[HN Gopher] Thoughts and Observations in the Wake of Apple's 'It...
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Thoughts and Observations in the Wake of Apple's 'It's Glowtime'
Keynote
Author : tambourine_man
Score : 42 points
Date : 2024-09-16 19:47 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (daringfireball.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (daringfireball.net)
| talldayo wrote:
| > That fat Nano was quirky. It was also, in hindsight, obviously
| a mistake. I'm quite sure that inside Apple there were designers
| and product people who thought it was a mistake before it
| shipped. Steve Jobs shipped it anyway, surely because his gut
| told him it was the right thing to try. Tim Cook's Apple doesn't
| make mistakes like that.
|
| Look, I'm willing to accept a certain level of fanboyish Apple
| defense, especially from Gruber. It _does_ seem like a bit of a
| stretch to say the fat iPod Nano was a failure for selling 10
| million+ units but the Vision Pro somehow wasn 't a mistake by
| comparison.
| itronitron wrote:
| hopefully at some point they'll return to non-fat iphones as
| well
| emsy wrote:
| I love the fat nano. I was said when its battery died. I love
| my iPhone Mini (besides iOS being a bit too dumbed down still).
| Apple should make more hardware for niches.
| MBCook wrote:
| He didn't say it was a flop. I know people who liked it.
|
| But Apple obviously didn't think it was the right track because
| they abandoned it and went back towards the previous form
| factor.
|
| I'd say the Vision Pro is different. I'm not sure they got the
| form factor wrong. Maybe some adjustments needed, but I don't
| think the core design is wrong.
|
| Also a ton of the Vision Pros issues have nothing to do with
| the physical design. The cost is massive to get components
| (mostly the screens) that can achieve what they want. Their
| normal profit margins makes it worse. OS and App Store policies
| blunt the utility. Refusing to let developers have them until
| release meant no/few killer apps. US only for 6 months made all
| that worse.
|
| In my mind it's a totally different thing.
| iorrus wrote:
| Obvious counter argument is the Vision Pro
| gwbas1c wrote:
| That's like the Lisa. It needs Steve to make it palatable to
| everyone.
| ggrelet wrote:
| No mention of it in the article, even though they wrote: > But
| it's also why Cook's Apple delivers fewer surprises. The
| delight is still there, but there's less amazement.
|
| The Vision Pro is literally mind blowing.
| MBCook wrote:
| But it's not changing the world. It seems to be doing very
| poorly, at least partially due to Apple's policies. The price
| obviously doesn't help.
| talldayo wrote:
| > The Vision Pro is literally mind blowing.
|
| Mind-blowingly stupid? I used an Oculus Rift DK2 in 2014; the
| fact that Apple could brute-force a similar product with no
| market fit and slightly more "magic" in it hasn't impressed
| me the slightest. Add in the fact that it's slower than an
| iPad and costs as much as a used car and the thing is dead-
| on-arrival. Meta ate Apple's lunch with $500 headsets and
| Valve dominated the high-end with better controllers and
| software for years. The only way Apple can create market fit
| is by inventing a new price segment (read: Stupid Expensive)
| and leveraging their branding to do the heavy lifting.
|
| Apple rejected Khronos standards for years, avoided OpenXR
| during it's development, and got cut off from SteamVR after
| Valve gave up engineering support. They have so many loose
| ends to tie up that it's kinda hilarious anyone thinks Apple
| is a competitor in this industry, at this point. Vision Pro
| isn't an iPhone moment, it's a Lisa moment. We'll count
| ourselves lucky for each one we're not burying in a landfill.
| mingus88 wrote:
| I agree, but I didn't feel amazed until I actually scheduled
| a demo and used it
|
| There have been so many bad VR headsets. I remember trying
| Doom on one in the 90s and getting motion sickness
| immediately. I also wear glasses so it's never been great to
| wear anything else.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if the Vision Pro is just not getting
| any attention due to the high bar to actually use one. It's
| not something you can describe that hasn't been polluted by
| prior experiences with VR
| thenewwazoo wrote:
| > My dissatisfaction flying home from last week's event is,
| ultimately, selfish. I miss having my mind blown. I miss being
| utterly surprised.
|
| Welcome to middle age, John. I'm here too, so I can't tell you
| what comes next, but I hope it's more fun.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| > I've been pondering this for the remainder of the week. One
| factor is that the iPhone defined the apex of personal computing.
| In the early years of PCs, everyone knew we wanted portability.
| Most of us -- including me -- thought we reached that with
| laptops. But laptops don't go with us everywhere, and, it turns
| out, we want computers that go with us everywhere. That's the
| iPhone, and the original iPhone in 2007 established the all-
| touch-screen form factor and general concept right out of the
| gate. That first iPhone blew our minds the moment Steve Jobs
| showed it to us.
|
| Gruber seems to think of iPhones as portable, use-everywhere
| computers when such characterization puts Apple in good light.
| However, his opinion about what the iPhone is seems to change
| when dealing with sideloading and, in general, App Store
| shenanigans:
|
| > The iPhone and iPad are not PCs; they're consoles for games and
| apps.
|
| (From
| https://daringfireball.net/2024/01/coming_to_grips_with_appl...)
