Genuine question.
I know they were the scrappy startup doing different cool things. But, what are the most major innovative things that they introduced, improved or just implemented that either revolutionized, improved or spurred change?
I am aware of the possibility of both fanboys and haters just duking it out below. But there’s always that one guy who has a fkn well-formatted paragraph of gold. I await that guy.
Target display mode let you plug another computer into your iMac, hit a key sequence, and use your iMac as an external display.
Target disk mode let you hold a key sequence at boot and use your Mac like an external hard disk.
Force Touch is something I am not sure that was ever done outside ~the Mac~ Apple. I still love how the trackpad isn’t really a click, but a haptic tap that can occur at a configurable pressure, and does not occur at all when the device is powered off.
LiDAR in a consumer device was unheard of when it came out with the iPad Pro. At the time it came out, I was working in a lab where we used $160k velodyne LiDAR devices. To have one in a $1k tablet was amazing.
Force Touch was done outside the Mac.
They added it to the iPhone 6S then removed it after iPhone 8.
As someone who used to work for Applecare, TDM was a bit of a lifesaver on some calls!
It’s actually been around since the PowerBook — where it was called scsi disk mode.
The recent Surface laptop also use haptic trackpads. That said I feel like I’m in the small minority that absolute hates force touch which is a real shame because the pre-force touch trackpads was the best trackpads anyone has ever made. I can definitely feel the lack of movement when I use a force touch trackpad and it feels extremely uncomfortable to me. So much that a Macbook is completely unusable without a mouse for me.