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This is part of it, but I imagine there was a lot of sunk cost in there as well. Imagine: you're in charge of Apple's new keyboard. You spend a bunch of time a
by donw 6y ago
This is part of it, but I imagine there was a lot of sunk cost in there as well.
Imagine: you're in charge of Apple's new keyboard. You spend a bunch of time and money making the thing as thin as possible, because that's the overall design trajectory.
Of course, you test this thing internally, and it's okay. It takes a little while to get used to, but isn't awful to type on, and a few months of stress testing seem to indicate that this thing will work in the real world with an acceptable defect rate.
Besides, your management chain loves this thing, because It's Thinner(tm).
And then, you ship it, and discover that this thing breaks way more often in the real world.
But, because Apple, you're a company that never publicly admits to doing anything wrong (because lawsuits), which takes customer feedback with an overly-critical eye (philistines must be using it wrong), and which is more likely to spend it's entire capitalization on cat treats than it is to interrupt an ongoing hardware design cycle.
It's not just management -- it's the company culture.
On the one hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being proven right. The iPod, no optical disks, bundled GPUs, AirPods, etc.
On the other hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being shown horribly, horribly wrong. The snowflake keyboard, the touchbar, the iPhone antenna, etc.
I also suspect this is why Apple's hardware design is just so overall excellent. They identify perfection, and relentlessly pursue it. Sometimes Apple gets it wrong, and it shows, but when they get it right, they get it really right.
- ghaff 6y ago>On the one hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being proven right. The iPod, no optical disks, bundled GPUs, AirPods, etc. When the iPad first came out: "OMG, you can't print! How insane." Probably forgetting other things. Apple does a ton of things wrong and arguably forces some changes before a lot of the world is ready for them. But they've never prioritized supporting legacy and, in fact, arguably have had a pretty consistent strategy of eliminating legacy at least one or two beats early relative to other companies. Certainly I've found some changes too aggressive. OTOH, there are usually ways to adapt that I've found no more than mildly annoying at first.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago> When the iPad first came out: "OMG, you can't print! How insane." Probably forgetting other things. I very much don't recall anyone complaining about printer support. The primary jab at launch was "it's just a big iPhone". Which was in fact true—it just turned out that "a big iPhone" was pretty damn good, especially when actual iPhones had 3.5" screens. I'd say most of these sorts of complaints are basically legitimate. When the iPhone came out, it didn't have copy and paste, and that was in fact extremely annoying!
- ghaff 6y agoI'm not going to spend the time to look but there were definitely complaints about printing which was still much more of a thing than it is today. (It's still sometimes annoying with both iPad and Chromebook but it's occasional enough that I just mail what I need printed to a computer.) The thing for me with the original iPad was coming to the realization that it was a (very nice) luxury device that was mostly useful for me (at the time) when traveling. And, when I gave one to my dad, it was a revelation relative to computers that he never could really use.