The list was an interesting read, but I don't think anyone should really take it terribly seriously. It's 50 companies from a billion different industries vaguely ranked against each other.
At the same time, I think most people would agree Apple isn't really the world leader in innovation anymore. Great company, great products, but... not so much "new" things happening. What did they innovate recently? The notch? Air pods? These aren't exactly world changing.
People will disagree about exact rankings, but it seems pretty clear Apple shouldn't be #1 in innovation right now with so much else happening in technology.
Now a days, I'm wondering about Apple's past great innovations. I'm glad to have owned many iPods (even to this day), travelled cross-border to get the original iPhone, loved the unibody MacBooks, but if Apple hadn't made them, we'd still be carrying around computers in our pockets. What if.. Steve Jobs had set his sights on improving humanity? I now seem to value innovation more critically. (Meanwhile this Surface Go I'm writing on is very capable.)
> What did they innovate recently? The notch? Air pods? These aren't exactly world changing.
Air Pods are one of the best innovations in mobile in the past 5 years. Apple's mobile and watch chips are best in class. Apple Pay seems best in class.
> Air Pods are one of the best innovations in mobile in the past 5 years.
Agree. I have a set of Bose Hearphones - a pseudo hearing-aid which cancels ambient noise while enhancing human voices. It's been quite life-changing when having dinner at a restaurant with friends where previously I'd sit in silence because I couldn't make out what people were saying. It's also great for talking while walking down a loud street where previously I'd just walk in silence because I couldn't hear that well...
...but I mostly leave them at home and always carry Airpods for when I want to make a call or listen to music. Other wireless headphones are too big, clunky, and charging them isn't as simple as dropping each bud into a tiny magnetically secured case. So simple and one of my favourite tech products in a long time.
Apple was only popular (this millennium) when they were making the BEST PC you could buy, and they did that by tracking with intel's latest and greatest offerings but then intel hit the wall. No innovation from intel, no innovation from apple. We'll be doomed to just get slightly faster busses and radios year-after-year until apple moves to a better core tech partner (Power again pleaaaaase!!!) =or develops a new computer platform totally inhouse (much more likely) that is a performance and quality leader.
This is a list where an oat milk company is 9th. While one can definitely debate Apple's innovation, I wouldn't treat this list as any kind of objective indicator.
