Who invented the iPhone?
The U.S. federal government did – according to U.S. House of Representatives Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is statements that echoed Barack Obama’s 2012 comments, “If you’ve got a business. you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
“‘Anybody here have a smartphone?’ Pelosi asked an audience at a Democratic National Convention Platform hearing in Washington, D.C.,” Aaron Kliegman reports for The Washington Free Beacon. “Pelosi then held up an iPhone for everyone to see, telling those in the room, ‘In this smartphone, almost everything came from federal investments in research.'”
“She then listed elements of the iPhone that various parts of the government have contributed to in certain ways,” Kliegman reports. “‘The list goes on and on. If you want to learn more, look at the Association for the Advancement of Science in America, and they have the full list,’ Pelosi said. ‘They say Steve Jobs did a good idea designing it and putting it together. Federal research invented it.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Lay off the peyote, Nance.
Feds doing any research into plastic surgery?
Yes and she has had the Fed operate on her many times.
Err…actually i think I invented the iPhone. Yes, that’s the ticket!
God help us all if these people get Hildibeast elected – we are SCREWED. Progressive = Marxist = Mental illness
Read and learn – https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
Let them have their fun. You have to realize that there is a DEGREE of truth in that. In fact, because humanity has been given the gift of language, we have the ability to pass on information to successors… unlike animals for example.
Fact is, a lot of the innovations and ideas that are in the iPhone were born in Universities, many of them funded ( at least partially ) with public money.
The government’s job is to maintain a stable environment, consistent education, and a framework where such ideas flourish. The public education system taught people like contributors to the innovation of Gorilla glass or the microchip or the Antenna or some other component.
It’s no secret that the early iPhones consisted of off the shelf pieces, formed into an innovative package. It was how they were put together that was breakthrough. Multitouch, or at least the science behind it, was developed in research labs.
Apple under Jobs deserved all the credit for envisioning the packaged product and how it would function and operate, but Pelosi isn’t wrong when talking about how government funding funded research of many individual components.
Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t understand how science and technology grows, and has a very shallow understanding of the basis on which it progresses.
I so do love reading unbiased intelligent answers. Thx.
Bluejeans, thx for your intelligent and true answer, but she is misleading us, and here is why she has earned such disdain: the video is from the “Democratic National Platform Hearing”. She is talking about getting elected by taking credit for “everything behind the iPhone”. This is at the very same time that her party’s Department of Justice is trying to deny patent protection to Apple (i.e. overturn the court’s finding that Samsung infringed Apple’s patents). She has no comprehension of how this behavior turns-back progress. Calling her a moron is unkind, but it is an understatement. She is offensive to civil, progressive, intelligent people. She should have retired long ago. I could live with her being creepy and all, if she were not standing in the way of progress.
Guess we all kinda of invented it since the government paid for the research with $ received via taxes…
Exactly. Governed by the people, for the people… if you take an idealist point of view.
You think there’s a difference between Hillary and Trump, that’s so cute.
I am not a fan of Hillary by any means. But what did the right do once again in the primaries? Choose a very poor candidate. And the result will be a third consecutive loss in the general election for POTUS. If you want to blame someone, look in the mirror. Give me a freaking viable alternative, not a Trump clown!
Echoes of “You didn’t build that….”
It must be so. After all, Super Al invented the Internet.
From the same woman who said of the healthcare bill, “we need to pass it to see what’s in it.” What a loon and schister. No wonder both dems/repubs are tired of the status quo.
You know I’ll take Vint Cerf’s (who goddamn well DID invent the internet) take on the matter http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt
There are many reasons I’m a libertarian…… People like this arrogant moron are prime examples.
Why an arrogant moron? She’s not taking personal credit. She’s merely saying that the iPhone wouldn’t be possible without framework that allowed the individual hundreds of innovations to happen.
Have you read “I, Pencil”? If not, then you should.
@bluemeansgo
Thank goodness a voice of reason and intelligence in these comments which tend to run to the asshole partisan side too frequently.
I have seen “I Pencil”, and this is how liberals see the world!
Nancy believes she is leading the smart phone parade. Taking credit for much of what she thinks the Government did to invent the smart phone.
Someone tell Nancy, for example, Government GPS on a smart phone is a slow, and is not easy to access. Its also a big drain on batteries. Companies like Apple had to find/invent a better GPS technology using cell towers.
