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How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac

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Re: How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac

#111

Post by hristov »

fnid2 wrote: post #87
chaostheory wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It works in the short term, but I believe it will bite them in the ass over the long-term." I disagree. Both Apple and Nintendo have shown proof that their closed 'circle of one' system works. Yes both of them have had a lot of big missed opportunities in the past because of this, but what matters more for these companies is profitability and not marketshare. Both Apple's and Nintendo's closed systems have led to la…

Apple has also shown that their closed 'circle of one' system does NOT work. That's why they lost to IBM/MS so long ago. Everything apple was proprietary and people went to PCs.

Good point. And to add to that in order to back in the computer business and come back from irrelevance, Apple had to progressively give up on everything that differentiated them from PCs except for the two things they are actually good at -- the gui and the nice shiny cases. And they had to make sure they could run most PC software.

If apple think their iPhone success shows that people like closed systems, they are kidding themselves. Phones have never really been open (thanks to the carriers), so the iPhone was actually one of the more open phones out there. But once they start competing with actual computers, it is going to be very different.

Re: How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac

#112

Post by potatolicious »

Scriptor wrote: post #78
scott_s wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because most people don't want a device . They want to be able to watch videos, read books and listen to music. The enabling device is incidental.

Netbooks, which are basically the same price or cheaper, can do the same as the above and are much less locked in. More immediately, they also have Flash support, multitasking, and USB ports. People still need more heavy-duty computers to do those other things as well as for non-leisure stuff. The advantage of an iPhone was that it was extremely portable and you could just pull it out on the bus to pass the time. The…

> "can do the same as the above"

I heartily disagree. There's a big difference, huge difference between "can barely" and "does it really fucking well". The iPad shoots for the latter (we'll see if it hits), the netbook's mere existence is predicated on the former.

If your definition of "can do the same" means "someone willing to bang their head hard enough and willing to live with a substandard user experience can do it", sure. But IMHO we need to strive for a higher standard than that.

After the iPod, the Mac, and the iPhone, I don't think geeks still get why Apple is successful: they build devices that normal people actually want. I think there is some collective head-in-the-sand in the geek community because what people apparently want is not at all like what geeks want. The average user doesn't want freedom, doesn't want an open kernel, doesn't give a shit about standards, they want to have a slick, usable, and intuitive user experience, and so far netbooks are failing hard at it.

The average user doesn't want the ability to hunt down zip files on obscure websites, downloading the file, and being able to run whatever app is inside. They like having a central place where all apps in the universe reside. This may or may not be good for the industry as a whole, but it is what our users desire.

IMHO the constant spec-based wankery is why nobody has yet caught up with Apple. I'm seeing a lot of internet chatter about how netbooks do more (does more, poorly), how the cost is too high, how the CPU is too slow, blah blah blah, but conveniently ignores what is IMHO the one defining reason Apple has succeeded in the last decade: user interface.

"My Android phone isn't locked down!" <-- Your Android phone also crashes all the time, emits strange cryptic messages that only developers understand ("a process has been forced to exit"?)

Re: How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac

#113

Post by jodrellblank »

scott_s wrote: post #46
jwhitlark wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The logical conclusion of the personal computer revolution is the person doesn't control their device?! That's not revolutionary; that's a return to the bad old days...

Yes, because most people don't want a device . They want to be able to watch videos, read books and listen to music. The enabling device is incidental.

Agreed. Few people went on about how miserable and useless and limiting the pocket calculator was.

Re: How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac

#114

Post by jpwagner »

DannoHung wrote: post #105
jpwagner wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wasn't being sarcastic. we're mostly makers here, not only consumers.

I don't know about you, but I am not a designer, I don't have years of experience creating usable interfaces. I do not have the ability to make a graphical user interface that is useful and intuitive.

mostly

Re: How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac

#115

Post by whyenot »

fnid2 wrote: post #87
chaostheory wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It works in the short term, but I believe it will bite them in the ass over the long-term." I disagree. Both Apple and Nintendo have shown proof that their closed 'circle of one' system works. Yes both of them have had a lot of big missed opportunities in the past because of this, but what matters more for these companies is profitability and not marketshare. Both Apple's and Nintendo's closed systems have led to la…

Apple has also shown that their closed 'circle of one' system does NOT work. That's why they lost to IBM/MS so long ago. Everything apple was proprietary and people went to PCs.

