Slashdot Mirror
Re-Imagining Apple
FirienFirien writes "Business 2.0 has put up a selection of ideas from Pentagram Design, featuring some interesting rumoured ipod innovations, as well as a look at what may be next for Apple. From the article: 'The project was led by Robert Brunner, who was Apple's chief designer from 1989 to 1996, and who oversaw the design of the PowerBook line, among many other hit products.'"
An interesting set of designs, but ones that show that non-steve-approved designers just don't get it.
Those products all look like any old generic electronics product. They entirely lack the current Apple design features of absolute minimalism.
If steve could create a sphere with one single button on the outside, that glowed, and had any realistic expectation that it might sell, he would.
(and the button would be optional)
'The project was led by Robert Brunner, who was Apple's chief designer from 1989 to 1996, and who oversaw the design of the PowerBook line, among many other hit products.'
Perhaps that should read "... chief designer from 1989 to 1996, a period where Apple saw its market share drop to near irrelevance".
Weren't these the same people Steve Jobs saved Apple from?
#DeleteChrome
dropped prices on their ipods, and laptops and released the mac mini???
_+_+__+_+_+_+_+_+_+++
when i moo u moo - just like that
MS? Then it would be world domination, of course.
Apple is the new Sony. Their iPod is this generation's walkman, and Apple is smart enough to leverage that success into other products. Apple has always been good at design. The unix-core of the Tiger OS extends that nice design into the innards.
More food for thought: Paul Graham's essay on Japan vs US design, which gives a nod to Apple as one of the few US companies that get it.
Steve Job's sexy face from a continuously playback of his latest keynote address!
...or are those designs really, really ugly? They bear hardly any resemblance to real Apple products. I'm guessing that's due to the fact that style-man Jobs became CEO in 1997, by which time this designer was gone.
Apple enforcing civil agreements (NDA) = good
RIAA enforcing civil agreements (copyright)= bad
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
This won't happen for a while. They basically have a monopoly on the iPods. There are some alternatives, but those are only available in Japan. So Apple's iPod will continue to stay at a high price as long as there is little competition.
XeRo
hmm.. the mac mini, the iPod shuffle, price drops across the ipod line. and it's only march.
but damn it would be the same size as a chiclet and only cost $75...
Mines on preorder as we speak...
I read slashdot for the sigs...
I don't know what Steve's got up his sleeve, but I know that Business 2.0 doesn't like giving out their stuff for free.
The page you requested is available only to magazine customers and AOL members. Subscribe now and you're in...
I guess that's kind of what Steve Jobs meant when he said they "just don't get it." Steve isn't the type of guy to go around giving stuff away for free willy nilly. In fact, he's built up Apple from relative obscurity to the powerhouse PC juggernaut it is today. But when he sees an opportunity, he goes for it. And sometimes that opportunity is to build a stronger brand through giving stuff away for free. He seems to be criticizing the RIAA's tactics of suing their customers, when they should be kissing their asses.
I'm not saying that Steve Jobs should be on his knees kissing anyone's ass, but it is quite obvious that he has a knack for reading the market and "knowing" what people instinctively want.
And what's to come...
Man, that PodWatch looks badass. I'd love to have something like that.. except that I KNOW I'd lose the wireless earbuds in a matter of hours.
To paraphrase a wise man, Steve Jobs, Why is it that the people who run the magazine companies just don't get it?
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
Did he happen to have anything to do with that awful orange toiletseat Powerbook? In retrospect, it is hard to imagine an uglier computer that anyone has ever built (all casemods aside!).
Apple settled, which is exactly what I predicted they would do. You can't squeeze blood from a turnip, but you can create enough buzz to make other think twice before doing it again.
I know someone who was sued by microsoft. It was essentially the same thing. Rattle the saber a bit, get some media attention, and settle for peanuts after the story has disappeared from the pages.
This looks to me like Pentagram is trying to get themselves bought, by showing off that they are good designers and might be a worthwhile acquisition for Apple.
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
He must be a design genius- 89-96 were such wonderful years for Apple!
Pentagram, Apple... they really do like the "Devil's advocate" trappings over in Cupertino.
--
make install -not war
I agree. Its all a scheme to lure me into a trap of some kind...
XeRo
Be sure to make a backup first...
Is this supposed to be a photo of Steve Jobs in 10 years? If so, they did a pretty good job!
Wow!
Ipicture 4 of 5, it looks like the aged Steve Jobs is wearing a Science Division Starfleet uniform from Star Trek IV?
Ooh, this is gonna be GREAT!
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
I think that the iPod could be the spring board for a whole new kind of human factor design.
The mock-ups are just that, and some of the technology isn't there yet, but since Apple is a brand that people associate with 'expensive but insanely great' products in their niche, like B&O speakers, it might behove them to roll out a line of niche, low volume products like these (rather like, but in a smarter way, than they did the Mac Cube.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Ahhh, yes, the prime era of Apple. Is this guy responsible for the wonderful internal design of the 8500 and 9500? (note: you had to essentially dismantle the entire machine to add RAM)
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Forget this website, take a look at what Apple really has up its sleeves:
g if
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/images/iProduct.
You've heard it here first and the best thing is, Apple can't even sue me into oblivion as I'm posting anonymous.
Now with tint-control . . .
In regards to Bloom CountyPS . . . What the alphabet would look like if Q and R were eliminated --- Mitch Hedberg
So is this a plant from Business 2.0? The pictures are free, but the article wants money.
Apple using pentagram design -- the sign of the devil.
OSX built on BSD, whose mascot is --- the devil (or at least a daemon)
Use MS -- live in hell Use Apple -- go to hell I'll stick with my little penguin.
Let me try this and see if it really works -- Hey MODS Not a Troll!!!
NYTimes is just annoying enough, but it would be nice for Slashdot to not link to paid registration articles. However, the 5 pics from the image gallery were pretty sweet. Personally, I like this idea. Not so much as an iPod, but as a multiGB HD system that I could easily use with my PDA, cellphone, or camera via Bluetooth rather than the limited 1GB/$99 flash sticks with their own fucking readers that no one else uses. Thus a photo on my camera is automatically dumped to my iPod if it's in range via BT and then sent to my PC via WiFi when I get home.
--
Want a free iPod?
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof
I'm not so sure these are really all that creative...
We have the
iPod Wristwatch
iPod Wireless
iPod Camera
iPod Media Server
iPod Wireless home phone
How about something new guys? I don't mean to troll, but if this is the most creative you can be then this company is going downhill fast. Whatever happened to the Apple that had all those great new ideas?
Unfortunately, most of the products (4 of 5)
involve "enhancements" to Apple's iPod. These
"enhancements" might (or might not) have a
market, but they certainly don't have the
simple elegance of Apple's iPod. Apple would
do well to pass on these designs.
Anybody remember this? Dood has a great natural feel for products.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
sed s/^/i/ /usr/share/dict/words
I'll tell you why these are not even close to what may come out of Apple.
Simplicity. I don't think Apple is in the game of mixing functionalities (I think Sony is a better contender for that). That is why there is no FM tuner in iPods.
Watch that plays music? No one wants to do anything except keep time using their watch. I mean no one sensible.
I think you missed the point of the post. All the things he mentioned *did* happen already. The reason iPods costs so much, BTW, isn't that the prices are artificially or unreasonably inflated due to a monopoly. Component costs certainly have a lot to do with it, since the retail prices of the storage media alone often cost more than the iPods they're included in.
I guess Apple has a "monopoly" on iPods, but they don't have a monopoly on MP3 players.
"
The opposite is true. The clones ended up being better machines at a lower price point, so clone sales started to eat into Apple mac sales. Especially on the high end. Apple wanted the clone program to increase profits by selling more of the OS, but did not want it to cut into the lucractive high-end hardware line.
These folks have done some cool work, but they're totally missing the point. Steve Jobs would rather shave with a cheese grater than let these things out into the wild with an Apple logo on them. Take one look at any of these gadgets and my first reaction is, "Huh, I bet that does a lot of cool stuff." But I'm a geek, and these designs are by geeks for geeks, and that's exactly what Apple is trying to avoid.
That silly-looking wirless iPod necklace thing -- what's with the bevelled see-through skeleton around it? How does that make it work better? The skeleton around the iPodWatch -- what does it add?
Apple succeeds because they hide the complexity, not because they call attention to it. Flashy complicated designs advertise internal complexity. While a geek sees power in complexity, most people see added cognitive burden. "Oh, shit, I bet that thing has a million features that I'll never figure out."
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Someone should string FirienFirien and Zonk up by their editorial tonsils. We can't RTFA unless we shell out money. There is no option to register for free or view advertising in exchange for a subscription. Since when did Slashdot becaome a digital country club where one has no option but to pay to play? Oh, I forgot. 90% of Slashdot doesn't ever bother to RTFA.
That said, I think the most interesting element about this article (of which I could read two paragraphs in addition to its headline) is that a major business news publication is engaging in rumor-mongering just like the fan-based Apple sites. It looks like even the mainstream media has begun imbibing Jobs' Purple Kool-Aid.
Not that I'm complaining. (Just check out mistersquid's profile on http://discussions.info.apple.com/ if you don't believe me). I just find it interesting that mood of Apple's fan-base is starting to be reflected in major media channels.
blog
Apple sues Business 2.0 for spreading rumours about Apple products.
thnks!
The single button mouse is a GREAT design. Just try teaching someone who has never used a computer before to use a two button mouse. It also forces intelligent design on software developers. Very few applications have (or should have) the level of feature complexity that would require contextual menus for basic functionality, and multiple mouse buttons should rightly be viewed as an optional enhancement rather than an interface essential.
If you don't like it, do what I did, and get a $10 logitech wheelmouse. OS X supports it just fine.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
If Apple actually sold computers again. Seriously, they are rapidly turning into a consumer electronics companies and selling computers are becoming more and more of an afterthought.
You can always tell those who haven't used a Mac. Once you do, be a blessing or a curse, your eyes glaze over and you stare like a juvenile boy looking at his first Playboy spread.
It might help if the blurb linked to the right part of the story (which is reg free).
Link
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
/.ed so here is a mirror http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/968128bf1c0820154 cd579120492e1e8/index.html
Good God, man, you forgot the most obvious one of all - Apple is based on BSD now! It's mascot carries a pitchfork and sports horns!
Could someone please find a mirror, or just log in through their grandmother's AOL account and post the text?
