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This is apple, once and for all, signaling to the world, that the people who make computers do cool things, the developers and the savvy, are not the market. I
by fnid2 17y ago
This is apple, once and for all, signaling to the world, that the people who make computers do cool things, the developers and the savvy, are not the market. It's too small. No one knows how to make computers do cool things, but lots of people want cool computers.
I, for one, take this as a blessing. If you are technically savvy, it's in your best interest for companies like Apple to lull consumers into a sense of satisfaction. Your job, as a programmer, is to avoid all things consumer. Your job is to do the hard stuff. If you're using facebook, you're wasting time. If you're building facebook, you're making tons of money.
This has been coming. The writing has been on the wall. The app store tragedy. Hard for developers, easy for consumers. The developers, as always, are the ones jumping through hoops. Change the color, add this, add that, i want it this way.
So the devs say ok and do it. That's the way it has always been and increasingly into the future, it will be more typical. Developers work harder so everyone else can work less. That's the way it should be.
- wensing 17y agoChange the color, add this, add that, i want it this way. This reminds me of what's been going on in real-world architecture for years. If you want to build in Apple County, it's got to have green awnings and Spanish tile and stucco walls with eaves of at least 18" ...
- bitwize 17y agoAnd yet the most desirable neighborhoods in the country are planned in just that fashion.
- holygoat 17y agoThat's kinda the same point: the people who just want to browse the web and look at photos are the people who want to live in cookie-cutter gated communities, burdened by CCRs. The iPhone and the iPad are gated communities with a HOA. Your neighbor can't park a clunker across the street from your house for six months... but neither can a friend of yours stay in an RV in your driveway for a week. "Most desirable" is a relative term. I want to have freedom, even at the cost of a more difficult life. I'm house hunting right now, and I'm actively avoiding the kinds of places you describe.
- wensing 17y ago"Most desirable" may be relative for each individual, but median sale price (or in Apple's case, profit margin) is a pretty good proxy for desirability at large.
- steveklabnik 17y agoDHH said something about this in his presentation at Railsconf.[1] He compared developers to puppies, saying that we really all just want to be loved, and fetch that ball over and over and over, even if it gets thrown in the mud. We need to stop thinking like that, and start demanding to be treated as equals in the requirements making process. --- 1: http://brightkite.com/objects/a8ab4412399611de9db7003048c10834 http://brightkite.com/objects/a8ab4412399611de9db7003048c108...
- potatolicious 17y agoWhy the entitlement? We exist at the whim of the consumer - that is who we serve, after all.
- steveklabnik 17y agoYou'd have to watch the full video to get his whole argument. http://railsconf.blip.tv/file/2081411/ http://railsconf.blip.tv/file/2081411/ It starts roughly around minute 46. His point was in relationship with stakeholders. Most people, when making up requirements, think about the Absolute Best Thing They Could Imagine. However, in reality, they'd be equally as satisfied by something that's much less fully featured, but also much faster to complete. In addition, simplicity also tends to have performance implications. He uses a permission system as an example. He worked for two weeks on a Best Permissions Ever, and then said "let's go back to the drawing board." They managed to find a 90% solution that he could code in a day and a half, was much more performant, and they found out that that last 10% didn't even really matter.
- potatolicious 17y agoI can grok that argument - but in my experience when it comes to consumer-facing software we (as developers) often stop well before the 90% solution. We hit the 50% solution, call it good enough, and wait for some guy willing to put the effort into the 90% solution to come and kick our ass (sadly, this has often been Apple).
- bitwize 17y agoOnce again, think of another tragically hip Steve: Steve Rubell, owner of Studio 54. He was completely capricious when choosing who got into his club and who had to remain a hopeful standing in the cool New York night, and his word was law. But that was okay because his club was the coolest around, and it was cool because, not in spite of, his caprice. Jobs, like Rubell did, knows cool when he sees it, and is in the business of delivering the coolest, most desirable, most enviable experience to his loyal customer base. That mandates a snobbish and dictatorial selection policy, because if you let pedestrians make the UX decisions what you end up with is... pedestrian.
- ZachPruckowski 17y agoApple's goal is to sell the iPad to people who already have a desktop, but don't feel like they need a full-blown laptop. For people who want a full-blown laptop, Apple still sells those. If they made a $800 iPad fully capable of replacing a $1200 MacBook, they'd be in trouble.
- wtallis 17y agoNo, they wouldn't be in trouble. The laptop form factor will always have the advantage of a physical keyboard and higher performance or battery life as compared with the iPad form factor. $400 sounds a bit smaller than the expected Apple markup to get those two advantages, which probably indicates how much more miniaturized the iPad components are compared with the MacBook. If you compare the iPad to the MacBook Air, which is similarly miniaturized, you get a $700 disparity, of which about $500 can be attributed to the difference in form-factor and the resulting expectations, and about $200 of which go to performance and storage improvements that aren't consequences of the relaxed size and weight limits.