INNOVATION
SPECIAL MOST
INNOVATIVE COMPANY RANK
NO.11 Apple
Apple is best known as the maker of the
iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, but it is underappreciated for its work in
designing the chips that power its devices and allow them to be ever more
powerful. Its A12 Bionic chip's 6.9 billion transistors lets it perform
much faster than its predecessors while consuming less battery power. It also
gives Apple the horsepower to enable itself and developers to explore the
vanguard in photography, augmented reality, and machine learning.
For a company slagged for not having had a
hit since the iPad in 2010, Apple had a notable 2017: Its wireless AirPods
became ubiquitous around the country; the Apple Watch Series 3 is a
best-seller; developers embraced ARKit, its AR framework; and even skeptics
were blown away by the iPhone X. Apple became the world’s most valuable
company by being its preeminent maker of computing devices, from those you
stick on a desk (Macs) to ones you strap to your wrist (the Apple Watch). So
when people talk about the company as a creative force, they tend to assess its
newest devices and judge how strikingly they improve on their
predecessors.
But creativity is more than skin deep—and
Apple’s approach to the hardware and software engineering that creates its
experiences has never been more ambitious. 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 company has gotten so good at chip design that the A10 Fusion
inside the iPhone 7 trounces rival processors in independent speed
benchmarks.
Apple has also made major inroads in
artificial intelligence, an area where the competition from companies such
as Google couldn’t be any more daunting. For
instance, it uses AI techniques to wring as much life as possible out of the
iPhone’s battery. Because of Apple’s privacy-driven decision to limit the
amount of information it aggregates and analyzes in the cloud, it also does
much of its AI right on the devices rather than using massive server farms.
When it calls machines such as the iPad Pro “supercomputers,” it isn’t
exaggerating.
The company has been expanding beyond its
traditional consumer electronics roots and is growing an entertainment
business with Apple Music and Apple TV. In March 2016, Apple announced
CareKit, an open-source platform that makes it easier for developers to aggregate
and share patients' medical information with their caregivers—all with consent.
Since its launch, CareKit has already been used to make apps to help patients
manage diabetes (One Drop), monitor depression (Iodine), track reproductive
health (Glow), and record asthma symptoms (Cleveland Clinic). Apple's approach
to health is to operate behind the scenes by helping researchers, patients, and
developers to make use of the health data they're collecting via a smartphone.
Cofounded in 1976 by the revered tech
entrepreneur and inventor Steve
Jobs and engineer Steve Wozniak in Cupertino, California, Apple
has continually revolutionized the consumer electronics industry. The company
helped usher in the age of the personal computer in the 1980s with the sleek,
affordable Macintosh; bolstered the age of digital-music listening with the
iPod and iTunes in 2001; and laid the groundwork for the current smartphone
landscape with 2007's iPhone and iOS operating system. Under Jobs's
purview as Apple's CEO from 1997 until shortly before his death in 2011, the
company became known for its intense focus on design. The British
designer Jony Ive, who was hired in 1992 and later
became Apple's chief design officer, is largely responsible for much of the
company's iconic visual appeal: sleek (often white) minimalis.
No comments:
Post a Comment