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The iPhone X

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Re: The iPhone X

#81

Post by mikestew »

jgruber wrote: post #79
mikestew wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take on Gruber is to not take him seriously. Don't take his recommendations, he'll flip on a dime. For example, when the Pebble was announced he was first in line on the Kickstarter. It shipped, he liked it. As soon as the Apple Watch came out, the Pebble was suddenly a piece of shit. I'm also convinced that he recommends things that he's either never used, or took money to recommend. An outstanding example is a w…

I don't recall ever overly praising the Pebble. Here's everything I've ever written about Pebble: https://daringfireball.net/search/pebble I really only wore mine for about a week, finding it more annoying than useful. As I stated here: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/02/24/pebble-time I like Apple Watch, but only as one of several watches I own. The others are mechanical, not digital. I don't know which weath…

I will say first that as it concerns the Pebble: I react my statement. (Can’t edit now, sorry.) Ugh, I made a decent effort to find what I was talking about, but you sure wrote a lot of mentions about Pebble. :-) All I have to go on is an increasingly faulty middle-aged memory, despite your giving me a handy list of posts, so I’ll leave it be.

As for the weather app, it might very well have been sponsored. But here’s the thing: despite my critical comments above, I still take you as a person of integrity even for sponsorships. Now maybe that’s just naive of me (I grew up on Paul Harvey, I should know better), but even if you’re paid I just assume you tried the product and said, “yeah, I can sincerely praise that.” Naive or not, I just know that when I downloaded it, my first thought was “no way Gruber’s seen this running, it’s horrible and I’m not nearly the font and design nut he is. That, and the forecast looks like it’s for Florida, not Seattle.” Again, maybe that’s on me: it was an ad, clearly labeled as an ad, caveat emptor. Made a good faith effort to find my purchases in the App Store to back this up, but Apple apparently isn’t going to make that easy on me.

Finally, had I even suspected you might see this I probably would have not used a Dvorak comparison. I meant it to mean “can go on a rant, but a rant that’ll be worth consideration; whether you agree or not”, but that was Dvorak 30 years ago. I truly do enjoy reading what you write, and do read every post, and that comparison was unfair.

Re: The iPhone X

#82

Post by lern_too_spel »

jgruber wrote: post #78
lern_too_spel wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until he says Apple screwed up so bad that he recommends another company's product, he can only be called a shill.

Which products do you think I should recommend a competing product over Apple's? On phones, tablets, and computers, I personally much prefer Apple's OSes, and I usually prefer their hardware as well. But even when I don't prefer Apple's hardware, the OS wins out. I don't recommend Apple's wi-fi base stations: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1370753

And why haven't you written anything about which WiFi base station you recommend? Because it isn't an Apple device? Everybody has a WiFi base station, while relatively few people have a smart watch or a programmable TV set top box, so noteworthiness is definitely not the reason.

On phones, tablets, and computers; your opinions are laughably one-sided, pooh-poohing all the things that Apple gets wrong, while making up issues with competitor products out of whole cloth. Your writing on Apple's long-delayed deployment of third party multitasking and its eventual copying of Android's Activity model, having worse battery life than the competition this the entire time, was especially cringeworthy.

Re: The iPhone X

#83

Post by armadsen »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #82
jgruber wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which products do you think I should recommend a competing product over Apple's? On phones, tablets, and computers, I personally much prefer Apple's OSes, and I usually prefer their hardware as well. But even when I don't prefer Apple's hardware, the OS wins out. I don't recommend Apple's wi-fi base stations: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1370753

And why haven't you written anything about which WiFi base station you recommend? Because it isn't an Apple device? Everybody has a WiFi base station, while relatively few people have a smart watch or a programmable TV set top box, so noteworthiness is definitely not the reason. On phones, tablets, and computers; your opinions are laughably one-sided, pooh-poohing all the things that Apple gets wrong, while making up…

He has talked pretty frequently about how he has and likes Eero’s products on his podcast.

Re: The iPhone X

#84

Post by calibration263 »

moogly wrote: post #30
bla2 wrote: post #16

In short, with the iPhone X Apple took a platform with two primary means of interacting with the apps — a touchscreen and a home button — removed one of them, and created a better, more integrated, more organic experience. [...] Android handset makers seem willing to copy everything and anything from Apple they can get away with...

That's pretty funny considering the iPhone X is the most Android-like phone so far, what with a) getting rid of the home button b) AMOLED screen (welcome to 2009) c) wireless charging. Finally an iPhone with some decent hardware features.

Getting rid of a physical button is hardly a decent hardware feature. I would've been massively disappointed if apple had gone the android route and just slapped a virtual button i can tap onto the screen.

If you want to say apple ripped some one off with removing the home button, it wasn't android. It was Palm. Welcome back 2009 indeed.

