Did Apple ever invent any technology on its own? [closed]

Question

In a wake of Apple suing everyone over shape of rectangles, many people claim, that Apple, never really invented anything on it's own. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​It's clear that a company marketed as "innovative", is one of the companies that spends least on R&D (only 2% of revenue, 18th place among R&D spenders in US).

Example of such a claim:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFeC25BM9E0

Some technologies which are misattributed to Apple:

• USB — in fact created by Compaq, Intel, Microsoft and NEC (see also Did Apple "jumpstart" the USB market?)
• Thunderbolt — 100% Intel technology;
• FireWire — known as IEEE 1394 to non-Apple users. This seems to be the closest one that Apple did to inventing anything. In fact Apple did lead the IEEE P1394 Working Group, but the group also consisted of engineers from Texas Instruments, Sony, Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM, and INMOS/SGS Thomson.
• GUI and mouse — Xerox PARC;

etc.

So is there any piece of technology, that Apple invented on it's own?

Answer 1

The difficulty with this question is that the seems to want to talk about broad technologies which are necessarily collections of individual advancements, inventions, and innovations. Invention is not as clearcut as the lightbulb anymore.

For example, Xerox PARC did not invent the mouse or the GUI. Those were developed and patented by Doug Englebart. Unfortunately for him by the time technology caught up to his genius his patents had expired. Of course the implementation of an idea can matter just as much as the idea itself. One of the reasons the mouse had not taken off was cost. Even Xerox PARC's design cost more than $200 per unit to manufacture. Apple redesigned it with their own innovations and lowered the cost to below $20 per unit.

Similarly with the GUI the idea of implementing it on a desktop computer was not seriously considered until Apple figured out how to do it. Solving the problems to implement a working, affordable GUI based desktop computer involved an enormous of innovation inside the box. They didn't come up with the idea for a GUI but they did figure out how to actually do it.

As for pure Apple inventions you could start with the patents solely held by Steve Wozniak during the development of the Apple I and Apple II computers:

• US Patent No. 4,136,359 — "Microcomputer for use with video display" — for which he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
• US Patent No. 4,210,959 — "Controller for magnetic disc, recorder, or the like"
• US Patent No. 4,217,604 — "Apparatus for digitally controlling PAL color display"
• US Patent No. 4,278,972 — "Digitally-controlled color signal generation means for use with display"

The initial success of Apple was based on Wozniak's designs and ability to develop novel techniques to do a lot of computing work with the minimum number chips.

Answer 2

There is a website devoted full time to tracking new Apple patents. That being said, getting a patent on something does not mean you invented it.

Also, a great many of Apple's patents are software patents. There is much debate over whether software patents should exist and to what extent software can be "invented".

While Apple may not have strictly "invented" all of the stuff they herald, there are definitely several key things that they popularized before anyone else.

Others may have technically invented it first, but Apple pushed these items into the mainstream well before their competitors:

• Laptop trackpads
• Mouse
• GUI
• MultiTouch
• The smartphone accelerometer
• The popularization of USB