7 ms·

2013: The Year in Apple and Technology at Large

65 points by tujv 13y ago

s3r3nity 13y ago
Thank you -- I wanted to write a post regarding that article for the past week, but couldn't do it as well or as eloquently. "The nature of progress is to move incrementally. The great leaps are exceedingly few and far between." I have a few buddies working on tech at Apple & MSFT that is crazy cool, but simply because it's not a shiny new product sitting on my desk next to my coffee cup 2013 was a lull in tech?! Give me a break. (Sidebar: one of my favorite advances in tech this year is the new Kinect. Seriously. Read up on its power and potential use cases sometime and it's f*ing mind-blowing. If MSFT only had the marketing power of Apple...)
- mandeepj 13y ago
  If MSFT had marketing power of Apple then Zune would be surely alive today as one of the top media players.
  - hornetblack 13y ago
    Plenty of people don't know that Zune existed.
  - sjs 13y ago
    I had a Creative Nomad jukebox and it was so bad I went back to an MP3 discman (all the while laughing at the $500 iPod). I had never owned an Apple product. After trying a Mac I saw first-hand that Apples makes great products so I tried an iPod and loved it. Not because of marketing or advertising. People who claim that Apple is successful because of marketing – and think Apple's millions of customers are brainwashed – are the ones who are brainwashed.
    - mandeepj 13y ago
      I would agree with you sjs. If your product is crappy then marketing can't do anything. I tried lot of laptop but none of them worked like macbookpro. I have tried lot of phones but none of them worked like iPhone.
- webwielder 13y ago
  >If MSFT only had the marketing power of Apple You mean if MS only had Apple's talent for turning advanced technology into compelling products, right?
  - throwawaykf03 13y ago
    I think he means MS does make compelling products, they just can't market them as well. As for "advanced technology", Apple is far behind Microsoft and Google these days when it comes to cutting edge stuff, but this is mostly because they both have fingers in a lot of pies while Apple restricts itself to a few highly profitable niche areas.
    - derefr 13y ago
      > I think he means MS does make compelling products, they just can't market them as well. I think there's a blurry place between marketing and UX where Microsoft falls flat. For example, Windows got "Shadow Volume Copy", and then OSX got "Time Machine." Windows could have done something exactly like Time Machine given Shadow Volume Copy, but they didn't until Windows 8 (File History Backup.) And so people use Time Machine as the example when they ask questions like "but if my computer is getting backed up, and it contains my music library, is that fair use?" Now, is that a marketing failure, a UX failure, or something that's not quite either? Either way, it's a failure to create something users will want to talk about.
      - XorNot 13y ago
        Its an executive failure. Shadow Volume Copy was gimped on Windows to try and move copies of "enterprise" versions of Windows.
jmduke 13y ago
Some random (counter and otherwise) points: - Correctly explaining how large of an improvement the 5S is over the original iPhone is not a valid argument for why 2013 was a "pretty good year" for Apple. Mac Pro was the biggest move Apple made -- for better or for worse -- and I'm surprised to see its omission. - If you’re not excited by the performance of the A7 SoC or, say, the quality of the iPhone 5S camera, why even bother writing about technology? This is ridiculous in a multitude of ways: the most glaring of which being that some of the best technology writers on the web today don't concern themselves with consumer technology. - You can't look at raw price point as evidence for iPhone's ability to resist depreciation because their starting value is so much higher than other smartphones -- though I do think Apple hardware ages better than other hardware. To answer his question of What other companies make cell phones that retain any value at all after two years?: Samsung, Google/Motorola. - The whole arguments of iOS 7 spurring planned obsolescence comes from the theory that the transitions, parallax, etc. etc. were done not only from a design standpoint but from an inferior-hardware-can't-replicate-this standpoint, which I believe Gruber propagated himself (though in reference to Android, rather than older iPhone models.) - Everything besides the 'jetpacks' line in the final section was great. Technology is something that should be celebrated with wary eyes, rather than blindly castigated. Ultimately, he seems to be dragging Mims' argument to a greater extreme than it is and attacking it on those grounds: I encourage readers to read the original article -- which, at the very least, is interesting and thought-provoking -- and draw their own conclusions.
- yapcguy 13y ago
  No, I'm not going to read his article and drive his traffic up. What stories did Gruber break this year? What exclusives? None! He has no special access at Apple, he has no insiders who give him the scoops, he's no different from any other armchair blogger. In truth, John Gruber is an Apple PR stenographer. The sad thing is, he probably doesn't even know it, because he's so drunk on the kool-aid.
