I think it's too harsh to call them "stolen". Apple understood things about these ideas that most others didn't. The end result was something that was qualitatively very different from what preceded them.
As an example, I worked on a tablet in '99 [1]. As the referenced article indicates we were not alone, nor were we first, and more came after. Around the same time there were a number of attempts at gluing together PDA's and phones. With e.g. Palm you had a UI that was not that dissimilar to the iPhone (ironically things like the memory model in PalmOS was inspired by pre-OS X MacOS - it was awful).
But all of these failed to graps fundamental issues that Apple understood, and you have it right when you say they "got to work" on making it work properly, making it user friendly, and so on. But I feel you undervalue how transformative what they did was.
When we started designing the Freepad, it's not like we were not thinking about usability, making it sexy etc. But while I think we did reasonably well in terms of aesthetics, we were too locked into thinking about it as a phone replacement, and letting ourselves be led down the wrong path by being controlled by technical limitations we ran into:
Battery tech had just barely made cellphones viable at that point. Instead of deciding what it would take, and waiting, like Apple did (not just on batteries, but also screen and others), the batteries available at the time dictated that this would not be a device to take out and about. The lack of a well established wifi standard and extremely slow GSM data mean we were led down the route - since battery meant you wouldn't run around anyway - of thinking of this as a home device and consider DECT (wireless home phones) with a data extension as a viable solution, firmly locking you into using the tablet around the house or at best out in the garden.
We ended up with a resistive touch screen because it was the only alternative that was viable cost-wise. RAW and flash was woefully limited, and dictated a model without any app eco-system, because we had to tune everything (hence things like Nano-X [2] mentioned in the article, coupled with our own widget library) to make even basic applications fit.
So while you may say that Apple "just" stole the idea (the idea was not ours either - I grew up with sci-fi describing or showing tablet-like devices; we were never under any illusion that we were first), they did more than "go to work".
What they did was that they refused to accept the limitations, and rather than let the technology-limitations dictate the product and lead them down the path of turning a good idea into a bad one, they didn't compromise and instead waited it out. They did this with the iPhone as well as the iPad.
This is why so many who had seen the previous tablet and smartphone fad reach maximum hype and fade away looked at the iPhone and went "so what?" (I was guilty of that): We'd already had devices that came from a similar idea, and we failed to realise that while the germ of that idea was similar, what we had ended up with last time was an idea that had been compromised in so many different ways that it was no longer the original idea but a corrupted, bastardised version that had lost the important bits when we tried translating it into reality.
I mean, the tablet I worked on was tethered to your house, for example, as mentioned above (and see the title of the article [1] - it references Ericssons "Screen Phone" - which basically says it all: the first generation tablets were either replacements for landline phones - in the case of Ericsson and Screen Media and others - or laptops with swivel screens in the case of PC manufacturers; the latter flawed in entirely different ways).
We didn't start out with that vision, but we let practicalities corrupt our vision, and convinced ourselves that the result would still be good enough, because we didn't see any alternative: It had to be good enough.
Part of the problem was that we failed to grasp which parts of the idea where essential, and which we could compromise on. Mobility was essential, and we compromised on it. Screen quality/touch quality, was essential, and we compromised on it (the screen was great for the time, but awful by the standards of even the first iPad). An application ecosystem was essential, and we compromised on it and never really even thought seriously about it.
The result, to me, is that while the core of the idea might have started out the same, the iPhone and iPad were fundamentally different and innovative from the attempts that went before them, not just because Apple "got to work" but because they understood where you could compromise, and which parts of the idea were essential and had to remain no matter what.
Very insightful post, thanks! I still stand by calling it stolen ideas though: if you go to PARC, see some cool stuff, and then come home and build it again for yourself, that's stealing an idea.
But the main point I was trying to make was : taking Apple's slogan to mean "just think of something new and the world will be changed" is wrong, Apple hardly even did the "think of something new" part, but they did the hard work of getting it to a useful state. The 99% perspiration.
But you're right, Apple did have something extra, they didn't get to where they are just by doing the hard work.
So let's say "99% perspiration, 1% recognising and stealing good ideas, and 1% knowing where (not) to compromise"? :-)
As someone who went to PARC and saw the cool stuff years before Jobs did, I don't think he stole their idea. The PARC approach was to build the future expensively and wait for hardware to catch up. Eventually the hardware did, but not until the late 1980s.
Kay had a vision, but his vision was quite different from the way personal computing went. He was thinking of closed systems which would replace dedicated word processors. The Xerox Star was the result. Imagine a machine with Microsoft Office built-in, with all the software installed at the factory.
