in being innovative than profitable and have decided to not spend as much as Apple on marketing (and polish), and that's the reason why Apple is succeeding?

[lttlrck]

quite...

[mej10]

You make being as profitable as Apple sound so easy.

[mbesto]

> they're interested in being profitable, not innovative

I'm confused. Any rational business is concerned with making money. Profit growth is a symptom of innovation.

> No, the reason why Apple has eaten's everyone's lunch up till now is because they're interested in being profitable

And Microsoft and IBM were not interested in being profitable?!?!

[marbletiles]

Crumbs, if only Dell and Microsoft had been interested in being profitable, just think!

[webwright]

Ugh, by this logic the first person to use drop-down menus should be the only person to use it (without licensing) for 20 years. Or a hover-event on a link. Or a hyperlink. Or real-time form validation. Or neverending scrolling instead of pagination. Or facebook style side menus on mobile devices.

Certainly there is UI innovation, and certainly it can move mountains-- I think arguing that fact is a straw man-- no one is saying that you can't be innovative with UI. We're just saying that most/all of it isn't worthy of patent protection.

[potatolicious]

I think much of our community actually does argue that you can't be innovative with UI (see wintermute's post above).

In any case, the notion that UX is important and innovative in no way justifies the gross abuse of IP law we've seen up till now from everyone involved.

Which leads to...

> "We're just saying that most/all of it isn't worthy of patent protection."

There's a false separation here. IMO almost nothing we do in the software industry is worthy of patent protection, UI-related or otherwise. To point at UI patents and scream foul, while giving a free pass to "real" patents (ones with academic papers behind them) seems misguided.

[erikpukinskis]

> UI and UX are innovations

As a UX designer, the idea that UX can be patented terrifies me.

It's like patenting a specific color of paint. shudders

[fpgeek]

Don't companies trademark specific colors all the time (or at least try to prevent those colors from being used in anyone else's corporate logo)?

[chipotle_coyote]

No, or at least I believe it's more complicated than that. A logo's trademark may encompass the colors used, but that's not a legal maneuver which prevents those colors from being used anywhere else. The point of the trademark is to be able to stop competitors from making "confusingly similar" trademarks for their products or companies. I can make a cola, and I'm certainly not enjoined from using red and white in the colors on my can. If, however, I make a red can and put "Boba Cola" on it in white letters with roughly the same typography as Coca-Cola uses, I'm cruisin' for a bruisin', legally speaking.

[stephencanon]

It's clear that you didn't actually read the linked article, since it argues precisely the opposite.

[klawed]

in·no·va·tive/ˈinəˌvātiv/ Adjective: (of a product, idea, etc.) Featuring new methods; advanced and original. (of a person) Introducing new ideas; original and creative in thinking: "an innovative thinker".

This definition does not tie innovation to invention. I think it would be hard to argue that Apple's work is not original relative to their competitors. Apple out-innovates their competitors in marketing, in supply chain management, in product lifecycle management and in design. It's impossible to invent every (or even most) components of a general purpose computer. But to select the right pieces, assemble them in a way that maximizes user experience and market them in a way that makes them stand apart from competitors' products made with almost the same components - that's innovation, just the same way that Netflix' model for mailing DVDs (they didn't invent the mailbox, the postal service or the DVD) was extremely innovative.

[001sky]

Perhaps another example of original innovation: the swiss army knife. Look at a victorinox. Look at a knife, a corscrew, a scissor, a toothpick, and a tweezer sitting on the desk. Sometimes an act of integration is enough to be transformative.

iOS is a great example of radical originality, even if not a breakthrough technically. The Concept of the ap - a litewight, bandwidth efficient, modular, reconfigurable element integrated into the OS - was certainly original. It was also thus, highly innovative. It was reductive smaller, lighter, less complex.

Edit: clarity

[eckyptang]

No iOS has been done before, as has the iPad. It's nowhere near original.

http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Computers/NC.html#NewsPAD

Note the features here: ARM CPU, Touch screen, Contextual media app, "Apps" button down the bottom, self contained apps which were modular, integrated into the OS. I know the OS well (RISC OS) and I've had my hands on an actual device.

It was smaller and lighter and less complex than anything else technologically possible at the time.

The basis was an EU funded project to build something like an iPad. Notes here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_computer#NewsPad

Arthur C Clarke innovated this particular nugget of technology.

Apple has invented or innovated precisely bugger all there.

Their only innovation is how to make it look pretty and extract money from people.

[gnaffle]

So I guess with your insight Apple could have saved lots of money by not buying FingerWorks, PA Semi etc and just launching a Newton with a color display and make it look pretty. Right?

If you don't see any software innovations in iOS, you're either blinded by Apple hate or unable to see further than checkboxes on feature lists.