  - bruceboughton 13y ago
    Save your rage. The parent was referring to the article Gruber is critiquing, not Gruber's article.
brianwillis 13y ago
I agree with Gruber's central argument that innovation happens in small incremental steps, and I don't in any way think that 2013 was a waste of time, but you've got to admit that this has been a light year for Apple. Between November 2012's announcement of the iMac and June 2013's WWDC, there were no product announcements (well, OK, they did announce that the iPad would be available in 128Gb, but you get my meaning). That's a very long time for them to go with nothing to say. Sure, iOS 7 must have been a substantial amount of work, I'm really liking Mavericks, and the new Mac Pro is an interesting piece of hardware - but it does feel like Apple announced less this year than they have in previous years. So it's got me speculating on reasons why. Did Forstall's exit result in a rocky few months as jobs were reshuffled? Is there some big product that gets announced in 2014 that's been sucking up all the engineering resources? Is Apple under Tim Cook becoming a company that moves a little more slowly and deliberately? I don't know, but it's fun to think about.
- demallien 13y ago
  No, there is no secret project sucking up the engineering resources for the simple reason that we know where the engineering resources have been spent. iPad Air. iPad mini retina. Ios7. Mavericks. iPhone 5s. Mac Pro. That's a big bunch of products to roll out in one year. Which does not mean that we won't see something different, like a 20" tablet, or Kinect style controls on a new Apple TV, but the fact is that Apple have released a large number of best in breed products this year, so we don't need to speculate on where engineering resources have been spent - the answer is right in front of us.
- ghshephard 13y ago
  Another thing to consider - I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Apple started work on, researched, went through prototypes, and then canceled a number of products that didn't meet their minimum standard of quality/market fit.
pearjuice 13y ago
I am still wondering how much Gruber gets paid by Apple for all the viral marketing he does for them. Or is he truly that passionate about Apple that it is out of free will?
- chavesn 13y ago
  Paid by Apple? He doesn't need to be paid by Apple. Have you seen his sponsorship prices[1]? Of course part of the reason he does what he does is because it's paid off so well for him through blogging as a business. His business has been his own creation, though, and that in and of itself is quite impressive. I don't know if every word is genuine, but one doesn't have to be on an official corporate payroll to make money through coverage/praise of a popular subject. To answer your question seriously, he has mentioned getting early demo devices by Apple (for a couple years, he's been in the in-crowd of journalists to do so) but I sincerely doubt he's a puppet paid under the table. [1] : http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/
mikerg87 13y ago
Planned obsolescence. How many HP printers are sold simply beacause of a lack of drivers in the new release of Windows.
- X-Istence 13y ago
  Meh, these days it is cheaper to buy a new printer than ink for the damn thing (unless we are talking about laser printers)...
kunai 13y ago
It's posts like these that make me wonder why we put Gruber at such a high pedestal at HN and in the techno blogosphere in general. On Sean Hollister's lament at the death of the keyboard: I’d say it’s not strange at all, for all of the reasons Steve Jobs explained, in detail, on stage in January 2007 when Apple introduced the iPhone. Software keyboards are a superior general purpose design. But that’s neither here nor there. So, because Steve says so, must it be right? Jobs took issue more with the fixed buttons than the keyboards, and just took mainly issue that the keyboard were "there if you ended them or not." Slider keyboards are there only when you need them and offer a significantly upgraded tactile experience over their touch-only counterparts. The whole “planned obsolescence” thing — started by New York Times economics columnist Catherine Rampell, but promulgated by Mims himself after the ball got rolling – was a pile of horseshit. No company in the computer/mobile industry makes products that hold their value longer than Apple’s. Value isn't just about resale value – it's about how long you can go with having the same product officially supported by a company. Right now, you can install Windows 8 on a top-spec PC from 2005, but the last OS that a 2006 MacBook Pro can run is from 2011. Tough, isn't it? I wouldn't say that the 2005 PC's experience would be better with W8 than it would with 7 or even Linux. Nor am I saying that it would be a good experience for the 2006 Pro to use a 2013 operating system. Still, the fact that Microsoft is going out of their way to support such older systems speaks of their commitment to value. Today we have mobile phones and tablets running on a 64-bit desktop-caliber CPU architecture. Four months ago, we did not. If you’re not excited by the performance of the A7 SoC or, say, the quality of the iPhone 5S camera, why even bother writing about technology? 