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IPhone 4

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Re: IPhone 4

#131

Post by mzl »

jherdman wrote: post #15

"... but I’ve had fun trying out FaceTime with a few iPhone 4-enabled friends" This sentence is absolutely delicious to my mind, specifically the use of the word "enabled". It's as if to own a device was to somehow be an upgrade for one's person. Is this how we've really all come to think of devices now? Are they extensions of our bodies? A whole raft of questions has drifted to the shores of my mind.

Scott Adams has a few fun ideas on how we should move forward with our new exobrains: http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/dilbert_pocket/

Re: IPhone 4

#132

Post by zygen »

brown9-2 wrote: post #70
antidaily wrote: post #6

The new volume buttons, silence toggle, and power button all have a better feel than ever before. No way. The buttons feel cheap compared to the 3GS. The silence toggle is a piece of shit. And I preferred the volume up/down as one button.

And this is exactly the crux of my problem with reviews like this: maybe how a button feels to an individual is a bit subjective?

All reviews are subjective. If the person doesn't have the same tastes as you, then don't take their opinion.

Re: IPhone 4

#133

Post by ZeroGravitas »

danudey wrote: post #50
pkulak wrote: post #43

"This is the result of a new manufacturing process Apple has pioneered. No other company gives a shit about things like this." Samsung is doing this for their new displays. And they were out before the iPhone 4 was even announced. But, to Gruber, if it's not Apple, it's automatically crap. No sense acknowledging its existence.

I might be mistaken, but I believe he's referring specifically to bonding the LCD display to a capacitive piece of glass, rather than just regular protective plastic. (Does Samsung use glass in their displays? They all look plastic to me.)

No, it's not glass vs. plastic he's talking about (and yes Samsung Super-AMOLED screens are glass anyway). The original poster is correct, Gruber believes this reduction in layers above the screen was pioneered by Apple because they made it seem like they did in their introductory videos and thinks it unique because he neither knows nor cares about things happening outside the sphere of Apple. He doesn't even just say that it doesn't exist (which is of course not true), he says it couldn't exist outside Apple because no-one else cares.

Re: IPhone 4

#134

Post by [deleted] »

ergo98 wrote: post #82
ugh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a rather serious accusation. Do you have any evidence which would point you that way?

A less serious accusation is that Gruber now knows that his core readership consists of, essentially, the Apple faithful. He knows to pander to that crowd and that is how he gets paid. It's iPhone fans who feel that every Gruber observation about the iPhone is so critically important that it needs to be voted up on HN.

[deleted]

Re: IPhone 4

#135

Post by ZeroGravitas »

ergo98 wrote: post #82
ugh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a rather serious accusation. Do you have any evidence which would point you that way?

A less serious accusation is that Gruber now knows that his core readership consists of, essentially, the Apple faithful. He knows to pander to that crowd and that is how he gets paid. It's iPhone fans who feel that every Gruber observation about the iPhone is so critically important that it needs to be voted up on HN.

A few people have claimed round here that paying attention solely to metrics can push you in strange directions e.g. Google ending up with inconsistent designs that annoy aesthetes because their stats show that people "prefer" them in some measurable manner.

I think it's quite likely that by paying even subliminal attention to his traffic stats Gruber has turned into the anti-Dvorak, someone who makes inflammatory and (crucially) factually incorrect statements about tech rivals because that is exactly the kind of thing that riles up nerds. Just being wrong or acting superior isn't enough, you have to really press people's buttons to troll effectively.

(Dvorak's a bit old-school so for those who aren't aware, he's a tech journalist that made a career out of trolling Apple fans and later admitted to doing exactly that because it drove page-views.)

Re: IPhone 4

#136

Post by tfh »

> No other company gives a shit about things like this.

There was a time where I really liked John's articles. Now he's sounding like just another fanboy...

Re: IPhone 4

#137

Post by Hari_Seldon »

dieterrams wrote: post #17
btmorex wrote: post #12

>The overall build quality seems impossibly good. The iPhone 4 is beautiful to behold and feels like a valuable artifact. It’s like a love letter to Dieter Rams. Do other people actually like reading stuff like this? I mean, regardless of what you think of the iphone 4, that level of praise almost makes me feel bad for him. It's like romantic love for an object.

I like reading it very much.

So do I, it's hard to find good, impassioned writing on the web.

Re: IPhone 4

#138

Post by Hari_Seldon »

tfh wrote: post #136

> No other company gives a shit about things like this. There was a time where I really liked John's articles. Now he's sounding like just another fanboy...

But he's right, can you name another tech firm that cares as much about these things?

I remember reading something a while back about how much time Apple spent on getting the angle (directon) of the mouse pointer right on the original Mac.

Re: IPhone 4

#139

Post by stilldavid »

chc wrote: post #118
jsz0 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His quote makes a lot more sense in context: * In fact, Apple seems very confident regarding everything it decided for the original 2007 iPhone. There are no new buttons, or even moved buttons. The Retina Display is emblematic of the iPhone 4 as a whole, both hardware and software: the same fundamental idea as the original iPhone, but clarified. It hasn’t really changed so much as improved — like the same picture in…

The only part of his comments that really amounts to negative criticism is about the glass back. He isn't hard on Apple about the missing italic face in the same way he is about e.g. Microsoft's errors (he basically treats it as a regression for Apple to fix), and it's a gross distortion to characterize his verdict on the antenna as "This could be a fatal design flaw." Almost every mention of the antenna issue is cus…

To put my two cents in on the antenna issue, I believe that Gruber is just saying it how it is in this case. I have an iPhone 4, and nearly everyone that sees it asks me about reception issues. I've talked on it for a total of probably 4 hours now, in various locations with various signal strength and have had no issues with dropped calls or reduced reception of any sort. During many of the longer calls, I've tried holding the phone upside down, bridging all the metal gaps, left handed, right handed, etc... and it made no difference.

So call him "optimistic" in his analysis, but if his experience is anything like mine, he is right to be wary of all the reports of the "death grip" as much as I am.

Re: IPhone 4

#140

Post by jrockway »

pkulak wrote: post #43

"This is the result of a new manufacturing process Apple has pioneered. No other company gives a shit about things like this." Samsung is doing this for their new displays. And they were out before the iPhone 4 was even announced. But, to Gruber, if it's not Apple, it's automatically crap. No sense acknowledging its existence.

The OpenMoko phone also had a higher number of pixels-per-inch than the iPhone 4. And this was years ago, by a no-name hardware company.

The reason other phones don't have a "retina display" is because it's expensive, and the other phones are trying to win market share by being cheap. Sadly, this works better than making a quality product.

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