Apple's top technical feats of the decade

We're well into 2010 (OK, 4 days), but there's still a few more lists and "top tens" of the last decade to clean up. One of the more interesting Apple-related wrapups is this list by Fraser Spiers, showing off Apple's best technical feats of the past decade. There's certainly tons of technical innovations by Apple in "the naughties" to choose from -- it was the decade of the iPod and the iPhone. But Spiers' list actually avoids direct mention of either of those, instead choosing to highlight some more Mac-based technical feats. Bonjour is in there, as is the great Time Machine and Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch system. Webkit is probably an obvious choice, given all the places it's shown up in Apple's various releases.

And there are some more interesting picks on the list as well, including Aperture, the underrated Exposé, and even the unibody laptop design. Some might argue that a few of these aren't necessarily Apple's innovations (I wouldn't necessarily credit them with DVD burning and encoding in the 2000s), but it's true that all of these were brought into a widespread, acclaimed form by Apple. If nothing else, a list like this shows just how much Apple has done for personal computing in the last ten years -- we tend to think first, these days, of their handheld accomplishments, but they've had plenty of other technical feats as well.

[via Michael Tsai]

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Source: http://speirs.org/blog/2010/1/2/apples-technical-feats-of-th…

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We're well into 2010 (OK, 4 days), but there's still a few more lists and "top tens" of the last decade to clean up. One of the more...

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montex

Time Machine is great. So are Time Capsules. Unless you got one of the TC's that blows it's capacitors after 18 months and are left with a pretty white brick.

January 05 2010 at 8:24 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

bombaimer11

Apple has achieved many things in 2009,i wonder what will they bring now in 2010.

January 05 2010 at 10:10 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

waiownsyou

Let's not forget fails of the decade. I've never heard of creating a guest account that deletes everything lol

January 05 2010 at 10:05 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

tuaw,com

It's Fraser Speirs (not "Spiers").

January 05 2010 at 8:48 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

sc7

I don't agree with this whole list, but some of it is good. Here are a few things I feel need comment.

Bonjour - Nothing but zeroconf tweaked and relabeled. I can't give Apple credit for this.

Webkit - I'll give Apple credit for this. KHTML was good when they forked it, but they made it quicker and more compliant, and look at today's KHTML (Konqueror), compared to today's Webkit.

Time Machine - The technology, Microsoft has had for years (that's what this was about), though the interface was a fairly new invention.

Unibody Laptops - Definitely a revolutionary product of Apple's work.

Device drivers - Unless you have a Mini or Mac pro and want to use a webcam that's not Apple-labeled.

Rosetta - I really feel this should be more than an honorable mention. Even though apple technically licensed the translative technology, the implementation was perfect and was likely an important aspect for the success of the Intel transition.

Boot Camp - Give me a break, this is far from inventive/difficult.

Safari/iTunes for Windows - Give me a bigger break. These are the worst pieces of software on Windows, Safari on Windows is an absolute disgrace, and iTunes gets worse and more bloated with each version, yet the Mac versions of these programs are both pretty good.

January 05 2010 at 1:21 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to sc7's comment

Andrew TJ

Whilst the DNS wire formats and link-local IP auto-configuration don't originate from Apple, the spec for DNS Service Discovery and multicast DNS originate do and are arguably the meat of the Bonjour/ZeroConf stack.

January 05 2010 at 2:34 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jason

the decade doesn't finish until the end of this year, isn't this article a little early?

January 05 2010 at 12:29 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

5 replies to Jason's comment

Brian Allen

If you only knew if the back was good, because you don't know the quality of backup or if it is stable.

January 04 2010 at 10:07 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jeff Wheeler

Except, of course, Bonjour is just their implementation of an existing service, Zeroconf. And they didn't invent Webkit, so much as fork it from KHTML.

Time Machine's ideas weren't so innovative either. It's way more accessible, but older versions of files can also easily be archived in Windows, and Time Machine works almost identically (hard links between backups, simply) as tons of tools based on rsync, such as rsnapshot, which existed long before Time Machine.

January 04 2010 at 9:59 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Jeff Wheeler's comment

Quinn Taylor

Except, of course, that the guy who invented Zeroconf has worked at Apple since before he invented. Stuart Cheshire is the man, he's been doing no-config networking since the AppleTalk days, at least.

Also give some credit to the solid efforts which have thrust WebKit (nee KHTML) into the limelight and browsers on countless devices. Apple's efforts have been good enough to overshadow the original project and cause virtually everyone involved to work on WebKit instead. The WebKit team has made it possible to use WebKit virtually anywhere, not just on Linux, due to the abstractions they put in place. And it's now blazingly fast in comparison to where it was. Even Chrome uses it. :-)

January 05 2010 at 12:30 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply