Re: Apple rips off Xerox, sues world+dog
You forgot Swiss Railways.
Also iPad was Fujitsu brand & iPhone a Cisco brand.
The designer at Braun that did all the plain white stuff (Dieter Rams) regarded it as sincere flattery and obviously copying).
There are others two. Apple spends a tiny fraction on R&D. How much R&D budget is on Patents & Clerical & Lawyers rather than actual real Engineers (D) and Scientists (R)?
The original iPhone used bought in FingerWorks and Samsung SoC with ARM core. Capacitive touch wasn't new, other phones used resistive because of GUI design and aimed at business, thus data entry & annotation.
The iPod succeeded because of iTunes. The deal with record labels was the innovation.
The iPhone succeeded because of Carrier deals with data included. Till then the data on Smartphones was per second time (1998-2003 approx) or per megabyte transfer (Edge data and 3G data).
I see lots of industrial design (the case/style and generally based on Braun late 1950s early 1960s minimalism) and struggle to see actual HW & SW innovation. I was designing such stuff from 1986 to 2008, so well versed in the Art. I also collect vintage electronics, earliest stuff I have is from 2008. I saw Xerox GUI in 1970s. It was real bitmapped graphics. Seriously programming since 1979 and started learning after school in 1969.
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Apple are brilliant at marketing. They tend to use mature HW & SW, exceptions being things like early adoption of ports (USB, Firewire, Display Port, USB-C etc) or ignoring/dropping them (analogue jack, standard watch strap) to ensure the faithful buy Apple accessories.
Also walled gardens (hard to use USB data transfer, have to use iTunes).
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Also using solder instead of connectors & glue instead of screws so as to save cost yet they have retail margins twice to x10 of other competing products.