Apple haven’t invented anything

Because Apple (AAPL) prepares to release what by all accounts will be the most successful device it features ever built — and only a few weeks after the company was awarded in excess of $1 billion in damages any time Samsung (005930) was found to possess infringed on its IP — a page penned by a former Apple executive questions just what exactly Apple’s role is in the customer electronics industry. Jean-Louis Gassee, who came very close to becoming the president of Apple within the late 1980s before being ousted through CEO John Scully and Apple’s board, claims that while Apple’s success in the profession cannot be disputed, its perception just as one innovator is open to discussion.

“Apple haven’t invented anything, ” was the title associated with Gassee’s Monday note column for the Guardian last week. In that, the former executive says that Apple seriously isn't an inventor but rather a master with regards to taking existing ingredients and to whip up a masterpiece.

The apple ipad tablet, for example, was clearly the initial consumer tablet to see success on a large scale, but the reasoning behind a consumer tablet had been around for 30 years before The apple company unveiled its first iPad in 2010. Similarly, the iPhone was clearly the reimagining of the smartphone rather than new and novel product.

Likening late Apple co-founder as well as former CEO Steve Jobs to a chef, Gassee argues that Apple’s true talent is based on taking existing products and ideas, and transforming them — not in inventing new services.

“The basic ingredients are the same, ” Gassee writes while discussing the iPAQ as a predecessor to the iPad, “Software will be all zeroes and ones, in the end. The quantity and order may vary, but that’s about it. Hardware is definitely protons, neutrons, electrons and photons humming around, nothing original. Apple didn’t ‘invent’ something, the iPad is simply their particular variation, their interpretation of the actual well-known tablet recipe. ”

Gassee says that line of thinking is myopic although technically accurate, and concludes that Jobs’s ability to take the same list associated with ingredients that was used to generate a device and rework them to produce unique new products was uncanny — irrespective of whether or not Apple’s products are defined as “inventions. ”

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