[eckyptang]

I don't see how you managed to draw that conclusion. I didn't mention anything about money etc. I see it more like...well:

Sony have been doing this sort of shit for years. Someone invents something, Sony adds turd polish and a decent supply chain and manufacturing capacity, then takes the market share.

Apple just got better at it than Sony. There is no more story.

For ref, I neither hate nor like iOS devices - I've owned a couple and they've been pretty ok but nothing special. I can't see a single feature or innovation that didn't exist already somewhere else. The same applies for my current Windows Phone (the only innovation there is abysmal battery life - no wait my Treo 180G pioneered that in 2002).

Also, if a feature isn't a checkbox on a feature list, why do they market it like that? http://www.apple.com/iphone/ios/

[001sky]

Not to argue with your counter example, but another example re; integration. The Richochet from the 1990s was a 28.8 version of a 3/4G usb modem.

But that's not a tethered iPhone, in terms of is overall ambition and functionality. Similarly, the acorn with 8MB RAM, was not an integrated multi-media device (ipod, phone, etc), limited as it was. Let us not forget the power of the sw (youtube app, for example).[1]

Lastly, the innovation (in part on the business side) of the Ap store and ecosystem should not be completely overlooked. There is seamless delivery/monetization etc (not just collections, but outbound to devlepers).

In short, there is alot of originality in how the puzle is put together. Some of it is like the swiss army example. Some of it is in the conceptualiztion of the user experience. Some of it, quite frankly is execution of the physical product (manufacturing details, etc), as I have argued before. (e.g http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4435490)

I look at an acorn and a blackberry+phone on the desk. And I look at the iPhone. The latter looks like the victorinox, the other items like tools on the table.

EDIT: [1] The internet-integration of the acorn aps, i'm not familiar with; e.g. is not full-time connected online unless it had a built-in richochet or whatever. clearly iOS is meant to fully integrate with live information without compromising its mobility.

[gnaffle]

You said: "Apple has invented or innovated precisely bugger all there.". I was simply trying to see how unreasonable such a statement is considering the companies that Apple bought and the work those companies had done in getting stuff like multi-touch to work right.

If all Apple did was turd polishing, then they could have saved themselves a lot of effort by polishing a turd called Newton (which was also quite advanced for its time) instead of inventing an entirely new user interface.

What I was saying is that listing stuff like you did: "ARM CPU, Touch screen, Contextual media app, "Apps" button down the bottom, self contained apps" and using that as an argument to why iOS has been done before, is to be unable to see further than a check list of features.

Lots of tablets had the same checklist before the iPad, and most of them were completely unusable.

I suspect that you would be just as happy with a WM6 or Symbian device than with an iOS device, since there were no innovations in iOS?

I also don't see how this relates to Sony. They had a lot of innovations, including the Walkman, co-creating the CD, 3.5" diskettes, Video 8, DAT, MiniDisc and lots of other stuff.

[lttlrck]

"ok but nothing special"? You clearly didn't own a 1st gen iPhone... It's oh so easy to say that now with the current market.

[babesh]

You didn't read the article did you? It starts from your argument that a list of ingredients constitutes an invention and tears it down step by step.

[klawed]

The point that keeps being made. Here is that innovation != invention. Inventions tend to be innovative but innovation does not require the creation of new inventions. Otherwise one might argue that there does not exist an innovative chef who does not invent new ingredients.

[gnaffle]

I think it's better to compare Apple to a high-end restaurant. You don't get three Michelin stars just by making the customer feel special and having lots of fit and finish, the food also has to be something special.

Yet still, of course there are lots of people that will claim that those restaurants can't possibly be worth the price, and _has_ to be mostly about making the customers feel special, after all they use the same basic ingredients as the restaurant around the corner.

[jlgreco]

"the food also has to be something special"

"those restaurants can't possibly be worth the price"

First off, there is more to a dinning experience than the quality of the food, so even if the food is the same a price increase can be justified. You could serve me a McDonald's hamburger for 20USD and leave me satisfied with the transaction provided the burger was not all that I was getting... That burger would not be worth 20USD, but that would not necessarily say anything about the worth of the establishment itself.

Regardless, the question is not if the expensive food at high quality restaurants is particularly good, but rather "What is the relationship between quality and price?"

In the case of high class establishments, the food is certainly good and the price is certainly high. Is that a linear relationship though? The 50USD burger is undoubtedly better than many 5USD burgers, but is it 10x better?

Furthermore, does higher quality food always cause the same sort of price inflation? Or is it possible that similarly superb food sold at undoubtedly higher prices at a restaurant without the other things that high class establishments offer would likely be cheaper?

I would even dare state that, to some extent, high price can actually be one of the desirable services that a restaurant can offer. If you happen to be more concerned with appearances than (in the grand scheme of things) a small amount of money, then being expensive for expense's sake can be a feature.

