snivilisationism said:
It's amazing really. I had an mp3 player way before Apple got into the game, and I've never had an iPod of my own. Apple seem to have innovated nothing, but copied and made globally popular quite many things.
I also had an mp3 player around the time the first iPod appeared on the market; a Rio Carbon. It was considered a best buy by WHF. I thought it was brilliant at the time.
But the reality was that early mp3 was a minor niche in audio. The general public hadn't heard of it, the major AV manufacturers weren't remotely interested and had no products of their own, availability of downloads was very limited and by and large it was going nowhere.
What Apple did was to take the technology and created a whole new ecostructure that provided the hardware (iPod), a very slick and intuative user interface, the content (downloads) and a easy to use portal (iTunes) to access, to listen to and purchase that content. Design and aesthetics were just the the icing on the cake. The result as we know was a roaring success.
By the time the "big boys" had woken up, it was too late; Apple had the market completely wrapped up.
You said ..."Apple seem to have innovated nothing"... but that's entirely incorrect as that example shows. It wasn't the mp3 player that was new, the innovation was the whole package.
The same applies to Smartphones. Smartphones were around, but they were mostly clunky and cumbersome to use, designed primarily for professional business use. They seemed to be an attempt to put a phone inside one of those old PDA's. Touchscreens had also been around for quite a while, but up to that point the technology had again been clunky and a little "primative" by today's standards. Apple weren't even in the Phone business back then.
With the iPhone, Apple introduced the idea of a slick fast OS married to the latest touchscreen technology, with an easy to use and intuative interface. But most importantly, they created an ecostructure, or rather an extension of one (Apps via iTunes) to open up a whole new market sector that appealed to not just business users, but anyone. Again, attractive and stylish aesthetics were the icing on the cake.
The innovation was not so much a "phone", but what we could now do with that phone; the apps and the social networking aspects that it became a platform for. That simply did not exist before.
As we know, the results have been phenomenal, propelling Apple to being one of the major players in the mobile communications market and kick starting a revolution in mobile communications that goes beyond "just mobile phones". The ultimate proof of this innovation is in the huge amount of competition and the number of players who are falling over themselves outdo (and to a degree copy), this idea.
Do I sound like an Apple "fanboy" ? Probably, but it's not intentional (honestly).
Until my daughter received her first iPod as a replacement for her Sony mp3 player, i wouldn't have anything to do with Apple. It had no appeal for me. After my Rio Carbon, I had a very nice Sony mp3 walkman and hoped all the hype over the iPod phenomenon would go away. However I got used to iTunes by helping her rip CD's, buy downloads and managing her library. The same when my son bought himself an iPod too.
I quickly realised that the ipod was actually really very good, but I had no intention of ever looking at Apple computers and was perfectly content with our Windows PC's. Not being particularly advanced in computer literacy, learning something different seemed like a chore I wasn't interested in taking on. Plus I believed some of the anti-Apple stuff that was starting to appear on the internet.
It was a chance visit to someone who'd recently bought one of the new metal bodied iMacs that sparked curiosity. So many of its features and the way it worked just seemed light years ahead of our various PC's. A visit to the Apple store for a demo convinced me that this was the way to go. Since aquiring the Mac, my family began to ignore their PC's and laptops and started to hog my machine. We continue to run two desktop PC's, a windows laptop and a netbook, but they receive little use now. Even the shiny new Windows 7 machine bought at the beginning of this year is considered "rubbish" by my son. A new MacBook Pro has just been aquired by my daughter; my son intends to buy one as soon as he can pay for his car insurance.
Why? As the slogan goes, "it just works".....well it does for us. It may not for others.
What is the point of this ramble? Just to say, don't slag off something because it's not to your taste.
By the way, we've got two Android phones and a brand new Blackberry here, so you can see we are not biased.
snivilisationism said:
Maybe I'm just too much of a geek to understand.
I know you said that in jest, but I suspect it's closer to the truth than you realise????? (said in a friendly manner and not intended to be patronising or an insult).
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