Apple changed everything? Yeah, right.(www2.macleans.ca) |
Apple changed everything? Yeah, right.(www2.macleans.ca) |
To the extent that all of Apple's ideas in GUIs, mobile devices, music retailing, physical stores, and so on are all "obvious" or "inevitable," Apple's success has been in executing on those ideas with overwhelming competence.
It may sound banal to say that all Apple does is execute competently. But experience with startups shows that executing competently with new products and creating new markets is heinously difficult. And without that execution, progress happens glacially if at all.
I would imagine a lot of startups find themselves in a situation where people simply aren't ready for the solution that is brought to the table.
Additionally, the state of Newton's handwriting recognition was immature.
I'd imagine the iPad got far, far more publicity than the Newton in its day.
(which is not to say Apple has never had an original idea in their life)
However, the problem is that after Apple does this, and then everyone and their dog copies it, a few years later, people pretend like it wasn't Apple who actually had the idea, developed it, solved all the problems and then brought it to market!
Its as if, because there's an android phone on the shelf, there was nothing new in the iPhone.
This is some form of post hoc ergo proctor hoc history!
Laptops existed before Powerbooks. MP3 players existed before the iPod. Smartphones (remember Handspring?) existed before the iPhone. In fact, one could argue that Apple is amongst the last into a market for a good reason: being last allows you to learn from the mistakes of others and see which approaches are dead-ends.
The early bird might get the worm, but its the second mouse that gets the cheese.
1) Their core technology, Google search.
2) The fact that they bought YouTube.
This isn't a very compelling summary of Google's concrete accomplishments, and I'm sure a much better one could be made. Even Google Docs is a better example of Google changing the way people communicate than "they bought YouTube". (YouTube itself is, of course, amazing, but they were established and very popular before Google, a fact that doesn't really fit the narrative as presented.)
The worst part of this article, however, is that it presents Apple's accomplishments as inevitable and Google's as miraculous, when you could just as easily argue the reverse. "Someone would inevitably have bought YouTube -- surely the fact that anybody can now share videos on the Internet is inevitable?" And the answer is, yes, someone would have, but the point is that Google did. In the same way, everybody can see, in hindsight, that the iTunes music store was inevitable, but Apple was the company to make it happen. Being first is only easy in retrospect.
What is the purpose of the post other than conveying the author's (for lack of better word) dislike of Apple?
I'm sorry if this sounds like fanboism but you shouldn't underestimate the change and the hard work here. Apple is the most innovative company in the world and so it should get credit for that. Even if you don't buy Apple products you should be happy that Apple is pushing the bars for simplicity and innovative products!
And I suppose we'd eventually have music players and smartphones without Apple. But the schedule of their appearance, and the elegance of their demonstration of possibilities, seem pretty important to the shape of those eventualities. We can learn a lot figuring out why the Wright Brothers were the first to "just" figure out pitch and yaw -- or we can ignore them and focus on aerodynamics, knowing that all breakthroughs happen eventually.
I'm going to be very interested in watching Apple's next ten years. One thing that I think Apple has always done better than everyone else is software, and as more and more computing power moves away from the desktop, software will become all the more important. I think Apple is going to become more and more software-centric, and it will be interesting to see whether it can stave off competition from licensed platforms when hardware becomes less relevant and margins start to decrease.
My point is that everybody has their own perceptions of what's important in this world. For Peter Nowak, apparently it's Apple. For Jesse Brown, it's Google. And that's fine ... in order for anyone to ever exchange money for goods they need to value what that good can do for them over the money in their pocket.
People should value things differently, otherwise all trade would grind to a halt as everybody hoarded the exact same shit. Ultimately .... what people value is really irrelevant ... but trying to rank Apple over Google, or vice-versa seems somewhat pointless to me ... especially since both companies are still plugging away throwing new things into the world to see what flies.
You can't change everything if everything refuses to change.
I've been mystified at the "Apple changed the world of X" memes but perhaps many of those things weren't common or even known about in the Apple proponent's world before Apple made such a big number about them. But to someone else it might seem ludicrous to say that Apple created this or that. A difference of perspective.
I think their secret is that they suck less than the competition. There's that little extra effort in the design and execution that doesn't give you gray hairs quite so often. If you want to stretch it a bit, Apple could make expensive and yet well selling fine washing machines for example. Most of the time when I do the laundry, I curse the Swedish or Korean ui designers to the lowest hell.
