CareKit, hardware design net Apple 4th place on Fast Company 2017 'Most Innovative Compani...

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Apple was awarded fourth place in Fast Company's" Most Innovative Companies" list, as well as scoring highly in rankings for health-related products and consumer electronics.




When looking at Apple's main products, the publication acknowledged there would usually be discussions about whether the design of the iPhone 7 differed enough from the iPhone 6s, and if the MacBook Pro Touch Bar was a "radical rethink" of notebook usage. The internal hardware design and the company's software engineering efforts received more praise, as Apple's ability to mould the user experience "has never been more ambitious."

Apple's work on designing the chips for its own products is noted as a major difference between its methodology and that of other smartphone producers, with the rivals acquiring "the same off-the-shelf chips as their competitors." Designing chips specifically designed for iOS and attached hardware is said to have allowed Apple to get "so good at chip design" that the A10 Fusion used in the iPhone 7 "trounces rival processors in independent speed benchmarks."

For Apple's artificial intelligence research, Fast Company brings up the fact that Apple performs a lot of AI functions from the iPhone itself instead of relying on a data connection and remote servers, due to Apple's "privacy-driven decision" that limits what it can aggregate and analyze. Suggesting it "couldn't be any more daunting" in comparison to AI efforts from competitors, such as Google, the publication believes Apple isn't exaggerating when it calls devices like the iPad Pro "supercomputers."




This year's ranking on the main list puts Apple amongst other major tech giants, with Amazon, Google, and Uber ahead in first to third positions respectively. Snap takes fifth place behind Apple, with Facebook, Netflix, and Spotify also making the top ten.

The 2017 result is also an improvement compared to last year, where Apple placed seventh for its performance cracking the Chinese marketplace. In 2016, it was beaten by Amazon, Netflix, Uber, CVS Health, Facebook, and Buzzfeed.

On a list focusing on consumer electronics, Apple is once again beaten by Amazon and Google, but improves to third place due to the removal of Uber. Other notable inclusions in this category are Xiaomi in fourth, Microsoft in sixth, and IFTTT in tenth.

Apple's expansion into healthcare has also helped it reach second place on the Health list, beaten only by One Medical. Apple's inclusion on this list stems from CareKit, the platform introduced in March 2016 to allow healthcare organizations to aggregate medical data from patients for analysis, both for helping with treatment and for research.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,718member
    Maybe I am just getting jaded but I am getting pretty mind-numbed by how many awards there are these days whatever the industry.  Be it a beauty pageant for 6 year olds to this, they all just seem to me to be self-serving money making scams for the organizers.
  • Reply 2 of 8
    Amazon. 
    Number one in innovation?

    That's......a bummer. 
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 3 of 8
    Amazon. 
    Number one in innovation?
    I'd say their big innovations have been on the back-end, not consumer facing. Their cloud offerings and server infrastructure have expanded considerably, and they have been developing a lot of custom hardware, particularly in networking, and a lot of nice software to keep AWS running. Of course it's debatable if this deserves the 'most innovative' award, but they are certainly doing some impressive stuff. Platform-as-a-Service is a big and growing industry, and they are the leader.
  • Reply 4 of 8
    rob53rob53 Posts: 3,241member
    I look at the list and don't see anything innovative among all the companies listed except, of course, Apple. Apple actually produces products people buy and use. The other companies sell advertising and undercut regular stores with nothing innovative unless you accept loss leader marketing as innovative. Uber is just another taxi service and its only innovation is being unregulated. 
    StrangeDayswatto_cobra
  • Reply 5 of 8
    MacPro said:
    Maybe I am just getting jaded but I am getting pretty mind-numbed by how many awards there are these days whatever the industry.  Be it a beauty pageant for 6 year olds to this, they all just seem to me to be self-serving money making scams for the organizers.
     Care to explain the scam further?
  • Reply 6 of 8
    It's nice to have something that counters the anti-fans who claims apple doesn't innovate, can't innovate, Cook isn't Jobs, yada yada...
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 7 of 8
    GeorgeBMacGeorgeBMac Posts: 11,421member
    sog35 said:
    afrodri said:
    Amazon. 
    Number one in innovation?
    I'd say their big innovations have been on the back-end, not consumer facing. Their cloud offerings and server infrastructure have expanded considerably, and they have been developing a lot of custom hardware, particularly in networking, and a lot of nice software to keep AWS running. Of course it's debatable if this deserves the 'most innovative' award, but they are certainly doing some impressive stuff. Platform-as-a-Service is a big and growing industry, and they are the leader.
    I would not consider running a cloud as innovative.


    True...   IBM was doing it back in the 80's.   It was called "Mainframe" back then.

    But, unlike Apple's current competitors, like the old IBM mainframe, Apple's cloud appears to have some reasonable semblance of security.
    edited February 2017
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