BTY, Nancy votes against most military spending anyway. So in other words she boast about technology she would of voted against, go figure?
Riiiiiiiight. Please go on, about how no libertarians are arrogant morons.
(side note – vote Gary Johnson in 2016! He’s conservative, not racist/crazy/trump, on he’s on every ballot!)
Everything that I perceive is a product of my own imagination, so I have no one to thank but me.
LuvConstitution why do you know so little?
Nancy Pelosi remains an idiot…she cements that fact every time she spews forth with one of her spectacular statements.
nancy pelosi should just go away…..she is a prime example why term limits are currently way too long….she is an embarrassment to the entire country !!!
I know that these guys are academically accomplished. Yet when it comes to basic common sense, technology and the ability to realize that what you are about to say is really STUPID, these guys are really lacking with that skill. 😊
So, did the massive amounts of facial cosmetic Botox or something else cause the brain damage?
Liberal/Progressive Derangement Syndrome is a terrible disease that negatively affects us all.
I want you so bad right now.
I’ve got a facial waiting for you, Mr. Fist.
Just say the word.
(After Botty and MDN, of course. I know you like their facials better…)
What an idiot. She said the government invented LLD as is points to the screen😂
Ignorance is bliss. It’s interesting and telling that the people commenting here evidently do not realize that federal research grants helped to create a lot of tech used by all of us today. A quote from the American Association for the Advancement of Science referenced by Ms Pelosi: “Hunter Rawlings, president of the Association of American Universities, who moderated the panel, said he likes to make that point to people by holding up his cell phone. ‘I tell them that the iPhone depends on eight or nine basic technologies,” none of which were invented by Apple. Those inventions were discovered at research universities or government laboratories, which were funded by ‘you-the taxpayer,’ Rawlings said.”
Electronics spinoffs for commercial use go back to the US Space Program of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Link: http://www.aaas.org/news/basic-research-often-mocked-targeted-budget-cuts-due-lack-public-understanding
Jobs never claimed to invent the LCD screen, capacitive touch, the lithium-polymer battery or the microprocessor. He didn’t invent polycarbonate, silicon, or gorilla glass. When Jobs and Apple did was bring it together into a coherent and sensible product that has revolutionized modern living.
Federally funded research has made some great advancements but the federal government rarely turns that research into practical use at a reasonable cost.
Is not the research behind what created LEDs, capacitative touch, microchips etc. useful? The government’s FUNCTION is NOT to create a practical use, it’s to create the framework.
Ask anyone what’s easier, the framework or the finished good. Most corporations do NOT build the framework, and rarely do the base research involved because 90% of the time, the research is a dead-end or isn’t cost-effective or is quickly superseded by something easier, cheaper, more efficient, or faster.
Research is EXPENSIVE when 95% of the stuff ends up being a footnote. Corporate America has the luxury of taking the 5% of things that have a marketable potential.
How many failures were made before a successful and marketable version of multi-touch came along? How about Gorilla glass?
Yes Apple has made iterative innovations in manufacturing technology, materials development, but they’ve also benefitted from things like Blue LEDs ( allowing the current low-power displays to even function ) and purchased things like Liquid Metal.
Government funding has its place.
Not only did business not create these underlying technologies, it would have been impossible for them to do so.
Business is inherently risk averse, because you cannot run a successful business by losing money. Maybe a business can go into debt for a few years, but at some point, a business must either turn a profit or die. That prevents most truly exploratory, ground-breaking, or totally new discoveries from originating in business. Private business could not possibly have invented space travel (which make GPS possible), for example, because inventing space travel involves many years of risky research with repeated failures before anything viable is figured.
The main thing business do that government can’t do, is making things cost efficient and people friendly. They can take GPS technology invented by the government, and make affordable and easy to use GPS navigation assistants. They can take technologies invented by NASA, and make the cost effective spaceships from SpaceX. They can take radio, LCD, GPS, TCP/IP, etc invented by the government and make the iPhone.
