Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did (2012)

Jobs mischaracterized the innovation, and the author is technically correct (the best kind), but it's a shame that the piece appears to want to bury Holt's actual accomplishment. Holt's work was innovative in the same way that Woz's Disk II controller was. He didn’t invent the underlying technology, and he did create an elegant, product-defining implementation of a known (but difficult) technique.

The Apple II power supply was the first switching PS I had ever seen. And I still saw a lot of linear ones post-Apple II… From the article, perhaps the IBM switching PS, four years after the Apple II, then more or less cemented the switching PS for consumer electronics.

Previously:

(2012, 246 points, 74 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3636047

(2013, 170 points, 63 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6575994

(2021, 208 points, 158 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28700554

What an excellent example of Brandolini's law: “ The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”

Missing (2012) in the title.

Is this one of those cases where Apple didn’t invented, but they did crash the price per unit?

No, Apple did.

Apple 2 power supply worked until it failed after a couple years.