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I am reminded of Libermann Computers (the scammers who sold rebranded PC hardware as their own with faked designs on their website). Plenty of promises and mockups of what could be, but probably won't. It's nice to dream because that is one place that "great things (tm)" come from. But it's also important to have your head firmly grounded in what is possible with today's technology. Many of these things aren't possible in a cost effective way yet. Maybe in two to five years, but not yet. Just as a sidenote, when I first saw L Computers, I was very excited about the possibilities. But after seeing them disintegrate, I am not too keen on vapor.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
oh c'mon, that's funny. one of the few times I've found one of these jokes to be so.
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
Seconded, wholeheartedly. I have a freelance client who, bless her little heart, has a hard enough time grasping the different between click and double-click. Throwing a wholly extraneous mouse button on there would just piss her off.
... that kind of stuff.
On that subject, does anybody out there remember "Mousin' around?" It was a tutorial that came with the original Mac, if I remember right. It taught basic mouse skills like pointing, clicking, double clicking, clicking and dragging
There are a lot of people out there who would benefit from such a tutorial.
Are they going to start selling Beowulf clusters iPods?
Somebody has already done something similar.
A disk eject button is friendlier than a pinhole or obscure key or menu command.
...even in an educational setting where most computers were Macs.
Any modern OS that uses caching locks the drive when it's mounted anyway, so what's the point of having a button?
If you've ever worked tech support you'd quickly notice how many windows users came in with lost data on their floppies, and how few Mac users had the same problem...
Do you seriously think that it was a GOOD thing for the first iMac to require you to buy a dongle to run your Centronics printer with it...
Since Apple branded printers never used that interface, why should they coutinue to support it? Plus, so what if you have to buy a $10 adapter. Better to make the few users that need it pay the extra $10 than to waste money putting a port on a machine that most people will never use.
>What ever happened to ease of use? A disk eject button is friendlier than a pinhole or obscure key or menu command.
why is a button on the disk drive any less obscure than a labelled button on my keyboard (F12) where THE REST OF MY F*CKING BUTTONS ARE ALREADY LOCATED!?
plus, in order to make things are lots simpler and convenient my iBook drive is slot loading so there's nothing to put the button "on" anyway.
go home, troll.
Well, since most software developers think they are god, this would make sense.
To see some of the stories you've been missing, see my Journal.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"When the hard drive threw away all its data inexplicably, it was not worth staying with the Mac. I moved on."
holy crap it's neal stephenson!
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
Wouldn't you rather have one mounted on your head?
Putting moderation advice in your
they are rapidly turning into a consumer electronics company And so are Dell and Gateway... hmm, I wonder why? Could it be that computers are now commodities with razor-thin profit margins, while consumer electronics can still be sold for several times their actual worth? Business is all about margins, and you don't get good margins by competing directly with Asian manufacturers. Someday even HP might figure that out...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
If steve could create a sphere with one single button on the outside, that glowed, and had any realistic expectation that it might sell, he would.
The Sphere is perfectly capable of handling my Logitech MX700, which has multiple buttons and a scroll wheel!
Oh wait...this isn't a real product? Crap...
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
A pay-for internet magazine posts an article featuring designs known not to be by Apple and which any shmuck can see will never be used by Apple because they are pretty stupid. This is Apple slashdot worthy news? Usually I don't complain about this kind of thing, but that the article is subscription-only just puts it way over the top.
--- What?
Was the iPhone and maybe the video iPod, though I think the flap idea is just bad.
For a movie iPod, take the current device, make the screen longer for 16x9. Now if you want to watch a movie, turn it on its side and use the wheel to move forward or back.
For the iPhone, let you side the top half sideways so you could hold the phone while revealing a keypad - great for finding/entering contact information, notes, text messaging, etc.
But I'm not sold that Apple will go this route. I think they see the iPod as a hub to the computer - insert music into computer, get music onto iPod. Insert movies onto computer, get DVD's or (in time) movies onto the iPod. Record messages to the iPod, and back to the computer.
So most - if not all - of what they do is still geared towards the computer. And I think most people in this generation can live with that.
Extend the idea further. Apple is using the iPod as a hub of its own - recording messages, storing contacts, etc. I can see a time when you buy a digital iCamera, and instead of accepting tapes it just uses an iPod for storage. Plug it into the digital camera or camcorder, take your pictures (with 4,000 picture storage space at incredibly high quality, or with 40 GB of storage space, that's what - around 40 hours of video at MPEG-4 for normal TV rates, different for HDTV? I'm just guessing, so I'm sure someone who knows more about video compression will know).
Cars, like GM, are making "iPod plugs" so you can charge up. Look at the third party iPod market - at least 3 manufacturers are creating car stereos to let you view and select playlists from your iPod.
Expect to see the iPod become more of a "hub" in this fashion - and, of course, still come back to the PC. Maybe it will get Bluetooth in the future so can "walk into the house, sync and go". But several of the ideas (such as the "Wireless iPod you hang around your neck") won't happen because doesn't use the computer as a hub - but as a streamer. Apple knows people want to sync and go.
One last thought - the one thing that I'd like to see in future versions of iTunes is a group/family system. I have music, my wife has music, my kids have music, all shared on a Mac Mini. I have a family user just for that reason, but I can see the first time my daughter does a User Switch to herself and doesn't unplug Daddy's iPod, then starts putting *her* music onto just her user - now duplicating storage.
I'd like to see a version of iTunes which takes this into account, and lets you say "I'm a member of an iTunes share - point me here". Granted, there is the DRM angle where you'll have to have a "family user" to play Audible/iTunes store purchased songs (fine by me, since I just either buy CD's or JHymn the music once I buy it online) instead of every person using their own - but an iTunes family system would be a great. Only 4 more years until my daughter turns 10, and I think the system should be in place by then when she *really* starts getting into her own music.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I was hoping you were talking about slashdot... because gizmodo has recently ALWAYS had the leg-up on all technology gadgets like this while slashdot posts about it DAYS later.
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
I think we may reasonably see FM tuners on iPods. My iRiver has one, but of course, like everything else on my iRiver, I have to use this multidirectional tiny button to browse around to get to it (I bought it for the open standards it supports).
I think if Apple could keep a straight, uncluttered interface they would support an FM (or XM, or Sirius) tuner.
I'd like my watch to do a ton of other things- but the "it has to be a watch" comes first. So a calculator would distract from that terribly (bunch of tiny buttons, my watch is digital with analog face, etc.). I agree that Apple hasn't been big into hybridization, and for this we have much more useable items out of them. A watch that plays music would presumably have a cable going to my ears: no thanks, guys. If it broadcast a tiny signal that independant headphones / headband recieved, then maybe. Maybe.
I think before we get truly multifunctional small slabs of plastic and metal, we will need better dynamic controls. Example: my Kyocera 7135 Phone/PDA combo works real nice, but mostly that's because of a touch screen that makes the MP3 player have MP3 player controls, the address book have address book controls, etc. But it's still a pain to use when moving at all, even walking, because of the stylus / difficulty of hitting the screen correctly. Dynamic buttons (LCD screen on each button) would go in this direction, but I think we are still far away from good general purpose items for this reason.
"I've never had a living, breathing music executive come to Apple."
Kinda makes ya wonder what's hidden in that closet in the corner of Steve's office, doesn't it?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Apple has a history of taking existing but fringe technologies and making them mainstream. I thought, in keeping with this, that the next revision of the iMac would keep the swing-arm structure, but add the ability to rotate the screen to portrait mode.
Don't get me wrong, the new iMacs are cool, but I would have liked to see the rotating monitor become mainstream.
- AJ
Apple today announced a lawsuit against Business 2.0 for engaging in speculation of rumoured innovations, as well as all Business 2.0 subscribers, on the basis of "receiving stolen property" by reading the article. Mr. Robert Brunner has been singled out by Apple for breaking a non-disclosure agreement that stipulated he was not allowed to speculate, imagine, desire, or dream anything that Apple may or may not do. Apple is now attempting to track down anyone who may have read the article online, in order to append their names to the suit. Asked for comment, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did so but then had reporters sign NDA's and forbade them to print his comment.
I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
I'm confused... isn't it up to Apple to say what the next Apple designs are going to look like?
sexy face? are smoking crack? put down the pipe, AC!
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
Yeah.... you can spend all your time moving a mouse around on a screen, or you can add context menus that are available by right button. It's essentially the same. You have to provide context menus in the menubar depending on what you have selected. With right click pop up menus, you don't even have to have the item selected.
Spending my time moving a mouse pointer around the screen to get to things that should be "at my right hand" is not my idea of good functionality or good design.
They are from Business 2.0. Now you know, why they suck.
And those are, in the grand scheme of things, very few applications.
Some idea of what the average user (read: non-developer) does on a daily basis is an even greater indicator of how IT literate a person is.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
why is a button on the disk drive any less obscure than a labelled button on my keyboard (F12) where THE REST OF MY F*CKING BUTTONS ARE ALREADY LOCATED!?
Because most other appliances have an "eject" button on the device itself, so people are used to that.
...for Pentagram Design, Mr. Reeves and Mr. Pacino, had no additional comment regarding the future plans of collaboration between Apple and Pentagram.
IronChefMorimoto
The link that you provided takes you to the galary of pictures and then onto the first page of the artile. After the first page, you're still expected to register to continue reading.
"If Apple actually sold computers again. Seriously, they are rapidly turning into a consumer electronics companies and selling computers are becoming more and more of an afterthought."
Turning into a consumer electronics company? If you recall, way back when Steve introduced iTunes to the masses, his plan was to make people want the iPod, which would make people want Macs. His plan is working perfectly. While other PC companies are predicted to have slowdowns in units shipped, Apple is actually expected to sell MORE computers in the near future. Not only is Apple selling computers...they are selling MORE computers than before. Making a nice chunk of profit from the product that is helping the computer-base grow is simply gravy.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
That is the saddest way to defend Apple's overpricing. The iPod is overpriced with expensive components, yes... maybe acceptable.
But you mean to tell me a car adapter, a firewire cable and other iPod accessories need to be orverpriced too. Apple is clearly jacking prices up, cause they are in the monopoly seat.
YHBT
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
(Expand browser window to view ungarbled.)
What's Next for Apple?
Steve Jobs won't ever tell you -- but we will. Here's what a trail of intriguing evidence reveals about
where the world's hottest company is going.
By Paul Sloan, Paul Kaihla, April 2005 Issue
Steve Jobs was rocking back and forth in his chair at the head of his conference room table -- and venting. It was January 2002, and the target of his
ire was the music business. The industry was reeling from Internet piracy and, as Jobs saw it, doing nothing about it. Even Jobs himself, a man
accustomed to commanding people's attention, had been largely ignored by music execs. Jobs railed to his audience, a few Apple (AAPL)
lieutenants and Paul Vidich, then a senior exec at Warner Music, about the industry's total lack of imagination. "Until now," Jobs said, "I've never had
a living, breathing music executive come to Apple."
