5 Apple Devices Made with Bought or Stolen Ideas

Ideas Apple Bought, Borrowed, and Stole

The most successful technological company ever may be apple. Steve Jobs is given the credit for most of these technological advancements, however, we take a closer look to discover the brains behind these inventions. You will be amazed at the discoveries made so far.

It would amaze you that in 2011, Apple made sales worth $128 billion, who are the brains behind this phenomenal success of the company?

The chief industrial designer of Apple, Jonathan Ive may be the brains behind lots of Apple’s products. In his own words, “I pay maniacal attention to where an idea comes from and keep notebooks filled with my ideas so it hurts to see Steve Jobs take credits for my ideas.” Steve Jobs has been attributed with the statement, “Picasso had a saying. Good artists copy, great artist steal and we have always been shamelessly stealing.” This statement was credited to Steve Jobs in 1996, but this must have been a misappropriation. Steve Jobs felt Samsung stole their ideas and won a law suit against Samsung for copying Apple’s ideas.

Apple Devices with Bought, Borrowed, or Stolen Ideas

In 2011, 16.8 million units of Apple Monitors were sold. This represents a 66% market share. In 1963, Stanford research institute invented the mouse. In 1970, Engelbart patented the mouse. While Jobs visited the Xerox Engineers at Palo Alto, he got inspiration for his mouse windows interface. The Icon Dock for managing application was developed by OS X, this was copied by Apple.

Windows Ideas Copied by Apple
– Finder Slide Bar
– Mac Path bar
– Back and Forward buttons
– Screen Sharing
– ALT+TAB through open apps

These products gave a revenue of about $17 billion in sales between 2005 and 2011.

1. The iPod is the most successful portable media player in the world, over 300 million units were sold. Apple admitted to stealing the concept from kane Kramer who developed a similar product in 1979 but never paid him anything for it. This product lead to a 74% peak in the US market share. The click wheel was copied from Nomad II Jukebox which was launched a year earlier. This product caused a total revenue of $41 billion in sales.

2. iTunes is the largest music vendor on earth with over 400 million active users. It was based on SoundJan developed by Deff Robbin and Bill Kincaid in 1999 and then purchased by apple in 2000. iTunes forms 70% of the download market. Ritmoteca was the first music online market that was launched in 1998, iTunes had lots of features similar to it. Over 16 billion songs were sold.

3. With over 250 million units sold, iPhone makes up about half of Apple’s revenue. It formed 24% of the smartphone market share. Touch screen technology was invented in 1965 by Multitouch and pioneered by Finger works, it was purchased by Apple in 2005.

4. The idea for name and logo for iOSS wireless syncing app was taken from developer Greg Hughes after it was rejected for iTunes app Store.

5. Samsung accused Apple for copying its “pinch to zoom” from diamond touch shown to some apple engineers in 2003. Samsung F700 was released at the same time with the iPhone 3 and its design interface was strikingly similar. iPhone brought apple a revenue of over $150 billion.

6. The iPad sold 84 million units exceeding the revenue of Mac in sales. It formed 70% of the tablet market. The first MS Tablet was developed and sold by Microsoft in 2002, many years before iPad. Roger Fidler claimed that Apple saw the prototypes of the tablet computer he was developing in 1981. Fujitsu of Japan developed a touch screen called the iPad. Mag-Tek had a number of encrypting devices called by the same name, both items were launched 10 years before Apple’s iPad. The iPad brought apple about $9 billion in revenue.

So in a single sentence, imitation is either the lowest form of competition or the highest form of flattery.