[Opinion] Apple CEO Tim Cook's Legacy Is Dull Products And Spineless Capitulation

cross-posted from: lemmus.org/post/25140646

karlbode.com/apple-ceo-tim-cooks-legacy-is-dull-products-and-spineless-capitulation/

His tenure is that of a businessman, not an innovator or visionary. Good or bad, Jobs was all three.

Vissonary maybe but innovator?

IPhones & MacBooks were well built & marketed but neither was really innovative.

And the apple mac, the iMac, iPod, and the iPad, and cofounding apple. Even the concept of iLife and the market targetting strategy. Yes, innovator.

The Apple Macintosh wasn’t innovative. Here’s how you “innovate” an Apple Mac: Take an existing product of your company, the Apple IIGS. Make that worse by reducing the processor clock speed so your new product will be superior in some way, because your new product is going to lack backwards compatibility, internal expansion card slots, color graphics or multi-channel audio.

The iMac wasn’t innovative. It was an evolution of their existing product line in trendy packaging.

The iPod wasn’t innovative. Even the UI was taken from Creative. Rio beat them to the market by several years.

The iPad wasn’t innovative. I was handed a Dell tablet PC a full decade before the iPad hit the market.

Apple was innovative twice in its very long history: The Apple II was the first microcomputer that combined color graphics with internal expandability, and the iPhone had a capacitive touch screen. The most innovative thing Steve Jobs ever said in his life was “You can just use your finger.”

The [Creative] Zen patent (6,928,433) covers the aspect of the user interface where a user can select at least one track in an MP3 player using at least three screens to browse for that track in a hierarchical method. As the Creative press release states: “One example would be the sequence of screens that could display artists, then albums, and then tracks. When the user selects an artist, the player displays a list of albums for that artist. Selection of one of the listed albums then displays a list of tracks on the album.”

I don’t think Apple stole UI from Creative.

No, I’m pretty sure they licensed it, and so did Dell. Go look at Dell’s MP3 players, damn near identical interface.