When I listen to Apple keynotes, I sometimes cannot help but shake my head. Apple is so excited about their new “innovations” that they seem to ignore the fact that some of what they announce closely resembles products other vendors have been selling for a while now. Today Apple introduced a new iPad with its gigantic 12.9 inch screen. For $99 they will even sell you an Apple Pencil. Oh, they even have a “revolutionary” new keyboard for the iPad that magnetically snaps in using magnets. Does any of this remind you of Microsoft Surface? These are no doubt great products and I am sure they improve the iPad experience tremendously, but let’s be real about what is and isn’t innovative.
In all this “excitement” about the new iPad, one may almost miss the real innovations Apple introduced. As I am sure everyone would agree, TV experience for most people really sucks. Whether you’re using AT&T U-Verse or some other service, your set-top box is probably clunky and slow. Finding the right content and then navigating to that content is probably quite horrendous. No wonder so many people rather use their iPhones and iPads to consume video. Well, Apple just introduced something that promises to provide a great new TV experience the way probably only Apple could do. They just revamped their Apple TV product which now includes universal search across all the different content providers — whether that’s iTunes, Netflix, or HBO. The new Apple TV also includes Siri with seemingly easy way to find content and even a very cool way to show a short caption if you did not understand what someone in a video said. But perhaps the most important innovation for Apple TV is not something new at all. Apple is opening up this product to developers and creating a new app store for it. Lets face it, Apple products are fantastic, but much of the value and utility they provide comes from third party developers creating amazing apps. Now, Apple TV will get the same ecosystem and it will no doubt have incredible apps that create truly great TV watching experience.
Oh, BTW, Apple also introduced a new way to do multi touch called 3D Touch, which essentially detects how hard a user presses on a screen and provides certain actions based on that. For instance, I can press harder on a text message bubble that contains an address and iOS will show a preview of the map without ever leaving iMessage. Do the same thing on a photo (taken with iPhone 6s) and the photo will by default show an animation of few seconds before and after the photo was taken.
So, is everything Apple does truly innovative? I don’t think so. Do their products create amazing, second to none user experiences — absolutely. Perhaps that’s their innovation. It’s not the products per se. It’s not some cool new technology. It’s how they approach and package new user experiences is what is innovative about them.