Top Ten … Things people think Apple invented (but actually didn’t)
Apple makes some truly great products, but you'd be wrong in thinking it got there first with many of them
7. The Dock
If you’ve ever launched a program on a Mac, chances are you’ll have used the Dock. The floating collection of icons keeps your most used applications within easy reach, but don’t make the mistake of thinking this was Apple’s idea. It made its first appearance in Apple’s operating system with OS X in 1999, but Acorn had done the same as far back as 1987. Not only was it one of the fastest home computers available at the time, but the Archimedes had one of the first docks built into its Arthur operating system, a whole twelve years before Apple.
It might be primitive, but Arthur was light years ahead of the competition thanks to drag & drop support
6. The App Store
Apple hit a goldmine with the iPhone App Store, so it’s no surprise that its desktop operating system has just received a similar feature. However, based on the way it was talked about during the release of OS X Lion, you’d think Apple had invented the entire concept of a computer-based digital store. Software stores are nothing new, from the GetJar mobile library to Ubuntu’s software centre, both of which pre-date the App Store by several years.
Ubuntu has had a unified software centre since 2009, two years before Apple launched the App store for Mac
5. Multi-touch gestures
Apple has one of the best multi-touch implementations in the business, on both portable devices and laptops, but they didn’t invent the technology. As it has done numerous times in the past, it bought out the company that did it better and repackaged its designs as Apple’s own. Fingerworks had several great products on the shelves when Apple bought it out in 2005, but they were all pulled to make way for things like the magic trackpad.
Does the iGesture Pad look familiar? It’s practically identical to the Magic Trackpad
4. The Thinnest Laptop in the world
Everyone swoons over the MacBook Air. We know we’re guilty of this, as it’s one of the thinnest laptops around, but Steve Jobs wasn’t entirely justified in his claim that it was the thinnest laptop in the world when he first announced it. The Mitsubishi Pedion, released in 1998, was 18mm thick throughout, whereas the MacBook Air was 19mm thick at its widest point. Because the Air tapered to an incredibly thin 4mm, Jobs claimed it was now the thinnest. There’s been plenty of debate as to which should take the crown,
It might have had a paltry 233mhz Pentium processor, but the Pedion was thinner than the original Air