7 ms·

> How did the designers become absolute dictators? When the iPhone became successful, before that it was all utility, then fashion took priority when the iPhon

> How did the designers become absolute dictators? When the iPhone became successful, before that it was all utility, then fashion took priority when the iPhone out sold literally everything.

kristopolous 5y ago
I've always been suspicious of that attribution. Pretend everything else about the iPhone happened; The charisma and leadership of Steve Jobs, the brilliant marketing, the countless number of talented software engineers, but instead the device basically looks like a blackberry. Physical keyboard, plastic case, More or less a knock off aesthetically. We're deep in counterfactual territory but I think it can be argued that this imagined iphone with a very conventional aesthetic would have done effectively just as well. It still connects to iTunes and hooks up to your Mac, having all the same technical features and functionality. The point is people see something successful, then they assign one of the attributes as the driver of the success and there seems to be very little reflection of the two core questions: (1) is it true? (2) is it generalizable to other companies? And let's say it is. Are you really going to make something that's more iPhoney than an iPhone? More macosy then macos? So even conceding those two points, which I think are utterly contestable, It still doesn't make any sense. Maybe that's why it's never worked. Maybe. Who knows?
- zakius 5y ago
  the thing about iphone is: it didn't start the smartphone era like many say, it ended it suddenly people started desiring device as expensive as business models were that coul'd only do half of things their mainstream ones could so by market rules it wasn't profitable to struggle and do things right anymore, do you remember cheap Chinese portable music players that required dedicated software but we beared with it because they were cheap? so... iphone isn't cheap
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    Apple, and a number of other players, have long had the ability to craft a favourable narrative in most people's minds. Heck even supposedly technically minded people will say things like "Apple invented the mouse" or they had "the first mp3 player" or "the first smartphone". There's a circus about them that permits them to stomp out history before their first performance and mark it as irrelevant. Musk is also a master of this craft. Founder of Tesla? You'd be surprised. Founder of PayPal? Go look that up. These people could have been excellent actors if their businesses had failed
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook...
    - Someone 5y ago
      > There's a circus about them that permits them to stomp out history And how do you think they would do that? Apple sometimes uses a bit of hyperbole to describe itself (https://512pixels.net/2014/01/apple-boilerplate/ https://512pixels.net/2014/01/apple-boilerplate/), but I don’t think Apple ever claimed "Apple invented the mouse" or they had "the first mp3 player" or "the first smartphone". I also have never met anybody who made such claims, only people saying there are people who make such claims. It also would be weird for them to do so. Their marketing differentiates their products from the competition, and has been doing that for years. The competition sells MP3 players, the iPod was a _music_player_ or just the iPod (look at https://youtube.com/watch?v=kN0SVBCJqLs https://youtube.com/watch?v=kN0SVBCJqLs, and count how often Steve says music before he says mp3. [1]); the iPhone an iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device (https://youtube.com/watch?v=x7qPAY9JqE4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=x7qPAY9JqE4), the iPad just the iPad. [1] There’s a claim in hat video that Apple invented FireWire. I think that is mostly correct. They were the driving force there.
      - bigbizisverywyz 5y ago
        I'm similarly confused that anybody would even think Apple claim to have invented these things. Particularly so since in the Keynotes where SJ introduced e.g. the iPod he shows the state of the competition and has a good critique before introducing his 'lame' replacement.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Upvote for content -- but, if I could have simultaneously downvoted for near-unintelligibility of run-on sentece, I would have.
    - zakius 5y ago
      in the text area it was separated into paragraphs but oh well, I guess it pretends to be markdown formatted?
      - chongli 5y ago
        You need to put an extra newline to get separate paragraphs. Like this.
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        Periods would have helped. They're standard even at the ends of paragraphs.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  >> When the iPhone became successful, before that it was all utility, then fashion took priority when the iPhone out sold literally everything. > Pretend everything else about the iPhone happened; The charisma and leadership of Steve Jobs, the brilliant marketing, the countless number of talented software engineers, but instead the device basically looks like a blackberry. > Physical keyboard, plastic case, More or less a knock off aesthetically. > We're deep in counterfactual territory but I think it can be argued that this imagined iphone with a very conventional aesthetic would have done effectively just as well. Yeah, but AFAICS that doesn't really contradict the hypothesis. Sure, I might agree with your counterfactual and also conclude that it wasn't really the design -- and, side note, I think what was originally meant here was the narrower sense of the ever-dumbed-down GUI, not physical characteristics like keyboard or not -- that led to the iPhone's breakout success... But just because you and I think so, CEOs didn't (necessarily) agree. If they thought it was the cheery skeumorphic (and later stylised, then rounded-corner, then sharp-edge-rectangular, then rounded-corner again... yadda yadda) graphical design that led to the market success, then they started listening only to graphical designers, and that is what has elevated graphical designers to "gods" over actual developers. And that's not just a counter-hypothesis to yours, but my theory; it's how I think it actually happened.