Vidich sat quietly.
"Why is it," Jobs continued, "that the people who run the music industry just don't get it?"
Vidich could have taken this the way Jobs certainly meant it -- as an insult. But as Vidich listened, he couldn't help thinking that he agreed. Finally,
he spoke up.
"Steve," he said, "that's why we're here. We need some help."
It's amazing to consider what has happened since that encounter at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. In three years Apple has utterly changed
the way people listen to music, and Jobs has become the hero of the very people he was lambasting. Top acts are eager to sell their music via the
iTunes music store. The iPod music player has become totemic; it's selling at a rate of about 40 per minute. White buds sprout from so many ears
that a sudden human evolutionary adaptation seems to have taken place.
Apple's lead in digital music is growing even as an army of corporate powerhouses -- Dell (DELL), Microsoft (MSFT), Samsung, and Sony (SNE)
among them -- spends hundreds of millions of dollars to grab a slice of the business. And the financial transformation driven by Apple's storming of
the music stage has been profound: On its knees when Jobs retook control in 1997, Apple is coming off a year in which revenue rose 33 percent and
profits quadrupled. Its stock, not surprisingly, has been on a tear, up more than sixfold in the past two years and now hovering around $42 a share.
So, Mr. Jobs, what do you do for an encore?
It has become a parlor game in some quarters to try to divine where Apple is going and how it intends to get there -- and not just at the dozens of
blogs that traffic in Apple rumors. Recently, Microsoft quietly hired a former Apple design executive whose mission is to help Bill Gates's baby
behave more like Steve Jobs's. Apple doesn't make the game easy; Jobs is famously secretive and detests leaks -- just ask the kid from Harvard
whom Apple recently sued after he posted details of the Mac Mini before the stripped-down computer was unveiled at Macworld (see "The Secrecy of
Success"). But there are ways to draw a bead on what's brewing in Jobs's fantasy factory. And we're here to tell you, it goes way beyond what he has
discussed at Macworld.
Jobs wouldn't talk to Business 2.0, but in various public forums, he has stressed how the $499 Mac Mini, the low-cost iPod Shuffle, and an advanced
operating system called Tiger, due out this spring, are meant to build on the digital-music momentum. In truth, they are but the tip of a very long spear.
Discussions with past and present company officials, Apple partners, and longtime acquaintances of Jobs, as well as clues in patent applications
and other evidence, point to a gargantuan effort to leverage the iPod's success by creating an entire line of breakout consumer electronics devices.
Dozens of gadgets -- from an iPod phone to wireless iPods that talk to one another to the ultimate all-in-one home-cum-car media hub -- appear to be
on the drawing board or, in some cases, already in prototy
In other words, they talked to a guy who was a designer during Apple's "dark ages", when they couldn't pull a decent design out of their @$$, were bleeding money, and were on their way out of business. How much do you want to bet that this guy was fired for incompetence even *before* Steve came back? If he'd still been around after the Second Coming of Steve, this is what I would have sounded like during his performance review:
Steve - Hi Frank. I understand you have designed many of Apple's products, including the Powerbook 5200.
Frank - Yes, that's right.
Steve - You are *so* fired.
HBH
"Smart is sexy." -- D. Scully ("War of the Coprophages")
...and the revolution will be complete.
If you don't know how to access contextual menus in the Mac OSes (and didn't think it was possible), maybe you need to get a clue.
I've tried to teach my father the keyboard shortcut for quitting an app. CMD-Q. Bless his heart, he still uses the menu every freaking time. Do you think these clueless people, such as my father, should be subjected to your "clueful" idea of computing?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Most of the accessories aren't produced by Apple. So you might want to complain about Belkin instead.
That reminds me, I've been meaning to ask.
How's that Yugo working out for you?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
He designed the whole toilet. http://www.electric-chicken.co.uk/toilet_06.jpg
Ease of use indeed. And when the user removes their disk while it's being written to? I can't tell you how many times I saw that happen while I was in highschool, and still see it happen with USB drives today. Someone grabs a bunch of files, drags them to the disc, and without even waiting for it to finish copying, hits the eject button or pulls the drive out.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Apple would be smart to integrate a cell phone and an iPod. It doesn't need to be a PDA, but a lightweight device that you could listen to music or make calls from. For the most part, PDAs are impractical and have features that your laptop would do better and with less hassle. I don't know if they want to venture into that market, but today mobile phone technology is complete garbage.
Right now phone companies want more money for poor phones and the only innovations they offer are fake innovations not driven by consumer demand. Heck, before 2001 who would have said, "this phone needs a crappy little camera"?
But by using Apple's minimalistic paradigm and integrating the iPod interface and your music library, the iPod could become are real "replace all your other crap" device. I'd rather have one bulge in my pocket that was slick and did everything I needed simply (data swap, music, phone, some email) than several devices that do it badly (I have a Smartphone, which sucks) and have features that are not needed.
Apple does bide its time though, but when they succeed (recently anyway), they really succeed. I think of all the crappy MP3 players I had before my iPod and now you can't sit on the subway counting white ear buds before you run out of fingers (or toes).
That's why Apple chooses to support it but not force it. How many people do you know still use the menus for copy and paste? Personaly, I know more than those who use the keyboard or the context menu. Unfortunately, these days, so many softwares have features that are only accesable through the context menus, and that's wrong.
A good example, put a new folder on your desktop in windows without using the context menu and without using the keyboard shortcuts.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Every single one of those was a combination of two devices. In most cases, this turns out to be a really lousy idea. Usually quality of both devices must be compramised to include in a single device. Camera phones, printer/scanner/fax, calculator watch, all of these suck.
I really would like Apple to make a cell phone and I'm not alone in this. NOBODY makes a bluetooth flip-phone for the low-to-mid-range market. I want a flip-phone, made out of iBook material, with a simple interface, and bluetooth sync with my OSX contacts. No camera, no stun-gun, no music player, just a phone. Some day...
People are going to carry around only one thing, once that's possible. The challenge is to to make the user interface of that one thing tolerable.
I disagree, and your second sentence is part of the reason. Once you combine devices with different types of controls, the UI suffers terribly.
The other part is getting the right features. When I look at "convergence" devices I can't find one device that has all the right features. Take a camera phone as an example. Can you find a single one that has all the features you want in a good phone, and has all the features you want in a good, general purpose digital camera?
Heck, my wife and I just bought a new washer and dryer. When looking I soon found that I liked the washer from one company, but the dryer from another company. I couldn't find a "matched" washer and dryer where both had the feature set we wanted unless we spent a lot more. Which of course led to a discussion about wether the washer and dryer really need to match. My wife won that argument so (surprise) the new, very expensive, but matching, washer and dryer arrived just yesterday.
Name one good thing they've done in 2005.
iPod Shuffle.
OK, you better sit down. It's even scarier than that.
.
Darwin's mascot has a pitchfork, horns, and a . . .
BILL!
Proof that MS is the Devil, if you were ever in any doubt.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
If you think iPod accessories (mostly sold by Belkin, Monster, and Labtech, not by Apple) are overpriced, make competing accessories and chop those guys off at the knees.
The pin-out diagrams for the iPod are easy enough to harvest from hacker sites.
Seriously. Do it. If you can make a reliable $20 car adapter which uses the cigarette lighter for power and FM for radio connectivity, I would rather buy yours than the $80 one from Belkin.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Yeah, I can even do it for $10 if you don't mind haywires and big globs of duct tape. There is a piece of uncooked maceroni that got into the tape somehow, so you will have to accept that. The cigarette lighter plug smells like Uncle Leonard's cigars, but hey, I saved money by swiping it from his 1973 LeMans.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
They show a bunch of designs by the guy who did the uninspiring early 90s Apple systems.
Apple now has Jonathan Ive, probably the best industrial designer on the planet. Does anyone think any Apple products will look anything like this?
The Mac isn't a 'BMW' class product.
It's a Schwinn. In a world full of Huffy, Hercules, and even lowly Sears bike riders.
Do you remember how we all treated the snobby kid with the Schwinn bike?
resigned
Since Apple branded printers never used that interface,
Indeed. And hell has no fury worse than the fate reserved for an Apple customer who wants to attach a non-Apple printer to his Mac.
Can you imagine the screaming, fuming, pissing match that would have commenced if IBM has designed their PC to only function with IBM Brand printers??
resigned
So how come when I drag the Hard Drive icon to the 'trash can' the machine doesn't conveniently spit out the Hard Drive?
Isn't the User Interface supposed to be consistent?
resigned
He's got a great instinct for being a natural asshole...
He wasn't asked for input because they thought he was a nice guy. They weren't fishing for an angel. They (or at least Doehr) wanted some hard asses with the stature to command the respect of Dean's team.
In hindsight, who was right and who was wrong?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Because most of the printers that the users want are non-Apple brand printers.
"Plus, so what if you have to buy a $10 adapter. Better to make the few users that need it pay the extra $10"
It probably costs a tiny fraction of that to just build in the port. Typical PC makers still build in these ports. It serve the needs of the users. Are you actually arguing that it is a good thing that Apple makes it harder for users to use other printers?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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What's Next for Apple?
Steve Jobs won't ever tell you -- but we will. Here's what a trail of intriguing evidence reveals about where the world's hottest company is going.
By Paul Sloan, Paul Kaihla, March 23, 2005
Steve Jobs was rocking back and forth in his chair at the head of his conference room table -- and venting. It was January 2002, and the target of his ire was the music business. The industry was reeling from Internet piracy and, as Jobs saw it, doing nothing about it. Even Jobs himself, a man accustomed to commanding people's attention, had been largely ignored by music execs. Jobs railed to his audience, a few Apple (AAPL) lieutenants and Paul Vidich, then a senior exec at Warner Music, about the industry's total lack of imagination. "Until now," Jobs said, "I've never had a living, breathing music executive come to Apple."
Vidich sat quietly.
"Why is it," Jobs continued, "that the people who run the music industry just don't get it?"
"Get what?" Vidich asked.
"The MP3 thing." Jobs continued. "There are millions of MP3s on the Internet, and people are downloading them for free, and the music industry is suing them. If the music industry were to sell MP3s instead, maybe people would buy them."
"But", said Vidich, "Why? I mean, if people can get them for free, then why pay to download MP3s? Isn't that the way the music industry is thinking?"