64-bit ARM is a large step, yes. But, to call it a major breakthrough is laughable. It's a natural evolution, the fact that Apple did it first does not make it more significant if Samsung or Qualcomm created their own ARM64 SoC. The iPhone 5s' camera quality is nothing significant either – the Lumia 1020 has a far better camera and is really true innovation – Zeiss optics, an enormous sensor... how is that less significant than a simple sensor upgrade? I didn't see anyone scoffing at the quality of the GS4 either. No one could argue that iOS 7 wasn’t a major update, so instead Mims takes to disparaging it. Is iOS 7 an improvement in every single regard? Certainly not. But on the whole, it’s quite good, introduces some well-needed conceptual cohesion, and best of all, it shows that the company is not afraid to boldly move forward from the Steve Jobs era. iOS 7 is certainly... bold, if you could call it that, but what core improvements does it hold that make it so much better than 6? On the surface, it's a pretty UI makeover with an ugly icon makeover, and few user-facing features such as AirDrop and Control Center. Yawn. Shiny new APIs? Nice, but, again, there's little in the way of "bold" innovation as Gruber claims. It's incredible how somebody with such obvious blindness and bias towards a company he loves is heralded as a neutral reviewer. Gruber makes some important points, such as Android's lack of support time, but he insists that Apple is better at everything that Mims criticizes Apple about than everybody else – which is ridiculous. Just a disclaimer – I am not an MS lover. Neither do I hate Apple. But I have become more friendly with Microsoft, and less with Apple, just because of my own personal experiences. I had been a die-hard Apple lover for years. Since I saw my first modern Macintosh in 2006, I've lusted after one. I finally got my wish granted in 2011 when I bought my MacBook Air. For about a year, I was ecstatic. I bought an iPhone and bought completely into the Apple ecosystem. It was a big mistake, for several reasons. Let's start from the top: 1. Apple now makes no effort to ensure that its users have a good long-term experience with their product. It used to be that once you bought Apple, you could expect a lengthy time of ownership and support, partly because of the machines' ease of access, repair, and maintainability. In the fall of 2012, I became unhappy with my Air's performance. My needs had changed, and running several Windows and Linux VMs quickly bogged down my system with its paltry four gigabytes of RAM. Initially, I thought I wouldn't need any upgrades to this system, because Apple's software optimizations and the SSD would make swapping faster and more seamless (how stupid of me). No problem, I thought. I bought a 15" MacBook Pro and didn't look back. Initially, when the Retina Display MacBook came around, I saw it as a middle-of-the-road product for Apple – not an Air, not a Pro, more of a premium flagship "halo." I had no idea at the time of initial release that everything including the battery, was soldered/glued to the main board/case and what little was replaceable was all proprietary. When I came upon this information, I was shocked. Didn't think much of it, but my past experiences with the Air made me leery of it, so I stayed away from the rMBP. Come 2013. The classic unibody Pros are all but dead, and the MacBook Pros have become more proprietary. People will defend this in the name of thinness, but I call bullshit, because the Dell XPS 15 is nearly as thin but contains DIMM slots. It's just a ploy to move more units, and I'm not pleased in the slightest. 2. Apple provides no more useful features in their products that would interest anyone beyond the average consumer. Whaaaaat?! How dare somebody speaketh this heathenous, trite, vile, garbage! BURN HIM!!1 In all seriousness, this is now true. When I look at Mavericks' feature list, it's pretty weak. Multiple display support is something that should have been addressed in a point release. Timer Coalescing is something Windows and Linux have had for ages[1], and compressed memory is something we saw years ago.[2] There has been no new replacement for the aging and outdated HFS+ filesystem. There has been no integration for UNIX protocols like X11, and Applescript has been left out to rot. Apple is now squarely focused on the iOS segment of their business. I don't mind it for them, but I can't help but miss my pre-2011 Macs. 3. This is probably the most important: they pride aesthetics over true usability. This philosophy of Apple's has always been somewhat prevalent, but it's been irking me more than ever post-2011. Thin aluminum bezels that cut into my hand. Sharp laptop edges that are hazardous to health. Keyboards that feel like you're banging your fingers against a packet of Dentyne. This ties into complaint #1 as well: the fact that form-over-function results in a loss of self-maintainability is no secret either. No Ethernet on a professional machine? I can understand getting rid of it on the ultraportable, but if you want something to be used as a heavy-duty appliance, it needs to have the necessary connectivity options out of box. If you're going to make users depend on an inconvenient