I think Apple's innovation is more about design and business model innovation. Nowadays, many technologies that we think are very powerful are actually not original by Apple. Of course, it is also an innovation to design products that lead the trend by acquiring technology and integrating technology.
NeXT INC: operating system technology and founder regression
Anyone familiar with Apple's history will know that Jobs was once forced to leave Apple. After he left, he and several colleagues from Apple started to set up NeXT.
NeXT Company launched the first NeXT computer at 1988, but in terms of output, the sales of NeXT products are very limited. The company only sold about 50000 computers. 1997, Apple bought NeXT for $400 million, which also meant that Jobs returned to the Apple Company he founded in 1976.
NeXT technology is what we now know as Apple OS X and iOS.
FingerWorks: multi-touch and gesture control
The time goes back to about ten years ago, when the first iPhone was not released, but in April 2005, Apple acquired a company called "FingerWorks" at an unknown price. This American company was originally specialized in gesture operation/gesture recognition, but it was not optimistic at that time, and no one guessed what Apple bought it for.
A few years later, with the official launch of the original iPhone with multi-touch function, everyone suddenly remembered the transaction of that year, and now multi-touch has become a necessary function of a smart phone.
F. p. a. Essence: Independent Chip Design
In 2008, Apple bought P.A.Semi for $278 million, which is a company focusing on ultra-low power processor design. Today's ultra-low power Apple A9 processing is absolutely inseparable from it. In addition, a small chip company called Intrinsity in Texas, USA, was acquired by Apple. At that time, mobile chips were developed for both Apple and Samsung, and the products were famous for their low power consumption and high performance.
This is one of Apple's most successful acquisitions on mobile phones. While other manufacturers are suffering from hardware homogenization and Qualcomm patent bundling, Apple's self-developed A-series processors have achieved "monopoly" in running points, making the slogan of "refusing to run points" a thing of the past.
Siri Inc: Hello, Siri!
Siri is undoubtedly Apple's most important voice product. 20 10' s acquisition of Siri Inc for $200 million is undoubtedly a very cost-effective transaction. After that, Apple's acquisition measures in speech recognition and NLP were based on Siri. But at that time, Comrade Lao Qiao was not satisfied with this, so on the one hand, Apple developed and improved the performance of Siri, on the other hand, in April 20 14, Novauris acquired by Apple was an automatic speech recognition technology company, and their core product was the server-based extensible speech recognition system NovaSystem, which was characterized by being able to handle multiple voice access requests at the same time. 20 15, 10, Apple acquired VocalIQ to solve the problem that Siri can only recognize the most basic instructions and can't make high matching answers.