"Why buy music at all then? People bought vinyl when there were blank tapes. People buy CDs when they can get friends to copy them onto CD-Rs. People want to be honest. They want to do the right thing. If you price MP3s low enough, people will buy them instead of downloading them for free."
"No they will not", said Vidich. "They can buy CDs. But they chose to download MP3s instead. Doesn't that tell you, all by itself, that the vast majority of these people are cheapskates, who want music, but aren't prepared to buy it?"
"No", said Jobs, getting frustraited. "They download because it's convenient."
"Sure, it's convenient" said Vidich sarcastically. "I mean, the "inconvenient" way is a matter of finding what you want on Amazon, clicking "Buy with one-click", and then opening a package a few days later. The other involves making some flakey internet connection, downloading some illegal software, trying to find an MP3 you want knowing that half of the MP3s you're looking at are probably not as labeled, or badly encoded, or 384kbps stuff with some corruption that'll mean it will not work on your PC, then waiting for the damned thing to download, which would be quick on your supposedly whizzy cable modem connection, but you're actually downloading it from a "peer" who's DSL outgoing bandwidth is capped at 128kbps, or maybe even some nerd in the middle of nowhere with a V.32bis modem, and what you get then plays exclusively on your PC or MP3 player, unless you're willing to burn it to a CD. And do you know, Steve, how hard it is on most platforms to burn a CD? The tools are getting better, but man. My band tried to make a few CDs a few months ago, and Nero sucks."
"Ok, point taken" said Jobs.
The big idea
It was several months later that Steve Jobs hit upon a way to solve everyone's problems. Jobs saw that the problem with filesharing wasn't just that it was illegal, it was that it was user hostile to the vast majority of users. But how to fix it? This meant making a new filesharing client supporting technologies that would fix the problems. "Official" versions of each song. A friendly, web-like, user interface for picking and chosing music to download. But if Apple was going to go into the filesharing business, Apple also needed to ensure it wouldn't be sued.
Jobs called Nancy Heinen, Apple's legal chief, into his office one May morning and asked her. "If we were to make it easy for our users to download music, but harder for music publisher
Can you imagine the screaming, fuming, pissing match that would have commenced if IBM has designed their PC to only function with IBM Brand printers??
Oh please.
Apple didn't design their computers to function only with Apple branded printers. You're stretching things more than just a bit. All they did was choose not to build in an obsolete port. Apple printers used ADB ports, and they didn't put one of those on the iMac either.
Do you think that computer makers should continue to support every port they ever had on their machines? After a few decades we would end up with hundreds of ports on the back.
The fact of the matter is that your complaint that you had to buy a USB to parallel adapter to use an old printer on your iMac is a stupid complaint.
You must be thinking of the Apple Design Award. It's a "beautiful metal cube ... that glows when you touch it." Unfortunately they're generally not for sale.
http://www.mekentosj.com/goodies/cubism/
PIctures, including x-rays:t ml
http://www.mekentosj.com/goodies/cubism/gallery.h
Well... I'd do it like this:
Start->Run (cmd)
In cmd, I'd
] cd Desktop
] mkdir MyNewFolder
] exit
but that's me.
nokia makes a very small, no button cameraphone aimed at clubbers that just accepts your SIM card then uses voice dialing.
http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,8764,62371,00.html
Not every port: just the popular ones that are still used. Most PCs still have 9 pin serial and Centronics printer port, along with a bunch of USB ports. Most PC companies tend to be more responsive to the customers. No way would Dell or Gateway get away with Apple's "We are forcing you to use only USB for your own good"... like Apple was on some sort of moral crusade, rather than trying to make it easier for iMac users to use their machines. With Apple sometimes, and especially with the iMac, Apple's attitude was "we crippled it. So go ahead and buy extra drives and dongles. Tough.". Also, based on the prices of the units, you end up paying a lot less to have more.
"The fact of the matter is that your complaint that you had to buy a USB to parallel adapter to use an old printer on your iMac is a stupid complaint."
The guy appeared to be complaining that the iMac was a step backwards in that you had to buy a dongle to do what the previous Macs did without extra hardware and hassle. If anything is stupid, it is insisting that this dongle situation was a good thing.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
from a point of view directly in front of and below an elephant's tail.
The concepts are cute but 'so what!'
We'll see what Apple delivers when they deliver it. RendezVous is one prime example of zero-config that just works. Expect more of THAT from Apple.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
They've actually been poor at design
If you believe this, it's because you don't understand design.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
The real tendency is for people to choose products that serve their needs. This also goes for SUVs. Just because you do not need one does not mean that someone else does not. The "my product is unpopular because everyone is brainwashed" idea never pans out.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
not only does it have WAAAAY too many buttons, but to enter any kind of information like numbers or text, you have to not only use the stupid 4 button keypad for navigation, but they've also thrown in the cel-phone style 'cycling through numbers & letters' interface as well...
it's an abstraction of an abstraction - just ridiculous...
if you are going to provide a 'mock' interface for people to enter information, why not provide a whole keyboard instead of the cel-phone letter/number game...
so stupid...but there's a lot about the PSP that makes it seem half-baked and incomplete...
Gekido's Lair
I don't think a clicker wheel would be the best on a phone.
Are you kidding? I'd love to do some rotary dialing on one using wheel-gestures.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
It is. Dragging to the trash unmounts the disk and ejects removable media. Since a hard drive is not removeable media, all it will do is unmount the media.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Newton + IPod (>=10Gb) + lightweight BSD/OSX on modern hardware (i.e. Zaurus SL-3000 size and form factor) with WiFi,USB 2.0, Outlook sync (for work), PalmOS emulation, Sony PSP screen resolution, and no shit 8 hours of battery life for less than $600.
Steve, let me know when I can place my pre-order!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
The thing is, the only applications that don't require/benefit from contextual menus are the ones that people use infrequently and shallowly.
The great majority of computer time is spent in situations where contextual menus are *great*. So, yes, for a given user, very few applications - but *most* applications (as opposed to utilities like media players) benefit from context.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
He's quoted at length in this article. He was just on NPR talking about computing. How has this cretin who has an absolutely abysmal record of pontificating about anything always the go to source for so many media outlets? He must be a master marketer of Enderle Group.
He's lousy copy, and I usually tune out of anything he says. Which is usually something bad about Linux or about open source is evil.
How do you remount the hard drive? There must be some 'user friendly' trick that I have yet to discern, eh?
resigned
The market share is a reflection of the Windows lock-in that occurs in corporate America, and for which Microsoft has been taken to court and lost. It has little to do with Apple having computers that work and look good.
"It's only a matter of time before the various competing MP3 players out there do the same thing to the iPod."
I don't think so. This is no longer the computer market. Now we're in the home electronics market and in that one style matters. That's why people care about having a cool flatscreen TV, and a stereo system that looks good on the rack, and cool features in their cell phone. This is no longer the "oh who cares if it's a big, beige boxy machine, I'll just stick it out of sight on the floor" market. This is the market where you look at the thing all the time, and you personalize it "It's my cell phone" and "It's my iPod."
In this market, style and extra performance is king, or else everyone would have Daewoo TVs instead of Sonys. This is the market for iPods, and it helps explain why as more competitors enter the market, the iPod percentage of the market keeps climbing. The knockoff Japanese manufacturers haven't caught on to the shift in thinking that differentiates the iPod market from the computer market. They think they are still shipping big beige boxes, but the market is saying "Nope, I'll pay more for a cooler machine." Precisely the opposite approach most people took to buying computers, which should tell you right there this is a different market.
Even I'm not foolish enough to think Apple hung their printers off the ADB port in the classic Mac era.
There was a printer port. It used a mini-DIN connector. I sure HOPE you didn't plug your keyboard in there. I sure HOPE you didn't plug your printer into the connector on the side of the keyboard (and bend some of the pins).
After a few decades we would end up with hundreds of ports on the back.
Only if every vendor spun out their own proprietary connector/port scheme. And not too many did (except in the early days before an 'industry standard' was established)
resigned
Are you actually arguing that it is a good thing that Apple makes it harder for users to use other printers?
Yes.
If they make a million computers and have to pay a buck a port... It's unlikely that many users would ever use the port. New printers use the port they included.
Typical PC makers still build in these ports.
So what?
Plus, I think you'd be surprised how many PCs are legacy port free these days.
If the plan was to sell iPods to sell Macs, they why make iTunes available for the PC? My understanding was iTunes was given away to sell iPods - but the computer didn't figure into the equation at all.
A good example, put a new folder on your desktop in windows without using the context menu and without using the keyboard shortcuts.
Sure thing.
Double click "My Computer". Click on Desktop (it is the top-most entry, VERY obvious and accesible). Click on the menu item File->New->Folder.
While you might argue that this is inconvenient, I would argue the opposite. The desktop was intended for program shortcuts, and fast access to useful OS features...like My Computer, for instance.
For non-power users, a cluttered desktop is less efficient. This is why programs usually ask you before creating an shortcut on the desktop, and remove them on uninstall, so users can easily manage the clutter without having to know how to edit it manually.
And what if you want to clean the desktop up without a keyboard shortcut or context menu? Just drag the shortcut or folder to the recycle bin, it's provided there for your convenience.
So, in summary, the tools to unclutter the desktop are painfully obvious, and the tools to clutter the desktop beyond program-installed shortcuts is only slightly less obvious. All this does is encourage people to use the user data folders already set aside for such purposes.
Ask yourself literally, why would non-power users need to put a folder on the desktop? These are the same people who are satisfied with the global accessibility of a few key user data directories (My Documents, My Music, etc.), and simplified installers.
I argue that if you find you need the capability and flexibility offered by a context menu, you can spare the brain cells to learn how to right-click, and experiment a little with the interface.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
So, let me get this straight...
A designer that was with Apple during it's greatest period of decline and hasn't been with the company in nearly a decade is getting press for his bewilderingly lame knock-offs of the iPod -- a product that he (thankfully) didn't have anything to do with the design of.
Shame on Pentagram. They're better than this. This stuff is crap.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
all the designs in the article look like they'd fit into the current sony line. they're much to complicated and black to be apple products.
The guy appeared to be complaining that the iMac was a step backwards in that you had to buy a dongle to do what the previous Macs did without extra hardware and hassle.
That is absolutely untrue. You could still hook up a printer with no dongle. It just had to be a modern printer.
What do you think the utilization percentage of parallel ports is these days? There are over 400 computers in the building I'm in right now, and not a single one of them has something connected to the parallel port. Considering apple printers didn't use the parallel port before this, the percentage would be even less on macs. Not putting a parallel port on the iMac was a good thing. If only PC manufacturers would figure it out...
