Rain

drewfx1
 
What died with Jobs is more the myth than anything else. 
 

As a user of Apple products myself, that is not my experience. And there seems to be a consensus among other Apple users around me, most of who can be pretty critical - and who were even before Jobs died.  

Maybe not the typical fanboys/legion of idiots most often portrayed as the monolithic Apple users base by people with a grudge against the company to conveniently support their argument, but not to be dismissed as an insignificant exception. Unless one's just trying to make a point.
 
Of course, as a non-user, one's perception may be entirely different...

 
Well sure it's easy to get a "consensus" when you just dismiss dissenting arguments out of hand. 

Apple didn't get where they are by making nothing but bad decisions, and the cynic in me does wonder if having lots of stuff about all going on about the iPhone 7 months before it will see the light of day might even be a marketing ploy.

Apple has succeeded despite its bad decisions. There have been many. It's been awhile since an Apple product has burst into flames, but the company's history is loaded with questionable moves and embarrassing fails. The one thing they've been consistently good at is marketing.
 
I was once an Apple user, one of the early adopters that initially put the company on the map. I didn't leave them, they left me.

All companies make mistakes and bad decisions. If the company is big enough and the mistakes small enough it will survive, otherwise it won't.

The classic examples of computer manufacturer terrible decisions are how Commodore mismanaged the development of the Amiga. A problem made worse by the person they eventually sold the rights to. As someone said at the time if the same marketing strategy had been used by KFC there would have been posters imploring us to "Come eat our greasy, warm chunks of dead birds, served with extra grease."

So a line of computers that had a superb graphical/command line OS, smooth multi-tasking and a good chunk of the rapidly growing 3D rendering market was allowed to wither and die at a point when Gates was claiming multi-tasking wasn't necessary because the computer operator could only do one thing at a time, NetBEUI was the only networking protocol to be allowed and what do you mean, you can't write your own config.sys and autoexec.bat files?

Apple, I think, have always had at least three or four different and in many ways conflicing types of customer, with overlaps between them of course. As far as desktop and laptop computers are concerned at any rate. And some of them are like a religious cult - queueing for days to get an early example of what everyone who wants one will be using in a few weeks time, or even mourning the dead gods of the 68000 power PC chip and Apple OS of the 1990s.

Keeping the "I don't want a single uncool ugly, ugly wire or extra box on my nice tidy desk or to have to configure anything" crowd and the audio/graphics/video/dtp world happy at the same time is not an easy balancing trick.

As for other devices, the success of the iPad saw MS frantically trying to catch up and altering its desktop OS to make it much more like Windows on a tablet. A move not exactly welcomed with joy by we on the receiving end.

God I miss my Amiga. I loved that OS. I also love that it's been kept alive and developed all these years (Hyperion?) although I seem to remember reading about some legal nastiness associated with it. 

They may not be the first to come up with things but they certainly do it in a way which shifts units. And surely that's all part of it - technology is the marriage of science and capitalism. Science makes the product, capitalism gets it on the shelves. They are mutually dependent on each other. Without the marketing and distribution, there would be no profits to reinvest in new development. 
 
Apple weren't the first to make an MP3 player, but it was their genius marketing (and a fantastic design) which made iPods a household name. None of the other ones at the time had a hope in hell of becoming as popular as Apple's. I remember around 2002 or so my friend showing me his brand new iPod. At the time I still thought my Minidisc player was ****en, but I had started to hear the iPod hype. I had heard of MP3 players before but nothing piqued my interest until I saw and used an iPod. It's not enough to simply make a great product - whether or not it catches on is very heavily dependent on how you market it. iPods put Apple on the map. Even if you'd never used an Apple computer, you'd heard of iPods. By 2007 Apple was reporting quarterly revenue figures of $7 billion and almost a third of that was from iPod sales. 

Here's a challenge: name one innovative technology that Apple actually invented. Not that they own a patent to, but actually invented in-house and did not exist prior to Apple productizing and marketing it.
 

bitflipper
Here's a challenge: name one innovative technology that Apple actually invented. Not that they own a patent to, but actually invented in-house and did not exist prior to Apple productizing and marketing it.
 

They invented rectangles with rounded corners.
 
What do I win? 

bitflipper
Here's a challenge: name one innovative technology that Apple actually invented. Not that they own a patent to, but actually invented in-house and did not exist prior to Apple productizing and marketing it.
 

 I think we're again assuming that Apple's user base is monolithic
.
 
Here's a bit from MacWorld, showing that some Mac user are actually aware that Apple didn't invent hot water.
 
"For its own part, Apple does not claim to have invented the personal computer or the smartphone or the tablet computer or lunar-based death lasers—oops, I’ve said too much. Rather, the company for years used the same boilerplate text at the bottom of every press release:

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh.

These days at the bottom of an Apple press release you’ll find:

Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store…

That wording is not accidental. It doesn’t say Apple invented these things, it says it reinvented them. There’s a huge difference."
 
http://www.macworld.com/a...ing-not-inventing.html
 
If all that mattered was who invented what, we'd all be using Cubase. 
 
And come to think of it - Apple invented what Cakewalk proudly marketed as Skylight, first seen in Logic 8 (2007). ;)

I doubt whether even Apple marketing can change the 3.5mm plug standard. Almost every single device that puts out audio to headphones, uses either 3.5mm or 6mm plugs. It would mean a retool for every single headphone manufacturer on the planet.
I'm not saying Apple won't change its products, just that it won't become a standard, just another propriety device. Only if they develop a device that the majority of people can't live without will they change something so ingrained. I can't see headphone manufacturers being too worried here.
Of course I have been wrong before. (Once in December 1985)

rebel007
I doubt whether even Apple marketing can change the 3.5mm plug standard. 

Except that almost all manufacturers just agreed on the new USB-C standard, so that could still be where things go. 

Good point.  That would suck for listening to music though...

Can anyone say AppleAudioCable to 3.5 adapter?
 

bapu

drewfx1

bitflipper
$14.95 at your friendly Apple Store. It'll be patented, so there won't be any cheap alternatives at K-Mart.

$14.95 is for the version that's too short to be useful.
 
The version you need costs $30.

Does it come in white?

Can you hear the basslines clearly? I can't...

bitflipper
$14.95 at your friendly Apple Store. It'll be patented, so there won't be any cheap alternatives at K-Mart.

There'll be a cheap Chinese knockoff available on the street though. Just have a fire extinguisher handy at all times.