The Apple Beat: 5 Technologies Apple pioneered that became tech standards

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Apple gets a lot of flack for dropping and discontinuing technologies from their products. They also get criticized for pushing new standards forward, some of these stick and the industry adopts them

They are known as much for their innovations as they are for their exclusions. Here are are some technologies that Apple pioneered which were eventually adopted by the rest of the industry.

USB - Apple’s iMac was a radical product. Not only did it look outlandish and unusual it also shed a number of technologies while introducing some new ones. USB or Universal Serial Bus was relatively new at the time with few peripherals available but it was a good option to ageing Serial and Parallel port standards. Not only is USB truly universal, it has evolved and has seen various generational changes with USB 3.0 being the emerging standard today.

Gorilla Glass - The super resilient and scratch-proof Gorilla Glass made by Corning first debuted in the original iPhone. Since then Gorilla Glass has been one of the key features of many mobile devices such as tablets, smartphones and even notebook screens. Originally a technology developed as far back as the 60’s, Corning recently announced that over one billion mobile devices use Gorilla Glass.

WiFi - Apple called it AirPort and it debuted with the original clamshell iBooks and the AirPort Base Station which was a hotspot that resembled a spaceship. A magical technology, AirPort made it possible to untether from an Ethernet connection in order to get true wireless Internet. WiFi has evolved, it is a standard feature on most portable devices and everyone from Starbucks to McDonald’s offers free connections to entice users.

Cloud Storage - Apple’s cloud services aren’t the greatest, but they were one of the first to offer a way to save files online with iDisk. From 2000-2002, iDisk was given free to all Mac users through the iTools service that later evolved into .Mac, and then after a name change in 2008, became MobileMe and eventually morphed into iCloud.

App Stores - The idea of buying software directly from a computer or a device was nonexistent before iTunes evolved into the App Store (for iOS) and then the Mac App Store for OS X. Now, Microsoft is starting to sell apps directly through Windows 8 and Windows Phone, same with Android and BlackBerry who now sell software directly as downloads on their devices.

These are jus a few of Apple's innovations that have become industry standards.