| idle_zealot wrote:
| Yeah, he's consistently frustrating on this issue. It seems he
| actively wants Apple to control general-purpose computing and
| will make whatever characterization necessary for that to sound
| reasonable. I really wish we had portable general-purpose
| pocket computers, but there isn't really an option on the
| market for that, and it's not a hardware issue.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| His perspective is as pro-Apple as it gets. This article about
| his keynote disappointment was mostly spent fawning over apples
| headphones and watch and how Tim Cook is a sage. Unable to
| criticize Apple for anything, he even concludes his remarks
| blaming himself.
| m463 wrote:
| I agree.
|
| Honestly I think apple has become both too impersonal and too
| controlling.
|
| SJ at the helm would have made things more personal, and
| might have headed off all the rot that has led to poor
| developer relations, anti-trust, and relentless profiteering
| without clear benefits.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Yes, he's what I've termed an Apple apologist:
| https://www.observationalhazard.com/2021/08/apple-apologetic...
| MBCook wrote:
| "I've termed"? People have been calling him that for 20+
| years.
|
| I disagree with the characterization.
| mafuyu wrote:
| Computing and the Internet have matured and become so much more
| central to daily life. For better or worse, that's going to put
| limits on the quirks something like a smartphone can have. If
| your photo library, banking, social media, or even job depends on
| your phone, it really does need to be rock solid and reliable.
|
| I think what people forget is pre-iPhone, we all saw _something_
| coming. Maybe we didn't expect it to look exactly like the
| iPhone, but there was a sense of excitement around what was
| coming next for computing. Sony Style magazine was still in
| print. eCommerce was picking up. Palm phones, Blackberry, Windows
| Mobile. Super quirky laptops and UMPCs. I remember lusting after
| some wildly impractical UMPCs, because it meant that everything I
| did on my desktop could now fit in my pocket.
|
| Even after smartphones took off, I remember sometimes thinking
| "man, imagine in the future when this stuff is good and it
| actually just works." A lot of stuff was basically just demos
| back then. Well, here we are. A huge portion of my life happens
| on my iPhone, and that really does mean it has to Just Work.
| DaoVeles wrote:
| I get it, being mind blown in this industry is getting further
| apart with time. It is just that the industry is becoming mature,
| we have picked most of the low hanging fruit and now it is a case
| of refining the refinded. Triple distilled design in action. More
| broadly this is a middle aged industry and unfortunately it is
| leading to some mid life crisis moments like metaverse, crypto
| hype and AI everything but generally it is still in decent shape,
| at least when you ignore some details.
|
| The last time I was blown away by any tech would have been the
| first time using generative AI stuff, yes we figured out its
| limits, but just that feeling of being able to just type
| something and just have these thing created on demand was wild.
| The time before that, I couldnt really say, it has been that
| long. Maybe seeing realtime raytracing on commodity hardware and
| even that wasnt ground breaking.
|
| In a way it us like the 10th season of a sitcom, we know all the
| characters and it is familiar but nothing much is new or fresh
| any more. The jokes are still fine and the catch phrases are
| there but it all just feels same-ish. That is ok so long as that
| is your expectation.
| gtvwill wrote:
| Buys a vanilla bean but get surprised when it's plain and simple.
| Not sure what he expected. Apple is a cash cow harvesting brand
| loyalty. 2 years of r&d and they got what? A usbc port and a
| button? Folks are joking if they think this is the peak of tech.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| > If anything, under Cook, Apple more consistently achieves near-
| perfection. Tolerances are tighter. Ship dates seldom slip.
|
| I'm surprised that Gruber doesn't mention the fact that Apple is
| now in the habit of announcing products or features 6+ months
| before they ship, both software and hardware (not talking about
| things like the iPhone which have to be submitted to the FCC).
| And sometimes, they never ship at all (see AirPower). This would
| never happen under Jobs.
|
| Also, while Steve Jobs straight up lied in order to protect
| future announcements (i.e. 'we're not making a video iPod', Tim
| Cook will say things like 'we are very interested in the AR/VR
| space' for close to a decade before announcing any products).
| xuki wrote:
| Steve Jobs announced a white iPhone 4 and couldn't ship it for
| 6 months.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Gods, how much longer until we all accept that phones have
| reached a local (if not global) maximum?
|
| There's really not much left to 'innovate'. More cameras, more
| memory, bigger and bigger and bigger screens, less ports.
|
| The next innovation here is gonna have to be a total paradigm
| shift, and I'm not particularly convinced that Apple and/or
| Google are capable of that anymore. The only levers in their
| grasp left to pull are software. So now we are innundated with
| capital-F Features. And these Features are so important that
| users must be constantly bombarded with tips and popups and hints
| and notifications telling them about the latest Features. Google
| even calls their extremely normal and standard update cycle
| 'Feature Drop'.
|
| People just want to buy a phone that fits their preferred
| physical dimensions, lasts at least most of the day, and
| generally _does what you tell it and stays the hell out of the
| way_.
|
| Nobody, not one person on this planet wants their phone to swoop
| in an animated rainbow-bordered modal telling them that their
| calculator app now includes AI, for some reason, and that they
| now are compelled to accept some new terms and license for a
| calculator.
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(page generated 2024-09-16 23:01 UTC)