this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Innovation is always based on what's already been done. If some tech company takes off on tech someone else invented, the question is why the inventor was not able to monetize on it. It's not always as simple as "tech company stole it". Invention and prototyping is very different to making a product that people want.
That's true for most innovations ever and not exclusive to the US tech industry.
Devil's advocate would say "okay, then just go make your own iPhone if apple isn't actually doing anything" but I don't really want to be defending apple, lol
You can hate on Apple all you want (and I really do) but they made the right device at the right time. Tech might all have been there but the combination and usability of the first iPhone was groundbreaking.
It's not that Apple makes amazing stuff, it's that other companies really put out barely shiny turds.
Look at the zune, the tech was fine, or so I have heard, but it looked like an ugly brick. Seriously, a regular red brick looks better, even a yellow brick does.
I have a Subaru, and while I love it, the infotainment system is garbage. Clearly there was no effort to make it look good and usable.
UX is hugely undervalued, I wonder if one of the reasons is because you don't notice good UX, it's not in the way, but you noticed bad UX. So good UX without a lot of marketing is invisible.
I absolutely agree. It's especially underestimated how hard it is to make actually good UX because what feels intuitive can be highly individual. In addition the typical techie nerd that does the programming is more interested in technical puzzles than trying to view the program with the eyes of an end user (which feels pretty schizophrenic at times since you know how the thing works but need to dissociate from that knowledge).
Strange comment to make about apple of all manufactures.
Claiming Apple doesn't develop tech is ridiculous, and raising them as an example even more so, because I can't think of a vendor with higher portion of hardware built in house. You could make an argument for Sony (camera sensors) and Samsung (screens, also Exynos for their phones), but they're up there.
Yeah, half of the stuff in an iPhone is made by Samsung.
fabricated by samsung but apples designs
Lol I work in software in The Valley. Trust me, we write this shit.
You're overgeneralizing. Government money is in everything. It needs more effort to prove it's causal for every innovation there is.
No. You're the one with the big claims that the whole industry (or in your other reply even the whole capitalist world) doesn't innovate. So you first provide some actual evidence. So far your arguments are just "trust me" themselves.
You have no idea how modern technology is produced. Any particular product is usually the result of dozens to thousands of iterations, some funded with public money and many not. Let's take an example from your chart: DRAM. I actually don't know when DARPA "developed" DRAM (since DARPA usually funds private companies to do development for them), but it must have been before 1970 when Intel designed the 1103 chip that got them started. Do you think that pre-1970s design is remotely similar to the DRAM operating on your device today? I'll give you a hint: it's not.
And no, modern device development does not consist of gluing a bunch of APIs together. Apple maintains its own compilers, languages, toolchains, runtimes, hardware, operating systems, debugging tools, and so on. Some of that code had distant origins in open source (e.g. webkit), but that's vastly different than publicly funded and those components are usually very different today.
They're failing to produce competitive modems because modern wireless is one of closest things humans have to straight up black magic. It's extremely difficult to get right, especially as frequencies go up, SNR goes down, and we try to push things ever faster despite having effectively reached the Shannon limit ages ago.
I haven't explained what the differences are because almost everything is different. It's like comparing a Model T to a Bugatti. They're simply not built the same way, even if they both use internal combustion engines and gearboxes.
Let me give you an overview of how the research pipeline occurs though. First is the fundamental research, which outside of semiconductors is usually funded by public sources. This encompasses things like methods of crack formation in glasses, better solid state models, improved error correction algorithms and so on. The next layer up is applied research, where the fundamental research is applied to improve or optimize existing solutions / create new partial solutions to unsolved problems. Funding here is a mix of private and public depending on the specific area. Semiconductor companies do lots of their own original research here as well, as you can see from these Micron and TSMC memory research pages. It's very common for researchers who are publicly funded here to take that research and use it to go start a private company, usually with funding from their institution. This is where many important semiconductor companies have their roots, including TSMC via ITRI. These companies in turn invest in product / highly applied research aimed at productizing the research for the mass market. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes it's extremely difficult. Most of the challenges of EUV lithography occurred here, because going from low yield academic research to high yield commercial feasibility was extremely difficult. Direct investment here is almost always private, though there can be significant public investments through companies. If this is published (it often isn't), it's commonly done as patents. Every company you've heard of has thousands of these patents, and some of the larger ones have tens or hundreds of thousands. All of that is the result of internal research. Lastly, they'll take all of that, build standards (e.g. DDR5, h.265, 5G), and develop commercial implementations that actually do those things. That's what OEMs buy (or try to develop on their own in the case of Apple modems) to integrate into their products.