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.