Kay also had a thing for discrite-event simulation as the killer app. Kay wrote, in Personal Dynamic Media, "In a very real sense, simulation is the central notion of the Dynabook." This matched well to Smalltalk, which was the successor to Simula-67, an ALGOL dialect with objects for discrite-event simulation. All that "message" stuff came from the simulation world, where you have many asynchronous blocks passing events around.
The real successors to the PARC work were the first generation of UNIX workstations. The Three Rivers PERQ, the Apollo, the Sun I, and the Apple Lisa all predated the Macintosh. They were all much better, but much more expensive. The UNIX workstation era tends to be forgotten, but those were the first good desktop computers. Macs were toys.
The original Mac was a flop. No hard drive, 128K RAM, too slow, and too expensive. The competition was the IBM PC/AT - 20MB hard drive, about 1MB RAM. This almost killed Apple. Not until the Macintosh SE (1989) did Apple have a built-in hard drive. In the Apple II era, Apple had a majority of desktop system market share. The Mac in the 1980s had about 15%, which gradually declined.
As an example, I worked on a tablet in '99 [1]. As the referenced article indicates we were not alone, nor were we first, and more came after. Around the same time there were a number of attempts at gluing together PDA's and phones. With e.g. Palm you had a UI that was not that dissimilar to the iPhone (ironically things like the memory model in PalmOS was inspired by pre-OS X MacOS - it was awful).
But all of these failed to graps fundamental issues that Apple understood, and you have it right when you say they "got to work" on making it work properly, making it user friendly, and so on. But I feel you undervalue how transformative what they did was.
When we started designing the Freepad, it's not like we were not thinking about usability, making it sexy etc. But while I think we did reasonably well in terms of aesthetics, we were too locked into thinking about it as a phone replacement, and letting ourselves be led down the wrong path by being controlled by technical limitations we ran into:
Battery tech had just barely made cellphones viable at that point. Instead of deciding what it would take, and waiting, like Apple did (not just on batteries, but also screen and others), the batteries available at the time dictated that this would not be a device to take out and about. The lack of a well established wifi standard and extremely slow GSM data mean we were led down the route - since battery meant you wouldn't run around anyway - of thinking of this as a home device and consider DECT (wireless home phones) with a data extension as a viable solution, firmly locking you into using the tablet around the house or at best out in the garden.
We ended up with a resistive touch screen because it was the only alternative that was viable cost-wise. RAW and flash was woefully limited, and dictated a model without any app eco-system, because we had to tune everything (hence things like Nano-X [2] mentioned in the article, coupled with our own widget library) to make even basic applications fit.
So while you may say that Apple "just" stole the idea (the idea was not ours either - I grew up with sci-fi describing or showing tablet-like devices; we were never under any illusion that we were first), they did more than "go to work".
What they did was that they refused to accept the limitations, and rather than let the technology-limitations dictate the product and lead them down the path of turning a good idea into a bad one, they didn't compromise and instead waited it out. They did this with the iPhone as well as the iPad.
This is why so many who had seen the previous tablet and smartphone fad reach maximum hype and fade away looked at the iPhone and went "so what?" (I was guilty of that): We'd already had devices that came from a similar idea, and we failed to realise that while the germ of that idea was similar, what we had ended up with last time was an idea that had been compromised in so many different ways that it was no longer the original idea but a corrupted, bastardised version that had lost the important bits when we tried translating it into reality.
I mean, the tablet I worked on was tethered to your house, for example, as mentioned above (and see the title of the article [1] - it references Ericssons "Screen Phone" - which basically says it all: the first generation tablets were either replacements for landline phones - in the case of Ericsson and Screen Media and others - or laptops with swivel screens in the case of PC manufacturers; the latter flawed in entirely different ways).
We didn't start out with that vision, but we let practicalities corrupt our vision, and convinced ourselves that the result would still be good enough, because we didn't see any alternative: It had to be good enough.
Part of the problem was that we failed to grasp which parts of the idea where essential, and which we could compromise on. Mobility was essential, and we compromised on it. Screen quality/touch quality, was essential, and we compromised on it (the screen was great for the time, but awful by the standards of even the first iPad). An application ecosystem was essential, and we compromised on it and never really even thought seriously about it.
The result, to me, is that while the core of the idea might have started out the same, the iPhone and iPad were fundamentally different and innovative from the attempts that went before them, not just because Apple "got to work" but because they understood where you could compromise, and which parts of the idea were essential and had to remain no matter what.
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/freepad-norways-alternative-to-...
[2] http://microwindows.org/