>Electronics (physical things) require prototyping shops, which require physical space.
This is true. Look at any of the 70's and 80's computer magazines on archive.org, and you'll see only about 20% of the ads are from companies in SV. All the others are scattered in cities big and small from coast to coast.
It's amazing to think that small towns in Illinois and rural Virginia used to have big players in the hardware industry.
Now, with the exception of the increasingly rare spark from Apple, it's not about building innovative and interesting physical things anymore. It's about taking other people's money and shuffling it around trying to make more of it through half-baked startup ideas. Silicon Valley is just banking in slow motion.
My favorite story of computer companies was Coleco, which was a former leather company turned into a pool manufacturer to a video game and computer company. HQ in Connecticut and Amsterdam, NY of all places.
It was a cool computer too — to this day their super action controllers are my favorite game controller.
This might be a bit hyperbolic, but I agree with the general thrust. Their watch was a pretty clear response to Pebble. The iPhone was an impressive achievement, but smartphones had been available for 6 years when it was released. The iPod was certainly the best MP3 player, but it was far from the first.
That's not really a knock on Apple; they've been very successful jumping in to proven markets with incredibly polished versions of existing products. But I agree it's been a long while since they've done anything as innovative as their early days. They got a nice injection of innovation when they brought back Jobs's other company, NeXT, including the foundation of all their current operating systems. But even that stuff is almost 30 years old.
Innovation doesn’t have to happen at the product level; it can also apply to manufacturing. For example, Dell innovated the supply chain of desktop computers.
For Apple, there’s lots of innovation in the way they create hardware at scale with previously unheard of tolerances. For example, when they thought “let’s make a laptop chassis from milled aliminium” they couldn’t just send the design out to a company used to making millions of milled aluminum bodies of that size.
Apple also innovated by bringing 64-bit CPUs to mobile phones (not a surprising innovation, but they managed to do it earlier than many people suspected were possible)
> smartphones had been available for 6 years when it was released.
I had a Sony Ericsson P-800 when the iPhone was launched. It was the first smartphone that didn't look like something out of Star Trek (and I mean it in a bad way). When you compare an iPhone with my P-800, it looks like the iPhone is something that actually came from the future.
Sure. I had a Palm Treo. The iPhone was definitely a better product, a highly evolved one from a consumer perspective. But it's not like Apple invented the smartphone or the MP3 player. They did improve them drastically from the user perspective, and they are amazing marketers. I give them full credit for that, but rxhernandez has a point.
> it's not like Apple invented the smartphone or the MP3 player
It's not. It's more like they invented the first usable smartphone and the MP3 player everyone would want to have.
There is a parallel with the Apple II here - it was one of the very first personal computers that was approachable, self-contained (with a real keyboard built-in), booted from a ROM with an easy to use programming language, could display color, output sound, and had expansion slots that were usually hidden under a beige cover. Apple didn't invent the personal computer - they only made one of the first ones people would actually want to use.
Remember Apple was acquired by NeXT. NeXT made the first Unix workstations non-technical users could actually use.
Their use of solid-state storage on the MacBook Air family enabled ultra-thin laptops others copied later on. Backlit keyboards (debuted in the Titanium Powerbooks). It seems everyone else just makes marginally cheaper versions of things Apple did first.
This is true. Look at any of the 70's and 80's computer magazines on archive.org, and you'll see only about 20% of the ads are from companies in SV. All the others are scattered in cities big and small from coast to coast.
It's amazing to think that small towns in Illinois and rural Virginia used to have big players in the hardware industry.
Now, with the exception of the increasingly rare spark from Apple, it's not about building innovative and interesting physical things anymore. It's about taking other people's money and shuffling it around trying to make more of it through half-baked startup ideas. Silicon Valley is just banking in slow motion.