Holding out for a Jobs: Tim Cook still auditioning for position of Apple god Apple is 40 years old. The leader was Steve Jobs, but he's gone and many still don't understand his core idea. The idea was Apple's control over "the user experience". That control is at risk today, and the company's future hangs in the balance as a result under the new leader. How people use things was Jobs' lifelong …
Point-and-click sure beats a busload of people all jabbering into their pseudo-AI-capable phones all the time. And I really, really don't imagine the workplace with everyone talking to their PCs to get stuff done on top of talking on the phone, in the hallways, to the colleagues, to the boss, to their wives/mistresses/best buddies.
Lets keep the noise down.
Where would the human race be without rounded corners, turning pages and the sliding locks of the kind used in the pyramids?
Don't forget the exciting innovation of apologising wrong.
Steve Jobs wasn't interested in the user experience. He was interested in the perceived value of his products. Good user experience doesn't let you charge 500 for an i-thing. Branding and value perception do that. He was very good at making things look like they had fairy dust on but it was all about increasing the perceived value.
Good user experience is a differentiator but it doesnt account for the value.
>Steve Jobs wasn't interested in the user experience. He was interested in the perceived value of his products.
The two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the easiest way to up the perceived value of your products is to make sure they have some value to begin with.
Felix Dennis had the same model of microwave in each of his homes around the world. This was because he couldn't be arsed with relearning how to heat some food. Being wealthy, he could afford to remove such minor annoyances from his life. Some microwaves are easy to use, some are just unaccountably awkward.
Jobs did care about the user experience - in the products he used himself (as Mercedes Benz and Sony will testify), as well as those his company sold. If you are going to differentiate your products, it makes sense to differentiate them in area you care and think about. If you are overly sensitive to shit, careless product design, then use it as an asset. This is no less true just because Jobs also wanted to makes lots of money (though his first billion came about by accident, because he financially supported the animation side of Pixar when really he wanted their hardware to be adopted by hospitals).
Of course, the PCs I steered my dad towards buying in the nineties were for gaming, where the more MHz and MBs the better the user experience (in this case, the user experience was shooting hellspawn in Doom at a decent framerate)- you'd want them to be as high as possible for the £. So most PCs were sold on those numbers, and money was saved everywhere else - there was simply no motive for a company to invest money in smoothing off the rough edges. Were these 486-era PCs user friendly? Hell no. And whilst I learnt some skills and aptitudes as a teenager which have since been useful to me, I would had sympathy for someone who just wanted to write and print a letter, for example. I also used Acorn Archimedes and Macs from LC IIs to PowerPC models in school, consoles from Sega and Nintendo, and there was plenty to appreciate in them.
There has been plenty that Apple has done that isn't mere fairy dust, and offer tangible benefits to the user experience. Would Jobs then (maybe over-) sell it? Yeah, that was his job. That should be the job of anyone in his position.
Good design costs time and money, and for a company to make that investment it has to see a return.
I've never owned a Mac, iPod, iPhone or iPad, so perhaps I'm more familiar (and the breeds contempt) with the occasional problems and rough edges of competing products - DOS and Windows PCs, iRivers, Androids. I've encountered so many clumsy and arbitrary design choices I've lost track. Like many people here, I have the experience to skip over many of these issues, but for many laypeople they appear more like hurdles.
Not any more so than competitors. It was hyped and well marketed. I fell for hype and bought one.
Awkward slow non-standard external floppy with only 100K storage.
Awkward keyboard (too high and built in)
Only forty column text.
I soon got a better computer.
I built one - much more fun, but it was a *lot* more soldering that I had bargained for :).
What I found interesting at the time (before floppy disks) was that a cheapo cassette recorder was far more reliable at recording and playback than a "proper" HiFi one. Never quite worked out why.
What I found interesting at the time (before floppy disks) was that a cheapo cassette recorder was far more reliable at recording and playback than a "proper" HiFi one. Never quite worked out why.
My guess would be that the quality decks have more filtering circuitry in them to remove high-frequency hiss from the tape. The unfortunate side effect of those filters tend to be that it causes the high-frequency signal on the tape to clip slightly, thus leading to errors. The cheapo decks, lacking these circuits tend to just play back whatever they can (so no signal loss, but more noise).
>I fell for hype and bought one. I soon got a better computer.
I would have thought that most people who bought a computer in that era soon bought a better computer! :)
Heck, it's only in the last few years that I haven't felt the need (have seen no huge benefit to my using of productivity software) to upgrade. For most of the last twenty-five years, none of my current computers has quite seemed quick enough, but the five year old model I'm using now is alright!
What computer introduced "soon" after the Apple II was offered 80 column text and a floppy with significantly more than 100KB? It was years before you could get either of those things.
Now if you bought the Apple II a few years after it was introduced when it was an old and tired design that was easy to do, but it wasn't like there was competition that got around those limitations back when the Apple II was new.
"Apple Watch peripherals such as the Kardia band, which acts as an EKG monitor, can be the "killer apps" that unlock the savings."
And the watch will send the data to the iPhone.
An interface connecting to an interface connecting to another interface.
If the watch isn't the sensor, what the hell do I need it for?
