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Marketing and gaining widespread adoption seem to be the areas that Apple excels at. In most cases where something is heralded as "revolutionary" by Apple, it has been done before. Maybe not as well or as polished, but usually it has been done before.



It's pretty hard to see the iPhone and iPad as anything other than a revolution. Similar to how Windows was a revolution in desktop computing (whether you liked it or not).

"Gaining widespread adoption" was never an area Apple was very good at. They were always good at creating consumer-focused PCs. The initial line of MacBooks and iMacs are good examples of this — minuscule user base compared to Windows, but built to Apple's standards of what a computer should be. Their initial aim for the iPhone was to capture 1% of the market, they hardly expected the success they received.


The Ipad definitely wasn't a revolution.


It was marketed as one though. And to be fair it was the first tablet to gain widespread adoption.


What is your criteria for "revolution" in the tech industry?


Even if all they do is do things better and more polished than others, that's something any company would do well to emulate.

And sometimes doing things simply in a "more polished" way is revolutionary.

The early, pre-iPod mp3 players were an absolute mess when it came to navigating your music. That doesn't show up on a spec sheet, but "creating the first mp3 player that lets you actually navigate your music in a simple and enjoyable manner" is pretty freaking revolutionary in my book.


Yes and no. I mean you cad hardly say the iPod shuffle was a revolution in music navigation. They just marketed it right.


It was a pretty good product for a lot of people! A lot of people, like me, just want to shuffle some music while we exercise and we're willing to trade fine-grained control for the fact that the device is as light as a feather.

It also has really respectable sound quality and volume, which is not always the case (to put it gently) for teeny tiny electronics.


I agree 100% with the first two sentences - but their strong point is exactly that they finish their products too. It is important to execute projects well (enough) and to add polish too - and Apple excels at that. (to be fair, their UX is far from perfect IMHO... but it is apparently good enough)


Saying that Apple is good at "gaining widespread adoption" is kind of like saying that J. K. Rowling is good at "being read".


If J. K. Rowling had only copied other books and stories, then yes, that would have been a good description.


You can't expect this to be taken seriously.




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