Oh yeah, Jonathan Ive. Damn.
Apple invented the GUI (using some ideas they licensed from Xerox), as part of a project that Steve Jobs led. The NeXT cube inspired the web to some extent and made the first browser much easier to write. Apple invented the touch UI. Hell, just listing the significant inventions of Apple is almost embarrassing because any list is going to leave so many of them off.
I credit Google for inventing page rank and for nailing web advertising. I won't even debate whether that is more significant than what Apple has done in just the last decade because doing so implies that some sort of one-upmanship has any point at all.
But, what significant inventions can we credit to Microsoft? HP? Dell? Lenovo? Samsung? Sony? The cell networks?
Lets step out of the world of computers, where Apple is somehow a controversial figure, and look at the world of movies. Steve Jobs bought Pixar from George Lucas for $6M of his own money (got from selling Apple stock) in 1986. At the time Pixar was just an effects shop for Lucas, but Ed Catmull et. al. wanted to make a feature. Jobs nurtured that company, tried to get it to at least break even (so it wouldn't break him) doing cutting edge commercials in the 1990s, until they finally got a break and got a deal with Disney. Pixar changed movies forever.
And they were able to do it because Steve Jobs had a perspective that even George Lucas didn't have. Lucas knew Catmull et al wanted to do features, but he didn't think it was viable. Jobs did, and put up what, at the time, was a significant portion of his net worth. And he stuck thru it during a number of thin years. All credit to the people at Pixar who actually made the technology and the movies-- but also credit to Jobs for letting them do it, with minimal interference.
It's not that Apple changed everything, its that Steve Jobs did.
I think attempting to deny this man-- one of the few genuine capitalist heroes-- the credit he is due is doomed to failure. You can't deny it, and trying to only reflects on yourself.
Google's use of link-based popularity metrics was truly revolutionary, in that it wasn't apparent by simply extrapolating existing trends in Internet search engines.
I think it can. Around the time that PageRank was published, Jon Kleinberg also published the HITS (hubs & authorities) algorithm. There are some key differences in the way they work, and Page & Brin smartly went on to found Google around PageRank, but it was becoming evident in that period that hyperlink-based ranking was a smart thing to do.
Wow, I think your comment is a perfect illustration of one of the author's points and the reason he had to speak up in the face of people going too far in extolling Apple's virtues.
Apple makes fantastic products, but to compare any of them or even the aggregate of them (and I'm including the Apple II and the original Mac in this, both of which I think are actually bigger game changers than anything 1997+) to any single thing in the list you just rattled off is insanity.
Apple has changed the world of industrial design, sure, and they make wonderful products, but none of that is a real sweeping history-altering game changer.
Let's recognize the great 10 year run they've been on, but let's not get crazy about it.
I think the service Google has done to humanity by making information accessible to all and that easily is hard to match by any company today on earth. Apple makes pretty devices, and accelerated the smartphone revolution (which was already en marche with blackberry as the article say), but on the whole, Google reached and helped (and keep doing so today) much more people than Apple ever has. Not to mention the billions of dollars Google give to publishers from India to Peru helping them make a living, not to mention Android, youtube, blogger etc.
So yes, Google has changed the world much more than Apple in my opinion and experience here and everywhere I've been.
Sure, but if Google wasn't around they would probably be using Yahoo or AltaVista to get knowledge.
Comparing Apple to Google is not very interesting to someone who has watched Apple's entire historical arc, not just the past 5 years.
A very large part of the world population is still unaffected by Apple Products. MS for that instance has a much larger impact on the world of personal computing.
Apple did produce some incredibly cool gadgets, but that was about it. iPods and iTunes was probably insanely popular in US (and Europe), just like iPhones and iPads are today - but Microsoft has definitely penetrated at much larger depth and positively (and in some ways, negatively) affected a lot of them. And yes, I know the article is about last 10 years - but even in these 10 years Windows XP was (and in a large population, it still is) THE operating system to have; Office (2003 and 2007) are still used in every damn office.
Aesthetics - yes, Apple products has a huge impact and also to the build quality expectations from hand held devices. But it failed miserably in providing a solution that could be used by masses (It actually focused on a niche clientele, like the ones here). Nokia on the other hand provided devices to the masses - affordable and with insanely awesome build quality. They were not popular in US, but in Asia - buying a non-Nokia phone was considered stupid at one time.