Re: The iPhone X

#85

Post by calibration263 »

willtim wrote: post #34
Brendinooo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were to write a review of a product you really liked, how would you do it differently?

Perhaps one might admit that Apple are late to the game with OLED and edge-to-edge displays?

How was Apple late to the game with edge to edge displays? They only started appearing on flagships in 2017, this is their first phone release since then. Not to mention most of the "edge-to-edge" android phones are not edge to edge. The S8/Note 8, Pixel 2/2XL, LG V30, and OnePlus 5t all have significantly larger chins and foreheads than the iPhone X. The only thing I think that comes close(and I'd say beats it) is the essential phone.

Re: The iPhone X

#86

Post by calibration263 »

Redoubts wrote: post #63
mikewhy wrote: post #36

This bit especially irked me: "In iOS 11 X, almost every role of the home button has been subsumed by the display, with the remainder reassigned to the side button: - Wake the device: tap the display. - Go to the home screen: short swipe up from the bottom of display. - Go to the multitasking switcher: longer swipe up from the bottom. - Even better way to multitask: just swipe sideways on the home indicator. - Access…

Yeah, I was really surprised the long-press-left-edge wasn’t a gesture that made it to the X, among other things.

I loved that gesture, but I was shocked how many of my friends/coworkers didn't know about it. I think the iPhone X up and over arc is more reliable to trigger(once you figure out not to do up and hold).

Re: The iPhone X

#87

Post by calibration263 »

nunez wrote: post #66

I like Gruber, but this article has so many words for so little content. As far as I understood it, he basically said, in many words, that iPhone X (and, by extension, removing the home button) is the beginning of a new age for the iPhone. That's well and good, but I don't agree with him. The competitive gap between iPhone and everything else is WAY smaller than it was in 2007, and with Google in the mix and actually…

I think that this can be a fundamental shift for the iPhone and iOS without being a paradigm shift that puts apple years ahead of the competition. I also didn't pick up an implication that this puts iOS years ahead of android while reading the article.

Re: The iPhone X

#88

Post by calibration263 »

armadsen wrote: post #83
lern_too_spel wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why haven't you written anything about which WiFi base station you recommend? Because it isn't an Apple device? Everybody has a WiFi base station, while relatively few people have a smart watch or a programmable TV set top box, so noteworthiness is definitely not the reason. On phones, tablets, and computers; your opinions are laughably one-sided, pooh-poohing all the things that Apple gets wrong, while making up…

He has talked pretty frequently about how he has and likes Eero’s products on his podcast.

They also happen to be a sponsor of the podcast, so I could understand why he hasn't written a glowing review on DF.

Re: The iPhone X

#89

Post by milkmilklemon »

He's never really struck me as a shill so much as a lazy writer with nothing interesting to say. Every time somebody sends me a link to his site I know that by going there I can generally expect to see something along the lines of "marketshare doesn't matter and just to prove it I'm going to write another 5000 words about marketshare which say something altogether very different than the last 5000 words about marketshare I wrote three months ago when it also did not matter," "BBEdit is the best web development environment for people who do absolutely no web development, like me," "Somebody's using Markdown wrong and this matters (unlike marketshare, which does NOT matter)," "I'm bored so I figured I'd namedrop some pseudo-famous indie Mac developer with whom I occasionally exchange tweets to remind myself how cool of an old timey software greybeard I think I am even though I have produced nothing of even marginal value since Perl had lots of marketshare (which does not matter)," "Acorn is better than Photoshop at everything and I can say this comfortably as a tasteless dilettante who has absolutely no idea how to use Photoshop in any meaningful way let alone do so professionally," "every journalist in the world should be writing the way I do even though it would make them just as unemployable as I am," "somebody at Apple told me a secret and I can't tell you what it was but it's really amazing knowing somebody at Apple because I like to imagine myself having a job again," or "boy am I lucky to mysteriously be able to pay for all these Epi-Pens without doing any actual work ever James Bond Stanley Kubrick Trump sucks marketshare."

When that's all you have going through your head, lots of incredibly uninteresting things probably look like "triumphs" and you're probably going to annoy everyone in earshot about them over and over and over. I'm glad I never worked with anyone in any department he had ties to because I imagine he'd be quite the annoyingly needy third wheel when grown folks was talking.

Marketshare.

Re: The iPhone X

#90

Post by calibration263 »

makecheck wrote: post #51

The extra step to kill processes on the X is bad enough that I would call it a serious bug (i.e. it is harder to view processes in the first place, you can’t swipe them out, and you can’t even see the kill buttons without a delicate push-and-wait). This has to be easy to do because there are just too many apps that can enter weird states, e.g. bank apps that will never accept log-ins again once they encounter their f…

Have you tried taking your phone to the Apple Store? I haven't noticed issues like that with mine.
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