dongle, at least include the damn thing inside the package. This is going to be anecdotal and completely unrelated to what I'm talking about, but I was in Atlanta last weekend and decided to check out the Apple and Microsoft stores. The Apple store left me with a cold, decoherent vibe. Nothing seemed interesting. iOS 7 was underwhelming, and the iPads were just iPads. They didn't have anything new. Everything was whitewashed and covered in super-thin Myriad. Shades of grey prevailed throughout, and the staff, while helpful, didn't seem to have much interest in the user so much as heralding the merits of the product. Enter the MS store. Everything felt... so new. Inviting. There was a real sense of warmth in the store. I hadn't tried a Surface before, so I picked it up and started using it. Boy, was I blown away – the entire experience was incredibly different from what I had used. I had dismissed touch screens with a desktop OS as simply gimmickry, but the Surface integrated the two exceptionally well, especially with the Type Cover adding significant functionality. I perused through the other paraphernalia and I really felt a sense of innovation and creation that I never did in the Apple store. Unlike the iPad, the Surface was productive! It ran a real operating system! It came with a ton of memory and could be used as a full replacement for a laptop! The ultrabooks I saw had neat form factors, and although I couldn't find myself using the other modes much, the addition of touch screens made Windows 8.1 make a whole lot more sense. I came through to the Windows Phones, and the live tile approach to a home screen is just perfect: it affords a significant degree of customizability while retaining user interface consistency across devices, something neither iOS nor Android have managed to nail. I sold my 4s and bought a Lumia, and while I'm typing this on that Air I talked about earlier, I can't see myself using it for much longer, and neither do I my MacBook Pro. Because when it dies in another several years... ...I won't be buying a new one. ––––––––––––––––––––– [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timer_coalescing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timer_coalescing [2] https://code.google.com/p/compcache/w/list https://code.google.com/p/compcache/w/list
bobbyi_settv 13y ago
What would it take for this guy to actually admit that Apple no longer makes the best phones? So okay, two year old iPhones still sell for a lot. Does that really show that Apple makes the best phones today? Or does it show that they used to make the best phones two years ago? If people are almost as happy with a two year old iPhone as a new one, is that really an argument against Apple having had a "lost year"?
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- jmduke 13y ago
  Honest question: what phone do you find superior to the iPhone 5S, and why?
  - bobbyi_settv 13y ago
    Galaxy S4 for one. Between the screen size, SD card support, Google navigation, Swype, replaceable battery, general Android advantages (notifications, Google account integration), Chrome, hardware back button, etc., I would pretty bummed if I were somehow forced to give it up and get an iPhone. Actually, the screen size and Swype would be enough since I mainly use my phone for web browsing and composing email.
    - Zombieball 13y ago
      I've recently switched from android (my latest was a GS3) to iPhone 5s. I figured it was time for me to give Apple a shot at my phone. While screen size hasn't bothered me, you hit the nail on the head with Swype (or just the choice of alternate keyboards). I have found many things better in iOs than Android and vice versa, but my biggest gripe so far has been the keyboard.
acchow 13y ago
Did anyone notice that there's an Android phone with a 2/3" camera sensor? That's larger than in the PowerShot S110. http://connect.dpreview.com/post/9705313773/sony-xperia-z1-camera-review http://connect.dpreview.com/post/9705313773/sony-xperia-z1-c... Hardly a lost year in smartphones.
- pavlov 13y ago
  The Xperia Z1's sensor is actually 1/2.3", so it's smaller than that. The Nokia Lumia 1020 does have a 2/3" sensor however.
- hornetblack 13y ago
  Dammit, another reason I should have waited for the Z1.
fauigerzigerk 13y ago
>He’s got it all backwards. The nature of progress is to move incrementally. What a strange straw man to pick. Isn't it glaringly obvious that progress happens in leaps and then incrementally in between the leaps? The leaps create opportunity that is exploited in the years following the leap. If there is no leap for a while, this incremental progress starts to feel like stagnation. Some feel it earlier, some feel it later. It seems rather contrived to present this as some kind of fundamental contradiction.
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radicaldreamer 13y ago
Very little about "technology at large" and mostly apologetics for Apple.
- josteink 13y ago
  What else do you expect from gruber though?
stiff 13y ago
Today we have mobile phones and tablets running on a 64-bit desktop-caliber CPU architecture. This is so silly it reminds me of the time when XML was praised in computer magazines as the approaching revolution in how everyone, including desktop end-users, will work...

