[PhasmaFelis]

> This is not about Android or iPhone. Or Google or whoever. I'll happily acknowledge that Apple sells well thought out products.

You specifically said that I was wrong to call them influential. I think Android demonstrates that they are. That makes it relevant.

> I stand by what I said earlier. There's too much of a cult of personality associated with Apple. Why do we shrink our worldview to gossipy discussions of a corporation. Tell me something interesting, something edifying that came up in this discussion?

Past predictions about the future of the industry have always had currency on Hacker News, from pre-electronic sci-fi like Wells' World Brain to Engelbart's 1968 "mother of all demos" to mid-'90s attempt to get a handle on the internet, and so on and so forth. Apple wasn't terribly relevant in the mid-'90s, but they _had been_ relevant (the Apple II, bringing Xerox's GUI ideas to the home desktop), and as it turned out they would be relevant again. This particular article is not exactly a giant of the genre, but it's a window into the conditions of the time and what people cared about and anticipated.

[terminus]

You are right about Android and Xerox's GUI. (There were others who were thinking in a similar direction (Openmoko for one), and I would argue that both of these things would have happened anyway. But Apple definitely moved the state of the world forward.)

However, my larger point is that Apple produces things of only one color -- things that you can exchange over the counter against money. Black box objects that are essentially consumer electronics -- things that die in 2, 4, 7, whatever years.

Contrast that with most other tech companies. Even if I don't care a whit about what they sell (witness IBM, Microsoft, Facebook -- I don't use any of their products directly) -- I (and the world) profit from their research and that gives them greater longevity than Apple.

So to correct what I said -- admired but not long term influential.