Oh Swordmaker, you know that much of the time I appreciate you and the cute terminology that you come up with... what fun! Unfortunately, much of the time you do not actually do a very good job refuting what is said here because the facts are often not on your side only your seemingly heartfelt devotion to Apple mythology.
I do admire your knowledge of Apple devices. And because of competition from other innovators these devices have continuously been improved to the point that the modern iPhone and many other Apple devices have become technological marvels.
Where you nearly always run completely afoul of the facts is when you start comparing Apple devices with those which came before them. You simply have very limited knowledge of non-Apple devices. You do not know their history; you do not know how to use them; and you do not know what their capabilities were. So instead you try to completely deny their worth if not their very existence. It would be entirely comical if you were not acting as a mouthpiece for the most valuable corporation in the and doing it in a way that is almost completely malevolent.
Instead of constantly attacking Apples competition, you and the rest of those who admire Apple's products should be thanking Samsung, HTC, Microsoft, and all of the other corporations whose competition has caused Apple to reach for greater and greater technological achievements. Instead yours and Apple's mottoes have been, “All is fair in Love and war.” and “A good offense is the best defense.” This shows through in your posts here and often causes me to wonder whether you merely have a tenuous grasp on reality or if you are just a rude and dishonest person at your core.
What an ad hominem you start your post with, Fireman15. You denigrate me before you even start, making me "cute." to belittle anything I said. Nice try.
I post actual facts, often with links to the those factual data. You do not, posting your unsupported opinion ex cathedra. You claim your history from the sixties and seventies as proof of your expertise. I pre-date you in technology. . . and have owned a tech business for over 40 years supporting both Apple and Windows tech. I have followed it far closer than you.
You don't use Apple products and don't know them intimately at all. You repeat myths and false reports as if they were absolute truth despite them being debunked multiple times and frequently by authoritative sources.
You claim things for your predecessor devices that are simply not the same as what the Apple does. . . equating tech that is completely different merely because you want it to be the same, while all reviewers say it is NOT, pointing out the degrees of improvements Apple has made, so much so that Apple was awarded a patent for the improvements. YOU, and you alone, claim it does not deserve that patent, wanting desperately for it to be a mere slight improvement, not a technological change. You denigrate the work and the invention that had to occur for multiple inputs to be sensed simultaneously and for software to take action differently than a single sensed touch. "Oh," you say, "its easy to do." It was not, or everyone would have done it. They didn't. They'd been trying to perfect a system for two decades and had not been successful. Apple was.
I challenged you to come up with a predecessor phone that had a large multitouch screen. You point to a MP3 player/DVD player with a 4.1" single touch resistive screen. Right, sure. It was NOT responsive to the challenge. It was not a phone and it was not multitouch. You point out Multitouch NON-SCREEN PADS as if they were somehow responsive to the challenge. . . when they are not. . . even though that was a technology bought by Apple and used on their laptops. It was still NOT a transparent screen that linked the multitouch to the image beneath it which is at least an order or two magnitude of technological difficulty to accomplish that you, in your ignorance, called "simple."
You live in the delusional world of extreme Apple hate. It makes you believe anything negative about Apple without considering the actual facts. You will ignore those actual facts in support of your version of events, no matter how irrational your versions are, or the fact that evidence from the period, and contemporary commentary from authorities in the field do not support your version of history.
I've been maintaining the FreeRepublic Apple Ping List far longer than the iPhone has been in existence, fireman. I posted and pinged the list to articles on the history of the iPhone during the time before you started posting on these threads and am intimately familiar with ALL of the articles, reviews, and commentary on the tech that was available and the complaints and features of the other phones that were available before, during, and after the introduction of the iPhone. I HAD smartphones before the iPhone. . . I helped clients with their smartphones. So don't tell me about my degree of expertise on these devices.
I've programmed a complete accounting package including payroll from scratch and designed and programmed a client intake and management database package, as well as inventory control packages, also from scratch. And, in response to another attack question you posed in another thread, I've built computers from components up, and in fact, back in the mid-1960s as a high school student, I've actually made my own transistor from the silicon, doing the doping by hand, working on a project with Bell Labs. YOU are a dilettante in comparison.
Instead of constantly attacking Apples competition, you and the rest of those who admire Apple's products should be thanking Samsung, HTC, Microsoft, and all of the other corporations whose competition has caused Apple to reach for greater and greater technological achievements. Instead yours and Apple's mottoes have been, “All is fair in Love and war.” and “A good offense is the best defense.”
Excuse me, but I am not "constantly attacking Apples (sic) competition. . .", nor do I see Apple enthusiasts constantly doing it, but you and a few other Apple haters are constantly attacking Apple. I have been rebutting YOUR constant invasions of Apple threads.
You don't find me making attacks on the competition in dayglored's Windows threads or ThunderSleep's Android threads bad mouthing those platforms, yet here you are, day-in-and-day-out bad mouthing and attacking Apple with everything you can throw at the wall, true or not, in Apple threads. In fact, you find a lot of people attacking Apple users with epithets like "fanbois," "Apple sheep," "Stupid Apple-Sheeple," "true believers", and "Apple idiots," merely for our choice of what platform or phone we choose to use.
I've been a publisher, an editor, and a published author, writing reviews on computers, mobile devices, and software . . . so, fireman15, I do know the history and the capabilities and the limitations of these predecessor devices.
The Apple's competition are those who have taken the idea that a “A good offense is the best defense,” not Apple. That is the one Apple originate patent infringement suit. The rest have been the other direction, usually from non-practicing patent trolls who have usually bought non-useful, marginal patents and are trying to monetizing them by stretching one or more of their claims into something that Apple is actually using under one of their or another licensed patent.
Here is a link to the BGR article with a SCRBD of the entire 132 page Samsung Memo of instructions from management to their designers on how to copy the iPhone, proof positive that resulted in the original patent infringement judgements that are STILL wending their way through our glacial courts, and Judge Lucy Koh's blockades to Apple ever getting the case finished:
132-page internal document shows how Samsung set out to copy the iPhone pixel by pixel
The original jury judgement was $1.3 billion. Judge Lucy Koh, a South Korean American, on her own keeps trimming that judgement, after originally arbitrarily forcing Apple to cut the number of infringed patents from over 60 down to just 6. . . just because she did not want to try that many, not because Samsung had not infringed them. Now Koh, again on her own, has determined the case has to be retried despite the US Supreme Court ruling in Apple's favor apparently because she did not like the Supreme Court's decision.