Before I say my opinion I just wanted to state my previous experience with Apples products. I currently own an iPhone 5, before that I had a 4S and a 3GS.
I own an iPad 2 and a 17" MacBook Pro (2009 Model) I've also owned the 17" MacBook Pro from 2006, the Powerbook G4 15" from 2005 and the iBook 12" from 2004. I've also owned a bunch of iPods including the iPod Classic 3rd generation and 5th generation and an iPod Touch 2nd generation. I also own an Airport Extreme Router and two Airport Express routers.
Those are all the "main" Apple products I've owned not including things like adapters, cables, headphones, cases etc.
So I'd consider myself quite an Apple fan as obviously I've purchased a lot of their products and my main "life" system right now is my 17" MacBook Pro and my iPhone 5. I use both of those every day of my life for all my personal life stuff.
But I'm under no illusions. Apple really isn't a technology inventor they are a widget maker. Their in the business of building better widgets. Ever since they started with the Apple 1 they have been combining components from other companies to produce a product.
They very rarely invent a technology straight from scratch because the economics of that approach simply aren't profitable. They don't have the scale in their product ranges to make it worthwhile.
Take CPU's for example, they used Motorola and IBM chips because they were the chip designers and fabricators. It takes billions of dollars just to make the facility to fabricate a microprocessor and that's before we get in to the R&D required to design the processor itself.
This is no different to what HP, Lenovo, Dell or even Microsoft do. People might say Microsoft invented the XBOX 360. They didn't invent its parts they just combined lots of different components together to make the product. Graphics by ATi, CPU by IBM, Optical Drive by Toshiba.
The thing that makes Apple special, the reason they are so successful is not because they invent things before other companies it's that they wait they bide their time and they do it the best way they know how. They integrate, they make the exterior of the product look gorgeous, they make it look desirable.
Let me give a realistic example. The iPad. Apple didn't get there first, I would consider the first modern tablets, the ones we can actually use in a meaningful way as popping up around 2002-2003. The Microsoft Windows XP Tablet edition OS ushered that time period into the Tablet era.
But the products were slow, they were bulky, they were tacky and plasticy, they got very hot in your hand, the battery life was very poor, the screen resolutions were not great, the input method was laggy and required the use of a pen. And the worst of all they cost a lot of money over $1500 for a decent model.
There were simply too many compromises for them to ever be popular. Now what we know is at this time period Apple were actually working on a tablet around this time period. The same time that Microsoft was working on tablets, Apple was too. We know this because it leaked. You can view pictures of it here:
http://www.cultofmac.com/179724/app...-inch-screen-was-3-times-thicker-than-ipad-2/
Now if Apple had this in 2002-2004 (Lets say 2003). Why didn't they release it? Well just look at that prototype. It's 12" in size, very bulky, uses the iBook casing, its battery life is more than likely around 2 hours or less. It would cost as much as an iBook would due to it using the same parts (About $999 on the low-end 12" iBook so about a thousand bucks) and it needed a pen as an input method still. It had all the pitfalls that the tablets on the market had.
Apple waited. And then we got the iPad. The first tablet that really worked. It was less than half the price of a mid-range notebook. Hours upon hours of battery life with days of standby time, you can use a bluetooth pen with it (with pressure sensitivity) or your fingers, it's light enough to hold in one hand while using it with the other hand, it has a very high resolution screen.
The only thing Apple did here was wait for the technology to mature. They went with ARM over x86 because it was the logical choice to get the product they wanted out. It wouldn't have been a success if it burned your hand while using it or only lasted 30 minutes to an hour per battery cycle.
Apples vision is their ability to be patient. Waiting for that right moment when all the parts they need are ready to be combined to make a product a reality and they continually do that before the rest of the market.
iPhone -> Before this smart phones sucked. Lets be frank here, they had dinky little software, the internet on them was poor because of a lack of browser compliance, they needed pens if you had a touch screen. They were very difficult to use aswell. Apple waited for the right time for capacitive touch screens for processors fast enough to hold a big-boy operating system. They had prototypes for this way before the 2007 unveiling. Just biding their time.
iPod -> Wasn't the first MP3 player by a long short. But it was the size of a deck of cards and it was very financially competitive with flash based players due to its Hard Disk. Other MP3 players did have Hard Disks but the rest of the player was bulky to support it. Jon Rubinstein flew to Japan on a trip to do something and while he was there a manufacturer (I believe Toshiba?) showed him this 1.8" Hard Drive they had made. They didn't have a use for it, and neither did he, but he took the prototype back to Apple in america and they realised they could make a small MP3 player with that. The component made the product a reality.
iPad -> Already detailed above, waiting for the components to mature just at the right time made the iPad the first successful tablet, the first mainstream tablet to ever exist. That wasn't just by chance, they could have launched and failed with their 2003 prototype, they waited another 7 years until 2010 before releasing a worthy product and now they are the market leader for a good reason. Everyone else was scrambling to make a tablet in the months leading up to the iPads release due to all the rumors and none of them were as good as what Apple pushed out. Even today you can count the iPad worthy competitors on one hand. The Nexus 10 would be on that list but it only came out a few months ago, we've had iPads now for 3 years already.
And there are other examples too, the Macintosh is famous for Apple taking XEROX's research into GUI's and the Mouse. The fact is, Apple got there first and negotiated a deal for that technology. They didn't invent it just like they didn't invent any of the components in their products I just listed, they were just able to pre-emptively get what they needed to make their product before anybody else.
So some might say ya know, Apple doesn't deserve their success because they don't invent their own technology. I disagree. Apple has brought out some great products and it doesn't really matter where they get the ingredients only that the end result is great. They've had their share of misses, I would not consider the Apple TV a runaway success although they have sold millions of units.
And I also find it a bit silly that this video dismisses Apples biggest advantage, the software. Sure Apple uses a lot of Open Source stuff in their products (Webkit -> KHTML, Mac Kernel -> BSD etc) but they've also built a lot of value in their software that integrated beautifully with their hardware. I love being able to just bring my phone home and have it sync over WiFi with my MacBook Pro. I love being able to play music from my iPhone, Mac or iPad to my stereo over WiFi. I love being able to start an iMessage conversation on my iPhone and then when I get home continue that same conversation on my MacBook Pro with full history from both sides of the conversation already present.
I can't think of any other company that takes integration to such a high level except maybe Google but even they have faltered due to their teams working separately instead of side by side. An example there would be their Messaging platforms. They have gTalk and Google+ both of which have their own IM Messaging platform built in, but they don't sync between them. Similarly their desktop client software doesn't sync notifications so if you for example get a gTalk notification on your PC and Phone if you then react to that notification on one device the notification on the other device doesn't go away. Well it does on iMessage because Apple thought of that already. Better product, not better invention.
Apple didn't invent TCP/IP they didn't invent push notifications but they do them pretty darn well when it comes to their products.
Anyway this post is already so long so I'll stop now, I think I got my point across.