And I am not a MS Fanboi; I am a Google Fanboi. Google is a verb now - Gmail is analogous to mail for most of my friends; youtube is the place we go to listen to music. Maps to get directions, Picasa for uploading pictures and Docs for collaborating on content. I am typing this from using Chromium browser and I had downloaded some libraries from Google Code to use in my Course Project. So the Roman analogy goes for Google, not Apple.
It seems the writer here is wearing blinders; it's fine if you're not a proponent of Apple Inc. that's 100% your prerogative, but if you're going to cherrypick which points stick and which don't so that the only thing that's left are the ones that directly support whatever point, well sorry.
Me either, but I also don't really understand the need to sanctify them, and I don't see how anyone could read this article as a denigration of Apple unless they've already made them sacrosanct in their heads.
Also, I don't think your history of Pixar is really correct. Lucas sold Pixar pretty much solely because he needed the money because of his divorce. It isn't that he thought Pixar making features was not viable, it is that he thought Pixar making features in 1986 was not viable, which clearly it wasn't. What makes you think he would have been opposed to them making features once the world was ready for it? George Lucas, for better or for worse, is one of the biggest proponents of all-digital movie making. One could easily make the case that Pixar features with Lucas as the CEO would have suffered from his meddling in ways they didn't with Jobs as the CEO, but that is purely speculation.
For the past 30 years I've been reading people denigrating Apple based on innumerable falsehoods and misrepresentations. Ever since the Apple II had competition, there have been fans of competing systems who felt the need to attack Apple, at that time, because it was the dominant system. During the windows era, because Windows fans felt vaguely insecure about the computer they were talked into by a salesman, and nowadays, by google fans because they want to believe that it is ok for google to rip off the iPhone and give away a counterfeit operating system. All of these people have both a motivation to denigrate Apple and, since they know that Apple is one of the few genuinely innovative companies in the industry, they end up having to make up stories to try and make Apple's innovations less significant than they are.
One of the ways people denigrate Apple is to pretend like there is really no difference in usability or performance of Apple products, while also claiming that they are more expensive (even when they aren't) and thus that anyone who buys them is obviously a victim of a Reality Distortion Field. For these people they cannot debate the purely pragmatic reasons that people choose Apple products, and so they attempt to portray Apple users as part of a cult, and often speak using religious terminology.
Ironically, it is those who talk about the "Reality Distortion Field" who have actually substituted ideology for pragmatism, otherwise they'd have pragmatic arguments to make.
This is why people feel the need to "denigrate" Apple -- people have serious misconceptions about the history of computing, resulting in a new history in which Apple is penciled in as the creator of everything. Their contribution to the history of computing is significant, but claims that they "invented" all these things give too much credit to Apple and too little to the companies and researchers who had the same ideas but lacked the resources, capitalist desire, or business acumen to profit from them.
See raganwald's comment regarding execution: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2934813
You're right that there are a lot of serious misconceptions about the history of computing, but they are all on the side of the people who claim that products that came after Apple's products are proof that Apple didn't invent the category, etc.
As for companies that lacked the "desire", or "resources" to invent these things, well, they don't deserve any credit because they didn't invent them.
You seem to be operating under the misconception that inventions are just ideas... and you would do well to read the ragenwald comment you link to, where he notes that ideas without execution are nothing. Apple did invent these things because they took them from ideas-- which are easy-- thru the hard part of solving all the problems with the idea-- to fruition. All those people who didn't bring anything to fruition didn't earn any credit.
Just as those people who copied Apple's products didn't invent them either.
Frankly, I find it kind of amazing that people who clearly have very little knowledge of this history of computing will repeat these myths-- myths debunked over 30 years ago!-- and patronizingly claim that people who are debunking the myths are operating under "misconceptions".
It's like trying to talk to a non-technical person who heard someone from some pimply kid over at Best Buy and therefore they think he's an expert and you, with the CS degree don't know nearly as much about computers... but of course, they don't know anything either, so they just see him as an authority figure because hell, he's 17, and he works at Best Buy, right? Sigh.
> Apple invented the GUI
No, they didn't. Xerox invented the GUI. You seem to be aware of Xerox's role, so I can't figure out why you'd assert that Apple making use of those ideas later would then constitute them "inventing" the GUI.
> NeXT cube inspired the web
That's stretching things, to say the least. The early web was a fairly incremental step from Gopher. Sure, Tim Berners Lee used a NeXT machine, but it's not like CERN wouldn't have had networked, GUI-based UNIX computers if it weren't for NeXT.
