Apple Innovations

[llbbl]

Let this be a list of all unique things that Apple has devleoped over the years.

I will get us started.

1) Ipod
2) SCSI
3) Firewire
4) Itunes

[theguy]

They never developed firewire, Texas Instruments did.

!. Co-Developed the G5 with IBM
2. Brought dual cpu desktops to the "mainstream"
3. First to the market with a DVD-R (Superdrive)
4. First truly plug and play OS

[llbbl]

FireWire (IEEE designation 1394) is a personal computer and digital video serial bus interface standard offering high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data services, developed primarily by Apple Computer, completing development in 1995. It is defined in IEEE standard 1394 which is currently a composite of three documents: the original IEEE Std 1394-1995, the IEEE Std 1394a-2000 amendment, and the IEEE Std 1394b-2002 amendment. Sony's implementation of the system is known as i.Link, and uses only the four signal pins, discarding the two pins that provide power to the device in favor of a separate power connector on Sony's i.Link products.

The system is commonly used for connection of data storage devices and digital video cameras, but is also popular in industrial systems for machine vision and professional audio systems. It is used instead of the more common USB due to its faster speed, higher power distribution capabilities, and because it does not need a computer host. It also has native support for isochronous data transport (data that must be delivered with deterministic latency, such as audio or video). However, the small royalty that Apple Computer and other patent holders have demanded from users of FireWire ($0.25 per end-user system) and the more expensive hardware needed to implement it ($1-$2) has prevented FireWire from displacing USB in low-end mass-market computer peripherals where cost of product is a major constraint.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewire

[llbbl]

good list theguy

[LisaJ]

Apple = The GREAT idea company inc. They should just sell the idea's they have since everyone always copies them. :dunno

[Ioman]

lol they would be a HUGE company if they offerered their OS for the regular PC market.

[LisaJ]

haha Ionman I don't think they even know there is a regular PC market :) :) do they? its like an underground thing for the past million years or something. :rotfl

Seriously,Apple got some serious marketing people to make the IPOD famous..why don't they do the same for everything else?

[spankers]

lol they would be a HUGE company if they offerered their OS for the regular PC market.I think that time has come and gone, Ioman. If Apple had licensed the OS to run on generic x86 hardware in the late eighties or early nineties then we might all be running MacOS on the desktop. I think this would have killed their hardware business though.

As it stands right now, the actual OS is basically Unix and the only significant thing that is proprietary is the windowing system/desktop environment/GUI stuff.

I think Linux will eventually become the MacOS for non-Mac hardware if enough GUI wrappers are written to mask the deadly Unix command line. :) I don't think Linux will ever be as polished however... there are too many hardware permutations. Apple can make their OS better/faster/prettier because they control the hardware the OS runs on.... they can optimize the software for the hardware it runs on.

[llbbl]

Apple can make their OS better/faster/prettier because they control the hardware the OS runs on.... they can optimize the software for the hardware it runs on.

Just like parents giving their kids allowance. Oh hello little MS Office 10 here is 10 MB of RAM for the week ... hahaha pwnd!

[spankers]

Oh hello little MS Office 10 here is 10 MB of RAM for the week Yeah. I had an original Mac. I expanded it to 512K and later to 2M w/SCSI & hard drive with a daughterboard built by a company called Dove. Steve Jobs has done some amazing things but has, in essense, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by crippling his products. For the longest time it seemed he hated hard disk drives (original Macs and the NeXT workstation).

Apple really didn't innovate anything per se, they just made technologies available to the masses. The physical design work was done (still is?) by Frog Design http://www.frogdesign.com/ and GUI research was done by Xerox PARC http://www.parc.xerox.com/

I'm really surprised that more companies don't spend more time/money on physical design and user interface stuff. Many computer products I see may be technically excellent but look like fecal matter.

[k2]

dual cpus have been a pc thing for years long before apple used it to keep up with single cpu solutions on the x86 front. dual p-pro*, dual p2-3, dual k7-8, dual xeon (p3-p4 cores), etc.

the ipod did nothing revolutionary for the mp3 player market, which creative and rio basically started. marketing made it a great player.

itunes on the mac = great.

my list is:

1. showing the world computers can be sexy to look at.

[ECA]

Did anyone mention SCSI, was an APPLE product?

BEST one they had, for ALONG time, and they wouldnt release it. We could HAVE, had SCSI everything long ago, if they had.
forget 2 channels and 2 devices on each..
we could of had multiples of 16 drives on a computer. WOW...
Had 1 computer that had 16 channels and upto 16 devices on EACH...wonderful..could of had a monster of a computer. Then RAID the whole system.

[ECA]

dual cpus have been a pc thing for years long before apple used it to keep up with single cpu solutions on the x86 front. dual p-pro*, dual p2-3, dual k7-8, dual xeon (p3-p4 cores), etc.

the ipod did nothing revolutionary for the mp3 player market, which creative and rio basically started. marketing made it a great player.

itunes on the mac = great.

my list is:

1. showing the world computers can be sexy to look at.


DUAL??
what are you talking about?? there have been QUAD, and MORE CPU systems sence before the 486...I even saw a system that TOOK 8.. 486 chips... but it wasnt RUNNING windows.
I wont/dont need to go into OTHER systems that were even before the 486..Some were AWESOME.