65 points by tujv 13y ago

Thank you -- I wanted to write a post regarding that article for the past week, but couldn't do it as well or as eloquently. "The nature of progress is to move incrementally. The great leaps are exceedingly few and far between." I have a few buddies working on tech at Apple & MSFT that is crazy cool, but simply because it's not a shiny new product sitting on my desk next to my coffee cup 2013 was a lull in tech?! Give me a break. (Sidebar: one of my favorite advances in tech this year is the new Kinect. Seriously. Read up on its power and potential use cases sometime and it's f*ing mind-blowing. If MSFT only had the marketing power of Apple...)

mandeepj 13y ago
If MSFT had marketing power of Apple then Zune would be surely alive today as one of the top media players.
- hornetblack 13y ago
  Plenty of people don't know that Zune existed.
- sjs 13y ago
  I had a Creative Nomad jukebox and it was so bad I went back to an MP3 discman (all the while laughing at the $500 iPod). I had never owned an Apple product. After trying a Mac I saw first-hand that Apples makes great products so I tried an iPod and loved it. Not because of marketing or advertising. People who claim that Apple is successful because of marketing – and think Apple's millions of customers are brainwashed – are the ones who are brainwashed.
  - mandeepj 13y ago
    I would agree with you sjs. If your product is crappy then marketing can't do anything. I tried lot of laptop but none of them worked like macbookpro. I have tried lot of phones but none of them worked like iPhone.
webwielder 13y ago
>If MSFT only had the marketing power of Apple You mean if MS only had Apple's talent for turning advanced technology into compelling products, right?
- throwawaykf03 13y ago
  I think he means MS does make compelling products, they just can't market them as well. As for "advanced technology", Apple is far behind Microsoft and Google these days when it comes to cutting edge stuff, but this is mostly because they both have fingers in a lot of pies while Apple restricts itself to a few highly profitable niche areas.
  - derefr 13y ago
    > I think he means MS does make compelling products, they just can't market them as well. I think there's a blurry place between marketing and UX where Microsoft falls flat. For example, Windows got "Shadow Volume Copy", and then OSX got "Time Machine." Windows could have done something exactly like Time Machine given Shadow Volume Copy, but they didn't until Windows 8 (File History Backup.) And so people use Time Machine as the example when they ask questions like "but if my computer is getting backed up, and it contains my music library, is that fair use?" Now, is that a marketing failure, a UX failure, or something that's not quite either? Either way, it's a failure to create something users will want to talk about.
    - XorNot 13y ago
      Its an executive failure. Shadow Volume Copy was gimped on Windows to try and move copies of "enterprise" versions of Windows.

jmduke 13y ago

Some random (counter and otherwise) points: - Correctly explaining how large of an improvement the 5S is over the original iPhone is not a valid argument for why 2013 was a "pretty good year" for Apple. Mac Pro was the biggest move Apple made -- for better or for worse -- and I'm surprised to see its omission. - If you’re not excited by the performance of the A7 SoC or, say, the quality of the iPhone 5S camera, why even bother writing about technology? This is ridiculous in a multitude of ways: the most glaring of which being that some of the best technology writers on the web today don't concern themselves with consumer technology. - You can't look at raw price point as evidence for iPhone's ability to resist depreciation because their starting value is so much higher than other smartphones -- though I do think Apple hardware ages better than other hardware. To answer his question of What other companies make cell phones that retain any value at all after two years?: Samsung, Google/Motorola. - The whole arguments of iOS 7 spurring planned obsolescence comes from the theory that the transitions, parallax, etc. etc. were done not only from a design standpoint but from an inferior-hardware-can't-replicate-this standpoint, which I believe Gruber propagated himself (though in reference to Android, rather than older iPhone models.) - Everything besides the 'jetpacks' line in the final section was great. Technology is something that should be celebrated with wary eyes, rather than blindly castigated. Ultimately, he seems to be dragging Mims' argument to a greater extreme than it is and attacking it on those grounds: I encourage readers to read the original article -- which, at the very least, is interesting and thought-provoking -- and draw their own conclusions.

yapcguy 13y ago
No, I'm not going to read his article and drive his traffic up. What stories did Gruber break this year? What exclusives? None! He has no special access at Apple, he has no insiders who give him the scoops, he's no different from any other armchair blogger. In truth, John Gruber is an Apple PR stenographer. The sad thing is, he probably doesn't even know it, because he's so drunk on the kool-aid.
- bruceboughton 13y ago
  Save your rage. The parent was referring to the article Gruber is critiquing, not Gruber's article.