- 8note 5y ago
  The iPhone being a flat glass screen and nothing else really was a big change. It lets you have video and web browsing, and what actually lets apps be useful. Before the iPhone, the UX was basically fixed and couldn't be iterated on, and the screen space was ~240p or 144 tops
shp0ngle 5y ago
Now that's some nonsense. iPhone was ways ahead in usability compared to everything else back then. For all the faults of Apple, they needed to define how smartphones look like and act. Mobile OSes were horrible pain to use. People tolerated that because there was nothing else out there.
- zakius 5y ago
  iphone always was behind, basic things always were either convoluted or just impossible, ios is the most painful mobile os I ever encountered
  - oblio 5y ago
    It wasn't behind the first year or so. It's not about buttons or even copy-paste as weird as that sounds for a techie. But zooming on a map with your fingers was a game changer. Zooming an imagine with your fingers. Using your fingers to scroll a list, naturally. And lists are probably the most common UI element except for buttons, labels and images. They're for sure the most common complex element.
    - zakius 5y ago
      if it adds some ingenious new features but at the cost of removing some basics it is still behind, that's the whole point of w11 issue
      - oblio 5y ago
        Yeah, but there's a term: "paradigm shift". It wasn't a "few features" (techie speak), it was a "new way of working" (usually marketing speak, but here it was actually true). W11 is a few missing features for an existing way of working. The iPhone had a few missing features for a fundamentally new way of working that was much superior to existing smartphones. Your complaint was like the handlebars on the new bike being hard to push (which I can workaround by pushing harder, up to a point) while the old bike had square wheels and a chassis meant only for square wheels (which I could not work around).
jq-r 5y ago
That's a very wrong way to describe what happened. Let me describe you what the phones scene was looking like just before iphone was released. They were fine for making phone calls, sending texts/e-mails (in blackberry case), and taking an occasional photo if you had a high end Nokia. That's it. The phones had very long lists of features nobody actually used. Yes they had rudimenatry browers, but why browse if the pages look nothing like the real ones and it was extremely expensive outside of being connected to wifi. When iphone was released it was very obvious that it was on a completely different level to what we had until then. Yes, one could argue that it was missing some minor functionalities like SMS character counter which was very standard. But the first time you see it, when you saw that the screen can be smooth scrolled, that you use fingers completely naturally to do any kind of actions (vs styluses which were crap), when you see that everything is presented clearly and nicely, that the screen is nice and bright, and GUI easy to use, it seemed like the device came from the future. In many ways it was like a pocket computer. I got the second batch of first iphone (the one which could be unlocked by some means so I could use it in my country) and showed it to my friends at college who all had high-end phones. You should have seen their faces. They had no idea what they were looking at. And no, they never watched Jobs's presentation or anything. Most of them didn't even know who he was, or were exposed to any kind of Apple marketing. Actually it was the reverse, Nokia and similar were established brands. The phone was judged on its own and it was almost magical to us. And I still didn't come to the best thing about it. It brought internet to your pocket. Not only the browser would render the pages like they've looked on your computer, but it was very usable which was unseen before. Have you actually tried to browse internet on a Nokia phone at that time? It was complete shit. That pinch to zoom/in out was actually revolutionary as well. The second part of the revolution was people actually wanted to use the phone to browse the internet, so Apple and users both put pressure on the ISPs to lower the prices of cellular data. And believe it or not, they did. They lowered the prices so much to make it from one of the most expensive resources in the world to the cheapest. That alone is groundbreaking. The third part, even though it happened some very short years after that, was that it enabled programs which were actually usable paving way to the whole mobile app ecosystem which we have now. How many people were writing software for a living on a mobile device before iphone? How many do you think are doing it now? The iphone kickstarted the whole industry. And all of this was actually made possible by excellent software and hardware design (not fashion, they are usually diametrically opposite!). Nothing of this would happen if it wasn't for that design. If iphone was just another N95, nothing would have happened whatever people thought of Apple marketing. Nothing would have happened if the browser was difficult to use, the UI lagging, or needed a stylus to use. It all had to come together for it work. And they've managed to pull it off spectacularly. It makes it very easy to argue that the most important Jobs' legacy is the iPhone.

