4 ms·

"Apple is making products nobody has imagined before." I beg to differ. They execute very well, but calling them that visionary is a little overboard.

• mattdw 17y ago
  But they are always ditching features everyone else is convinced are vital – hardware keypads, removable batteries, floppy disk drives. In that sense they're doing the unimaginable.
  • stcredzero 17y ago
    It's not so much doing the unimaginable as it is the ability to exercise awareness about the essential functions of a device. They don't lose sight of the device forest for the feature trees.
    • tjogin 17y ago
      When Apple released the iPhone, I distinctly remember Steve Ballmer laughing it off, saying it won't make a significant impact. He summed it up as the world's most expensive phone. To him, the success iPhone achieved was unimaginable, and Steve Ballmer ain't no nobody in the industry. We can pretend that everybody else knew how and why the iPhone would become a staggering success, and only the very top guys in the industry were too blind to see it — but then we'd be lying to ourselves. Nobody saw this coming. The concepts for what an "iPhone" would be, prior to Apple announcing it, were pathetic. Our collective imagination didn't go further than to imagine a regular phone with an Apple logo on it (or, how about a phone with an iPod click-wheel). The iPad was largely being written off as a "big iPhone". The iPad is a "big iPhone" the way a swimming pool is a big bathtub — everything changes with scale. Played water sports in your bathtub lately? Unimaginable — or lack of foresight due to insufficient imagination. That about sums it up.
      • tensor 17y ago
        The idea of a touch-only PDA device has been around in science fiction literature for decades. Perhaps nobody expected a company to implement it when Apple did with the iphone, nor did they expect Apple to to be the one doing it. But the idea is far from unimaginable. After it came out, I doubt many people really thought it would fail. The potential was pretty obvious. Of course competitors will claim it's going to fail. What do you expect them to do? Encourage people to buy their competitions product? The iPad. It is a big iPhone, with a few new interface elements. Yes, you can do more with it, but scaling up a bathtub hardly a stunning idea. Perhaps the first swimming pool was an engineering feat, but not a feat of imagination.
        • tjogin 17y ago
          It is not a feat of imagination to scale an iPhone up to the size of an iPad, but it is extremely unimaginative to not realize that it makes a world of difference in how and for what it can be used. I'm not saying Apple is enormously imaginative, I'm saying its critics often are unimaginative; they are unable to imagine the applications. The same way a swimming pool is just a big bathtub, it makes all the difference in the world. You can't do the same things in a bathtub as you can in a swimming pool, or a lake, or an ocean. Scale changes everything.
• catch23 17y ago
  MP3 players were pretty boring until the iPod came into the scene. I've still yet to see the iPod Killer; the first iPod came on the market in 2001 and 9 years later, nobody has done anything better yet!
  • brettnak 17y ago
    I haven't actually tried one, but anecdotally, I have been hearing a lot of people say that the zune is at least as good as the iPod, many say it's better.
    • jeremymcanally 17y ago
      I have tried one, and they're really not the worst device I've ever used. But they don't compare at all to an iPod. The experience is just weird (and this may just mostly be because I'm used to the way iPods work so I have skewed expectations). The design is trying to be edgy but it just comes off as weird and awkwardly non-functional. The software just doesn't work as well. The store functionality isn't even close to iTunes. I think Microsoft could top the iPod (and some things on the Zune are really cool UI-wise), but they've got a long way to go. They would basically need to take the shine they have on the device now and rethink the entire experience from a UX perspective to really get anywhere, though.
  • sekou 17y ago
    That depends on what you mean by "better." Several brands of mp3 players have had superior sound quality, powerful equalizer customization and the ability to play more formats. But Apple had the streamlined iPod+iTunes experience, as well as fantastic marketing.
    • arethuza 17y ago
      Not only that, but the 3-rd party ecosystem around iPods is huge. e.g. the gym I go to has a new set of exercise machines that have iPod connections on them - I can plug in my iPod (which has a lot of ripped DVDs in it) and watch the movie through the large screen on top of the machine rather than using the tiny iPod screen.
• deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
• tvon 17y ago
  I think it's more accurate to say they are pulling off products nobody has been able to pull off before.
• stcredzero 17y ago
  They execute very well, but calling them that visionary is a little overboard. They're not the first ones out with something new. Instead, they are consistently the first ones out with something that works really well across the entire User Experience. To do that, they have to make sure they wait until the technology can support the sort of UX they want to present. It doesn't pay to just be visionary. Plenty of visionary people tried to build a flying machine before the Wright Brothers. In many cases, the technology they had access to just wasn't strong enough, light enough, or powerful enough.