> Apple invented the touch UI.
Huh? Touch interfaces have been used for ages. The restaurant that I worked at in high school in the mid-90s had one on its cash register. Apple didn't even produce the first touch-screen phone.
Similarly, Google's "invention" of PageRank was pretty incremental. It was a refinement of Jon Kleinberg's idea for using link-based search ranking.
Most innovations, when looked at under a magnifying glass, turn out to be more or less incremental. Apple's had some really impressive instances of refining, marketing and popularizing. That said, most innovation is really just refinement.
Have they been the most influential company of the last decade? I think it's too early to tell, but I seriously doubt it. That's something that's clearer in the history books. We're probably looking in the wrong places completely. It seems totally plausible to me that the human genome being sequenced in the last decade will trump e.g. mobile internet in its long-term effects on society.
If any of Apple's innovations will pan out as having been truly disruptive to society, I'm pretty sure it will have been their first. Their role (along with their contemporaries, most notably Commodore) in popularizing personal computing is one of those truly game changing moments in history. My life was radically changed when my family got a computer. In contrast, when I got my first smart phone (considering the fact that my non-smart phone already had Google maps, Skype, a web browser and IMAP client) virtually nothing changed in my life.
(As a side note, there hasn't been anything that Google's done thusfar that I'd nominate for being society changing. Web search was already prevalent and the research that led to PageRank was already out there. Google Books, Street View and their work on autonomous vehicles seem like they might be some of those things in retrospect.)
> Xerox invented the GUI
Not really either. Engelbart has show mice and windows before the PARC folks. I remember people dragging stuff with light-pens on IBM's 2250's and other similar GUI-like behavior on high-end CAD and image manipulation software. Was the Star close to what Apple offered? Yes. Was Star clunky in comparison? Yes. It was also 3 times more expensive. I think the single most meaningful innovation in Lisa was the mouse drag actions and the clipboard metaphor. They made a convenient bridge between physical and virtual objects that took windows & icons one step further.
> The early web was a fairly incremental step from Gopher
It reminds me more of local-based hypertext and SGML. From that to HTTP, it's a very easy jump.
> Apple didn't even produce the first touch-screen phone.
Indeed. I owned a Sony Ericsson P-800. It was multi-tasking, had a huge touchscreen and, when I first saw the iPhone, I felt it was very "meh". Nice animation, beautiful icons but I had a more functional phone. And the honor of the first touch-screen smartphone belongs to the IBM/BellSouth's Simon. Unless you count Esslinger's concepts (they show a touchscreen desktop phone that predated the Simon).
And yes. I agree that Apple's most revolutionary product was the Apple II, but it must share the spotlight with Commodore, Atari and Radio Shack. The Apple II is (or, at least, should be) a source of inspiration for engineers: it's simple, small, concise and incredibly rich in functionality.
> there hasn't been anything that Google's done thusfar that I'd nominate for being society changing
An open-source post-PC OS seems quite impressive. Helping move data into web apps, dooming local storag, too.
GUI Networked personal computers Object Oriented Programming
Source: http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Comp...
Seriously, that book is a must read for any person that reads this site. 3 dollars for a used copy. And Apple did not license anything GUI related from Xerox - there was a lawsuit involving the lack of licensing the technology.
You know what rubs me the wrong way? I am a geek - I love it when the geeks get the credit for making things work and the marketing people just get the credit for the shiny veneer. Woz is the geek here and I feel like he doesnt get the credit he deserves. Anybody know where Woz worked before Apple? HP - he took the risk of leaving a well established company and joined forces with Steve Jobs. I am not saying it didn't work out well for him but I think too many people forget about him and focus on the other Steve. Oh well. Oh yeah, I wrote this on my iPad and it took forever to compose. FWIW.
They put a computer in every home.
At any rate, I don't deny Microsofts massive commercial success... but that success is not itself an invention. If you meant the personal computer, it wasn't microsoft that invented it.
HP Excellent quality servers and network hardware. It's hard for that to be sexy because it doesn't have a touchscreen, but just because the masses don't know about it doesn't mean that they're an also-ran.
Dell Perfected mass-marketing of PCs, bringing computing costs waaaay down for everyone.
Lenovo Meh, they bought IBM's line of laptops only a few years ago. I notice that you studiously avoided the "so, what has IBM invented that's significant?"