I don't think it's at all clear that people "went to PCs" because the Mac was proprietary. Macs were also expensive, slow, monochrome, and you couldn't buy them from IBM or Compaq, for example.

The elephant in the room is the iPhone, where "circle of one" seems to be working extremely well. Maybe the model just needed some fine tuning.

Re: How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac

#116

Post by GHFigs »

lambda wrote: post #57
telemachos wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People hate being held down, forced into one category, etc. Here's an alternative take on this (with a story). I recently saw Thomas Keller (chef and owner of Per Se here in NYC and French Laundry in CA, among others) talking about a new-ish restaurant of his in CA, Ad Hoc. Ad Hoc has no menus. They make meals and serve them family style. You take what you want from the dishes provided. You have choice only within…

But, this isn't about giving the users freedom from choice; with 140,000 options in the App Store, that's a lot of choices. This is explicitly about locking developers down, and not allowing them to do things that Apple does not approve of. Want to write a competing web browser? Sorry, you can't. Want to write an awesome JIT that optimizes itself for their shiny new chip? No can do. Imagine if this policy had been in…

Half of the technologies that they themselves use and tout as great would not exist.

Except the ones you listed do exist and are open for anybody else to go use and build their own great products, even using the work that Apple put into them.

Re: How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac

#117

Post by yesimahuman »

dannyr wrote: post #38
yesimahuman wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the design will be shit and you won't have the user base.

It's almost guaranteed that anybody who disses a product is very likely to have never tried it. Likely they read it on some blog that it is shit and just believed it.

I wasn't referring specifically to the Nexus, which I have not tried. However, I tried the Droid, and was just upset that these companies just don't get it. I want to leave Apple and use something else, but they aren't putting in the time and effort to polish and make the experience awesome.

That said, I do not regularly use Mac computers, so I don't think everything they do is awesome.

Re: How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac

#118

Post by uuilly »

I see the iPad as a communal home machine that floats around the house. It replaces newspapers, books, magazines, remotes (for music and hopefully TV), picture frames, and for some video game consoles. Eventually it will control your oven, door entry system etc. To me it's a "home computer."

Re: How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac

#119

Post by Locke1689 »

jwhitlark wrote: post #99
mechanical_fish wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you've killed the metaphor yet. Because, in fact, the sale of gas is subject to a great deal of regulation. That's to prevent someone from selling you adulterated gas that destroys your car's emission system. Or from selling you leaded gas that pollutes the air that our kids have to breathe. And the reason the manufacturer doesn't need to enforce your use of the roads is that it's already being enforced…

Well, like all metaphors, it's only an approximation. However, the laws don't dictate that I keep my car on public roads, they dictate what I do with my car when I'm not on my property. And while those laws are enforced by a higher authority, if you follow the chain up in a democracy, you come to me again, in theory. To your other point, Windows is insecure, not personal computers. A true personal computer is/would b…

All computers are insecure. Do I need to repeat that? ALL COMPUTERS ARE INSECURE. OK. Good.

Re: How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac

#120

Post by jstevens85 »

fnid2 wrote: post #87
chaostheory wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It works in the short term, but I believe it will bite them in the ass over the long-term." I disagree. Both Apple and Nintendo have shown proof that their closed 'circle of one' system works. Yes both of them have had a lot of big missed opportunities in the past because of this, but what matters more for these companies is profitability and not marketshare. Both Apple's and Nintendo's closed systems have led to la…

Apple has also shown that their closed 'circle of one' system does NOT work. That's why they lost to IBM/MS so long ago. Everything apple was proprietary and people went to PCs.

I'm not sure if that's really true. The problem with the first Mac was that it launched a couple of years after the IBM PC, and the hardware was underpowered for a GUI OS. By the time the Mac became useful and suitable for businesses, MS had already built too much of a lead for Apple to catch up.
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