[lukeholder]

Don't underestimate that Apple has a good grasp of the cutting edge technologies even if they are not building those things themselves and putting out beta after beta. What Apple have a knack for is waiting until the technology is at a stage where there is a real and legitimate consumer use for the technology and refine it down to where its practically usable.

Futurist tech list google glass and self driving cars is exciting - but not within the grasps of real use by everyday people.

[kamaal]

Sorry but if that were true Apple would have already replaced the Google search engine.

Technology isn't what you can just search on the internet and copy paste. It takes years to continually build and tune technology that powers things like Google.

The thing about Google is the mere scale of research in AI and other areas going into building things like self driving cars isn't something your average programming team can code up in 6 months when given the requirements. There are a lot of hard problems, that take time.

Things like iPhone, iPod etc. No matter how radically different in UI aren't in the same scale of technology comparison as a search engines or a self driving cars are. The latter takes time, a lot of effort, and precious brain cycles applied to core science topics over a lot of time to achieve.

The difference is like inventing a drug to cure cancer, and comparing it with software to distribute it. No matter how difficult the latter is, there is no way you can compare it with former.