What we are witnessing is Cook trying to earn his spurs as an Apple deity – on the Watch, as the initiator of a new interface, and in standing up to Washington
I don't think Tim Cook is aiming for deification, nor is he "standing up" to Washington. He has a simple commercial duty to protect the organisation against threats, and the idiocy in Washington is exactly that: a commercial threat.
There was no way Tim Cook could have taken a different position because what the Feds were trying *was* (and is, don't assume they won't try again) a danger to the whole industry in both a tactical and a strategic sense and I'm personally glad they tried to start with the company that has the best budget to battle until the very end.
It was my impression that Mr. Cook is acting as a caretaker for the company and conducting auditions for the position of next Apple god.
It may seem that Apple is slow to innovate but that must be from the viewpoints of its consumers and not of its production planners and lines let alone inter-reactions with the marketing departments and whatever else comprises the [formerly] world's largest company by capitalization.
Tim Cook is aware that Apple operates in a global context whereas the FBI is US centric. A surprise for you FBI; wetware and software are global.
They may be seen as being slow to innovate, but really there is no point in 'innovating' for innovation's sake - iPods, iPhones and iPads were all refinements of existing products. Indeed, I get the impression that Apple didn't really want to release a watch until batteries and SoCs improve, but felt they had to stake their claim on a nascent market.
Again, it should be self-evident why anyone who thinks they know what the Next Big Thing is keeping it themselves. Our home computers are fast enough, and have been for some time. Our mobile devices are almost as fast as our computers. There are some new forms of man/machine interaction around - LeapMotion, RealSense, Kinect, Project Mango - but none that yet feel like a must have.
a "Macintosh way" for designing programs in a consistent manner so that users could concentrate on what they were doing, rather than how they were doing it.
When the Mac was first released there was an article in Byte about Apple's extensive usability testing. As they were growing rapidly and taking on office staff they had a steady supply of recruits who'd never seen the interface, and maybe no other computer interface either, so each iteration of the design could be tested on subjects who had no preconceptions. It was from that testing that the importance of principles such as consistency emerged.
A few days ago this emerged - http://fossforce.com/2016/03/usability-study-gnome/
Look at the 2nd item on things that could be done better: consistency.
I started off with "Mac vs Gnome" as a headline but that would be unfair to Gnome (says he through gritted teeth) as it was simply the test system in this particular study. A third of a century has rolled by and we can still have criticism like this emerging from usability studies! And is it any wonder when we have "user experience" designers who prefer style and novelty over consistency and functionality?
While arguably most people need or could benefit from a smartphone, most people do not need smartwatches at all, a mix of gadget and fashion accessory.
This won't change until a battery revolution happens, that could enable smartwatches to do interesting things for a long enough period without recharging.
I don't need any of the current smart-watches, but I might consider one in the future if it offers some basic functions without any of the current downsides.
The Apple Watch does too much for my tastes, and its most interesting feature - ApplePay - doesn't require the power-hungry colour screen. It is not ApplePay itself I find interesting, but the concept of a device I can potentially use in place of physical keys, cash-cards and passwords (I prefer to carry cash, but its reassuring to have a backup).
The simple functions that I would like on a watch include being able to 'page' my phone (for when it drops down gaps in sofas), receive notifications, and use the watch to control media playback on another device. These features can be implemented on watches that boast a battery life of over a year - as Casio and Citizen have demonstrated.
My other criteria are more my personal taste: a small watch, simple dial, waterproof, stainless steel, sapphire crystal, rotating bezel. A bezel could function as both rotary input (volume control etc), and also as Direction Pad (up down left right - or Fwd, Back, Pause etc) without one's fingers obscuring the display.
...but every other smart watch out there is much worse.
So should Apple be congratulated for at least being the best of the worst or criticised for a sub-standard product?
Jobs never would've released the Apple Watch - he was far too savvy. So should Cook be congratulated for being brave or criticised for wasting Apple resources on a half-baked vanity project.
Last question: does anyone care either way?
The dustup between Tim Cook and the FBI created quite a bit of press, both pro and con on both sides. The standoff which this created provided the opportunity for a 3rd party to walk on scene and hack the phone for the FBI. This is exactly what happened and Apple should have considered this possibility when they faced off against the FBI with much public fanfare.
Apple should have at the very least considered the possibility that their encryption was not perfect. After all, what encryption is perfect? The belief in the perfection of ones creations has been the downfall of many companies. This sort of hubris on the part of Tim Cook does not exactly qualify him for the role of Apple God.
Instead of making a public display of Tim Cook chest pounding to the cheers of their fanbois, Apple could have quietly worked with the FBI and in so doing found the holes in their security so that they could plug them. Even if word got out of such a joint effort, Apple could have made the point that their security was improved by working with the FBI. Instead a 3rd party found the holes in Apple's security and exploited them, leaving Apple in the unenviable position of begging the FBI to tell them what holes they exploited to crack the terrorist's phone. After Tim Cook's chest pounding, the FBI is likely to tell Apple to go pound sand.
This entire episode leaves me with the impression that Tim Cook is a long way from filling the empty shoes of the Apple God.
These psychopathic personalities like Jobs and Ellison do enormous damage to our society and people's lives. Anybody, who can see clearly, will recognize the truth in this. Remember 1995, when the Internet was free, not watching you, not selling your eyeballs? Then, you could make a telephone call without identifying yourself. Now, you walk across the street, and they got you within 20cm.
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