> Sometimes it takes an outsider to come in and build with no preexisting design or engineering prejudices (or even overt knowledge) to change the world.
Yes, this is probably the main reason why Apple was willing to spend extra time and effort reinventing the wheel rather than hire some experienced smartphone engineers. This decision may have been influenced by the experience of the Lisa project, where the influence of engineers from HP has often been blamed for some of the shortcomings. (Mind you, on the other side of the coin the Macintosh barely survived the conviction that a hard disk or more than 128KiB of RAM were unnecessary, a mistake which seems to have been based in the Apple II background of the Mac people.)
(It's not a uniqutely Apple practise either. In the heyday of Japanese electronics companies, several times a firm made a successful leap into an area which was completely new to them, often into a technology which was still in a very early stage or already had strong players or both. See /We Were Burning/ http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electron... .)
Yes, this is probably the main reason why Apple was willing to spend extra time and effort reinventing the wheel rather than hire some experienced smartphone engineers. This decision may have been influenced by the experience of the Lisa project, where the influence of engineers from HP has often been blamed for some of the shortcomings. (Mind you, on the other side of the coin the Macintosh barely survived the conviction that a hard disk or more than 128KiB of RAM were unnecessary, a mistake which seems to have been based in the Apple II background of the Mac people.)
(It's not a uniqutely Apple practise either. In the heyday of Japanese electronics companies, several times a firm made a successful leap into an area which was completely new to them, often into a technology which was still in a very early stage or already had strong players or both. See /We Were Burning/ http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electron... .)