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It’s a valid meta-criticism. The product isn’t out yet, and the criticisms all boil down to “I imagine their approach doesn’t solve the problems I imagine peopl
by brookst 3y ago
It’s a valid meta-criticism. The product isn’t out yet, and the criticisms all boil down to “I imagine their approach doesn’t solve the problems I imagine people have”.
So we can argue hypothetical rebuttals to these hypotheticals, but we can also note that this pattern has repeated over and over. Apple has failed before, but “it doesn’t have a physical keyboard” and “what improvement can they bring to the commodity mp3 player” and “what’s wrong with command lines” and “who wants a small iPhone on their wrist” and “wires make earbuds socially acceptable” are valid things to remind this year’s doomsayers of.
- as_bntd 3y agowhy would wires make earbuds socially acceptable?
- massysett 3y agoThis was a retort people used against AirPods. They look like funny Q-tips sticking out of the user's ears. But really they don't look much different from earbuds, which people wear all the time, so shouldn't AirPods be fine? The response was that the wires on the earbuds make them socially acceptable.
- as_bntd 3y agoI really struggle to see how the earbuds being wired changes their social acceptability in comparison to wireless ones. I don't understand the retort.
- brookst 3y agoIt never made any sense. But people who saw AirPods as doomed to fail insisted that they looked dorky and embarrassing because… they didn’t have wires. It doesn’t make sense in hindsight, like the “iPhone will fail because it doesn’t have a physical keyboard” doesn’t make sense. But that’s the pattern here. Vision may fail, but if so, it will not be just because it’s different than current paradigms.
- dgreensp 3y agoI agree, especially the criticisms like “we don’t know if it will do very good eye-tracking” when this thing is loaded with cameras and custom silicon specifically for things like eye-tracking, and from all descriptions they engineered the crap out of problems like that. And it has a crazy high pixel density—are we really going bet on “jaggies” meaning people won’t watch videos on it?