There’s an interesting thread in our forum right now: “When will
apple [sic] do something truly innovative?"It’s a good question, and it got me thinking. Has Apple been innovative, or have we all been drinking the purple Kool Aid? Is Apple really all style and no substance like Apple detractors insist? Is Apple’s claim to being an innovator all hype?

Not really. While Apple may not be as innovative as their marketing suggests--that is, almost everything is an innovation--Apple is still damn innovative. They may not be inventing new product categories or tricking out their products with every feature imaginable, but Apple is an innovator.

Apple’s main innovations (or at least their most visible--much of the under-the-hood stuff gets lost) come in the area of user interface and product design. The iPod is a perfect example;. Here you have a product that didn’t create the MP3 player product category. It entered a market with many preexisting products, but no real standout. So what made the iPod tops in the industry? Innovation. As many of you know by now, the iPod’s biggest innovation is in the design of the product. These innovations include a streamlined control interface (five buttons and a scroll wheel) that anyone could master in five or ten minutes (or less). They include the on-screen interface, which is easy to use, powerful, extensible (that is, it can easily handle new features without becoming “tortured,” as Steve Jobs would say), and it just makes logical sense. They also include the size of the player. Back at the iPod’s release, many hard drive players were quite bulky; the iPod changed this. And while some may see this, and the later changes in the iPod’s form factor, as only cosmetic “innovations,” most iPod owners will tell you that these innovations, such as the click wheel and sze reductions (which increase portability), make the iPod a joy to use. That, and miniaturization and changes in form factor often require that technical challenge be overcome. The result? Why innovation, of course.

Apple’s innovation isn’t limited to such areas as industrial and interface design. Apple has made many innovations that go deeper. A perfect example is launchd in Tiger. For those who aren’t gear-heads, lunchd is a mechanism for controlling the launch and termination of certain processes. The current UNIX systems work, but all have some serious issues that neuter their functionality. Launchd is Apple’s attempt to overcome these limitations. In his Tiger review, John Siracusa (the best product reviewer on Earth in my opinion, Anand Lai Shimpi from AnandTech is damn good too) goes into depth about it. Some of it goes over my head, but the basic idea is this: Apple saw a problem. Apple decided to fix the problem, so Apple developed something to eventually replace the problem. Innovation in its purest form. As Siracusa puts it, “‘Good enough’ is never good enough for Apple’s core OS team, and I’m glad.

“‘Good enough’ is never good enough” is a way of life for Apple a good deal of the time; and it reflects in much if what they do, both on the outside and inside of their products. Trying to innovate doesn’t mean every innovation is going to be a strong-selling product (Kisa, anyone?). Trying to innovate doesn’t mean that every attempted innovation is going to work out very well (puck mouse, anyone?). But Apple takes risks. Sometimes they pay off, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they turn out some great innovation, sometimes not. But I feel that if the rest of the industry was as willing to take risks as Apple is (as opposed to going the Dell route), we’d be technologically farther along than we are.