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.