TSMC. They dominate the semiconductor market because they're consistently first to market with the world's most advanced chip fabrication.
replyBut they're an example of the same phenomeon; they were founded in 1987, long after chip fabrication was a thing. They just did it right.
replyI think it's hard to know where to draw the line between derivative product and something unique. If we follow your logic that TSMC hasn't done anything new, then aren't all computer manufacturers just rehashing the ENIAC or whatever? Is a Tesla just a better model T? No, arguably we would say that these products are new to market because they've integrated new technologies in unique ways and often expended massive capital on R&D to do so. TSMC is no different.
replyThey took extreme risks on EUV lithography and accumulated market share by being the first to shrink nodes.
replyAbsolutely not TSMC was and has always been a pure play “execution” of chip foundry, based on the government of Taiwan taking financial bets on a growing chip market.
replyIn no way was TSMC the first to market for chips or chip production or even any major chip fab product at its outset.
In fact they did exactly the Apple model and took what TI was doing and used government money to scale it. I don’t know a single unique product from TSMC
If anything Texas Instruments (which is I grew up around in Houston) could be considered actually building a good product from scratch, look at them now…
Depending on how you define "new" but there are certainly examples of this, Spotify is the first to come to mind, AWS could be another.
replyVision Pro.
replyA costly gamble for tech they really wanted that wasn't mature yet.
replyThey were still late, just not late enough.
replyDominating the market??
replyHonestly seems like a supportive argument. Yea, your amendment clearly shows Apple isn't always right/late, but Vision Pro is an example of them being early and how far they miss when they're early hah.
reply(I don't have a side in this discussion)
And I’d add that like AI, there was clearly a conflict inside Apple between people who wanted to be in the game and the people who correctly recognized that it wasn’t yet where most consumers wanted.
replyLike AI, the Vision Pro would have been a better product if Apple told the detractors to shut up and ship out. NPUs and AR are not going to sway consumers or compete for market share.
replyNevermind the godawful Liquid Glass UX they cooked up and imposed on everyone else...
Vision Pro failed
replyApple fails at every novel thing they try and crushes it at every thing they copy
The iPhone was revolutionary. There really was nothing like it at the time. The closest thing (the PDA) was _nothing_ like it.
replythere were tons of smartphones on the market prior to the iphone. i used several of them. mostly windows mobile devices that required a stylus or keypad for input. they had apps stores, web browsers, email, etc. copy and paste, which the iphone lacked at release. from a functionality stance there were many options very much like the iphone available. the interface on the iphone was nicer for most things, and it had a nicer web browser. not a different world of functionality at all, just a bit nicer overall but also with some big trade offs.
replyA world of difference. Completely different products.
replyThat doesn’t fit: Apple’s been experimenting with VR since the 90s and Vision Pro was hardly novel–well executed, but not novel. I think it’s more complex where you have to think about the products executives and Wall Street analysts want to exist providing pressure against the “is it good enough to buy?” response.
replyApple Watch.
replyThere were literally thousands of smart watches that were launched prior to the Apple Watch
replyGarmin anyone?
I think Timex and Casio even had ones in the 90s
Ok but "Business Email" wasn't exactly invented yesterday...
replyWhich is my point. They did basically nothing new internally and will be able to capture what...10-20% of overall business suite market?
replyThat’s genius