Take a step back and look at how you explain away everyone else's innovations as if they're nothing. "Subscription models have been around for a long time" Really? That's like saying "Online shopping has been around forever". Amazon clearly did something much better than everyone else, just as Spotify's (and Pandora's radio) subscription music service was a clear innovation on all of the services that came before it and that's why they exploded. Apple essentially adopted their proven business model by leveraging their control of the OS to pre-install and promote their service over a third party, while trying to undercut them because they can avoid their own App Store fee. "but it's not like Spotify invented the concept" Right, they didn't invent "subscriptions", but like Apple, they took a well known idea, and make a very user friendly service out of it.

>Can you elaborate?

http://geeknizer.com/what-apple-copied-webos-android-wp8-bb1...

There's plenty more. The chrome tab switcher one is the most obvious ripoff.

Then you can add phablets, mini-tablets, big screen phones. Apple for years attacked these devices. They put out an actual television commercial saying any phone where your thumb couldn't reach the whole screen was a bad design. Steve Jobs famously said mini-tablets "should come with sandpaper, so users can file down their fingers"

Then they got up on stage and gave a ludicrous political talking point excuse as to why they had not produced a big screen phone prior to the iPhone 6+ by saying that "big screen display tech wasn't ready yet", absurd because Android devices had been shipping high-DPI Retina-quality displays 2 years prior, displays that when evaluated by DisplayMate often ranked as good or better than the small iPhone display.

The reality is, they had an institutional bias against larger and heavier devices, and got caught with their pants down when they found out that many people, especially in Asia, loved giant phones. Prior to that, Apple fan forums were full of people saying racist things like Asian hands are too small for big phones.

Or how about multi-tasking windows? They criticized that, and then copied Windows Mobile's split-screen snapping identically for the iPad Pro, it was so obvious that Walt Mossberg instantly gasped and called it out during their presentation.

>Apple Photos does it all on-device.

Does it worse, costs more, and the majority of users aren't aware, and don't care. "It's been an obvious idea for literally decades, it's just taken until now before it was feasible to do." Right, everyone else's idea is either obvious, or the innovation to implement it doesn't matter at all. Leaving aside that what you call "feasibility" wasn't just about compute power, but also required conceptual leaps to improve quality as well as ImageNet. It wasn't until CNNs and ImageNet, that the leap was made and quality started to get dramatically better to the point that it was worth shipping to users. And it wasn't until Google shipped it at scale and got industry applause for making photo management dramatically easier and hassle free, that suddenly they had to fast follow.

This is the problem with arguing with Apple loyalists. The constant hagiography. I work for Google, and I criticize the hell out of the failures and missteps Google makes. It is not perfect and I have no problem pointing out it out.

But it seems arguing with Apple fanboys is like arguing with a political pundit on a Cable news network. Their goal is to defend the image of their target no matter what.

Apple copies stuff. Sometimes they innovate, sometimes they just copy what is already proven to be a success without anything but superficial changes.

Going back to my original point, the constant minimization of other people's innovation and achievements, and the boosting of every Apple announced feature as if it's a breakthrough innovation, rubs people the wrong way, and that's why you see people pointing out hypocrisy.

I've been in this industry since the 80s. The marvelous iPhone you hold in your hand today is also the result of a long litany of achievements of others, Apple stands on the shoulders of giants.