It’s not just Apple that like to give existing technology a new name. But certainly in this discussion it’s them that forced the clause.
I already said MP3 players and smartphones were new. Though technically the first digital music player pre-dates analog walkmans that thing was so archaic and had so little market penetration we can pretend it didn’t happen and MP3 players are recent. And I don’t really feel like look up which companies were first in those, we know it wasn’t Apple.
Most companies don’t do anything new. I’ve never had any product I’ve worked on in any company be the first of its kind in the market place. Best yes, first to have certain big features we were surprised nobody else did a surprisingly high number of times, but first in the market no. Most technological advances are incremental, taking something existing and adding a killer tweak. Look at what I was talking about with cars. If you teleported somebody from the 1920s or 30s to today, a very skilled driver even, they probably wouldn’t even know what to do in a modern car. There’s all these new controls and keyless entry and keyless starting, except for the steering wheel and pedals there’s nothing really the same. And forget letting them peek under the hood to try to fix the damn thing. Cars have evolved incredibly in that time frame, heck they’ve evolved incredibly in your pet 20 year time frame. But they aren’t new, because they’re still cars.
Which is really the same for the vast majority of our advances and changes. Yes life has changed dramatically, but largely not because of anything completely new, instead because of old things made dramatically better. This interweb thing you and I are using now has changed almost everything about any form of entertainment you can think of, and it’s older than me, but it’s a lot different now. All the various toys of our life are radically different but also clearly just incremental evolutions of stuff we already had. Even the stuff that’s really new, like smartphones, aren’t really new. Usually the stuff we call new, that’s really new, is only new in so far as it joined two evolutionary paths. Smartphones are the ever shrinking computer merged with phones, both old technologies, but together they make something new.
New is a rare thing in this world.
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.