[nikcub]

> far before anyone was thinking about multi-touch interfaces

CERN built capacitive multi-touch displays in the 70s. Mitsubishi, Bell, Microsoft, IBM and a bunch of other companies were involved in the R&D from there.

What Apple are good at is integrating and commercializing at the exact point where the economies of scale are viable, adding a layer of accessibility for users (eg. inventing the gestures, but not the touch technology itself).

The anecdote about how Apple tried to launch the iPad before the iPhone is proof that they didn't catch-on to how the core touch tech scaled (every inch of touch surface would increase production cost non-linearly) until much later.