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The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

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Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#31

> Just check out its striking video for the Surface Studio — it is so influenced by Apple’s playbook that I’m surprised there’s no Jony Ive narration. What's happened is that other companies have figured out how to emulate Steve Jobs's playbook that's now several decades old and there's nobody at Apple to write new plays. Jobs always talked about how Microsoft didn't have taste and when you look at MS products up unt…

One thing you're missing is how the market came to them, partly through their own making. Laptops and PC's looked "corporate" Apple products (blue, pink, green computers anyone?) looked decidedly uncorporate. The iPhone looked so not like a Blackberry (with it's accompanying belt holster!) Hope, the "consumerization" of IT meant sleek personal design was preferred to corporate design. The iPhone helped breakdown that wall and now MSFT and others went out the side door and are reentering as consumer looking devices.

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#32
post #5

I feel like Apple is trying to force innovation with their latest offerings. I'm not against change, but change for the sake of change is annoying. The idea well must be running pretty dry at Cupertino

20 years Apple released the iMac which did away with SCSI, ADB, RJ232 etc in favour of USB. What they have done now with the MacBook Pro is exactly the same thing. They are trying to establish USB-C as the one port to rule them all just like they successful did with USB-A. Yes change can be hard and some people like yourself clearly struggle more than others. But change is needed sometimes to push the industry forwar…

The original iMac with its 2 USB ports was unusable for anything but the simplest tasks. It was equal to a dumb terminal.

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#33

> Just check out its striking video for the Surface Studio — it is so influenced by Apple’s playbook that I’m surprised there’s no Jony Ive narration. What's happened is that other companies have figured out how to emulate Steve Jobs's playbook that's now several decades old and there's nobody at Apple to write new plays. Jobs always talked about how Microsoft didn't have taste and when you look at MS products up unt…

I always found it offensive that they used long deceased, mostly anti materialist socialists to peddle consumer electronics (as if mother Teresa would be using an ipad with her name etched in the back). They should have tried using a living legend without permission like Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky and see how that went...

A computer is just a tool. It's not as important as what it enables you to do.

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hacker" as in "Hacker News" is from an even more distant past. The word just got appropriately decaffeinated, so as to be acceptable within our current iteration of group think.

I tried going to a 'hacker' meetup in my city. It was disappointing. I was asking people if they were programmers, the median reaction was "a programmer? oh lord no, I'm a [marketing/UI/non-technical] person". It seems the term was coopted and gutted by some in the startup scene. (I'm aware there are legitimate hackers in the startup scene, this was just one particular event in one particular city.)

> I'm a [marketing/UI/non-technical] person".

They are obviously confusing a hack with a hacker.

/me ducks

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#35
Thursday's reveal of new MacBooks was so lackluster I am rethinking my loyalty to Apple. The Apple platform has always been the most productive platform for me. But other firms seem to be innovating and iterating on things quicker than Apple has: rumor has it that Apple will more or less copy the edge-to-edge display of Chinese handsets or the rounded edges of the S7 Edge, wtf, what happened to doing really bold things that nobody else has, or can? I guess we might have just hit peak-phone handset. In any case Apple wants to push into the enterprise but won't make a surface like device (what the iPad Pro should have been). Oh well. OS X is still the killer feature for me so I will remain securely on Apple and I'm not leaving my iPhone for any other handset but this is still very disconcerting.

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#36

> Just check out its striking video for the Surface Studio — it is so influenced by Apple’s playbook that I’m surprised there’s no Jony Ive narration. What's happened is that other companies have figured out how to emulate Steve Jobs's playbook that's now several decades old and there's nobody at Apple to write new plays. Jobs always talked about how Microsoft didn't have taste and when you look at MS products up unt…

I still find the Surface Studio is not exactly breathtaking. I dislike the chrome arms - they are part of the computer and shouldn't stand out like that. I like the computer being on the base, usually a piece of dead space, but that makes the design of the arms more complicated as they need to carry signals back and forth.

It's good, but nothing I would be surprised seeing coming out of HP or Sony.

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#38
post #21
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

App£e. or Appl€. Ideally you could use the $ symbol but there's no s in Apple. Sure, you can just throw in whatever character you want, but !nevets doesn't make a lot of sense. what you're shooting for here is a pun. You want something that looks like a regular character, so @pple is kind of cute, but there are two obvious problems. One, it kind of looks like a direct message to pple, which falls apart. &pple isn't b…

yeah I was going to do that but apple is an american company and it doesnt make sense to use the euro. Using $pple is just as lazy as using m$ to call microsoft greedy.

Apple is an Irish company. /S http://www.forbes.com/sites/leesheppard/2013/05/28/how-does-...

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#39

> Just check out its striking video for the Surface Studio — it is so influenced by Apple’s playbook that I’m surprised there’s no Jony Ive narration. What's happened is that other companies have figured out how to emulate Steve Jobs's playbook that's now several decades old and there's nobody at Apple to write new plays. Jobs always talked about how Microsoft didn't have taste and when you look at MS products up unt…

Microsoft lacked taste and the ability to execute. With the Surface Book, they absolutely nailed taste. But they still have no ability to execute (the SB suffered at launch from firmware glitches that took months to iron out: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/02/new-firmware-finally-...).

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#40
I don't think it's a role reversal at all, rather everybody has been chasing Apple for so long the competition has caught up and surpassed in some aspects. Who doesn't have a laptop that hasn't been modeled after the macbook. Also remember that everything Apple introduces doesn't turn to gold every time, they have plenty of product feature failures.

The only innovation I saw yesterday which will be copied really came out of Microsoft with the Surface Studio and Surface dial. I'm sure microsoft would really like to see a surge in high-end desktops. The only worthwhile technical feature Apple did was adding touch id in the touch bar, but even then how often would I use this? Also seems like the more logical place for touch id is actually on the mouse where my fingers are a majority of the time.

The only commonality between these two is there marketing departments thinking people want to spend $3k+ on products, no reversal there.

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