6 ms·
I think attention to detail in terms of a column name is different than attention to visual design and look and feel of a product.
by cmelbye 15y ago
I think attention to detail in terms of a column name is different than attention to visual design and look and feel of a product.
- tlrobinson 15y agoSteve Jobs doesn't think so. Have you seen the insides of Apple products? They're as beautiful as the outsides of competitors' products.
- Zak 15y agoIn my experience, that's only true of the parts the customer is intended to take apart. The inside of a Mac Pro is beautiful. The inside of a Macbook... not so much.
- enneff 15y agoAre you kidding? You really think there isn't something incredibly beautiful about this? http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Air-13-Inch-Mid-2011-Teardown/6130/1 http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Air-13-Inch-Mid-2011-...
- shard 15y agoAm I missing something? Doesn't look that different from other PCBs I've worked on.
- Zak 15y agoWell, once you get past this, which is its very own beautiful flower: http://www.macnews.de/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/MacBook-Air-Pentalobe-200x150.jpg http://www.macnews.de/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/MacBook-Air... you find some pretty netbook-line innards with a big, flat battery. I've certainly seen laptops with less attractive innards, but the main thing I see when I look inside the MBA is non-replaceable components. I actually had the white plastic Macbook in mind in my original comment. Those have more stuff in them and a lot like a PC laptop with a bit more reinforcement than average.
- rikthevik 15y agoWhat would you rather a circuit board look like? They are satisfying 23 different constraints at once. They are small, fast, constrained by size, power and heat, and still they look good. What the fuck do you want?
- eftpotrm 15y agoBeautiful, maybe; maintainable, not so sure. A colleague's iMac is likely to need a motherboard replacement and he was going through the procedure with me. The amount of work and the sheer cost of parts for something so routine on a PC astounded me.
- apetrovic 15y agoRelevant: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=PC_Board_Esthetics.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
- rimantas 15y agoTo quote the man himself (from Playboy interview): > When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, > you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even > though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll > know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of > wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, > the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
- sachinag 15y agoThis is another one of the ways in which Apple is very much like Nintendo. (Others include very strong leadership; doing things their own way, standards be damned; and cultivating the brand above all else.) The inside of the N64, in particular, was astonishing.
- uxp 15y agoI am a trained watch repair technician. In school, we were trained to never touch the movement of a watch with our bare hands, even if it was filled with water and any sort of dirt, and to never leave a movement sitting out in the open air to collect dust, even if it was already filled with dirt. The only reason why, it develops the habit of leaving fingerprints on parts and leaving clean watches out in the open. If you don't strive to be clean, efficient, and build beautiful products that you enjoy looking at and working on, even when they are broken or where no single person outside of you and your colleagues are going to see it, then you will start making mistakes by leaving fingerprints and broken code snippets on the side where your customers are going to notice.
- jarek 15y agoAlso proprietary screw heads.
- jarek 15y agoBeautiful? Maybe. Functional? I'd rather service a Thinkpad.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mikeash 15y agoHave you seen their source code? Go download the CFLite code and then come back here and tell me that the insides of Apple products are as beautiful as the outsides of competitors' products.
- tlrobinson 15y agoI meant the hardware. I suppose it depends on what Steve could look at and decide whether it was beautiful or not.
- mikeash 15y agoYeah, but... the whole thread was about whether this icon thing is comparable to excessive nitpicking over a database name.
- lloeki 15y agoNope, it's just as important. "Good design is thorough through the details" and that permeates all the way from visual design to code to database. This is actually what makes Jobs different: he knows every little detail matters, anywhere, and that it's just not a gimmick. This is what it takes to have a robust, elegant, awesome and enjoyable product.
- mlinsey 15y agoExactly, this is a perfect application of Jobs' quote from the '80s about how a carpenter wouldn't put a piece of plywood on the back of a cabinet, even it was just going to face the wall.
- tzs 15y agoThe assorted people who came before me and somehow exuded what became the main database where I work did not pay attention to column names. It is infinitely annoying when I'm writing SQL to have to stop and check to see if the account ID is "account_id", "acid", "Account_ID", or "acct_id".
- hessenwolf 15y agoOr f_e_id. (This turned out to be fund value at the end of the month - the fund value is the value in the account, if you really want to look it that way.)
- mtkd 15y agoThe fact that he enforces quality and innovation in every part of his organisation (hardware, software, purchasing experience) is why the company is so successful. The mistake everyone else makes is believing only the tip of the iceberg matters.
- zwischenzug 15y agoWhy? To me, it's the same thing in the end, since I've seen a poorly named column cause impedance mismatches felt for years in countless ways and costing God knows how much to - ultimately - the consumer.