No way would Dell or Gateway get away with Apple's "We are forcing you to use only USB for your own good"...
Oh really?
This is true now, but not when the iMac came out. Back then, it was missing something that was needed.
"Plus, I think you'd be surprised how many PCs are legacy port free these days."
I know. I use one, and have a Belkin dongle for it. It is not so bad now, as these ports are starting to fade away. At the time that other ports were removed from the iMac, they were in common usage. Taking the ports away a few years down the road when few miss them is not a bad idea. Shipping computers without ports or devices that most users need (and have had up to that point) and somehow saying that this loss is a good thing is a bad idea.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Totally untrue. They work great for the vast majority of typical computer users. For the moms and pops of the world, they work better. I've seen that myself in several cases. I've yet to have anyone I recommended a Mac to later say they missed Windows. Everything worked as expected, there were no compatibility issues, it was easier. Only a small subset of users will find that Macs don't work well for them.
subscription site news articles shouldn't be news on /.
"You don't work in GUI design, do you? Context menus are essential in complex applications, e.g. IDEs, Tech Drawing, UML design."
You quoted the parent, but perhaps you didn't read it first? Let's see it again:
"Very few applications have (or should have) the level of feature complexity that would require contextual menus for basic functionality..."
Your list represents an almost insignificantly small subset of the applications used by PC owners. Most applications used by people are nowhere near as complex as the ones you cite.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
Now my question is... are any of those applications you expect your grandmother to use? When the parent says "very few", he/she i think means, "all but the most technical". you just cited 3 that (in my books anyway) fall under that "most technical" designation.
Hmm... I can think of no company in the computer space that has had more designs copied from apple. Hell, every Linux and windows GUI is a copy of the old Mac UI (and not a very good one at that.)
I can understand why Microsoft did it- they have little creativity and their culture stifles it.
But why did Linux GUI developers just copy the really poor Windows UI (which is a poor copy of the Mac UI)?
Sidebar-- if you're going to mention xerox in your response, don't bother. Apple licensed some ideas from xerox, paid them in Apple stock, and then created a user interface from them that went far beyond what xerox had in the lab, etc.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
This is true now, but not when the iMac came out. Back then, it was missing something that was needed.
Taking the ports away a few years down the road when few miss them is not a bad idea. Shipping computers without ports or devices that most users need (and have had up to that point) and somehow saying that this loss is a good thing is a bad idea.
Something has to drive the technology forward. What Apple did spurred the creation of the USB device market; a market that was invented by intel, but was failing to catch on because it wasn't "better enough" compared to the legacy ports. Had they not done it, perhaps the parallel port would still be "needed".
Apple also ditched the floppy drive with the iMac and replaced it with a recordable CD drive. You don't hear anybody complaining about that anymore. (Come to think of it, other than in this one thread you don't hear anybody complaining about the lack of a parallel port except in this one thread either...)
There is definitely tactile feedback on touch sensitive panels. you have to touch them in order for them to register anything. This fits in with the definition of tactile: "Perceptible to the sense of touch; tangible". Perhaps what you are really missing is the bounce of a keyclick. Not sure what that is called: kinetic feedback?
If you want an example of a user interface that has no tactile interface, look at the virtual reality helmet-based GUI that the Keanu Reeve character used in (I think) "Jonny Mnemonic". While it looked like he was pressing buttons when he saw it through the goggles, outside his fingers were just whooshing through the air.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
So, by your reasoning, Windows is great?
I would separate out require and benefit. Just about everything benefits, but most things don't require. I'm generally a feature junkie, but I recently got a used iBook. Since I didn't immediately get around to putting my usual apps on it, I've gotten used to Safari instead of Firefox, iChat instead of Fire, etc. It's turned out that the limited feature sets of those apps don't feel nearly as limited as I expected them to once I started using them on a daily basis. I also considered the one button trackpad to be a serious liability until I actually started using one. On the Mac you use control-click to get a contextual menu if you don't have a right clicker. It'd be interesting to have something count control-clicks on this machine; it turns out I don't use it *nearly* as often as I anticipated.
I used to disagree pretty strongly with people who said that requiring lots of contextual menu usage was merely a symptom of poor interface design, but I suppose I've come around to their point of view, at least to some degree.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
"If the plan was to sell iPods to sell Macs, they why make iTunes available for the PC? My understanding was iTunes was given away to sell iPods - but the computer didn't figure into the equation at all."
That's a good queestion. Here's one of the more popular views on why they did what they did. Apple got tired of being labeled as dumbasses by targeting only their niche audiences. Remember when the iPod first came out...it was available only for Macs. They realized they could sell many more (and thus make a load more money) by making it compatible with PC users. Now we have the connectivity issue. The iPod integrates just great with iTunes so then they had to make iTunes for the PCs. While all this is going on, Steve Jobs was talking about the "digital hub". He wanted the Mac to be the centerpiece of the consumer-level digital experience (cameras, video cameras, mp3 players, etc). iTMS was not expected to make any money, but rather have the largest catalog to draw users to it. iTMS works with the iPod. Millions of PC users see the wonderful interface on the iPod and the great user experience with iTunes. It was also a great consumer awareness issue. Everyone now recognizes the Apple logo as the dominant player...
So...tie all this together and that's what you've got. Evidently Apple learned from their mistakes and went about selling more Macs based on the halo effect.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
I believe Microsoft already purchased the rights to use the pentagram exclusively on all their products from the Dark Forces. Why do you think they named their next OS "Longhorn"?
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
That is the philosophy I strongly disagree with. What is the real point of it? Perhaps it is just to sell new machines?. Shouldn't the new technology be driven forward instead by the needs of the users? Shipping a machine without a feature in order to "force" them to use another feature is an example of high-handed "morality" being handed down from on high.
"What Apple did spurred the creation of the USB device market; a market that was invented by intel, but was failing to catch on because it wasn't "better enough" compared to the legacy ports."
How is this good? It is not even true: at the time the iMac came out, many Intel PCs had USB ports built in, and more were adding them all the time. The PC adoption of USB was not affected by the Macintosh "forcing", and it ended up being easier on the users.
"Had they not done it, perhaps the parallel port would still be "needed".
And the problem is...?
"Apple also ditched the floppy drive with the iMac and replaced it with a recordable CD drive. You don't hear anybody complaining about that anymore"
You sure did hear howls at the beginning. For one thing, you are remembering the history differently from what occured. Those floppy-less iMacs first came with non-recordable CD drives, you forget. You had to log on, or buy extra hardware just to remove data from them. This was another bad idea, and a step backwards. This was another "Bad thing". Only later did iMacs add the CD-R. Floppy drives have only recently started to fade in the PC world because the PC makers, are, again, more responsive to the needs of the users.
A CD is a poor replacement for a floppy because of the slow speed of burning. Only in the past year or two has the floppy become obsolete due to the increase in cheap thumb drivers. The recordable CD dented the floppy, but only the thumb drive is killing it.
The design should serve the users. Not some department head who somehow thinks it is immoral to use a floppy drive or a Centronic printer port. Or perhaps someone who has a motive of forcing people to buy new printers and peripherals when their old ones work fine. Either way, these design decisions are not in the interests of the users.
Shouldn't the decision to replace a printer be made because the old one is broken, or the new one has a nice photo feature you want? Not because some design-nazi in Cupertino determined that the port of the old printer was immoral and had to be stamped out?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
There's tons of competition, Dell, creative labs, arcos all have ipod, and ipod mini competitors. Apple has patent on ipod interface, and the supplier of the dial wheel has patent on the click wheel design and exlusive agreement with apple. Apple also has millions of purchased itunes songs that can't play on any other digital music players, and apple won't license their DRM to be used on these other players. Patents + DRM, is a very effective way of holding onto a market and locking out your competitors.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
but ideally the mouse should be perfectly round.
It's the perfect yin/yang of design. So simple yet so complex.
The desktop was intended as a work environment, just like your current desktop is. It's an extention from the real world. If the desktop was ment as simply a launcher device, they would have made it a launcher.
Why would non-power users want a new folder on the desktop? Maybe to put some files in. Maybe they want to clean up their desktop. Maybe it's so full of shortcuts to other places on their computer they decided organizing it a bit would be useful.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
That is amazing. At the exact same time, Microsoft is selling X-Boxes based on the halo effect.
Seriously, though, I think there is a good chance that the iTMS/Pod stuff might swamp and entirely redefine Apple. They could evolve into a huge music company while the computer part fades away.
How many remember that the toy/game company Coleco started out as Connecticut Leather Company? Commodore started out importing typewriters. Is that what they are known for?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I remember Mousin' Around, it could have been something else though, I had an Apple II GS. The version I remember had a simple drawing program in it, and there was a part where you had to point and click a man thru a cave (it was kinda a very short plateform game). Is that the same thing?
I know what you are talking about as far as clients and one button mice. I used to make extra money in college by tutoring people in the use of the Adobe suit, mostly Photoshop. I spent so much time just going over simple "this is how to use your computer" stuff that I wasn't even sure they are absorbing the software I was actually being paid to teach. The Mac people generally had less difficulty even though they were using OS9 (OS X had just come out and I didn't use it, I was a late adopter). Maybe it was the mouse.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
One of those isn't something to be very proud of. The reason the IBM eraser tip is not a lot more common is that IBM charges a lot to license their patent. At times, Toshiba has chosen to bite the bullet and include it The eraser nipple thing is far easier to use than one of those mushy touchpads. Especially when so many touchpads have the horrendous "feature" where if you bump the surface, it acts as a mouse click. This makes absolutely no sense: how many real mice register a click when you touch the mouse without clicking it? I've seen some where you could not even turn it off, making "a Drag is often a Click and Drag even though you never clicked any button" a common situation.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Bah, Apple is doing it too. Check their store.
$29 for the Shuffle base which is just a USB cable with a fancy stand?
Ouch.
Do they still charge $99 to replace a worn out battery? That hurts.
So, did you end up making a career out of Photoshop-related litigation?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
If the single button was better, everyone else would have copied it years ago. Especially the grassroots Linux community. but no.
"Everyone else" != Linux users. Linux is made by geeks for geeks. True it can be modded into something that can be passed off as user-friendly operating system but really that's not it's goal. You might be able to simplify Vi but it'll never be designed for Joe & Joanna Average. Basically all Linux use of the multi-button paradigm prove is "Power users perfer complicated interfaces since they often allow them to be more powerful when working with them." Hardly ground breaking.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
You and I may see Apply as a computer company...but these designers didn't. Not one computer among the pictures I was able to see.
