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Came across this on a forum a while ago:

‘Steve Jobs never invented the Ipod - this chap did:
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http://www.kanekramer.com/default.htm
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Kane Kramer is a serial inventor. His inventions include the technology behind the MP3 player and Monicall. He was the first to conceive the idea of downloading music, data and video down telephone lines in 1979 when he was 23 and patented it with James Campbell who was 21. Together they went on to pioneer digital recording and built the world’s first solid state digital recorder/players.

Apple didn’t invent the first digital music player:
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The SaeHan Information Systems MPMan, which debuted in Asia in March 1998, was the first mass-produced portable solid state digital audio player.
The South Korean device was first imported for sale in North America by Michael Robertson’s Z Company[1] in mid-1998. Around the same time, Eiger Labs, Inc. imported and rebranded the player in two models, the Eiger MPMan F10, and Eiger MPMan F20.
The Eiger MPMan F10 was a very basic unit and wasn’t user expandable, though owners could upgrade the memory from 32MB to 64MB by sending the player back to Eiger Labs with a check for $69 + $7.95 shipping. Measuring at 91 mm tall by 70 mm wide by 16.5 mm thick and weighing a little over 2 oz, it was very compact.
The Eiger MPMan F20 was a similar model that used 3.3v SmartMedia cards for expansion, and ran on a single AA battery, instead of rechargeable NiMH batteries.

The Iphone wasn’t invented by Apple neither. Been around in the 1990s.

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The first smartphone was the IBM Simon; it was designed in 1992 and shown as a concept product that year at COMDEX, the computer industry trade show held in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was released to the public in 1993 and sold by BellSouth. Besides being a mobile phone, it also contained a calendar, address book, world clock, calculator, note pad, e-mail client, the ability to send and receive faxes, and games. It had no physical buttons, instead customers used a touchscreen to select telephone numbers with a finger or create facsimiles and memos with an optional stylus. Text was entered with a unique on-screen “predictive” keyboard. By today’s standards, the Simon would be a fairly low-end product, lacking a camera and the ability to download third-party applications. However, its feature set at the time was highly advanced.
The Nokia Communicator line was the first of Nokia’s smartphones starting with the Nokia 9000, released in 1996. This distinctive palmtop computer style smartphone was the result of a collaborative effort of an early successful and costly personal digital assistant (PDA) by Hewlett-Packard combined with Nokia’s bestselling phone around that time, and early prototype models had the two devices fixed via a hinge. The communicators are characterized by clamshell design, with a feature phone display, keyboard and user interface on top of the phone, and a physical QWERTY keyboard, high-resolution display of at least 640x200 pixels and PDA user interface under the door. The software was based on the GEOS V3.0 operating system, featuring email communication and text-based web browsing. In 1998, it was followed by Nokia 9110, and in 2000 by Nokia 9110i, with improved web browsing capability. In 1997 the term ‘smartphone’ was used for the first time when Ericsson unveiled the concept phone GS88, the first device labelled as ‘smartphone’.

Jobs and Apple didn’t invent the PC mouse:

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The trackball was invented by Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff and Kenyon Taylor working on the Royal Canadian Navy’s DATAR project in 1952. It used a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball. It was not patented, as it was a secret military project. Independently, Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute invented the first mouse prototype in 1963, with the assistance of his colleague Bill English. They christened the device the mouse as early models had a cord attached to the rear part of the device looking like a tail and generally resembling the common mouse. Engelbart never received any royalties for it, as his patent ran out before it became widely used in personal computers. The invention of the mouse was just a small part of Engelbart’s much larger project, aimed at augmenting human intellect.

Apple and Jobs didn’t invent touch screen technology used by smartphones and Ipads:

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The first touch screen was a capacitive touch screen developed by E.A. Johnson at the Royal Radar Establishment, Malvern, UK. The inventor briefly described his work in a short article published in 1965 and then more fully - along with photographs and diagrams - in an article published in 1967.

So he wasn’t that much of a ‘visionary’ after all.’

So he wasn’t that much of a ‘visionary’ after all.’

The 'visionary' aspect of what he did was not to invent the underlying technologies. He crafted PRODUCTS. And the market proved they were visionary. Anyone that paid any attention to tech in the late 90s knew there were already MP3 Players for sale all over before the ipod came out. And not just one brand, there were several. But they were clunky things for a tech savvy user. Jobs made the ipod sleek simple and so easier to use than a walkman. The real genius there was the seamless integration with the itunes music player. The same thing happened with the iphone. Sure there were smart phones before that. The real genius was the app store and how easy they made it for third parties to put apps on the thing. Prior to that ATT and Verizon and other phone makers had these crappy little systems for buying a few overpriced addons for your phone. The Apple App store blew those out of the water and the market loved it.

Jobs understood that there is more to good technology products than just having good stats. He looked at the big picture of usability and entire consumer experience. The results speak for themselves.

A lot of break through products are not the 'first'. The Kindle was not the first ebook reader by a long shot but it kicked off the market. The ipad was not the first tablet by a long shot, but it made tablets into something everyone has to have. Apple did in vent some things... they made one of the very first hand held devices with handwriting recognition. The Newton was cutting edge stuff... and it flopped. The first of something is not always what gets big. They sold the technology to 'Palm' and it was the Palm Pilot that put PDAs on the map.