[6ren]

I hesitate to contribute to a troll thread, but Apple is a commercialiser of technology. That involves both marketing and engineering - it's not creating a new vision, but realizing a vision.

For example, with the iPhone 5, they doubled CPU performance in a year - better than Moore's Law. It's not a new vision, but it is an engineering accomplishment.

[rustynails77]

And? The specs for the Nexus 7 out-performed the iPhone 5 - even though it was released earlier. You could argue that this is quad-core and apps need to be coded to use quad cores etc etc. The point is that I don't understand your point. I agree that Apple do more than marketing, but marketing is one of their greatest strengths .. prior to this Samsung trial at least.. What was a BAD PR move.

[6ren]

Yes, it's better than quad-core for that reason. Also smaller, lighter, uses less battery etc. We already have faster PCs; the achievement is doing so within the other constraints.

Yes, marketing is their greatest strength, but "marketing" includes more than advertising, more than design, it's also knowing what will be wanted, and making it happen. Jobs actually cited Sony as a great inspiration - and perhaps we forget now, but they did create the first commercially successful transistor radio and the walkman (also Trinitron TV and the first playstation, and a bunch of other stuff in their heyday). I would say these are close parallels to Sony with the iPod, and arguably the iPhone and iPad.

My point is that Apple doesn't do invention of new technology, but commercialization of technology. A great example is the mouse: PARC invented it, Apple commercialized it. I think it's a cool and impressive thing to commercialize technology, but it's no more than that (unless Apples starts doing fundamental research like PARC, Bell Labs and IBM used to do).

[glenra]

PARC didn't invent the mouse.

Yes, they built a mouse and shipped it as part of an integrated product, but it had been invented by others more than a decade earlier. It had even shipped in a product well before they did it. PARC is actually in pretty much the same position there that you're putting Apple - they took an existing idea and made it a bit more commercial than it had been. Englebart's mouse was unreliable and uncommerical; PARC's mouse was more practical to make, more reliable, but way too expensive; Apple's mouse was finally reliable and cheap.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_%28computing%29#Early_mic...

[6ren]

Thanks - I thought Engelbart was at PARC, incorrectly. Well, I'm happy for there to be stages of commercialization, just as there are stages of invention (and not always a clear demarcation), people improving what went before is the way.

Interesting that Engelbart patented the mouse. http://www.google.com/patents/US3541541?printsec=abstract#v=...

[ryanpetrich]

The Nexus 7 doesn't have better specs all around—the iPhone 5's GPU is considerably more powerful.

[sjwright]

A large device is more powerful than a small device. Film at 11.