> How did the designers become absolute dictators? When the iPhone became successful, before that it was all utility, then fashion took priority when the iPhone out sold literally everything.

kristopolous 5y ago

I've always been suspicious of that attribution. Pretend everything else about the iPhone happened; The charisma and leadership of Steve Jobs, the brilliant marketing, the countless number of talented software engineers, but instead the device basically looks like a blackberry. Physical keyboard, plastic case, More or less a knock off aesthetically. We're deep in counterfactual territory but I think it can be argued that this imagined iphone with a very conventional aesthetic would have done effectively just as well. It still connects to iTunes and hooks up to your Mac, having all the same technical features and functionality. The point is people see something successful, then they assign one of the attributes as the driver of the success and there seems to be very little reflection of the two core questions: (1) is it true? (2) is it generalizable to other companies? And let's say it is. Are you really going to make something that's more iPhoney than an iPhone? More macosy then macos? So even conceding those two points, which I think are utterly contestable, It still doesn't make any sense. Maybe that's why it's never worked. Maybe. Who knows?

zakius 5y ago
the thing about iphone is: it didn't start the smartphone era like many say, it ended it suddenly people started desiring device as expensive as business models were that coul'd only do half of things their mainstream ones could so by market rules it wasn't profitable to struggle and do things right anymore, do you remember cheap Chinese portable music players that required dedicated software but we beared with it because they were cheap? so... iphone isn't cheap
- kristopolous 5y ago
  Apple, and a number of other players, have long had the ability to craft a favourable narrative in most people's minds. Heck even supposedly technically minded people will say things like "Apple invented the mouse" or they had "the first mp3 player" or "the first smartphone". There's a circus about them that permits them to stomp out history before their first performance and mark it as irrelevant. Musk is also a master of this craft. Founder of Tesla? You'd be surprised. Founder of PayPal? Go look that up. These people could have been excellent actors if their businesses had failed
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook...
  - Someone 5y ago
    > There's a circus about them that permits them to stomp out history And how do you think they would do that? Apple sometimes uses a bit of hyperbole to describe itself (https://512pixels.net/2014/01/apple-boilerplate/ https://512pixels.net/2014/01/apple-boilerplate/), but I don’t think Apple ever claimed "Apple invented the mouse" or they had "the first mp3 player" or "the first smartphone". I also have never met anybody who made such claims, only people saying there are people who make such claims. It also would be weird for them to do so. Their marketing differentiates their products from the competition, and has been doing that for years. The competition sells MP3 players, the iPod was a _music_player_ or just the iPod (look at https://youtube.com/watch?v=kN0SVBCJqLs https://youtube.com/watch?v=kN0SVBCJqLs, and count how often Steve says music before he says mp3. [1]); the iPhone an iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device (https://youtube.com/watch?v=x7qPAY9JqE4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=x7qPAY9JqE4), the iPad just the iPad. [1] There’s a claim in hat video that Apple invented FireWire. I think that is mostly correct. They were the driving force there.
    - bigbizisverywyz 5y ago
      I'm similarly confused that anybody would even think Apple claim to have invented these things. Particularly so since in the Keynotes where SJ introduced e.g. the iPod he shows the state of the competition and has a good critique before introducing his 'lame' replacement.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Upvote for content -- but, if I could have simultaneously downvoted for near-unintelligibility of run-on sentece, I would have.
  - zakius 5y ago
    in the text area it was separated into paragraphs but oh well, I guess it pretends to be markdown formatted?
    - chongli 5y ago
      You need to put an extra newline to get separate paragraphs. Like this.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Periods would have helped. They're standard even at the ends of paragraphs.
CRConrad 5y ago
>> When the iPhone became successful, before that it was all utility, then fashion took priority when the iPhone out sold literally everything. > Pretend everything else about the iPhone happened; The charisma and leadership of Steve Jobs, the brilliant marketing, the countless number of talented software engineers, but instead the device basically looks like a blackberry. > Physical keyboard, plastic case, More or less a knock off aesthetically. > We're deep in counterfactual territory but I think it can be argued that this imagined iphone with a very conventional aesthetic would have done effectively just as well. Yeah, but AFAICS that doesn't really contradict the hypothesis. Sure, I might agree with your counterfactual and also conclude that it wasn't really the design -- and, side note, I think what was originally meant here was the narrower sense of the ever-dumbed-down GUI, not physical characteristics like keyboard or not -- that led to the iPhone's breakout success... But just because you and I think so, CEOs didn't (necessarily) agree. If they thought it was the cheery skeumorphic (and later stylised, then rounded-corner, then sharp-edge-rectangular, then rounded-corner again... yadda yadda) graphical design that led to the market success, then they started listening only to graphical designers, and that is what has elevated graphical designers to "gods" over actual developers. And that's not just a counter-hypothesis to yours, but my theory; it's how I think it actually happened.
8note 5y ago
The iPhone being a flat glass screen and nothing else really was a big change. It lets you have video and web browsing, and what actually lets apps be useful. Before the iPhone, the UX was basically fixed and couldn't be iterated on, and the screen space was ~240p or 144 tops

