Apple named 4th most innovative company in the world thanks to chip design & health efforts

While there has been much debate as to whether or not Apple is still innovating at the same rate it once was, Fast Company today named Apple the fourth most innovative company in the world.

Fast Company attributed Apple’s positioning to its internal hardware design, health efforts, and more…

Apple came in at fourth, lagging behind Amazon at number one, Google at two, and Uber at three. Rounding at the top five was Snap, which recently filed an IPO and listed Apple as one of its competitors.

Last year, Fast Company ranked Apple at the seventh spot, which may come as surprise to people who operate on the belief that Apple no longer innovates like it used to.

Fast Company notes of the argument that Apple isn’t as creative as it once was, but explains that “creativity is more than skin deep.” One thing that helped Apple propel up the charts this year is its efforts to improve the internal hardware of its device by building its own chips. Fast Company explains that this leads to a more optimized experience than what’s offered by smartphones with outsourced chips.

Apple, by contrast, designs its own chips—so an iPhone packs a processor designed specifically optimized for Apple’s operating system, apps, display, camera, and touch sensor.

The company has gotten so good at chip design that the A10 Fusion inside the iPhone 7 trounces rival processors in independent speed benchmarks.

Furthermore, Apple is praised for its efforts in artificial intelligence, especially with how it takes user privacy into account. Fast Company credits Apple with making “privacy-driving decisions to limit the amount of information it aggregates and analyzes in the cloud,” instead opting on-device analysis.

Apple also makes appearances on Fast Company’s “Consumer Electronics” list, coming in at third place, as well as on the “Health” list where it ranks second.

Since its launch, CareKit has already been used to make apps to help patients manage diabetes (One Drop), monitor depression (Iodine), track reproductive health (Glow), and record asthma symptoms (Cleveland Clinic). Apple’s approach to health is to operate behind the scenes by helping researchers, patients, and developers to make use of the health data they’re collecting via a smartphone.

While rankings like this should always be taken lightly, Apple’s improvement year-over-year is notable as it faces increased scrutinization as to whether or not it’s still as innovative as it once was. Nevertheless, let us know if you think Apple deserves the fourth spot down in the comments.