$ Apple is Now Debt Free $

[Agathon]

Originally posted by MrBaggins
Half for LEGAL music downloads

I wouldn't be suprised if a lot more people are using MP3's, OGG's and unprotected WMA's.

and unprotected AAC

[Q Classic]

the itunes store hasn't been profitable for apple. like aggie said, it's to push ipods.

i still think ipod minis suck. ipods themselves are nice, but i dunno if i'd want to get one. everybody, their mother, and their uncle's neighbor's sister's cousin's pet's petsitter's lover has one now, (at least on my college campus...) so it's kinda lost its snob appeal for me...

as far as innovation: blah blah blah blah blah, neither side seems willing to give the other its due.

out of curiosity, does anybody know if apple has managed to arrange something with apple records? iirc, apple computer agreed to not go into the music business when apple records complained, but with itunes and all...?

[MrBaggins]

Sure but I'm betting more MP3's than anything else, by a very long distance.

[Imran Siddiqui]

First to bring the Graphical User interface to personal computers.

First to bring the mouse to personal computers.

Both were invented by Xerox, however. They just didn't start shipping them before Apple stole the idea.

The others have been covered by Asher.

[Q Classic]

i don't see how multi-button mice take away from the one-hand-on-keyboard-one-hand-on-mouse thing at all...?

[Hagbart]

Originally posted by Asher
Creative was the first to make portable MP3 players. They were the first to make a HD-based MP3 player. They are the first to make portable media players.

Before iPod was Creative Jukebox, a big bulky devise, larger and heavier than a diskman. Using USB1, tiny display, bad skip protection. Ugly as hell and anti-userfriendly.

The iPod came and changed the mp3-player world. It was severel generations ahead of the competition.
Using the 10 times faster firewire, having a large display, the size of a deck of cards, the great scrollwheel (which can scroll thru 1000 songs in a couple of seconds), supreme sound and syncing with iTunes. The design was a piece of art.

Later the iPod clones appeared. Among those we have the Zen. An example of one of the 100 clones are below.

Today no company has yet managed to push the iPod from its throne of the mp3player world!

The iPod brought mp3 players from the geeks to the common people (who can afford it of course, )

Just accept that the iPod has had a tremendous effect of the world of portable digital music players. Denying this will make you look silly.

[Hagbart]

one of the clones:

[Q Classic]

imacs aren't computers. they're pieces of ****. ugly pieces of ****, at that.

powermac cubes aren't computers either. they're pieces of ****, but at least they look nice.

and the imac was hardly innovative, seeing as ibm had done it before, that and the monitor-and-cpu combo isn't a new idea...

[Hagbart]

Short summary of the history of personal computers:

1. Apple innovates a new product.

2. Microsoft copies it.

Repeat.

[Q Classic]

hagbart, firewire/ieee1394 could be used on the ipod because most macs came equipped with them. until this past cycle, it wasn't even standard on most x86 machines. why? not innovation (or lack thereof), but because most consumers didn't want to shell out the extra money required for a firewire port in their box.

how was the ipod generations ahead? i won't disagree that the ipod has dominated it, and therefore influenced the industry, but making the claim that it was the innovative spark is ludicrous.

just like your next post: give some examples where apple has innovated a product which led to microsoft's copying it? i guarantee you that you'll find a few examples, but that a majority of the ones you point out will either be 1) not innovations on apple's part, or 2) not stolen by microsoft, but rather developed concurrently.

[Hagbart]

CNET has a video review of the new iPod mini.

http://news.com.com/1601-2-5159150.html

Eliot Van Buskirk, senior editor of CNET.com, describes the iPod as being innovation, apple as being ahead of all other mp3 players and the new touchsensitive clickwheel (picture below) as being a major innovation.

The clickwheel is the only buttons you need to navigate, change volume, rate songs, make playlists, turn backlight on/off.... ..... and so on.

THAT IS INNOVATION, like it or not.

[Hagbart]

The new iPod minis, released tomorrow (100.000 preorders):

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

First to bring the Graphical User interface to personal computers.

First to bring the mouse to personal computers.

Both were invented by Xerox, however. They just didn't start shipping them before Apple stole the idea.

The others have been covered by Asher.

You'll believe anything he says, won't you?

Check out the facts. The Macintosh GUI was quite different from the Xerox GUI. If you bothered reading around you would find that Jef Raskin, the chief mac designer had come up with these ideas long before Xerox put them to work.

Raskin wrote his PhD thesis on GUIs in the 60s.

http://mxmora.best.vwh.net/JefRaskin.html

My thesis in Computer Science, published in 1967, argued that computers should be all-graphic, that we should eliminate character generators and create characters graphically and in various fonts, that what you see on the screen should be what you get, and that the human interface was more important than mere considerations of algorithmic efficiency and compactness. This was heretical in 1967, half a decade before PARC started. Many of the basic principles of the Mac were firmly entrenched in my psyche. By the way, the name of my thesis was the "Quick-Draw Graphics System", which became the name of (and part of the inspiration for) Atkinson's graphics package for the Mac.

Moreover, the story that Jobs went to PARC and came back to start the Macintosh is simply false. The Mac project had been up and running for months before Jobs went to PARC.

The similarities between the Mac OS and Xerox GUI have been wildly exaggerated Like most major inventions the development process was not linear and involved a large amount of cross fertilisation.

Here's the other article that Raskin references.

http://web.archive.org/web/20020808181757/www.apple-history.com/horn1.html

Anyway, have you ever seen Xerox Star? This is what it looked like.

[Agathon]

A better pic.

[JohnT]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

First to bring the Graphical User interface to personal computers.

First to bring the mouse to personal computers.

Both were invented by Xerox, however. They just didn't start shipping them before Apple stole the idea.

The others have been covered by Asher.

No they weren't. They were invented by Doug Engelbart of SRI back in 1968, and not only did he "invent" the mouse and the GUI at that demo he also "invented" video-conferencing, hypertext, object addressing, and dynamic file linking.

You can see the footage of his demonstration here: http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html