[neuroking]

dual cpus have been a pc thing for years long before apple used it to keep up with single cpu solutions on the x86 front. dual p-pro*, dual p2-3, dual k7-8, dual xeon (p3-p4 cores), etc.

the ipod did nothing revolutionary for the mp3 player market, which creative and rio basically started. marketing made it a great player.

itunes on the mac = great.

my list is:

1. showing the world computers can be sexy to look at.

I totally agree. Look at the list...

1) Ipod

Just another MP3 player. Nice interface, but not 'new'.

2) SCSI

Sure, though Firewire has replaced it on teh external side, and 3Gbps SATA II has ganked it on the internal side.

3) Firewire

Yup, even though it is a modification of the original standard, they made it what it is today.

4) Itunes

Not even close! Itunes was a proram bough tout by Apple int eh OS9 days. SoundJam MP.

!. Co-Developed the G5 with IBM

That's not innovation. By that standard, Itel has 10^10000 more innovations than Apple.

2. Brought dual cpu desktops to the "mainstream"

That move was totla desparation because of losing the MHz race. Dual processors have been available forver on PCs, you just had to use NT back in the original Pentium days.

3. First to the market with a DVD-R (Superdrive)

By an agreement with Pioneer. They didn't make the drive, nor would anyone believe that no other manufacturer would include this option.

4. First truly plug and play OS

That's like saying 'the best OS'. Believe it or not, there are people that haven't had problems with Windows when it comes to plug and play. Apple did it 'better', but again, not really an innovation.

There are alot of big Apple moves that don't qulaify as 'innovations' but are more significant than the above:
-first with a floppy drive standard
-first with a bult in speaker standard
-first with mic input standard
-first with CDROM standard
-first with Ethernet standard
-first docking laptop
-first build in mouse on a notebook
-first to kill off the floppy

All these things were PC options, but i guess when you only make 4 computers, you can claim titles like 'first' pretty easily.

[ECA]

forgot RAID..SCSI was the first to use it..

[neuroking]

SCSI may have been in the first RAID discs, but RAID technology was developed at Berkeley.

[ECA]

and raiding a Disc array on SCSI is killer...esp SCSI super fast wide

[seans]

WHOA! Lots of internet misinformation here!

1. SCSI is NOT something that came out of apple. The SCSI standard was first dreamed up in the very late 70's by a guy named Alan Shugart, this is the guy that invented the floppy disk and was a co-founder of Seagate. At the time it was called SASI. Throughout the first half of the 80's his company and NCR put together the X3T9.2 group. This group developed the first ANSI standard for SASI and in that process the name was changed to SCSI. In 1986 the interface standard was published for ANYONE to use.

The only thing Apple did was understood that by having a serial channel for the I/O subsystem interface to the computer they could gain performace benifits from this. Back then the vast majority of "business" and "personal" computers simply did not need this type of interface since it was overkill for the supporting and main systems. In other words, Compaq and IBM knew that the full potential of the intface would not be relized in their hardware of the day and picked ATA/IDE since it was more in line with the rest of the capablities of the system. Apple had this great interface to their storage system but none of the hardware around it could ever come close to using 25% of the capablites.

2. Frog Design

Frog has never done anything for Apple. Apple has wonderful, hell demigod status industrial and human interface designers inhouse. I'd say 50% of the value of an Apple product is created by the inhouse design talent.

Now Frog has done good deal of work with Microsoft (and dell, and sun and AMD) but they don't do human interface design. They took the years of R&D and focus group data from Microsoft and they skinned it. Yes that's all they did They created a single graphical sub-brand for Microsoft that is called Windows XP. The how and why things happen the way they do is all Microsoft the lickable "luna" and everything around it is Frog.

As far as I know, Frog has done nothing for Vista.

[ECA]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scsi

but its the raid system that makes SCSI a monster. Even IDE/ATA raid cant match the setups that RAID can do.

http://home.nc.rr.com/woodsmall/SCSI.htm

And then there is SAS...

[seans]

but its the raid system that makes SCSI a monster. Even IDE/ATA raid cant match the setups that RAID can do.

Umm, look at the products offered by 3WARE, their entire line is nothing but making xATA drives work like their SCSI breathren in RAID arrays.

Also EMC has a TON of SATA products all of which are on par with their big brothers that still use SCSI.

OH and since this is an Apple thread, my personal fav Apple product, the xServe RAID. SATA drives right there for ya.

For anything not inside the glass house there really is no reason for SCSI these days -- the glass house is starting to see much more prenitration of SATA with WD's RAID drives, with 3WARE providing interface adapters and backpanes and the whole AX100 series of kit from EMC for the joe sixpack user all the way to medium sized businesses and large enterprises that are looking for cheap ways to do nearline storage SATA is the way to go. The costs are lower and the quality is just as high. Hell the Raptor line and RAID lines use the same motors and actuators as WD's SCSI drives, the platers have always been the same.

The only time I'd even ponder SCSI today in an actual computer case would be for a database server RAID array or tape drives. With the latest adapters from 3WARE I'd really need a political reason to choose SCSI that or have a pile of SCSI drives laying around collecting dust.

SAS? The only reason I see for the exisitance of this standard is for crazy people to re-use older attached storage enclousers and drives with newer controllers and backpanes. It has some applications in the glass house for the enterprise and that's it. iSCSI makes so much more sense for SAN needs in the enterprise.


scsi is dieing

[ECA]

SAS - SERIAL ATTACHED SCSI
SAS controllers allow the use of SATA drives, but SATA controllers do not handle SAS.


This could be a nice advancement tho..
Sence SCSI devices are abit high priced..