This is supposed to be fun and interesting. When it stops being either -- when I feel myself turning into that guy -- it's time to walk away.
Posted on 04/29/2012 7:34:53 AM PDT by SmokingJoe
I can get any song, watch any of tens of thousands of movies (and the only reason I can’t watch all of them is copyright law), look at any point on the surface of the Earth from a satellite, pull up encyclopedia articles, publish to an audience of millions, transmit photographs and video instantly to most of the world, all from a device the size of a deck of cards. None of these things was possible twenty years ago, some of them fifteen, some of them ten. But none of this is new.
So we’ve gotten to the point that it’s useless to argue any further. Your position is that Apple does nothing new, under a definition by which no one does anything new.
You’re grossly misapplying what I said. Actually outright lying. I said smartphones are new. So that entire paragraph is exactly the opposite of what I said. Why is it you guys always have to resort to lies. We’re done.
You’re right. You did concede that smartphones are new. So take my post above and replace “all from a device the size of a deck of cards” and replace it with “all from my desk,” and you would say that nothing in that is new.
On your desk then it’s the functions of a computer (goes back to the 50s) connected to the internet (goes back to the 60s). Is that new? I was playing Adventure (pre-cursor to Zork) on the dumb terminal my dad had in his home so he could what we now call telecommute in late 70s. A lot of this stuff isn’t nearly as new as folks think, the interface is new, the speed is new, the convenience is new, the percentage of people that can do it is new, the concept and general ability is nowhere near new.
That’s my point: Your definition of “new” is so narrow that you’re defining that dumb terminal and a modern computer with broadband as the same basic “concept and general ability.” All of the changes between the two, which have radically changed the lives of most people living in the industrialized world, aren’t new.
If you want to be that reductionist, the smartphone wasn’t really new — it’s just a PDA with a phone built in (the first marginally successful smartphones ran PalmOS). The MP3 player wasn’t new, because all it did was replace a spinning optical disk with flash memory; portable digital music wasn’t new.
It’s not MY definition of new, it’s THE definition of new. A new thing has to be actually new. Remember this all came up from silly claims that Apple invented a bunch of stuff, and in all those things their product was not the first in that category. If a product is not the first in that category then the company that made it cannot claim to have invented the category. That’s the core of the discussion you’re trying to obfuscate with all this “is this new” strawman erecting.
I’m not being reductionist, I’m being accurate to simple dictionary definitions of simple words. Apple did NOT invent the PDA, the smartphone, the GUI or the MP3 player. The reductionism here is all coming from you desperately scrambling trying to find some way I’m wrong, throwing up strawmen, slippery slopes and the occasional outright lie, all so you can say “AHA” and reverse the reality that started this discussion. But none of your weaseling around playing the fallacy game changes reality, and the reality is that if you look up the history of anything Apple fanboys claim they invented you will ALWAYS find they weren’t first, in fact they usually don’t even medal, they’re generally close to a decade after the actual invention.
So when a car dealership sells "new" cars, they're lying, because there were cars before? When Hollywood releases "new" movies, they're lying, because there were movies before? After all, those violate what you just said was THE definition.
Your definition is that nothing is new unless the entire category didn't exist before -- "category" arbitrarily defined so that a Psion is the same "thing" as a Newton, or a VT-100 connecting to a mainframe at 110bps is the same as a teraflop PC on broadband. It's startling to me that you seem to believe there is nothing "new" between the former and the latter.
No one buys a technology -- they buy products (or, in biz speak, "solutions"). I would describe the Model T, the Apollo program, Edison's light bulb, the World Wide Web, high definition TV, digital SLRs, as "new," even though there were cars, rockets, lights, cameras, computers, TVs and cameras before. They create new paradigms. They change the way people live.
Apple did NOT invent the PDA, the smartphone, the GUI or the MP3 player.
And no one is saying that they did. Straw man. What Apple fans are saying, and what even a cursory look at the relevant markets will support, is that in desktop computers, in smartphones, in portable media, and in tablets, they introduced a new combination of hardware and software that nearly every other player in the market soon copied. The component parts might not have been new, but the whole was.
And there you go with lying. The “new” in question was INVENTING A NEW ITEM, not just building a new thing.
And yes actually people on this thread HAVE said that Apple invented those thing, they’re the ones I was replying to in the first place.
Post 7:
Apple invented the product and therefore the market.
Post 32:
you will find they did indeed invent the palm held computer with touch screen capability,
And there were Newtons with phone capabilities... Invented by Apple!
So stop lying.
There I go, at any rate. If you can't have an argument without calling the other side a liar, I have no further patience.
This is supposed to be fun and interesting. When it stops being either -- when I feel myself turning into that guy -- it's time to walk away.
If you didn’t lie I wouldn’t call you a liar. Notice how I quoted two people saying Apple invented stuff while you said nobody said that. Gee.
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