What would you say was revolutionary? I think of the iphone but as far as I recall, other than multi-touch, most of that had been done before -- apple just did it way better and more seamlessly.
The personal microcomputer
[1] was one. No one manufacturer wins that claim. Transistor miniaturization, probably the progenitor revolution
[0?], can claim that one (codified into a fairly predictable model known as Moore’s law).
The World Wide Web was another
[2]. Technically ARPANET could be here, but it was the former to have made the latter’s breakthroughs legible and accessible to non-computer science engineers. The former is what
propagated the standards and breakthroughs of the latter so rapidly and completely in just five or so years. (Seriously, if you, reading this, were
both born after, say, 1993, this one cannot be overstated).
Post-1983 “1G” analogue mobile phones (i.e., the generation after “mobile-radio phone”s, aka “0G”) were one
[3]. This was a slower revolution, but one with profound implications as it was the first to, quote-unquote, “democratize” or
mass-commodify handheld mobile communications.
Realizing the capacitive/“glass” UI in a portable form factor, as you note with the iPhone, was one
[4], even as “glass” UI has a history with roots in the 1980s and first appearing, in a form familiar to us, as consumer products in 1993 (namely, the IBM Simon and the Apple Newton).
I don’t, however, believe this was a revolution with, ultimately, a positive outcome for humanity, given the way this was woven deliberately, inextricably (and synthetically) and, by-then, already-large manufacturers, with the tendrils of another revolution, “Web 2.0”, to emerge during the dawn of this millennium
[5]. Apple here
do get credit for being one of those manufacturers. (As Laurie Anderson foresaw, pithily, in the closing of 1986’s “Language Is a Virus”, revolutions like Web 2.0/social media need not be positive or beneficial for the general health of a society. They only need to be disruptive to that society
fundamentally. Some revolutions can set back many other elements of a healthy society in a mess of other ways.)
More important than the “glass” UI, however, was reduced instruction set computing, or RISC
[6]. This was a significant leap forward from complex instruction set computing, or CISC. Although one thinks of PowerPC, ARM, and Silicon when they think RISC, this revolution began with the IBM 801 in 1975. Credit here, however, should be shared by the IBM 801 and the
Acorn
RISC
Machine, later to become ARM.
Advanced machine learning/neural networks/AI
[7], happening as we speak, with consequences yet to be fully revealed or known, is probably the latest and last revolution to emerge within my lifetime. Watching that unfold in real time is a whole thing (i.e., “what a time to be alive”).
Those are the seven to come to mind. No, there’s an eighth, which you got very close to recognizing for its sincere origins.
Maybe going to a GUI like the Apple Lisa or Macintosh? Those were the first GUIs that reached consumers but the tech had been done about a decade before by Xerox. But to the public I'd say that was revolutionary.
I’ma say no to anything from Apple.
If credit to the GUI revolution belongs anywhere, PARC get it
[8]. Apple, under Jobs, paying a visit to PARC, cribbed it unabashedly.
Apple are less, historically, of a revolutionary force and more of drawing from innovation elsewhere and, fortuitously, being in the right place at the right moments to, pardon the pun, produce fruits of those cribbings — to capitalize on those fruits — to propel them to where they are now (which, as we know, almost
wasn’t the case on a couple of occasions during the first twenty years of their history). They learnt to crib with flair, as well, but credit to that industrial design belongs to the Dieter Rams and Frog Designs of the world, not with the Ives. Apple lucked out in ways other companies (arriving just before or after, or being in the wrong geography at nearly the right time) didn’t.
(Yes, hard work paid off, but hard work is pretty widespread everywhere one looks, and much of that doesn’t pay off.)
Regardless, I'll have no take on that anytime soon because I haven't used Windows in 20 years and don't plan to start now 🤣
Windows is an evolutionary dead-end OS. It remains propped up by businesses because it’s long been too big to fail. Apple should take heed of this, as the further they move away from BSD/Darwin (née, OpenDarwin), “it just works” (including playing nice with other protocols and other companies’ products), and the larger the market share they enjoy, the more they lock themselves into an evolutionary dead end, especially as they and their signature products, too, become “too big to fail”.
💁♀️