It's all about perception, and Apple is not longer a computer company in the eyes of most people.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
And... 99% of SUV owners are such because they are assholes. Not because they "need" 4x4 for city streets.
Changa hates change.
Don't argue with him. I bet he drives a car where the door handles are inside the trunk instead of on the doors. And he loves it too.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Your uncle had a power adapter plug in the lighter of his 73 LeMans? Sounds like a fire hazard.
Hey, I had a power adapter in the plug of my 65 LeSabre when we went on vacation to New Mexico. Had a laptop plugged into it and watched movies as we cruised down the Interstate at 90.
Find coupons in Greeley
"Hey, I had a power adapter in the plug of my 65 LeSabre when we went on vacation to New Mexico. Had a laptop plugged into it and watched movies as we cruised down the Interstate at 90." Did the customs agents attempt to confiscate your movies when you came back into the United States?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
You don't have to carry the washer and dryer around with you all day.
I notice the story summary didn't have the "soul-sucking-registration" disclaimer. Is that kind of joking reserved only for the NYTimes.com site? At least NYTimes.com is still free (and you can always skip the registration by redirecting through Google). Also, I noticed no one here has posted the plain text of the article like they do for the NY Times stories. What gives?
Yes, he probably would.
(and the button would be optional)
No, it would be mandatory. It would also be placed round the back near the bottom of the sphere, making it as hard as possible to reach.
Within two weeks first generation spheres would develop discoloration and hairline cracks. Apple fanatics would flood Slashdot telling users "to quit whining." Two months later Apple would acknowledge the problem and recall the early, faulty spheres.
This article claims some rather outlandish things I'd never heard:
1. That iTunes was created as an attempt to mimic P2P software.
2. That the makers of Kazaa sued Apple, and settled out of court for a rather large amount of money.
3. That ESR did much of the programming on iTMS.
4. That ESR is the one who suggested putting DRM on the files, a prospect that hadn't occurred to Jobs or the music industry.
5. That the music industry had to convince Apple to loosen the DRM restrictions because they were afraid people wouldn't buy otherwise.
I almost want to say this sounds like an early April Fool's joke. Are they serious? Does anybody buy this?
They've got the apple philospohy down cold. Take existing technology, clean up the interface, make it a fashion statement, and call yourself an innovator.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Apple fanatics would flood Slashdot in praises of the incredibly simple design of the base vMac unit, its zero heat radiation, superb energy efficiency and environmental friendliness, and its perfect invulnerability to malware.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Don't thank me, thank the web site I found that converted entered text into Swedish Chef talk. I typed in a few pirate words, and pasted the result back to slashdot.
If you want to dare the lameness of my more original efforts, check out this one.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I'm afraid your statement does not follow. There are all sorts of examples of people doing things that are not good for them.
I'm so sick of people bashing Apple's one button mouse. Next to the PowerMac beige mouse that was standard through the 90s, the new clear optical mouse is the most ergonomic design ever made. You can hold it just about however YOU want, there's no craning to reach the button because the WHOLE THING is a button. All you people who love scroll wheels, and buttons on the side, top and front are going to wake up one day and not be able to move your hand because of carpal tunnel. Take it from me - 10 years as a graphic design power user.
Sure, I can get 10% more productivity with a scroll wheel or multi-button mouse, but I wouldn't be working today PERIOD if I'd used one all along.
"I've never had a real life music exec in here" said Steve "apart from those Beatles fellas wanting their cash..."
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
The single button mouse is a GREAT design.
...[snip]...
If you don't like it, do what I did, and get a $10 logitech wheelmouse.
Apparently not great enough to remain attached to your computer.
I told you my opinion, but I also made the facts quite clear: users can customize the layout of the desktop as easily as any other folder on their machine. In fact, it's even easier than an arbitrary folder because it has a direct top-level link in the file explorer.
If you're asking for anything more than that, then you're asking MS to create an inconsistent design. If people are bright enough to realize that their desktop can have file and folders on it, not just OS widgets and shortcuts, then they're smart enough to know how to use the file explorer just like they do for every other file and folder they own.
My opinion is that if users feel this consistent interface is TOO SLOW or TOO TEDIOUS, then it's on them to find a way to do better. This is the whole reason for the existence of shortcut keys and context menus.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Apple defies this trend because demand is inelastic, or in other words, it's a cult whose members will buy anything. Then justify it post-facto with crap like "Something has to drive the technology forward."
In desperation, the authors turned to hot-shot programmer Eric Raymond, author of an unused Linux configuration tool. [...] Eric suggested using an "encryption" system to prevent music from being used in ways the music publishers wouldn't like.
and this gets +1 informative ?!
Well, either I've drunk too much to read properly or someone's seriously missed the satire.
Shipping a machine without a feature in order to "force" them to use another feature is an example of high-handed "morality" being handed down from on high.
Except that's not what happened. Users of the older technology were supported through an inexpensive adapter. It wasn't the users who were forced to upgrade, it was the makers of perhipherals that were forced to upgrade.
It is not even true: at the time the iMac came out, many Intel PCs had USB ports built in, and more were adding them all the time.
While this is true, devices that used these ports weren't being developed. While USB was a potential boon to customers, manufacturers had no incentive to upgrade their existing products.
[...] some department head who somehow thinks it is immoral to [...]
Immoral? Give me a break. There are only two possible reasons that Apple would have made the decision that they did: It saved money, and/or they thought it would improve the user experience. Apple has never cut corners in the manufacture of their products just to save a few bucks, so you'd have a hard time convincing me that the first of those reasons was the only one. Looking at what USB turned into after the iMac came out makes it a hard sell that their decision didn't ultimately lead to a better user experience than what would have been otherwise. Most of all, however, I'm sure morality didn't have anything to do with it.
A CD is a poor replacement for a floppy because of the slow speed of burning.
A 2X CD-R drive burns at 300kB/s. That's a full floppy disk worth in 4 seconds. Good luck finding a (non-USB) floppy drive that can fill a disk in under 30 seconds. CD-R drives have *always* been faster than floppies. Since you can boot off of them too, the moment blanks became cheaper than floppies, CD-Rs were a superior solution. The only thing anybody has needed a floppy disk for in the last 5 years is to read data off of pre-existing disks.
[...] Either way, these design decisions are not in the interests of the users. [...] Shouldn't the decision to replace a printer be made because the old one is broken, or the new one has a nice photo feature you want?
Once again, it's not the *users* who were forced to upgrade. It was the *manufacturers*. Users needed only to buy an adapter. The design decisions *were* in the interests of the users becuase it forced manufactures to make products using the newer, better technology available instead of continuing to pump out the older technology. Hell, Microsoft didn't even bother to properly support USB in Windows until the explosion of USB devices caused by the release of the iMac occured. Sure the ports were there, but did you ever try plugging something into one of them under Windows 95, or Windows 98 before the USB patch was released?
If only iTunes weren't introduced 8 months before the iPod.
"A 2X CD-R drive burns at 300kB/s. That's a full floppy disk worth in 4 seconds"
You have some good points. However, CD burning takes a lot longer. You put in the disk and the drive chugs along a while recognizing the CD. Chances are, you can insert the floppy, copy the file to it, and eject the floppy in the time it takes the machine to "figure out" the CD in this very first stage. Then it has to be formatted. More time.
Copying the file is, yes, pretty quick.
However, after you copy it, you have the lengthy finalization and ejection stage. It is what happens before and after you copy that makes copying a little 80k file a lot quicker on floppy than CD. It is not the copying itself. For the past several years, prior to the recent triumph of the thumb drive, a floppy was much quicker and more convenient for moving such small files around.
For small files, CD-R's have always been a lot slower than floppies.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"funny" if you want, but realize that he's not kidding. Somewhere there are still probably several 7100's 8100's with my blood on their motherboards...
Sharp started out selling mechanical pencils, Logitech started out selling Modula-2 compilers, and Microsoft started out selling BASIC interpreters... yes, if you "See a need and fill it" you could quite possible wind up positioning your company in a completely different direction then was originally intended.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Walt Mossberg publishes a glowing review in the Wall Street Journal. "Apple has made the computer invisible!" he writes, excitedly.
"Arthur C Clarke once said that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'," writes Mossberg. "Apple has gone one step further - and made it indistinguishable from the air around it. It's the most beautiful computer I have ever used - since the last one they sent me."
Except there were still many things that were easier on the command line than the GUI. The command line serves the users, period. Apple crippled thier OS by not having it. No one else copied this mistake, and eventually Apple rectified it with OS-X (which is their first serious OS).
"Users want total control over their computers. Redefinition (via Mac): "
Apple was way behind on this at the start. Jobs was openly hostile to "hackers" playing around in the guts of the machine and the OS to make it work better. The CLI went away only on the Mac. No one copied this mistake, and Apple was forced to bring it back. Besides, you never increase user control by getting rid of a feature. That only makes it harder to use.
"- Computers sit on a desk and run applications. Redefinition (via Newton): Computers can portably support everyday tasks. Result: PDAs"
Now it seems like you are making stuff up. The Newton was a false start, a failure. It was Palm who gave us the PDA for others to copy. Newton's only legacy is "flvvbr writte on nVVt0n!" handwriting recognition jokes.
" Computers are for computing. Redefinition (via iMac, iLife, iTunes, iPod): Computers are for entertainment."
Again, you have it backwards. Look at Jobs again, often outright hostile to the idea computers being used for games. Computers were also making music and playing games long before, as well. Original Napster on PC was hugely popular long before iTMS. Yes, the iPod is hugely popular now.
" Computer companies make computing equipment. Redefinition (via iMac, iPod): Computer companies make consumer electronics."
Do you think history began in 1984? Of course not. Commodore sold calculators before, during, and after its computer run. It took mere seconds to think of them. There are probably many other examples.
What we really have here is instances of Apple doing something so badly it never mattered (the Newton), Apple doing stuff others already did before (consumer electronics, computers as a way to listen to your personal music), Apple doing something the wrong way and eventually catching up to everyone else (sophisticated command line only in the 10th "X" version of the OS), or Apple just doing what everyone has done since the late 1970s (making computers for entertainment). On the network part alone, you are pretty close to the mark.
There is no redefinition going on here, except when it comes to colors. The iMac color scheme had a profound impact throughout industry, resulting in staplers and George Foreman grills.
