Disclaimer: I'm a PC user, and I don't have a serious problem with Macs other than that they don't offer a machine I want to buy (namely, an affordable upgradeable midtower).
Friend linked me here. Said it would send me into incoherent rage. I doubt it.
Without Apple Computers, I could only imagine where the world would be. Nowadays, everyone has some kind of smart phone and they're all running some kind of app to make things easier. There are probably more portable computers in use by the average person nowadays as well, and we know Apple created the laptop as we know it today in the 90's.
I'm not really disagreeing with anything you've said thus far, I'm just confused on what particularly innovative things Apple did with the laptop. Always happy to learn and admit areas I am less knowledgeable abuot.
I now feel like the iPod has been around forever, but it's hardly ten years old.
It's pretty wild, I remember seeing the first generation iPod and liking the idea, but absolutely hating the device itself (specifically the mech. wheel).
When my brother got an iPod Touch 3G with the synaptic wheel and the 4 buttons above it...I was pretty impressed. Less so with syncing with MusicMatch (the very Mac faithful will not understand how painful that was... iTunes for Windows was infinitely better, although I prefer using foo_dop with Foobar2000 for iPod syncing now myself).
And the iPhone isn't even four years old yet, and it didn't even have any third party apps when it first came out. What iPhone user could now imagine life without one? I remember when I first got my iPod touch I remember thinking how blazing fast it was on the Internet and how much joy it brought me. And now I can't imagine life without it. I'm feeling the same feelings with the iPad that I had with the Touch.
Apple's done a good job with the iPod/iPhone OS overall user experience. WebKit scales really well on the device. The "closed garden" works well from the pocketable device size- bad crap doesn't screw things up, there's some quality control, etc...
I had an hour hands on with an iPad and I was less impressed. The gestures are nice, and I was happy that Apple could keep the battery life up -true enough, the battery gauge barely dropped.
In other aspects, I was less impressed. Perhaps I'll get some flak for saying this (I'm on MacRumors, I'll get flayed) but I don't get the appeal myself... it's not pocketable, but it's very locked down in what it will run. It'll fit in a bag like a laptop, but it won't run nearly as much software.
Perhaps as a nerd I miss the point. But I love my touch. And I feel that - yes, I'm going to say it- the iPad is a bigger iPod Touch. There's not really anything "magical" about the device to me. Sorry.
It seems anything that Apple does just keeps pushing the envelope with modern computing and how we all live our lives. I could only imagine what the whole world would be like if Apple Inc. ran everything.
Any time one company leads the market, it leads to stagnation and decay. Apple is not a charity- it is a business. A business that is efficient at satisfying their users, but at the end of the day, the main priority is stockholders.
And if Apple had a monopoly, they wouldn't have to work for their marketshare.
This isn't a hit against Apple- monopolies suck in general.
Just think about what your life would be without Apple. It's actually a pretty hard thing for me to do.
It's a little easier for me, since I don't use a Mac (it wouldn't be the end of the world, namely
)
Well, first of all OSes would not have or would have a much more basic GUI. Especially Windows, Aero has been obviously made as of to copy Aqua, if Aqua never existed in the first place Windows 7 would probably look like this
(image of childish laptop)
that is IF they would've ever been able to abandon the Classic theme.
I heartily disagree. Making everything look better was the direction of the market- everything was getting shiny, everything was supporting transparency. It had started seriously with XP and moved on even more heavily in Vista (due to the release being delayed several times)
The Mp3 player market would be pretty stale, with nothing innovative.
So if Apple didn't exist, nobody else would try to gain a competitive advantage?
A large part of the reason Apple's kept the iPod market to such a degree is because they moved in the field early, thought of an intuitive control scheme, and kept thinking of newer usability features- many of which they patented, so other companies can't use their ideas (which is interesting when you hear a younger Steve Jobs talk about how
good artists invent, but great artists steal, and the reason why the Mac was so great was because they stole all the best ideas... Jobs certainly changed position, eh
).
I've seen some neat players come out of Cowon and Archos. And for a small player- I'm sorry, Macrumors- the Sansa Clip+ beats the Shuffle so hard it's not funny. In fact, I'm starting to prefer it over my 2nd gen Nano...
The Smartphone market? Probably just keeping on with Windows Mobile and Symbian, with few, expensive ones with unresponsive touch screens and a very limited number of applications.
I disagree. BBM was still growing as the iPod OS came out, and Google wanted to get on the mobile platform (knowing that, if they made the OS, most manufacturers wouldn't change the default mobile search from Google, and they could ensure an open platform that allowed the use of their services. Now with iAds, it's becoming interesting for Google... Apple could make a huge impact with a mobile search engine)
Finally: Adobe wouldn't even exist
If the Mac didn't exist, I think it's more than likely they would have developed for another platform
floppies would've died much later
They may have died quick in the Mac world, but in the PC world, they died many years after it became absent from the Mac lineup. USB memory becoming affordable killed the floppy.
the internet would be slower
I am struggling to see Apple's involvement with broadband penetration and speeds.
USB 2.0 would've arrived just now in 2010
USB 3.0 was inevitable.
Yeah, which is a shame. Firewire was the BetaMax (although USB was so bad for important applications- like video capture- that it never died completely, but it lost on the majority of devices) - technically superior, but more expensive. Namely, the royalties
PC laptops wouldn't have a good design to clone so they'd be stuck in their ugly, thick plastic shells
Disagree, it's been momentum for a long time. I like the designs of ThinkPads (which some might argue are big, blocky plastic shells- magnesium alloy rollcage, no flex, pretty thin. I'll take it!) and Asus' machines (more modern). I don't like Mac imitators (I have nothing against the look of Macs, other than the charge for a non-glossy screen)- they tend to sacrifice quality for the appearance.
(at least nowadays some manufactures are actually "inspired" by (or better, to copy) the Macs' design
See above. I don't really think that most manufacturers are copying the Mac look.
the tablet market would be stagnant
An interesting point. This is a pretty wide field, so the debate is always present, but I'll say this: Microsoft implemented tablets when a lot of people were excited by the concept, but not the price. I remember trying a tablet in a Gateway store. I got to try one running Windows 7- Microsoft has made a huge amount of progress, it works pretty damn well now.
And then the bigger problems come up. Namely, friction between the tablet and the Office/IE divisions, who have always been not only not willing to work with the tablet, but actively refusing changes that would help them integrate tablet work (especially into Office). A lot of former employees have written about this.
A bigger problem in MS is that it's too damn big to make changes quickly as the politics within the company drag everything down, making it slow and dropping a lot of good ideas by the wayside. (If you want a good read on this, the CEO of Starbucks wrote an autobiography. He discusses this very problem in a lot of depth.)
mice might've not existed
If I remember correctly, Xerox had this with the Alto before the whole "stealing of the GUI and stealing of the stealing", etc...
(As a side note, I'd like to note that this is one of times that John C. Dvorak was utterly wrong. "No one wants to use these things (mice)!", "Cable internet is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, it'll never work", etc.)
