Roger Fingas
Business magazine Fast Company on Tuesday selected Apple as its "Most Innovative" company of 2018, spanning 350 enterprises and 36 categories.
The magazine noted that "for a company slagged for not having had a hit since the iPad in 2010," the company did pretty well in 2017, reaping high sales of AirPods and the Apple Watch Series 3, and praise for offerings like ARKit and the iPhone X.
Although people tend to judge companies on their latest products, "creativity is more than skin deep," Fast Company continued.
"Apple's approach to the hardware and software engineering that creates its experiences has never been more ambitious," it said. "Other makers of phones and tablets buy the same off-the-shelf chips as their competitors. Apple, by contrast, designs its own chips — so an iPhone packs a processor designed specifically optimized for Apple's operating system, apps, display, camera, and touch sensor."
The magazine also cited things like CareKit, Apple Music, and "major inroads" in artificial intelligence, the last including examples like optimizing battery performance and favoring on-device processing instead of the cloud.
AI has actually been one of the sharpest criticisms of the HomePod, Apple's first smartspeaker, since Siri doesn't offer as many functions — or as much flexibility — as voice assistants from Amazon and Google.
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Wesley Hilliard
AppleInsider Staff
Andrew Orr
Amber Neely
William Gallagher
49 Comments
And yet you have traditional trolls saying that Apple has innovated in years and then all the new-age trolls saying that Apples doesn't care about "real" pros anymore.¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Link is here for those curious souls. Didn't see the proper one within the AI article.
https://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2018
Apples efforts on the lower level stuff, while not so headline grabbing as an OLED screen or new form factor, is putting them leaps and bounds ahead of their competitors. SSD custom controller (I forget the exact name), APFS, A-series chips, various continuity features. My new iMac unlocks with my watch, calls and messages come up on screen ... no configuration, no third party software to install or keep updated ... it all just works. In particular the ability for new devices to just be configured automatically with my wireless network and icloud account is extremely posh feeling. I think a few years down the road other tech companies are going to all the sudden realize they are so far behind the curve there will be no real way to level the playing field no matter how many dollars they are willing to burn trying. All this is to say it is nice to see Apple getting it's dues for once, instead of the ever spouted narrative of analysts and the tech media, in general, that Apple isn't innovating and therefore doomed!!!
But I thought they were doomed.... maybe next quarter