Actually, the blissful ignorance is on the part of anyone who looks at what we have today as a result of this bureaucracy of bloat and is happy with a federal government that has far overreached its bounds for far too long. What those blissfully ignorant people fail to ask is…. What if? What if instead of government using tax dollars to extend grants to some favorite charity, a private institution or group thereof had more efficiently invested their capital into that result? Might that result have been achieved faster, more efficiently or might the result itself have been altered in such a way that a totally new and revolutionary result was achieved? Those are called opportunity costs. They aren’t accounted for on paper because they require imagination – something that NOBODY in government (Pick your aisle!) has any tidbit of. I pose that were it not for the federal government’s overreach throughout the 20th century, we would be in a far BETTER position with innovation and workforce to this day. I know Bill Gates and I believe Steve Jobs as well said that nothing they did in the 1980’s would have been possible today because of the government regulations on business. So, yes, it’s very easy to say the government invented the iPhone when in fact what the government did was confiscate money and give to certain groups in the form of grants (a portion of which was gifted back to the non-taxable political party of your choosing) who then gave us these pieces which Apple had the vision to combine into the iPhone because the brainless government workers like those of the Soviet Politbureau never had the vision to combine those parts to make that item because the bureaucrats never have to worry about demand.
Hmm. She must have some weed stored up somewhere. Did the government invent that too? Did the government invent life? Is my mortality at the hands and whims of the government? Lol. Why are people so freaking stupid? I mean, can’t they just… think?
yes, yes, yes, I don’t know, no.
There may be a bit more wisdom and reality in your comment than you intended or realize. 😣
“In this smartphone, almost everything came from federal investments in research.”
Especially the technology we can use to track and record everything you say and do.
And WHO funds the government, Nancy Pelosi?
WE THE PEOPLE
Does that make your dizzy little head spin round, poor, delusional Nancy Pelosi?
Okay Nancy, you are correct in saying that government-funded research is responsible for many consumer items today. Just think of Tang. You are old enough, Nancy, to remember Tang.
However, government funding for basic research has fallen steeply in the past few decades. Now most research is funded by corporations.
So, while a few parts of the iPhone may have started in some government-funded project somewhere, I suspect those parts make up a very, very small part of the iPhone. In fact, government’s role in high-tech recently has primarily been one of getting in the way of innovation, not funding it.
So STFU you fool!
Tang was invented by food scientist William A. Mitchell of the General Foods Corporation in 1957. I don’t believe the government had anything to do with creating it.
I don’t need a “history” lesson from Pelosi et al, I want freedom from these nut cases.
Nancy is drinking some of that Al Gore cool aid.
They both share a well of lead infested waters, as do many others of various political persuasions, living in collective aether-filled boxes that float apart and exclusive from the real world.
IOW: I’m sick of the crazies.
Why is this video “under moderation” when I posted it yesterday yet is a story today?
that’s a load of crap.
one more rabid politician plasticizing the truth. yes, someone else built that, but that someone didn’t make themselves, another someone made them and made them and them and them and grandthem and great grandthem and evolved them and fed them and someone else crawled out of the ocean but they didn’t crawl themselves, someone else crawled and someone else landed on this planet on a meteorite but didn’t book their own flight instead, someone else did that, and then there was god but god didn’t make himself, we made god but then, we didn’t make him, someone else did.
nancy pelosi doesn’t celebrate life, she doesn’t celebrate invention and poetry, she doesn’t celebrate ingenuity or individual genius, she was born to point the finger, to diminish the human spirit, to stand on someone else’s back and with a big spoon stir the human soup so that we’re all the same and no one need feel more and no one need feel less ..big or small …or ever ever ever driven to excel. fuck this dispirited wretched mortal who was invented by another dispirited. wretched mortal who was made by yet another dispirited wretched mortal. nancy pelosi and all the other nancy pelosi’s are why we have the darwin awards.
So because of government funded research we should all succumb to the government? That is what this Marxist is insinuating. So we should just sit back and let the government rule over us without question. Fuck you!!! I can’t feel my face Pelosi.
Sometimes I wish Marx had never been born. He was an idealist with a distinct lack of comprehension of incentive, systematics or human nature. I rant on further below.
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I’m no ‘Republican’ apologist. But persons such as Nancy Pelosi are great examples of why I am also not a ‘Democrat’ apologist either. This woman has been raving loony for years. Why the hell does she lead the ‘Democrats’ in the US House of Representatives?
