I'm a bit tired of hearing Mac fans complain about Apple's ideas being "ripped off" by others (whether it's Vista, Linux or whatever).

First of all, most of OSX is derived from the actual work of others (Mach, BSD). Apple did a fair amount of work in the GUI but the core of the system consists of millions of lines of code written outside of Apple. This is all fine. What I find aggravating is when Mac fans bitch about people "stealing" Apple's ideas. First of all, let's be clear: they are just ideas. Since Apple doesn't open source code, anyone who "copies" them must do so from scratch (contrast this with Apple using actual code from other people).

Secondly, many, if not most, of the ideas that Apple has "invented" actually have prior art that predates Apple's particular implementation by several years.

Let's cover a few of the currently popular ones Mac users seem certain were ripped off from Apple:

1. The GUI (including all the key elements: mouse, window, menu, icon, etc). Invented by Xerox PARC and shown to Steve Jobs who immediately wanted to bring it to market.
2. The taskbar. It's part of the CDE spec. If you don't know what CDE is, it's because you're too young. Even KDE had a taskbar long before Mac. Apple's main contribution in this regard was to make it more annoying with flashy animations.
3. The desktop cube. I used 3Ddesktop back around 2002 on Linux. Pretty cool but used too many resources back then. I'm sure there's been several implementations and variations prior to that. It's not an original idea.
4. The iPod. Sorry, MP3 players have been in existence almost as long as the MP3. Apple's big contribution was to take another technology invented by someone else (IBM) called the microdrive and apply it in a patently obvious way. Oh, and they got to market first with this incremental improvement. I also seem to recall a product called a "Walkman" which used different technology but embodied many of the same ideas.
5. Podcasting. We used to call it "streaming" in the old, less-branded days.
6. White. Apple's marketing has made white the new black. Let's not forget that other companies (Gateway) had white (not beige) PC's and laptops back in the early 90's. Back then we called them "ugly". I'll grant that Apple does make slick hardware and if I packed a Powerbook around all day I'd probably have hairy palms too.
7. Arrogant, condescending users. Sorry, Unix had those years before Jobs and Woz had stopped doing laundry at their mom's house.
8. Marketers who claim their product somehow makes you sexy, young and hip. Apple's only real innovation here is having customers who actually believe it.

I'm not claiming Apple hasn't contributed to the modern PC at all. In fact, they have made huge contributions (much like Microsoft has) to bringing inexpensive hardware and software to the masses. They've also made improvements to existing ideas (like most of the ones I've outlined above). We'd be far worse off without them. I'm just tired of hearing Mac fans pretend that the contributions are a one-way street. Apple borrows as much from the rest of the world as the world does from them. That's a good thing.

Of course it would be nice if they gave back a little more than ideas (i.e. real source code), but ideas are valuable too. Just stop acting like they're somehow worth more than actual man-hours of programming.

[Update]

9. Safari/WebCore: I plain forgot this one. Safari is basically a port of Konqueror to OSX. It also serves as a fine example of Apple's interaction with the FOSS communities it rapes for source code: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1001

With the recent announcement that Apple's CalDAV server was built on Twisted and the following announcement that Apple had donated an Xserve to the Twisted project, it's become clear that Apple has some interest in Twisted.

Twisted isn't exactly the most popular framework on the planet, so I found this a little surprising but chalked it up to mysterious forces.

This morning I was showering and I was thinking about how lame it was to get an Xserve. I'd seen benchmarks that demonstrated that OSX simply is not there as a server OS. The blame is apparently to be placed on the overhead associated with spawning threads and processes on OSX under Mach. The performance of server processes like Apache and MySQL is terrible compared to Linux on the same hardware.

Then it dawned on me: this is undoubtedly the root of Apple's interest in Twisted: it's asyncronous, hence, no threads. I've done no benchmarks or even heard of any, but if Twisted is twice as slow as Apache on Linux, and Apache on OSX is five times as slow as Apache on Linux, then it stands to reason that Twisted on OSX is at least twice as fast as Apache on OSX.

Pure speculation of course, since I've neither seen nor done any type of benchmarks, but it's interesting speculation.

I must be in a particularly anti-Mac-enthusiast mood today. Somehow the web is conspiring to keep me in that mood because I ran across this ancient article and it irked me, particularly this section:

But perception matters. A small but vocal class of very-small-weinered[sic] self-proclaimed PC experts has been attempting to delegitimize the Mac ever since it came out. Surely you know at least one of these guys (and they are all guys):

• In the 1980s, they declared that graphical user interfaces were for sissies, dummies, and artists (and frequently insinuated that the three terms were synonymous). The Mac was overpriced and Apple was going out of business.
• In the early 1990s, they declared that Windows was just as good as a Mac, although experts would never be satisfied with less than a pure command-line interface. Discordantly, they declared the Mac “a toy”, but bemoaned that there weren’t any good games available for it.
• In the late 1990s, after everyone, including them, had switched to desktop-metaphor GUIs, they conveniently dropped their “real men stick with the command line” mantra, and instead proclaimed that Windows wasn’t merely just as good as the Mac, it was better. Or at least that it had better games. And Apple was going out of business.

Now, for reasons of full-disclosure, I'll state upfront that I was one of those people who thought GUIs were for wimps. Despite this, I happen have a huge wiener. Also, I've never thought Windows was better than anything except perhaps herpes.

But on to my response:

The reason GUI's were "for sissies" back in the 80's is because they didn't help you work more efficiently. Was it a problem with the GUI metaphor? Obviously not. The problem was that hardware was slow, memory was limited and quite frankly, very few applications from that era benefited much from a GUI. So the choices were: use a fast, efficient CLI or a slow, less-flexible GUI. Who would choose a GUI in this case? One group would be desktop publishers and graphic artists, but these folks were the minority. The other group was simply people too lazy, too stupid or too unconcerned to learn the most efficient way to accomplish a task.

Now, today, all this has changed. A CLI is still the most efficient for some tasks (i.e. remote server management), but for the most part, the GUI has caught up to the CLI in functionality, and more importantly, the hardware makes the computational inefficiency of a GUI practically unnoticable. Also the fact that all the commodity operating systems can multitask more-or-less successfully means having multiple windows is useful (I remember using Windows 3.1 solely because it allowed me to run multiple DOS windows simutaneously).

So, I'd argue it's not that "the GUI people were right all along and now the CLI people are tasting crow" so much as the way we compute has changed drastically and what was once a dumb idea now makes sense.

No doubt Steve Jobs is a visionary. But by definition, visionaries are ahead of their time and following them can make you look downright stupid.

Incidentally, remote server management is in this same boat today: stupid, lazy admins use remote desktops to manage their servers. Smart guys use SSH. Will that change? Probably, when 100Mb internet connections are commonplace and all the CLI tools have GUI equivalents. Will that make the stupid, lazy admins appear smarter or more efficient in retrospect? Only to them.