Skip to main content

The idiocy of fools

Why Apple made a mistake releasing two phones.

Well let’s see… Apple releases two new phones and I’m pissed that I didn’t order the Nexus 4 yesterday and now it’s out of stock. I feel like a dumb ass. I wanted that phone. I’m rather tired of the iPhone. Why? well it’s slow as molasses these days. Every progressive iOS update seems to leave the phone slower and slower and the apps buggier and buggier. And Android has caught up with the iOS features and now it seems de-coupled from Android updates.
You see the bane of Android is fragmentation of the platform. Huge amount of screen sizes, processor, etc. But the Nexus devices and the maturity of the Android market has made that less of an issue. This was Apple’s greatest strength: a unified platform. Because on hardware (features), they were already the same.
Apple’s last true innovation in the iPhone line was the retina screen. That’s the iPhone 4 (the one I have btw) and it was fantastic. We are three models in after that. Three years. No break-through device in that time. Bigger screen, eh, faster processor, eh. How about longer battery life? nope. Free cloud back up of all your phone’s data? nope. Well what good is the other stuff then?
Without having any true significant innovation in the mobile space all that was left was cachet. Android phones were the space of the uninitiated, the late adopter. iPhones were pioneers… That is until you go ahead a release a ‘cheap-looking’ but still very expensive iPhone and another blah upgrade to a phone that does nothing interesting: ‘more power!’, like your Angry Birds experience would improve because of that. It’s 64 bit? Only interesting if any iOS app for that platform would be immediately compatible with Mac Desktops and thus unifying purchases across both devices. (Play Plants vs. Zombies on your Desktop too!) Otherwise who cares?
Recently I saw a superb talk on design (heard about it on ruby rouges, btw) and it talked about how a huge part of design is realizing which problem you should solve. A machine to buy tickets for a train may solve the problem of buying a ticket for the train, but the problem you want solved is getting to your destination — not buying a ticket at all. The same thing with all these upgraded features on the iPhones, none solve problems I’m interested in. Pretty colors?? Yeah I buy a phone to have it be champaign colored.
Amazing how Steve Jobs absence is felt so acutely.
Check out the talk on design: Superheroes and Villains in Design and see the true value of design. The new iPhones don’t have it. Hope it’s a stumble and not a omen of things to come.

Comments

  1. rebelwarriorJune 1, 2014 at 11:30 AM

    Gotta say that with the iOS 7.1 update my iPhone 4 gained new life.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Medieval Economics can teach us about tariffs.

As a teen, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) with my friends. This started an interest in the medieval period that led to me taking a medieval history class in college just to understand the period more. Over the years I've also read great books like " Dungeon, Fire and Sword " about the crusades (I recommend the book) and yet with all that knowledge it wasn't until recently that it occurred to me I had a completely wrong understanding of economics in the Medieval Period. "Viking helmets, sword and footwear" by eltpics is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 In my D&D games, players who are adventures battling monsters and creatures would need equipment and on the trips to town, they'd get resupplied with their adventuring necessities. I'd run these moments referencing my imagination of what it must have been and fantasy books I'd read. There be an inn with a raucous bar, a gruffly black-smith, if a city also a weapon and armor sm...
Post a Comment
Read more

Testing with Cucumber, Sinatra and Capybara

Everything you need to know There are many elements you need to simultaneously learn to do effective testing of your code. Because some of these elements are very simple a lot of explanations just jump over what you need to know and give them up as obvious. Let’s start with a list of the things you need to learn: Gherkin (the language of Cucumber) ——> super easy Capybara (the DSL that controls the browser tests) Rspec (the DSL in which the actual pass/fail tests are written.) None of these are hard. But having to learn all at the same time can seem daunting. But it’s not! It’s easy peasy but takes time. :-/ It took me three days to get a handle on this. And I hope by reading this you’ll get a handle on it much much quicker. Let’s start with Cucumber first. Cucumber Five things you need to know about Cucumber: Cucumber tests are located on a features folder that have plain text files with a .feature extension and written in Gherkin . The .feature files contain t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Best Tech Books

Best Tech Books for Programming Language Learning I'm a bit of a polyglot no only in human languages (English, Spanish, Japanese) but also with programming languages. I found that the best way to get a deep understanding of the programming field, I needed to be broad. I got introduced to Bruce Tate's 7 languages in 7 weeks series right when I was starting to learn Ruby and found the cross-language trends to be very useful in knowing what to learn for the future.  So here is a list of Programming Books that I found good for learning a language. These are the must have books in my opinion to "get" or "grok" the language. Most of these books I have not finished but they're so good I can recommend them for other language learners and polyglots. All these books should accelerate your learning dramatically.  Poignant Guide to Ruby Ruby: POODR and _why's Poignant Guide to Ruby .  Okay, so _why's Poignant Guide to Ruby is the reason I fell in love with ...
Post a Comment
Read more