Apple's top technical feats of the decade
We're well into 2010 (OK, 4 days), but there's still a few more lists and "top tens" of the last decade to clean up. One of the more interesting Apple-related wrapups is this list by Fraser Spiers, showing off Apple's best technical feats of the past decade. There's certainly tons of technical innovations by Apple in "the naughties" to choose from -- it was the decade of the iPod and the iPhone. But Spiers' list actually avoids direct mention of either of those, instead choosing to highlight some more Mac-based technical feats. Bonjour is in there, as is the great Time Machine and Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch system. Webkit is probably an obvious choice, given all the places it's shown up in Apple's various releases.
And there are some more interesting picks on the list as well, including Aperture, the underrated Exposé, and even the unibody laptop design. Some might argue that a few of these aren't necessarily Apple's innovations (I wouldn't necessarily credit them with DVD burning and encoding in the 2000s), but it's true that all of these were brought into a widespread, acclaimed form by Apple. If nothing else, a list like this shows just how much Apple has done for personal computing in the last ten years -- we tend to think first, these days, of their handheld accomplishments, but they've had plenty of other technical feats as well.
[via Michael Tsai]