[gnaffle]

Of course, all of what you say is true.

But I think it's difficult to quantify quality differences like that. For instance, when watching the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi, I had a hard time thinking that a sushi meal could be worth more than $400 (starting price). It would certainly be wasted money on me, since I'm not a big sushi fan. But to the reviewers, apparently it was worth a dedicated trip to just eat there, so they would probably say yes if asked if it was 10x better than a $40 sushi meal.

[mtgx]

I think you're referring more to invention than innovation. I think innovation is more about bringing something new and good to the market. The last part "to the market" is the most important part in the whole "innovation" process.

There are a lot of inventions, especially in those R&D labs you mention, but they rarely come to market, or are good enough for the regular consumer to use.

[arrrg]

In the first two paragraphs you seem to say that they innovate while you deny that in the last paragraph.

Perfecting fit and finish is quite obviously innovation.

[kybernetikos]

The way I use the word, I usually intend it to mean covering a completely new idea. For me, execution, no matter how superior can never be innovative. It can of course be important, world changing, profitable, etc.

If I say that the ipad is not innovative, I mean precisely that there was no element of it that was an implementation of a completely new idea, but I don't mean to suggest that what Apple did with it is not amazing and transformative.

So yes, for me, innovative is usually a very high bar.

Jobs saw the mouse at Xerox and knew it was an idea whose time had come. The first mouse was innovative. The first optical mouse was innovative. The first mouse that reduced the number of buttons to one or reduced the cost to $30 was pragmatic and clever but not innovative.

[lttlrck]

what about the magic mouse? If you think making mice optical was innovative it'll be hard to say that wasn't....

[zizee]

Perfecting fit and finish is quite obviously innovation.

But is it patentable?

[arrrg]

That’s a simple question for me. I think all patents should be abolished.

[podperson]

It's a heck of a lot more than "fit and finish". This is just another way of dismissing what Apple does as frippery.

A Mont Blanc pen is prettier than a bic biro, but it doesn't really write any better. A fabulous meal is probably not as good for you as plate of boiled vegetables.

[smartkids]

Yes, but perhaps _making things easy to use_ and _sexy hardware design_ might have something to do with their success?

The problem with the research labs at those example companies you cited is that those businesses have little incentive to introduce innovation that would compete with "yesterday's ideas" that are driving their profits.

This is why Bell Labs was so unique. They could basically do whatever they wanted (you might try to make the same claim with your example companies, perhaps) _but_ ... they also managed to release these ideas into the market. And not always to the satisfaction of AT&T. People once had to pay for UNIX. Not anymore.

Xerox PARC is another well-known case where people were "set free" to work on whatever they wanted. But their ideas did not manage to trickle out to the market very well. Instead, Microsoft got one of their key people, Excel was born and the rest is history.

Apple is _not_ an idea factory. If someone called them two-timing thieves and told us to watch our backs, I would be inclined to take it seriously. (The fact that Apple is not the idea factory is why the lawsuits are so offensive to anyone who knows anything about the history of computers. If these sort of broad patents should go to anyone, it should be people like the ones who worked at Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. But maybe patents were not their priority. Maybe they were more interested in research, or playing computer games, than money. [How many UNIX patents? 1?] Go figure.)

But, Apple is a design house. An within IT, they do not have lots of competition in that area: e.g. design of hardware casings. In addition they go to great lengths to make the great ideas (namely the flexibility and stability of UNIX-like systems) easy to use. Another area that is lacking in IT: making the good stuff (like UNIX) easy to use.

Unfortunately Apple feels the need to abuse the patent system to stay on top. It makes me think if they didn't they might be in for a big fall. Maybe they are surprised at their own success? And nervous about losing the top spot?

Incidentally you could argue IBM started all this software patent nonsense. Not sure many programmers would agree with you, but the number of filings and issued patents by IBM, most of them before Microsoft even had a patent department, tells the story quite clearly.

You are not going to see much innovation released from "research labs" at the likes of Microsoft or those other companies. They will not keep their patent department in the dark. Those guys want to keep their jobs, not take risks. "Microsoft Research" or "Google Labs" are not Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. It's a wonder that something like Kinect was even made into a product. And you could see how nervous they were about it.

Today, the "labs" and the idea factory is the world wild web.

That's where the risks are taken.

[tedunangst]

The funny part, considering how everyone complains about not really getting to "own" their device, is bringing up AT&T as a good guy. The company who literally would not let anyone own a telephone.

[smartkids]

They owned the network. And they wanted to control devices that could be used on it. (There may have once been legitimate reasons for this.)

Apple wants to control your devices. How you use them after your purchase. The network you use to obtain content. And even the content you download: you don't own it, they license it to you. There have never been any legtimate reasons for all this and there never will be.

[Evbn]

RMS picketed Rob Pike over Bell's patent aggression.