(And yes, I could point out mental derangement regarding House Speaker Paul Ryan as well).
The investment of the US government in research is FUNDAMENTAL to our success in research and development as a whole. But it takes supreme craziness to attribute invention to the government. Please STFU Nancy Pelosi and try a dose of the real world.
#MyStupidGovernment proving itself yet again.
Right do after years of claiming unfair competition from European competitors due to governmental support the US Government is openly admitting that they have supported their own companies more than anyone. Well it’s only what we already knew tbh but you have to smile.
Folks, though Apple did not invent LCD screens, capacitive touch, the lithium-polymer battery, microprocessors – or fire (that makes them all possible) – but apple did more than merely assemble the iPhone. APPLE INVENTED THE iPHONE. Not the government, and certainly not government-funded research. Apple also invented the modern OS X operating system, iTunes, etc.
Furthermore, no one in the world can successfully sell a PC unless it looks and works just like a Mac (or a “good enough” facsimile). Nor can anyone sell a smartphone that doesn’t look and act just like an iPhone. No tablet is salable unless it mimics the iPad. And the list goes on. And what does the government itself “produce,” exactly? Laws, bureaucracy, and taxes. And if anyone invents and successfully markets anything, it is in spite of these rather than because of them.
This is a clear case of the tail claiming to wag the dog.
The iPhone would not exist either, without BOTH capitalist business AND government funded research and infrastructure. People enjoy believing in extremes and ignoring how complicated and not-binary reality actually is. Fact is, no economy has ever worked that did not include both capitalism and socialism balancing one another. Neither capitalism or socialism work on their own, and economies have always collapsed when taken too far to either extreme.
Dooby Pelosi?
Number 1: The Federal Government didn’t do squat except collect tax from each of us and fund some stuff. People invented these things, and capitalistic enterprise created the wealth that made it possible. The Fed Gov is important in facilitating some of this, but they don’t invent anything. Pelosi is blowhard politician who thinks her shit doesn’t stink.
Okay – lets play her game.
If the Federal Government Invented the iPhone with its research – then the government should embrace it more.
Furthermore, the government should invest in hiring someone like Steve Jobs to run the business side of government – then perhaps the US would not be so freakin’ in debt.
Wake-up jet-lag brains… same bs as xerox inventing everything – yet didn’t have to balls or energy to see a great thing put on the market.
Pelosi is a politician, so grandstanding is par for the course. Term limits are the obvious solution. It’s ridiculous that she hasn’t been thrown in the same cell as corrupt McConnell long ago.
Nevertheless, US technology grants and development money — most funneled through the most accomplished universitiy system on the planet — have made the difference between the USA being a military & economic superpower versus other less socialist nations being also-ran backwaters. So while the extreme right wing political operatives whine about government assistance for ANYTHING in public, it is usually true that they line up to the pig trough right next to equally corrupt democrats whenever there’s a chance for getting hands on government money.
1. you have no idea how much the feds embrace any technology. the iPhone is actually a relatively dumbed-down consumer product compared to the specialized equipment that many organizations — both government and private — use.
2. Why? Apple doesn’t have the level of technology nor product offerings that most branches of the military have. Do you think the military uses MacBooks on deployment? Of course not. Compare a Panasonic Toughbook to any MacBook and you might have a clue to the difference in reliability and environmental requirements that professionals — and that includes the military of you big bad government – need to do their jobs. Boeing makes the phones for the government, not Apple, and for good reasons. Military contractors have written orders of magnitude more code than Apple, Microsoft, and Google combined. Maybe it’s time they received respect for their excellent work.
3. The purpose of a democratic government is NEVER to make money. Show me a government sitting on cash and I will show you a corrupt semi-dictatorial regime or communist experiment. Democratic republics cannot run surpluses for any extended period of time because if they did, the TEA party would be crying bloody murder. The anti-tax groups are already demanding that taxes be reduced to starve government, not realizing of course that it only baloons the deficit. You gotta cut spending before you cut taxes. Reagan proved that, twice. Repubs still haven’t learned.
4. All the stuff that anti-government groups claim is waste is claimed by another group to be essential for one reason or another. You can’t build a bridge in any part of the USA without somebody whining that their bridge needs are more important and that whatever government monies were used must have been totally wasted.
