This is wrong for two main reasons.

First, everyone copies. In computing space, let me give you a funny example. Apple iOS home screen is a copy and evolution of PalmOS user interface, down to four buttons, pages, graffiti area and so on.

Palm's phone (Android running one) copies Apple Watch's user interface as home screen like a revenge, with a iPhone X-esque camera bump. Funny, ironic, real.

Second, Apple is a slow moving company. They don't rush things. They are the last company to move OLEDs on their phone, because they want to implement without any apparent flaws and with a long life. i.e.: My parent's Samsung A9 2018 phones have screen burn-in, but my iPhone X doesn't. They are at a similar age.

Like them or not, their engineering is solid and novel. At least give them that. My 18 year old Mac still boots despite being dropped (I fell on top of it) and bent badly, and gone through three batteries.

My 12 year old MacBook Pro still runs like day one despite being hammered for years for high performance computing, and its disk still shows ~10% wear.

Like every company, Apple makes mistake (these keyboards were bad, yes), but they are sometimes misunderstood (you can only charge that upside down, but charging it for 2 minutes gives you 8 hours of use, so get a coffee and flex at least).

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faishalmanzar 3 hours ago | parent [-]

As a mechanical engineer working in software, I think both fields have completely different philosophies of product development. In hardware, you give a lot of thought to potential failure modes and contingencies before building something, which takes time. In software, I’ve rarely seen a product whose first version is completely free of bugs. Shipping with some bugs and fixing them through iterations is standard industry practice, whereas it’s less acceptable in hardware.

I think Apple is more of a hardware company than a software company these days. They invested enough time, resources, and patience in ARM for it to now compete with the once-mighty Intel x86 architecture. That kind of progress requires patience, so I don’t think we can simply call Apple a slow company or say it isn’t innovating.

	▲	criddell 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> As a mechanical engineer working in software, I think both fields have completely different philosophies of product development. A sloppy mechanical engineer can be sued for malpractice and lose their license to practice. If they do something unethical they can't blame it all on management and could end up being held personally responsible with fines and even jail time. Sometimes I think it we might be better off if the same held for software engineers.
	▲	bayindirh 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Apple is always a hardware company first, they always have been. The software is supposed to be a reflection of their hardware perfection and passion (we can discuss this later). I didn’t use slow in a negative way. On the contrary, my context behind that “slow” was “patient, detail obsessed and immaculate”. Also I didn’t mean that they are not innovating. Again, they innovate and bake well, then release things, which is how I like my hardware. Thanks for your reply though. Seems like I missed the point I was trying to make by a mile.