brianwillis 13y ago

I agree with Gruber's central argument that innovation happens in small incremental steps, and I don't in any way think that 2013 was a waste of time, but you've got to admit that this has been a light year for Apple. Between November 2012's announcement of the iMac and June 2013's WWDC, there were no product announcements (well, OK, they did announce that the iPad would be available in 128Gb, but you get my meaning). That's a very long time for them to go with nothing to say. Sure, iOS 7 must have been a substantial amount of work, I'm really liking Mavericks, and the new Mac Pro is an interesting piece of hardware - but it does feel like Apple announced less this year than they have in previous years. So it's got me speculating on reasons why. Did Forstall's exit result in a rocky few months as jobs were reshuffled? Is there some big product that gets announced in 2014 that's been sucking up all the engineering resources? Is Apple under Tim Cook becoming a company that moves a little more slowly and deliberately? I don't know, but it's fun to think about.

demallien 13y ago
No, there is no secret project sucking up the engineering resources for the simple reason that we know where the engineering resources have been spent. iPad Air. iPad mini retina. Ios7. Mavericks. iPhone 5s. Mac Pro. That's a big bunch of products to roll out in one year. Which does not mean that we won't see something different, like a 20" tablet, or Kinect style controls on a new Apple TV, but the fact is that Apple have released a large number of best in breed products this year, so we don't need to speculate on where engineering resources have been spent - the answer is right in front of us.
ghshephard 13y ago
Another thing to consider - I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Apple started work on, researched, went through prototypes, and then canceled a number of products that didn't meet their minimum standard of quality/market fit.

pearjuice 13y ago

I am still wondering how much Gruber gets paid by Apple for all the viral marketing he does for them. Or is he truly that passionate about Apple that it is out of free will?

chavesn 13y ago
Paid by Apple? He doesn't need to be paid by Apple. Have you seen his sponsorship prices[1]? Of course part of the reason he does what he does is because it's paid off so well for him through blogging as a business. His business has been his own creation, though, and that in and of itself is quite impressive. I don't know if every word is genuine, but one doesn't have to be on an official corporate payroll to make money through coverage/praise of a popular subject. To answer your question seriously, he has mentioned getting early demo devices by Apple (for a couple years, he's been in the in-crowd of journalists to do so) but I sincerely doubt he's a puppet paid under the table. [1] : http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

mikerg87 13y ago

Planned obsolescence. How many HP printers are sold simply beacause of a lack of drivers in the new release of Windows.

X-Istence 13y ago
Meh, these days it is cheaper to buy a new printer than ink for the damn thing (unless we are talking about laser printers)...