Now for the good part:
You forgot to mention an actual Apple innovation that they DID start and was copied by others: firewire. Wifi (Airport) probably should have been mentioned: Apple was a true leader in this. You also under-emphasized the iPod. While not 100% a "computer" thing, it is having a huge influence.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Mom: "Ever since I dumped my Dell and got one of these things, I've gotten no viagra spam!"
Jr: "I get to take this thing to school in my backpack and still have room to fill the backpack with books!"
Bruce the interior designer: "I recommend this to all my clients, dear. It fits with any decor.
Samuel Buckbanks, Busy Business Executive: "The vMac is so durable that I can send it through checked luggage on plane trips, and be 100% certain that nothing will change when I get it back."
Grandma: "Now, at last, a computer I am not afraid to use!"
John Dvorak: "I'll do a review of this thing as soon as I can find it. I could have sworn I set it next to that Amiga 8000. I will say, however, that it is the quietest machine I have ever worked with."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The only thing I can figure is that you have one of Sony's 1973 model "Mavica" 0.3 kilopixel digital cameras that stores the pictures on an 8-track tape you insert in the side of the camera.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
An arse, with a clickwheel!
Reads article.
Damnit, they've already got that one...
You just made my point. If 3rd parties can do it for so much less why can't Apple?
Because they know that the many people will go to them to do it no matter what they change because their marketing machine has done such a great job at instilling brand loyalty.
I want to know more about the Frog Design era, when they went from the chunky dark beige Apple IIe look to the sleek grey Apple IIc and IIgs, and Mac Plus and SE! I'll go as far forward as 1990 and say that the Mac Classic and LC were physically gorgeous.
If you are instead reading a web article about Starbucks while logged in on your Mac, does this come close at all?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
They've changed the requirement for registration... it's free now
...but all of the quotes are familiar to me as from older articles (and none of the other articles they use for their information are cited)
but the article is pretty bad... the lead makes it seem like they have inside information about the meeting, but they don't. They just take quotes from other people's articles and make it appear as if they got all of these great interviews with Wozniak and others.
and they have this gem:
"But above all, some argue, Jobs must avoid repeating the mistake that cost Apple its massive early lead in the computer market. That happened largely because Jobs would not open up the Mac. He kept its operating system proprietary, and Microsoft and its ally Intel(INTC) clobbered him"
This isn't even remotely true... Steve Jobs was no longer at Apple during this period. He was forced out shortly after the introduction of the Mac. I think they meant "Apple" rather than Jobs.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
(with apologies to Rudy Rucker)
.. it can handle a 4" 16x9 screen, 720x480 resolution.
* beef out the ipod mini case style so...
*
* make it a touchscreen
* emulate the ipod interface with the touchscreen
* select a video and hold the unit sideways to watch the video.. Home videos, PVR recordings, iMovies, ripped DVDs, etc.
* incorporate a 3G phone, bluetooth and wifi
* Newton/Inkwell HWR and full PDA functionality
* drop in a 60g drive, with firewire 800 and usb2
* nice to have: GPS (probably part of the 3G phone chipset
* Super cool: put in support for Dashboard apps!!
Go download a 1.x version of Gimp (thankfully, they fixed this in 2.x).
Notice that when you right-click on something, you get the entire menu bar.
This sort of thing is what we're talking about when we say having a one-button mouse leads to better software design. The context menu should be for context. If a user's smart enough to know about it, then the features are available to them. If the user's not smart enough to know about the context menu, then the commands should be available in traditional menus.
Defaulting to two-button mice leads to lazy developers ruining the utility of the context menu by putting every damn thing that comes to mind into them instead of keeping it short and simple.
Re:Well, for one thing..., posted to Re-Imagining Apple, has been moderated Insightful (+1).
It is currently scored Insightful (2).
Re:Well, for one thing..., posted to Re-Imagining Apple, has been moderated Insightful (+1).
It is currently scored Insightful (3).
Re:Well, for one thing..., posted to Re-Imagining Apple, has been moderated Overrated (-1).
It is currently scored Insightful (2).
Re:Well, for one thing..., posted to Re-Imagining Apple, has been moderated Offtopic (-1).
It is currently scored Insightful (1).
Re:Well, for one thing..., posted to Re-Imagining Apple, has been moderated Offtopic (-1).
It is currently scored Offtopic (0).
Applele has been making mock-up Apple products for a long time - and some of them look pretty good!
Circumcision is child abuse.
I don't know; I don't really consider IM to be an application (I consider it a utility - utilities generally don't benefit, applications generally do.) If you wanted a definition for the difference (beyond "I know it when I see it"), I think it has to be that one is designed to do a single thing well (utility), while the other is designed to do many things in a single way (application). IM is designed to talk to other people. When you start to get into doing conferencing, desktop sharing, etc, etc., you're pushing IM beyond utility into application, and you start to require more context.
I do agree - *requiring* contextual menu usage is poor design. Requiring contextual menu usage for efficient use of an application at a high level is not. I think that applications should be designed such that a novice doesn't need contextual menus, but such that an expert can be more efficient through their use.
(And personally, having gotten used to gestures and context in my web browser, I can't use a browser without those features for anything more than a quick check of the weather. I find myself doing right-clickhold drag left whenever I want to go back, and then I swear at the computer when IE pops up a stupid contextual menu, and it's all downhill from there.)
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
So therefore all computer mice should be crippled just to remove a button that some users don't use? Good argument...
Having the button there does no harm whatsoever.
I don't get you. The argument was that most users don't need the second button, therefore it should not be there. That is a bullshit argument. And what is "my clueful idea of computing"? The argument that removing the second button would be silly? Please re-read my post and let me know what you meant; I'm still trying to figure it out! "subjected"?
I agree on your point about some folk not using extra features. That's just the way it is. Keyboard shortcuts are hard for most people to remember. Some people have trouble pressing two buttons at once!!
If you don't know how to access contextual menus in the Mac OSes (and didn't think it was possible)
You need two hands. Nice design!! I regularly use by mouse in bed as the TV in my bedroom is actually a TV tuner card. So, I should now buy a cordless keyboard just in case I want to enqueue in Winamp rather than play imediately? With a contextual menu, I can do just about anything from the mouse.
Thanks. I always wondered about Apple's brief involvement with Battlebots.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum,
He hummed.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
You have to learn to look at it differently. Approach it from the standpoint of a religious discussion, instead of an emotionless technical discussion. Or, imagine if the old Hatfields and McCoys were around today carrying on their feud on "Slashdot". If you are a McCoy, the Hatfields will always remember what you said.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
They don't have anything like a full keyboard, so it doesn't make sense there. But if they did, they would need it.
"The computer is now a piece of consumer electronics and the interface matters. That began with the Macintosh."
It began long before the Macintosh. Besides, in the mid 1980s Apple was one of a few companies with the GUI. The "piece of consumer electronics" started with the C= Pet, TRS-80, and Apple ][. The Macintosh came, what was it, 6 or so years later when things were well underway, and it was a Apple was a minor player by then. Apple then, as now, even tried to avoid being a major player of consumer electronics by intentionally making its machines hard to buy with the idiotic dealer situation. The iPod is their first serious attempt: you can get them at Target, and don't have to put up with dealers at Official Apple Stores who are only open from 10 to 5.
In an alternate reality, Macs might possiby have dominated things if Apple had early on made the decision to have them sold at as many places as possible. But this did not happen: the company still shoots itself in the foot with the "official Apple store" problem.
Let's say it is 6:00 at night, and I want to see the latest Toshiba laptop. No problem, just go to Best Buy. But wait, there is something called a Powerbook that might be better? Go over to the Apple store. The lazy bums don't even want to sell them: the store closed over an hour ago.
As for your mention about insulated geeks, the mom and pop non-geeks during the Mac's early years still prefered PCs. The mom and pop non-geeks still do.
"calculators are not high-volume CE devices"
Commodore is an excellent example. Back when Commodore was in it, calculators were a big deal, and not something you get for $2 on a keychain without thinking about it.
"The only important innovation of the Palm was their special alphabet Graffiti."
The other important innovation was that they made a well-designed machine that gained wide acceptance. The previous makers (of which Apple with its Newton was only one) never had succeeded at that. The Willard (oops, too much Seinfeld)... I mean Sharp Wizard never had mass acceptance.
")!It did not sell well because they did not properly manage expectations with respect to handwriting recognition."
That was just one of many problems. Apple, like usual, also made the Newton hard to get by limiting the distribution stream. It was also a mess compared to the Palm.
"Consoles are getting there now, but were not when Microsoft introduced the X-Box."
Do you think that history began in 1999? The Atari 2600 was one of many high-volume game consoles that preceeded the X Box. Intellivision, Coleco, others...
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The photo-essay is what was titled "Re-imagining Apple," as the Slashdot Entry was. Notice it says, "[b]Plus:[/b] What's next for Apple?" which is the companion story.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
Sorry for jumping into your flame war with Mr. Anonymous...
k /20050313.html My Apple store is open much later than 6. Second, Macs are sold at CompUSA for example. At said stores you could easily walk between a Toshiba and a Powerbook at 10pm. Apple does sell with "big box" stores, just not Wal-mart and Best Buy I guess.
First... http://www.apple.com/retail/stjohnstowncenter/wee
Second... The Newton is the most elegant PDA ever. Period. The first Message Pad was horrible, that's true enough, the recognition was poor unless you carefully and excruciatingly wrote in seperate letters with one or two strokes (ironically, just like using Graffiti, which this thread holds up as superior). The last generation (MP2200) is so great I still use mine today, even though it's 4 times the size of my various Palm and Palm-based devices (I've also owned Pilots Pro through 3, Visors through deluxe and Clies for what they are good for: being small).
And finally... Holding up the Atari 2600 as a "high-volume console"? A 2600 was as rare in the home as a Commodore or an Apple. Contrast: the NES, sold in the tens of millions, the Playstation, sold in the hundreds of millions. Consoles didn't start being in every home until the Playstation in the 90s. Intellevision and Colecovision?? How many of those were every sold -- 100 thousand(s)? I would hardly call Pong a console while we're at it.
My evidence is anecdotal at best, but just like the title of this thread, you and I are biased. I'm sure we've both built with bread-boards, wrote guis with shell scripts, owned every console worth owning, owned one or more Commodores, Apples, TIs, or God forbid Tandys.
The point that is being lost here is the population that intersects at all of these purchases is exceedingly small. It's easy for us all to aggregate at forums like this, where the subject matter appeals to and reinforces our biases. But we, and our trite opinions and purchasing demands, are very meager in the greater industries. How man people buy a computer with XP-home for its great command line? Even supposing Xp's command line was worth a shit, of all the PCs sold today I'll bet only one was sold because the end user needed it for its CLI.
