> > If something wasn't feasible to do until the moment Apple copied it from others, why didn't Apple do it first?
> I really don't know what you mean by this.
You've answered to Apple copying others with "it was an obvious step forward, just infeasible before". Which fails to explain why was it infeasible for Apple until after it became feasible for others.
> I feel like you're trying to accuse me of saying that nobody but Apple is capable of innovation, which is nonsense.
It is a strong predictor of how you responded to the examples that were raised. The obvious question after seeing that is "is there a counterexample?"
I said automatically classifying users' photos to search was only feasible to do recently. It didn't become feasible for others first, it became feasible for everyone at about the same time (well, I suppose it was feasible for Google slightly earlier because Google's doing it in the cloud where they have more computing power available, versus Apple being limited by the computing power of the iPhone, but this appears to be such a relatively small difference that it doesn't really matter).
It was only feasible to do recently, in the sense that only recently did Google develop (and publish) the ML techniques that made it feasible. It wasn't some inevitability brought to us by Moore's law.
This isn't my area of expertise, but I thought the recent ML boom was kicked off by ImageNet, which came from the CS department at Princeton, and the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge? Google's been a big player in ML recently, but they're not the only ones researching this.
ImageNet is a manually-annotated database to train models. Google had the Image Search corpus internally too.
The advances in image and speech recognition of these times are due to innovations in deep learning by Google, Microsoft, NVidia, Stanford, U. Toronto, CMU, and many others. I didn't mean to imply it was all Google's doing. Rather that Apple wasn't there, which is why "just waiting for it to become feasible" sounds like apologetics.
Then there's also innovation in making a product out of the new capabilities, or integrating them into an existing product. I think dismissing that as "everybody was just waiting for the technology" is not realizing that, in hindsight, all products look obvious.
> I really don't know what you mean by this.
You've answered to Apple copying others with "it was an obvious step forward, just infeasible before". Which fails to explain why was it infeasible for Apple until after it became feasible for others.
> I feel like you're trying to accuse me of saying that nobody but Apple is capable of innovation, which is nonsense.
It is a strong predictor of how you responded to the examples that were raised. The obvious question after seeing that is "is there a counterexample?"