Apple was the (second) mover in the currently-dominant space of smartphones with capacitive touch screens, which has also been their most profitable division (IIRC) for most of the past decade. (LG (Prada) beat them to it by a few months but botched the marketing and software.) To wit, Wikipedia's "multi-touch in popular culture" section is divided into "before 2007" and "after 2007": before 2007, multi-touch was the exclusive domain of futuristic sci-fi:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch#Popular_culture