I don't meant to rant, and don't intend any kind of insult.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Just try teaching someone who has never used a computer before to use a two button mouse.
.us. Most kids are using two button mice without a problem, it's the older generations that tend to have issues with computer interfaces. My grandmother refuses to use a microwave also, saying it's too complicated. Does that mean that none of us should use them either? My grandmother would be just as confused by explaining that you have to hold down the botton for X seconds or hold down a key on the keyboard while clicking as she would be by the right button.
Those people are becoming pretty rare in
Very few applications have (or should have) the level of feature complexity that would require contextual menus for basic functionality
It's not necessarily about complexity, it's about ease of use. One of the reasons I can't stand Safari is that you can't go forward or back using the right button. I generally surf without my hand on the keyboard and I use high resolution monitors the vast majority of the time. Traveling to the upper left hand corner to get to the navigation buttons is a waste of time and energy compared to the right-click, slight movement down, left click that I can use in IE or Mozilla. I *like* being able to do that, or correct mispelled words, etc. with the bare minimum of movement.
multiple mouse buttons should rightly be viewed as an optional enhancement rather than an interface essential.
If you don't like it, do what I did, and get a $10 logitech wheelmouse. OS X supports it just fine.
Given that 95% of the Mac users I know (quite a few - I work for a university) have multibutton mice, wouldn't it be nice for Apple to either not bundle a mouse at all or include a mouse that caters to the majority and let the tiny minority who can't handle two buttons buy a single button mouse, saving money and landfill space for the majority?
P.S. A laptop should be useable in and of itself. If Apple split the button in two, you could always map both buttons to act as the main button. There's no way to do the reverse.
Are you confusing the 2600 with the Atari 400/800 computer? This is the Atari VCS, and it was a runaway success. From the AtariAge web site: "The Atari 2600, originally called the Atari VCS, is the godfather of modern videogame systems, and helped spawn a multi-billion dollar industry. Atari sold over thirty million of the consoles, and together with other companies sold hundreds of millions of games. "
You mentioned the NES, another huge success, as selling "tens of millions", as a high volume console. If the NES is, then the Atari 2600 with tens of millions is also.
"My evidence is anecdotal at best, but just like the title of this thread, you and I are biased"
heh...:)
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
If they had a wide single-button, perhaps, that would left-click if you clicked on the left side, and right-click if you clicked on the right side. Would be somewhat inexact, however.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
You're right, I didn't look up sales for the 2600. But grant me this -- if the sales of the 2600 topped 30 million, then I MUST have the sales of the NES and Playstation under by a similar order. :-D But yeah, I was just shooting off my [flawed] memory. (oh and to be fair, each 2600 owner would only need to have on average 5 games to sell "hundreds of millions of games". I'll bet the actual average was higher. I know I, and my buddies each, had more than five games. Compare the Playstation again, if each PS owner has 5 games that would be a billion games. (today's guesstimate based on May-2004 sales numbers, world-wide). Maybe the argument gets even weirder with the backward compatibility of the Atari 4800 and the PS2, the mind reels.)
:). Cheers.
My point was that a [the?] "high-volume console" was the Playstation. Prior to that, video-gaming was cool for dorks and nerds like me. I.e., Tecmo Bowl wasn't getting the jocks and ballers off the fields and down in front of the TVs (maybe it was getting skinny, pastey nerds into football though?). But, games like Adventure and Zork, (and their later offspring like Zelda or Ultima) was getting the kids who liked to read sci-fi, fantasy, 321-Contact, and play with basic and assembly on the family computer.
I think it would be an interesting project to plot the sales of genre specific titles (space, swords and dragons, modern mystery, puzzle, board game sim, sports, etc) against a timeline starting in the late 70s. Next to that chart you could plot the same data as percentage of entire market vs. time. I think these visualizations might clarify my assumptions about the main-streaming of video games as the popularity of bedrock genres started drifting as new audiences were tapped.
Now I'm just rambling. Anyway, thanks for checking up on my numbers
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
I was correct in saying the Atari "2600 was as rare in the home as a Commodore...". The Commodore 64 alone sold in excess of 30 million. :-D Add the Vic-20 in the mix and a Commodore may have been in more homes than the 2600. :-) Woot!
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Dean Kamen wanted a practical solution to a practical transportation problem. Steve Jobs wanted style.
These are not mutually exclusive. Obviously, Kamen didn't think that style was important, and the sales of the Segway have been disappointing, to say the least.
Kind of reminds me of Henry Ford.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"Any modern OS that uses caching locks the drive when it's mounted anyway, so what's the point of having a button?"
To request the modern O/S to dismount the drive and eject the media, if possible?
Doh. I actually like those old CDROM drives with play, stop, FF buttons and volume controls on the front panel. You can actually select and play different tracks without having to wait for the O/S to launch the darn CD player app.
Also find it annoying to have to dismount USB drives before pulling them out. But I suppose that can't be helped given the design. (OK I know you don't always have to - it just depends on the situation, but it's still annoying).
I had an Apple user explain to me that Apple made it hard for the user to eject disks because the Apple disk system tended to scramble the disks unless you ejected them at the perfect time. This was not a problem with better-designed systems, including PCs and Amigas, which could take this in stride. I think Apple should have fixed their disks systems rather than try to make up for it by making a basic task difficult for the user.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Yeah.... it worked fine on the Apple ][, // etc line, but I guess Apple forgot how to make it work later. Maybe it was when that Pepsi guy took over the company. He confused eject buttons with pop-can pull tabs, and wanted to minimize the risk of pop spraying all over the user's face when they pressed the eject button any time they wanted.
"Personally the one button mouse sucks too. Most people can figure out their index finger from their middle finger, but double-clicking is hard."
Maybe it was the Pepsi guy again. Due to an unfortunate experience riding a cab in New York, he did not want the middle finger used in any respect, even if it meant using it to control a mouse button.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
To request the modern O/S to dismount the drive and eject the media, if possible?
There are already buttons for that on the screen. Why do you need another one? There also aren't any OSs I can think of that work that way. (Windows doesn't).
I actually like those old CDROM drives...
CD-ROM drives are read only. They don't count. There's no data loss penalty from ejecting whenever. There are also plenty of macs with normal sized eject button on the CD drive. Every mac I own has one.
Also find it annoying to have to dismount USB drives before pulling them out.
You would also probably find it annoying if your flash drive was as slow as it would be if your OS didn't use the write caching that makes the unmount required. If not, just turn it off (mount in sync mode, or whatever your OS of choice calls it) and you won't have to worry about pulling the drive unless you care about a particular write that happens to be in progress. You'll wear out your flash more quickly from the redundant writes though.
So therefore all computer mice should be crippled just to remove a button that some users don't use? Good argument...
This is a strawman. What I'm saying (and I think the parent was saying as well) is that Apple is fully justified in shipping single buttoned mice with its computers. This simplifies the use of the computer for those who wish to use it as an information appliance, and forces developers to make the basic apps easy to use. 'Unsophisticated' users represent 99.9% of all computer owners, so it makes sense to cater to them. "Having the button there" confuses them needlesly, especially when the apps are so simple in the first place. Power users who want a mouse with a second or third button are fully capable of getting one at minimal cost and effort.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
I hear what you are saying on application design, but I've NEVER met anyone confused by two mouse buttons. If that's a problem for them, maybe Apple OS's are the helping hand they need!!
'Unsophisticated' users represent 99.9% of all computer owners, so it makes sense to cater to them.
That was not the case when the decission to go with one button was made. You can't go back and change your reasoning/justification to suit the current climate! Unless you are the US Gov. re. Iraq!! ;-)
I hear what you are saying on application design, but I've NEVER met anyone confused by two mouse buttons.
;-)
You should see my 77 yeard old father in front of a computer, then. And you'd be even more surprised how many Windows users don't even know about the right-click.
"Unsophisticated' users represent 99.9% of all computer owners, so it makes sense to cater to them."
That was not the case when the decission to go with one button was made. You can't go back and change your reasoning/justification to suit the current climate! Unless you are the US Gov. re. Iraq!!
I remember when first the Lisa and then the first Mac came out. There was much talk about why they went with one button, and Apple's explanation was ease of use for novice computer users. Maybe most users at the time were relatively 'sophisticated', but those weren't the people Apple was trying to sell computers to. They wanted the other 99.9% of the population to want and buy a computer. To quote the man himself:
"Working on the Apple I at the time, they weren't interested in human factors. While I was the first PARC-savvy person at Apple, Larry Tesler was the first PARC employee to join the company. At first he was strongly opposed to the Mac's easier-to-use mouse methods, and I eventually wrote a memo that showed, point by point, that the one-button mouse could do everything that PARCs three-button mouse could do and with the same number or fewer user actions. It was faster and more efficient, and much easier to learn and remember how to use."
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
But not all SUV's are 4x4's. The rest of your point is nice, though
That's what I was refering to in my original post. Once someone I know new to computers has gotten to a certain point, I show them it and most never look back. :-)
Personally, I like them from a design standpoint. I like Windows style of "default" action in bold, with other relevant options next to it. When I right click on a message in my inbox, I want to see "move", "delete", "properties" etc. Maybe not all that useful for one, but when you multiselect you can tidy the inbox very quickly. If you are running over VNC/X11 as I often do, dragging can be a bit flakey.
From Larry Tesler's quote you provide: "I eventually wrote a memo that showed, point by point, that the one-button mouse could do everything that PARCs three-button mouse could do and with the same number or fewer user actions."
I'd quite like to see that memo (is it public?), because that's one of the things I believe that a two button mouse does better. I take it he meant that you could just use the full menu? To be honest, I'd argue that having a context menu was more user friendly, due to it having less but more relevant options. File/Quit is not relevant when I select a message. If you told new users that the right brings up a menu and the left selects, I reckon they'd all pick it up quite easilly. It's more a case of them not being shown the basics when they start.
Besides, in a FPS, the more buttons the better! :-)
only requires one button on my phone... or any of the three that I've had so far...
it's only when I access it elsewhere that I need to key in other numbers...
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Even worse. What business does an SUV have existing if it's not even got 4x4? I mean, good grief, that's the only good thing any SUV has! That's the only reason I'd ever use one, anyway. Ah well. I did know that. I just try to block the really painful stupidities of this world out. And my employer owns compaqs because "everyone says" they're good computers, even though we've never had much luck with them. So maybe it is brainwashing afterall, but it's self inflicted in any case.
Changa hates change.