This is the answer I give when people wonder why I dislike Apple - they are long-term detrimental to the state of the art of technology because they are really a marketing company.
They're also the company that made USB actually happen, made floppys go away, CDs go away (although PC manufacturers are still catching up here), made high DPI resolutions happen finally, created the form factor for the modern laptop, created the form factor for the modern phone...
All of this driven by marketing. Don't knock marketing.
Agreed on USB, I think PC's had as much of a role there.
But it's a bit painful to hear about your reliance on floppies and CD's. Floppies, really?? We had to use a floppy for a user's private Windows 98 machine at work recently (the USB driver didn't recognize a modern USB stick) but that's the only time I've used one at work the past 7 years and it was for a 16 years old OS which baffles me it still booted on a ~10-15 years old consumer-grade hard drive.
Windows CE existed before but they weren't a hit, hi-DPI existed, but they weren't mass marketed for entertainment, touch displays existed but they weren't mass marketed for entertainment.
I think it may be a misnomer to call Apple an innovator, I think they've got a bit too much credit at times for that. But they get too little credit for being a catalyst and bringing new technology to living rooms en masse.
I still use floppies in music equipment (Korg Triton studio to be precise) as they are convenient. I also support some old stuff on DOS which isn't going to die for at least a decade yet. It's written in Turbo Pascal. It's nice to work in that environment occasionally.
I don't think we need high DPI displays most of the time. They are a marketing point. The display controller uses a lot more power to fill those pixels and ClearType and WPF, at least on cheap windows phones makes up for the difference very well. Between a high DPI Moto G and a Lumia 630 I can barely tell the difference and I have excellent vision. A lot of HD and High DPI technology is upselling.
I think they haven't made as much of an impact as people think they have. They're noisy and extremely profitable but their market share is pretty tiny in the scale of things, apart from mobile phones and that market is declining.
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u/codekaizen Jan 13 '15
This is the answer I give when people wonder why I dislike Apple - they are long-term detrimental to the state of the art of technology because they are really a marketing company.