Samsung Dunno, I'm sure someone will come up with something.
Sony Yeah, Sony have never pushed the envelope with things like the Playstation. Combined with Microsoft's Xbox, these guys have pretty much created a massive market where previously there was none. Not to mention the bunch of other stuff that the multi-tentacled Sony has done.
The cell networks I was unaware that we were looking to service providers to change the way we use computers.
The reason why people denigrate Apple is because Apple fans invite it. They keep on about the company like it's something amazingly special and everyone else is somehow daft for choosing something else. I've seen this referred to as "the Apple Smug Field". You've done it here by saying (or strongly implying) "Apple is awesome, what have those other guys done? NOTHING!", which, of course, is monumentally self-centred and irritating.
But it is worth noting that I was genuinely asking a question. It is easy for me to think of the innovations I named (and many more) from Apple, and the ones I named from Google, but off the top of my head, in the areas of mobile phones, tablets and personal computers I can't think of any from those other companies... and wondered if I wasn't missing them... so, by all means, if you have some significant innovations to bring up, I'd be happy to hear them.
Notice that handwriting recognition was not part of ipod/iphone/ipad/ios. Rather than continuing down that path, Apple went in a different direction altogether.
I replied to nirvana about how the word inventing does not mean anything. And yet he and you kept on debating on minutiae. Many techie people from India look up to MS and Google as opposed to say Apple or Amazon, partly because their influence is more apparent, so I understand your affinity for them. But attributing invention or success to something which can be attributed to random events and network effects, is a bit off by standards here.
I did not down vote anyone, just making a general comment. Things are never so black and white, grab a good book, read some scientific (non-CS) papers, you will probably have a broader perspective. I would recommend starting with the massive bibliography at the back of The Black Swan (Taleb).
Now, the Macintosh was a far more impressive execution of those ideas than either of its predecessors, but to say Apple "invented" the GUI, and to downplay Xerox's contribution, is unfair.
I'm not saying this because I'm "invested" in any product or company; I owned a 512-K Mac, I covet my wife's MacBook Plus, but I don't find identification with any particular company's fictional narrative a useful way of discussing technology or history.
You could even go with the automobile, the assembly line, the light bulb, the telephone, and any number of frequently misattributed inventions and innovations if you need to move outside modern technology to see the point.
I think you are being intentionally dense. We all know what is meant by "making technology usable" is "making technology usable - for muggles" ;)
Apple's triumph has been in making technology less aggravating. And that's something that most people can readily appreciate.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch#History [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#History [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_i...
That being said, your links are not authoritative, nor do they even address what I said.
That is very much like believing in Flying Spaghetti Monster. It's logically irrefutable, but sounds absurd.
[Edit: Spell]
I'm no Apple hater. I just want to keep an appropriate perspective. They've made some VERY good products, but over the last decade, their focus has been more on "putting together a complete product in a slick, well-made package" than on "making life-changing leaps". There's nothing wrong with that, but don't mistake it for something it's not.
The idea that an arby's touchscreen means Apple didn't invent anything with the touch UI is so dishonest that it boggles the mind that you could say it in public with a straight face, seriously. The only motivation for doing so is either that you're really uninformed about this stuff and are just repeating what you've heard from Apple haters, or you're an Apple hater.
Seriously. This is Hacker News. This is not uninformed barely-computer literate consumer news. If we can't be honest about the major contributors to computer science here, then the site is completely lost.
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The Altair 8800 was a kit computer, which could also be ordered preassembled. The Apple I had a fully assembled circuit board, but still required assembly of other components. The TRS-80 and Apple II were both fully preassembled, and contemporary with each other. It's fair to say that Apple was an important player in the move toward personal computers, but I don't think it's fair to say they invented them.
AFAIK, Xerox was the first company to use an actual GUI, on the Alto (none of what Stanford did before would qualify as a "GUI", IMO.) Apple's Lisa was a big step forward for the GUI, adding things like window controls and menus. Again, Apple was an important player in the move to GUIs, and pioneered several specific GUI elements, but it's not fair to say they invented the GUI.
And, of course, both of these inventions are well over a decade old; when speaking about companies that "changed everything" between 2000 and 2010, they're not relevant.