kunai 13y ago

It's posts like these that make me wonder why we put Gruber at such a high pedestal at HN and in the techno blogosphere in general. On Sean Hollister's lament at the death of the keyboard: I’d say it’s not strange at all, for all of the reasons Steve Jobs explained, in detail, on stage in January 2007 when Apple introduced the iPhone. Software keyboards are a superior general purpose design. But that’s neither here nor there. So, because Steve says so, must it be right? Jobs took issue more with the fixed buttons than the keyboards, and just took mainly issue that the keyboard were "there if you ended them or not." Slider keyboards are there only when you need them and offer a significantly upgraded tactile experience over their touch-only counterparts. The whole “planned obsolescence” thing — started by New York Times economics columnist Catherine Rampell, but promulgated by Mims himself after the ball got rolling – was a pile of horseshit. No company in the computer/mobile industry makes products that hold their value longer than Apple’s. Value isn't just about resale value – it's about how long you can go with having the same product officially supported by a company. Right now, you can install Windows 8 on a top-spec PC from 2005, but the last OS that a 2006 MacBook Pro can run is from 2011. Tough, isn't it? I wouldn't say that the 2005 PC's experience would be better with W8 than it would with 7 or even Linux. Nor am I saying that it would be a good experience for the 2006 Pro to use a 2013 operating system. Still, the fact that Microsoft is going out of their way to support such older systems speaks of their commitment to value. Today we have mobile phones and tablets running on a 64-bit desktop-caliber CPU architecture. Four months ago, we did not. If you’re not excited by the performance of the A7 SoC or, say, the quality of the iPhone 5S camera, why even bother writing about technology? 64-bit ARM is a large step, yes. But, to call it a major breakthrough is laughable. It's a natural evolution, the fact that Apple did it first does not make it more significant if Samsung or Qualcomm created their own ARM64 SoC. The iPhone 5s' camera quality is nothing significant either – the Lumia 1020 has a far better camera and is really true innovation – Zeiss optics, an enormous sensor... how is that less significant than a simple sensor upgrade? I didn't see anyone scoffing at the quality of the GS4 either. No one could argue that iOS 7 wasn’t a major update, so instead Mims takes to disparaging it. Is iOS 7 an improvement in every single regard? Certainly not. But on the whole, it’s quite good, introduces some well-needed conceptual cohesion, and best of all, it shows that the company is not afraid to boldly move forward from the Steve Jobs era. iOS 7 is certainly... bold, if you could call it that, but what core improvements does it hold that make it so much better than 6? On the surface, it's a pretty UI makeover with an ugly icon makeover, and few user-facing features such as AirDrop and Control Center. Yawn. Shiny new APIs? Nice, but, again, there's little in the way of "bold" innovation as Gruber claims. It's incredible how somebody with such obvious blindness and bias towards a company he loves is heralded as a neutral reviewer. Gruber makes some important points, such as Android's lack of support time, but he insists that Apple is better at everything that Mims criticizes Apple about than everybody else – which is ridiculous. Just a disclaimer – I am not an MS lover. Neither do I hate Apple. But I have become more friendly with Microsoft, and less with Apple, just because of my own personal experiences. I had been a die-hard Apple lover for years. Since I saw my first modern Macintosh in 2006, I've lusted after one. I finally got my wish granted in 2011 when I bought my MacBook Air. For about a year, I was ecstatic. I bought an iPhone and bought completely into the Apple ecosystem. It was a big mistake, for several reasons. Let's start from the top: 1. Apple now makes no effort to ensure that its users have a good long-term experience with their product. It used to be that once you bought Apple, you could expect a lengthy time of ownership and support, partly because of the machines' ease of access, repair, and maintainability. In the fall of 2012, I became unhappy with my Air's performance. My needs had changed, and running several Windows and Linux VMs quickly bogged down my system with its paltry four gigabytes of RAM. Initially, I thought I wouldn't need any upgrades to this system, because Apple's software optimizations and the SSD would make swapping faster and more seamless (how stupid of me). No problem, I thought. I bought a 15" MacBook Pro and didn't look back. Initially, when the Retina Display MacBook came around, I saw it as a middle-of-the-road product for Apple – not an Air, not a Pro, more of a premium flagship "halo." I had no idea at the time of initial release that everything including the battery, was soldered/glued to the main board/case and what little was replaceable was all proprietary. When I came upon this information, I was shocked. Didn't think much of it, but my past experiences with the Air made me leery of it, so I stayed away from the rMBP. Come 2013. The classic unibody Pros are all but dead, and the MacBook Pros have become more proprietary. People will defend this in the name of thinness, but I call bullshit, because the Dell XPS 15 is nearly as thin but contains DIMM slots. It's just a ploy to move more units, and I'm not pleased in the slightest. 2. Apple provides no more useful features in their products that would interest anyone beyond the average consumer. Whaaaaat?! How dare somebody speaketh this heathenous, trite, vile, garbage! BURN HIM!!1 In all seriousness, this is now true. When I look at Mavericks' feature list, it's pretty weak. Multiple display support is something that should have been addressed in a point release. Timer Coalescing is something Windows and Linux have had for ages[1], and compressed memory is something we saw years ago.[2] There has been no new replacement for the aging and outdated HFS+ filesystem. There has been no integration for UNIX protocols like X11, and Applescript has been left out to rot. Apple is now squarely focused on the iOS segment of their business. I don't mind it for them, but I can't help but miss my pre-2011 Macs. 3. This is probably the most important: they pride aesthetics over true usability. This philosophy of Apple's has always been somewhat prevalent, but it's been irking me more than ever post-2011. Thin aluminum bezels that cut into my hand. Sharp laptop edges that are hazardous to health. Keyboards that feel like you're banging your fingers against a packet of Dentyne. This ties into complaint #1 as well: the fact that form-over-function results in a loss of self-maintainability is no secret either. No Ethernet on a professional machine? I can understand getting rid of it on the ultraportable, but if you want something to be used as a heavy-duty appliance, it needs to have the necessary connectivity options out of box. If you're going to make users depend on an inconvenient dongle, at least include the damn thing inside the package. This is going to be anecdotal and completely unrelated to what I'm talking about, but I was in Atlanta last weekend and decided to check out the Apple and Microsoft stores. The Apple store left me with a cold, decoherent vibe. Nothing seemed interesting. iOS 7 was underwhelming, and the iPads were just iPads. They didn't have anything new. Everything was whitewashed and covered in super-thin Myriad. Shades of grey prevailed throughout, and the staff, while helpful, didn't seem to have much interest in the user so much as heralding the merits of the product. Enter the MS store. Everything felt... so new. Inviting. There was a real sense of warmth in the store. I hadn't tried a Surface before, so I picked it up and started using it. Boy, was I blown away – the entire experience was incredibly different from what I had used. I had dismissed touch screens with a desktop OS as simply gimmickry, but the Surface integrated the two exceptionally well, especially with the Type Cover adding significant functionality. I perused through the other paraphernalia and I really felt a sense of innovation and creation that I never did in the Apple store. Unlike the iPad, the Surface was productive! It ran a real operating system! It came with a ton of memory and could be used as a full replacement for a laptop! The ultrabooks I saw had neat form factors, and although I couldn't find myself using the other modes much, the addition of touch screens made Windows 8.1 make a whole lot more sense. I came through to the Windows Phones, and the live tile approach to a home screen is just perfect: it affords a significant degree of customizability while retaining user interface consistency across devices, something neither iOS nor Android have managed to nail. I sold my 4s and bought a Lumia, and while I'm typing this on that Air I talked about earlier, I can't see myself using it for much longer, and neither do I my MacBook Pro. Because when it dies in another several years... ...I won't be buying a new one. ––––––––––––––––––––– [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timer_coalescing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timer_coalescing [2] https://code.google.com/p/compcache/w/list https://code.google.com/p/compcache/w/list

