Apple may be one of the world’s profitable tech company, but you know who invented its biggest single product, the iPhone? If you’re House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the answer is simple: not Steve Jobs, Jony Ive or any combination of Apple employees — but rather the federal government.
Check out the video below.
“Anybody here have a smartphone?” Pelosi asked an audience at a Democratic National Convention Platform hearing in Washington, D.C. this week. She then held up her iPhone, and said that everything in it came from federal investments in research.
“They say Steve Jobs did a good idea designing it and putting it together. Federal research invented it,” she said — naming GPS, high-tech displays, wireless data compression, voice recognition and more as some of the iPhone’s supposedly key components.
It’s an interesting (and contentious) point, reminiscent of President Obama’s 2012 comments in which he said that anyone who had achieved something with their life had done so due to investment on the part of the American government — whether they got there thanks to “a great teacher somewhere in your life [or] somebody [who] invested in roads and bridges.”
“If you’ve got a business. you didn’t build that,” Obama said. “Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”
Do you think Pelosi (who certainly hasn’t been shy about using Apple government products in the past) is right or wrong about the iPhone? Leave your comments below.
Source: Washington Free Beacon
