if you are gong to compare transistors and and icons and so forth - sony, MS, Hitachi, Toshiba, etc, are all equally innovative. They all have R&D departments, all have secret plans, and all have come up with products that have altered the landscape of personal computing.

However, When looking at the current landscape of computing, There are few companies who have altered it more than Apple. Especially a company with ~ 12,000 employees (excluding the stores). Microsoft has ~90,000. Sony is a gigantic conglomerate, with divisions that fight each other for implementation. Read the articles that came out recently about tablets (the pet project of Bill) and the touch OS at Microsoft getting shafted by the office division. It was recently on daring fireball. I can never imagine anything Steve says is important getting shafted at apple because a dept head doesn't like it.

For a single company to bring computing to the masses with the Original Mac, properly introducing the stability of Unix to general computer users with Mac OS X, reshaping the entire music industry - not only in how music is consumed in the main stream, but also completely upend the distribution model, and is currently upending the entire wireless industry - it's very difficult for another company to have done so much.

Sony with the creation of the walkman, Playstation and Bravia Televisons, Microsoft with Windows 95 & Exchange servers, and many other things. but to have a company in the span of a few years upend two tangentially related markets is amazing. Bringing in Win 98, or shrinking down some laptops and calling them netbooks may earn you fame and money (or in the xbox's case, just fame) but a netbook is merely a laptop. Asus makes great gear. Good quality shit. But I would never compare them to Apple, in innovative terms.

to downplay the effect Apple has on the motivations of designers of Operating systems (Windows, Android, Palm) Consumer Electronics (Music Players, household gadgets) Computers (Particularly laptops) and the absolute superiority they command in making decent, understandable operating systems for their devices - the older Palm OS or the embedded OSes in RAZRs aren't winning any awards in user ease or consistency.

Apple brings difficult tech to the masses. Tech that other companies have issues implementing in a way that works for the "80%" of us. and taking an idea - a phone, an Mp3 player, a Computer, a tablet - and making it usable and accessible when it wasn't before is remarkable. Their marketing merely shows off the simplicity that it offers.

Those simplistic ideas - even if they are just "pressing a button" are the core of what makes Apple products different from the rest of the crowd - even if a few of those out there are technically better on paper.