5. Economists worth listening to are wise enough to point out that a dollar spent is a dollar that circulates around the economy. It doesn’t matter if its the government or business or private citizens, what matters is that the money circulates. Money is fertilizer. What is bad today is that corporations hoard wealth. Small business and citizens haven’t got deep enough pockets to hoard wealth, so in their hands, the multiplier effect is strong. Corps forgot that long ago when Henry Ford died. The Feds PER THEIR MISSION STATEMENT have to ensure liquidity in order to keep the economy healthy per modern measures. will every time go into debt to buoy the economy when corporations refuse to spend money. The American people demand it to be so.
6. Despite all the perceived problems with the inefficient bad evil federal government, the USA remains the best place in the world to do business. You will not see Us companies rushing to move their headquarters to China or India or Africa — those are places of far greater waste, corruption, and graft. You will see a few transcontinental mergers, but those are NOT for tax reasons. Those are strategic industry consolidation moves.
Not that anyone here would understand the complexities of national policies or international economic trends.
Oh, and one final thought: do you think that congress is any worse than the average American at managing money? Look up the relative amounts of public versus private debt if you want to learn how bad off Americans themselves are. Until Americans get fiscal discipline, it’s hard to believe they will demand it from their representatives. After all, the most popular republican-in-name-only right now has zero fiscal plans other than to blow unspecified amounts of money on the Great Wall of Mexico, lots of money on military adventures apparently intended to make people feel great again, all while slashing taxes on the top 0.10% of wage earners. These aren’t my empty assertions, these come directly from the mouth of the populist blowhard himself.
Term limits and better education are desperately needed NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m noticing several posts from people I’ve never noticed posting before and they seem to fall into two groups; those agreeing with Pelosi and those saying how intelligent such posts are.
Anyone else smell anything funny?
So, if I understand this correctly, there is no concept of “property”, intellectual or otherwise, in the US. All your inventions belong to US because federal (tax) sponsored research produced some component or other.
And by the way, since electricity production and/or distribution can be traced back to some federal project, any invention that uses electricity is not entirely yours either.
I don’t think even the communists of old had this much imagination in defining the reach of government ownership over everything and everyone.
I worked at UCLA for 13 years. In that time, the research we did was funded mainly by the NSF. And same goes for most research, unless it medical, and that often gets private (pharma) money.
If not for that money, many fo the things we use today indeed may not exist – at least not in the advanced state we currently enjoy.
I have Polosi as much as anyone can, but in this case, she is correct, even if it was unintentional…
F*ck, let me edit my crappy mistakes. This forum software blows MDN.
yeah, it needs an edit option.
I’d like to edit your option, Botty. Know what I mean?
(Meet me in back of the RNC at midnight. I’ll be the the one with guns cocked).
Melvin, shut-up, you püssy.
If the federal government “invented” the iPhone, then why did they want Apple to unlock its security for them?
Okay, after her blanket statement, she apparently presented a big list of specific items. So, is there anything on that list that is . . . specifically . . . wrong?
It is always good to get another source. Don’t trust what you read on the Internets, after all.
OK, so both Business Insider and Bloomberg agree with her. Here’s the latter:
“The picture is similar throughout the economy. Of the roughly 100 most important innovations from 1971 to 2006, as identified by R&D Magazine, almost 90 percent depended heavily on federal research support…”
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-06-19/who-created-the-iphone-apple-or-the-government-
Okay here’s the final analysis of the story, why it is wrong and why it bugs everyone. (not that anyone is going to read it at this late date)
Nancy’s statement that the government invented XYZ is false.
The government doesn’t invent anything, they DO provide money to partially fund other people to put in the hard work and invent stuff.
This is the kind of reverse logic that sounds right but is just wrong. It’s like saying to a cop he works for you because your taxes pay his salary. Governments do not invent anything. People do. And people build on what was learned and invented by people before them. Learning and invented has been going on long before governments. Governments are just consumers of things made by people and companies. Nancy’s logic fails when put in other contexts. It like saying your masterpiece wasn’t created by you because the paint and canvas was purchased. Or LeBron is not really a great athlete because he didn’t invent the game of basketball and Chinese factory workers made ball.
I wonder if Cook is realizing why Jobs stayed the fuck away from all of these braindead schmucks yet?