shp0ngle 5y ago

Now that's some nonsense. iPhone was ways ahead in usability compared to everything else back then. For all the faults of Apple, they needed to define how smartphones look like and act. Mobile OSes were horrible pain to use. People tolerated that because there was nothing else out there.

zakius 5y ago
iphone always was behind, basic things always were either convoluted or just impossible, ios is the most painful mobile os I ever encountered
- oblio 5y ago
  It wasn't behind the first year or so. It's not about buttons or even copy-paste as weird as that sounds for a techie. But zooming on a map with your fingers was a game changer. Zooming an imagine with your fingers. Using your fingers to scroll a list, naturally. And lists are probably the most common UI element except for buttons, labels and images. They're for sure the most common complex element.
  - zakius 5y ago
    if it adds some ingenious new features but at the cost of removing some basics it is still behind, that's the whole point of w11 issue
    - oblio 5y ago
      Yeah, but there's a term: "paradigm shift". It wasn't a "few features" (techie speak), it was a "new way of working" (usually marketing speak, but here it was actually true). W11 is a few missing features for an existing way of working. The iPhone had a few missing features for a fundamentally new way of working that was much superior to existing smartphones. Your complaint was like the handlebars on the new bike being hard to push (which I can workaround by pushing harder, up to a point) while the old bike had square wheels and a chassis meant only for square wheels (which I could not work around).

jq-r 5y ago

That's a very wrong way to describe what happened. Let me describe you what the phones scene was looking like just before iphone was released. They were fine for making phone calls, sending texts/e-mails (in blackberry case), and taking an occasional photo if you had a high end Nokia. That's it. The phones had very long lists of features nobody actually used. Yes they had rudimenatry browers, but why browse if the pages look nothing like the real ones and it was extremely expensive outside of being connected to wifi. When iphone was released it was very obvious that it was on a completely different level to what we had until then. Yes, one could argue that it was missing some minor functionalities like SMS character counter which was very standard. But the first time you see it, when you saw that the screen can be smooth scrolled, that you use fingers completely naturally to do any kind of actions (vs styluses which were crap), when you see that everything is presented clearly and nicely, that the screen is nice and bright, and GUI easy to use, it seemed like the device came from the future. In many ways it was like a pocket computer. I got the second batch of first iphone (the one which could be unlocked by some means so I could use it in my country) and showed it to my friends at college who all had high-end phones. You should have seen their faces. They had no idea what they were looking at. And no, they never watched Jobs's presentation or anything. Most of them didn't even know who he was, or were exposed to any kind of Apple marketing. Actually it was the reverse, Nokia and similar were established brands. The phone was judged on its own and it was almost magical to us. And I still didn't come to the best thing about it. It brought internet to your pocket. Not only the browser would render the pages like they've looked on your computer, but it was very usable which was unseen before. Have you actually tried to browse internet on a Nokia phone at that time? It was complete shit. That pinch to zoom/in out was actually revolutionary as well. The second part of the revolution was people actually wanted to use the phone to browse the internet, so Apple and users both put pressure on the ISPs to lower the prices of cellular data. And believe it or not, they did. They lowered the prices so much to make it from one of the most expensive resources in the world to the cheapest. That alone is groundbreaking. The third part, even though it happened some very short years after that, was that it enabled programs which were actually usable paving way to the whole mobile app ecosystem which we have now. How many people were writing software for a living on a mobile device before iphone? How many do you think are doing it now? The iphone kickstarted the whole industry. And all of this was actually made possible by excellent software and hardware design (not fashion, they are usually diametrically opposite!). Nothing of this would happen if it wasn't for that design. If iphone was just another N95, nothing would have happened whatever people thought of Apple marketing. Nothing would have happened if the browser was difficult to use, the UI lagging, or needed a stylus to use. It all had to come together for it work. And they've managed to pull it off spectacularly. It makes it very easy to argue that the most important Jobs' legacy is the iPhone.