bobbyi_settv 13y ago

What would it take for this guy to actually admit that Apple no longer makes the best phones? So okay, two year old iPhones still sell for a lot. Does that really show that Apple makes the best phones today? Or does it show that they used to make the best phones two years ago? If people are almost as happy with a two year old iPhone as a new one, is that really an argument against Apple having had a "lost year"?

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jmduke 13y ago
Honest question: what phone do you find superior to the iPhone 5S, and why?
- bobbyi_settv 13y ago
  Galaxy S4 for one. Between the screen size, SD card support, Google navigation, Swype, replaceable battery, general Android advantages (notifications, Google account integration), Chrome, hardware back button, etc., I would pretty bummed if I were somehow forced to give it up and get an iPhone. Actually, the screen size and Swype would be enough since I mainly use my phone for web browsing and composing email.
  - Zombieball 13y ago
    I've recently switched from android (my latest was a GS3) to iPhone 5s. I figured it was time for me to give Apple a shot at my phone. While screen size hasn't bothered me, you hit the nail on the head with Swype (or just the choice of alternate keyboards). I have found many things better in iOs than Android and vice versa, but my biggest gripe so far has been the keyboard.

acchow 13y ago

Did anyone notice that there's an Android phone with a 2/3" camera sensor? That's larger than in the PowerShot S110. http://connect.dpreview.com/post/9705313773/sony-xperia-z1-camera-review http://connect.dpreview.com/post/9705313773/sony-xperia-z1-c... Hardly a lost year in smartphones.

pavlov 13y ago
The Xperia Z1's sensor is actually 1/2.3", so it's smaller than that. The Nokia Lumia 1020 does have a 2/3" sensor however.
hornetblack 13y ago
Dammit, another reason I should have waited for the Z1.

fauigerzigerk 13y ago

>He’s got it all backwards. The nature of progress is to move incrementally. What a strange straw man to pick. Isn't it glaringly obvious that progress happens in leaps and then incrementally in between the leaps? The leaps create opportunity that is exploited in the years following the leap. If there is no leap for a while, this incremental progress starts to feel like stagnation. Some feel it earlier, some feel it later. It seems rather contrived to present this as some kind of fundamental contradiction.

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radicaldreamer 13y ago

Very little about "technology at large" and mostly apologetics for Apple.

josteink 13y ago
What else do you expect from gruber though?

stiff 13y ago

Today we have mobile phones and tablets running on a 64-bit desktop-caliber CPU architecture. This is so silly it reminds me of the time when XML was praised in computer magazines as the approaching revolution in how everyone, including desktop end-users, will work...