Remember "Redmond Start Your Copiers!" That was an official WWDC banner hung from the rafters by Apple, not some fanboys. Steve Jobs frequently gave interviews accusing rivals of copying, and then copying with the excuse "Good artists copy; great artists steal". All of those years of going on the offensive against everyone, has created a tendency of the other side to look for hypocrisy now.
There's something pretentious, and deeply hubristic and lacking in humility in Apple's marketing that I think has fanned the flames of these fanboy wars. In a way, their marketing reminds of the way Trump talks, only with a larger vocabulary. Replace "Great!", "Bigly!", "SAD!", with "Beautiful", "Amazing", "Breakthrough". It's just continuous repetitive of superlatives, even for minor features.
> "Good artists copy; great artists steal"
The point of this quotation is that "good artists" merely copy other people, which is what Apple is talking about when they hang banners like "Redmond Start Your Copiers", but "great artists" 'steal', which means they take the good idea and transform it to make it better. And this is very much how Apple works, and this comes back to your original pseudo-quotation, "it doesn't matter if you're first, Apple waits till its 'ready'". Apple doesn't just blindly copy what other people are doing. They 'steal' the ideas and turn them into something great before releasing them.
Apple doesn't blindly copy? What do you call Apple Music then? Ping? What did Apple do to innovate in that space above and beyond Spotify? That's a long list of UI features Apple cribbed from Android, WebOS, and Windows Phone that ended up (IMHO), inferior copies, where the copy didn't actually improve on (make great) the original.
In what way does Apple Photos improve on the quality of Google Photo's deep learning based categorization that is user-visible and noticeable?
Not everything. "Redmond Start Your Copiers" was in response to some very specific copying over the previous year, though I don't remember the details anymore.
> What do you call Apple Music then?
I call it a subscription model to the iTunes store. Subscription models have been around for a long time, even though Spotify is the poster child for applying them to Music I don't think it makes sense to say Apple is copying Spotify (or anyone else) by having a subscription music service, it's the logical evolution of paid music services. You could certainly argue that Spotify proved the customer demand was there (as well as the ability to convince the labels to go along with this), but it's not like Spotify invented the concept.
> Ping?
An unmitigated disaster. But I'm not sure who you think that was copying. I can't think of any pre-existing service like Ping.
> What did Apple do to innovate in that space above and beyond Spotify?
Provide a seamless "it just works" experience across all Apple devices, including integration into their customers' existing iTunes libraries, and into Siri, including the forthcoming Homepod. And I think it's fair to give Apple Music credit for iCloud Music Library as well, which is great.
> That's a long list of UI features Apple cribbed from Android, WebOS, and Windows Phone that ended up (IMHO), inferior copies, where the copy didn't actually improve on (make great) the original.
Can you elaborate?
> In what way does Apple Photos improve on the quality of Google Photo's deep learning based categorization that is user-visible and noticeable?
Apple Photos does it all on-device.
Also, I really don't think you can claim that using machine learning to classify photos is something that Google owns. It's been an obvious idea for literally decades, it's just taken until now before it was feasible to do.
>Can you elaborate?
http://geeknizer.com/what-apple-copied-webos-android-wp8-bb1...
There's plenty more. The chrome tab switcher one is the most obvious ripoff.
Then you can add phablets, mini-tablets, big screen phones. Apple for years attacked these devices. They put out an actual television commercial saying any phone where your thumb couldn't reach the whole screen was a bad design. Steve Jobs famously said mini-tablets "should come with sandpaper, so users can file down their fingers"
Then they got up on stage and gave a ludicrous political talking point excuse as to why they had not produced a big screen phone prior to the iPhone 6+ by saying that "big screen display tech wasn't ready yet", absurd because Android devices had been shipping high-DPI Retina-quality displays 2 years prior, displays that when evaluated by DisplayMate often ranked as good or better than the small iPhone display.
The reality is, they had an institutional bias against larger and heavier devices, and got caught with their pants down when they found out that many people, especially in Asia, loved giant phones. Prior to that, Apple fan forums were full of people saying racist things like Asian hands are too small for big phones.
Or how about multi-tasking windows? They criticized that, and then copied Windows Mobile's split-screen snapping identically for the iPad Pro, it was so obvious that Walt Mossberg instantly gasped and called it out during their presentation.
>Apple Photos does it all on-device.
Does it worse, costs more, and the majority of users aren't aware, and don't care. "It's been an obvious idea for literally decades, it's just taken until now before it was feasible to do." Right, everyone else's idea is either obvious, or the innovation to implement it doesn't matter at all. Leaving aside that what you call "feasibility" wasn't just about compute power, but also required conceptual leaps to improve quality as well as ImageNet. It wasn't until CNNs and ImageNet, that the leap was made and quality started to get dramatically better to the point that it was worth shipping to users. And it wasn't until Google shipped it at scale and got industry applause for making photo management dramatically easier and hassle free, that suddenly they had to fast follow.
This is the problem with arguing with Apple loyalists. The constant hagiography. I work for Google, and I criticize the hell out of the failures and missteps Google makes. It is not perfect and I have no problem pointing out it out.
But it seems arguing with Apple fanboys is like arguing with a political pundit on a Cable news network. Their goal is to defend the image of their target no matter what.
Apple copies stuff. Sometimes they innovate, sometimes they just copy what is already proven to be a success without anything but superficial changes.
Going back to my original point, the constant minimization of other people's innovation and achievements, and the boosting of every Apple announced feature as if it's a breakthrough innovation, rubs people the wrong way, and that's why you see people pointing out hypocrisy.
I've been in this industry since the 80s. The marvelous iPhone you hold in your hand today is also the result of a long litany of achievements of others, Apple stands on the shoulders of giants.
Which is generally a response to itself being sued constantly over the iPod.
Apple tried to ban other companies from using GUI, claiming ownership of the concept. Of course, they themselves got the idea from Xerox, which got the idea from SRI/Englebart, which got the idea from Sketchpad (Ian Sutherland), which got the idea from Memex/Vannevar Bush all the way back from 1945. There's a continuous lineage of which Apple was a part of and clearly pushed the field further from military and corporate R&D to consumer, but did they deserve to own a monopoly on it?