Your references to "the touch UI" are confusing. I'm not aware of any product with that name. My best guess is that you're referring to some specific detail of iOS -- multitouch, perhaps? Without clarification, I don't really know how to respond to this particular point, or even if it needs responded to. Apple certainly put together a nice UI, and probably invented several specific conventions in doing so; I'm just not sure what in particular you think is revolutionary or needs to be acknowledged.
And pardon me, for coming off as arrogant, but I hate to see trivial fights here when you are missing the bigger picture.
Here you go too far. You don't have to like Android, MeeGo, or any other non-Apple OS, but calling any of them counterfeit is highly inaccurate. Google isn't stealing Apple's software and repackaging it as their own.
In the form of the oft-used car analogy: you're accusing Hyundai of selling "counterfeit" cars because they slightly resemble a Jaguar.
Before the announcement of the iPhone the Android phones looked a whole lot like blackberries. Google didn't spend 7 years coming up with a multi-touch operating system, and the underlying technology. They spent one year copying what Apple did, right down to the icon placement, and then started licensing it to manufacturers who sell it to consumers who genuinely think they are getting iPhones.
I know google fans don't like to admit this, and so they claim that because in the past there was a touch screen somewhere, therefore, Apple didn't invent anything, but the standards of law are much higher and disprove this claim.
This, in and of itself, is a sign of how innovative Android is, under-the-hood. Google and everyone else saw the iPhone at the same time. Google took one year to have a baseline-credible iPhone competitor ready. Palm took two (and they had the advantage of starting over from scratch). Microsoft took three. Nokia took four (so long they eventually killed the platform and have embraced Microsoft). RIM still hasn't gotten there.
Even though most people don't realize it, being a fast follower isn't easy. The Android team planned for their OS to be flexible and retargetable from the start. You can see it in their architecture, some of their lower-level features (e.g. Intents, input frameworks) and you can see it in the speed of their "iPhone pivot".
Are you delusional or just trolling? If the latter, I'd suggest a more subtle approach in the future.
I'll understand if you've forgotten all of these. After all, when a software patent only inconveniences people making Free Software, it doesn't really count as "bogus and a bad idea," right?
I love how in one breath Apple fanboys call Android a copycat and in the next claim it's so much harder to use than iOS. Which is it?
To suggest that this kind of algorithm is something special and new that Apple invented for the iPhone is just plain insulting.
The Apple and Lisa groups were unquestionably influenced by PARC, but a lot of the innovations that are used in today's GUIs come from Apple: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
That's something you'd probably never do, but for millions of people, that's how they know how to get to Facebook.
I'm neither delusional, nor am I trolling. I'm just making an argument you don't like. I don't think its appropriate that you would characterize me in a derogatory way like that, because you're engaging in attacks to the person, rather than to the point, and I think that Hacker News should have a higher level of debate than that.
I'm not sure how you can say that with a straight face immediately after characterizing me in such a derogatory way in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2934973
At the very least, your putting words in my mouth so I don't have to defend them.
The modern GIF format, GIF89a, used a compression algorithm called LZW. This algorithm was patented by a company named Unisys. Unisys threatened ISPs and large websites with legal action if they didn't agree to license the patent. This directly led to the creation of the PNG format as a free and open alternative.
S3TC, the S3 Texture Compression algorithm, is patented by a group of graphics vendors known as S3, and licensed to Microsoft under terms which let MS sublicense it under the name DXTC, (DirectX Texture Compression). The patent holders have been very mean about enforcement, and the patent is broadly written, so it applies to nearly every possible S3TC implementation, software or hardware. To this day, MS still makes money off of every graphics card sold, from licensing fees, and free 3D libraries, like Mesa, cannot safely ship S3TC decoders for fear of legal repercussions.
h.264 is covered by a big portfolio of patents, held by MPEG-LA (Motion Picture Experts Group Licensing Authority). They have been very proactive about getting licensing fees any time they can, and using fear tactics to suppress free codec libraries like x264. One member of MPEG-LA is Apple, by the way. That's right, Apple has been conducting patent warfare since before the conception of Android. (Since I'm expecting a [citation needed]: x264 development started in 2004 at the latest; Android was acquired by Google in 2005.)
It's very much like how Apple invented PC but MS revolutionized and captured the market. I am giving due credit to all parties; you are omitting/trivializing all the conceptualization that went into an earlier concept - the ones that Apple's products were based upon.
This is a lie that you really shouldn't be perpetuating. This isn't a question of opinion, but of historical fact, an you are telling a falsehood. There's no debating it.
