I find it interesting that Apple promoted a culture of insular product development from soup to nuts, and greatly valued what most would consider small successes in execution, rather than have their product managers play it safe and go with off-the-shelf solutions.
Perhaps that's helped them keep a wealth of talent in-house throughout their span, ones able to do the heavy lifting required to pull off what might be considered truly innovative products from time to time. By employing their hot shot engineers like Rod Holt in "revolutionizing" power supplies, they have him around later to help design the Lisa and Macintosh hardware.
Those small little detailsa all added up to things people really liked when they got them.
When we say apple "innovated X" or "invented Y" - I think most of us know that Steve Jobs, or even his engineers didn't necessarly invesnt the technology - in fact they probably didn't. What they did do was put them together and package them up in a way nobody else had before, even if only visually, and make it part of a whole product lineup.
I'm sure there were tons of inventions that let these cool apple power supplies exist.... ebtter electronics. plastic with better thermal designs.... and someone came up with a good way of attaching an extention cable or plug to the thing that's mechanically stable...... all these things matter. Putting it all together into one package and shipping it then selling it is what matters.
Perhaps that's helped them keep a wealth of talent in-house throughout their span, ones able to do the heavy lifting required to pull off what might be considered truly innovative products from time to time. By employing their hot shot engineers like Rod Holt in "revolutionizing" power supplies, they have him around later to help design the Lisa and Macintosh hardware.