How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices • Hacker News Board

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#31

Post by lotyrin » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 2:08 AM UTC

gibwell wrote: post #13

rednukleus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of warped reality do you live in that only selling 5 million units a year while updating the hardware every week is "no big deal"? Regarding rapid obsolescence, this seems to work very well in Asian markets. They typically release a far greater number of devices, because there is a strong market for second hand phones, and many people like to keep switching to the latest thing.

Do you seriously think that Xiaomi makes the kind of changes that Apple makes to their products annually on a weekly basis?

Do you seriously think they would have to before it's worth being impressed over?

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#32

Post by kkowalczyk » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 2:19 AM UTC

37prime wrote: post #29

Company like Apple COULD make different phones every week but there is no reasons why they wold want to do it. It is highly impractical for many reasons. Imagine IF Apple just made one iPhone in different color each week. Then imagine if Apple tweaked the internals each and every week. They’d be supporting at least 52 different versions of iPhone every year. The weekly “design, build, redesign and build” process shou…

So if we apply your logic to software, a "thoughtful R&D process" of yearly releases (also known as "waterfall software development") is better than agile process of shipping frequently and tweaking your future features based on customer feedback.

Etsy (http://codeascraft.com/2011/02/04/how-does-etsy-manage-devel...) and just about any web dev shop disagrees with you.

There's nothing different about hardware.

In fact there's a story about a guy who build human-powered airplane not by planning harder but by increasing the frequency of iterations (http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663488/wanna-solve-impossible-p...).

This is exactly the idea behind Xiaomi's hardware and software efforts: improve faster by learning faster from more frequent iterations. Apple can only learn if their stuff works every year. Xiaomi can learn something every week.

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#33

Post by smith7018 » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 2:34 AM UTC

AJ007 wrote: post #24

bluedino wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forbes has been hit and miss lately. For every good article they do about tech, they do some short, sensationalist 'China is taking over' piece like this.

Comments from actual users of these phones would be far more informative. Karma to scott_karana for mentioning his experience with their version of Android.

MIUI is actually a fairly well-known (and used) Android variant. Fun fact: it was supposedly based on iOS' looks but branched off into their own direction after ICS. Since then, iOS 7 was (comically, IMO) compared to MIUI and people believed Apple was inspired by it. It was even sold on a phone that was very iPhone-esque: http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/08/xiaomi...

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#34

Post by kkowalczyk » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 2:36 AM UTC

heifetz wrote: post #10

Here's an experiment. Take all the forum members on macrumors and crowd source a new phone by taking all of their ideas. See what kind of mutant non-functioning phone results from a democratic process. One of the reason why Apple and Google's phones and OSs are successful is because there are visionaries (Ives, Jobs, Rubin) at the top coming up with new ideas, instead of taking a poll and purely going with consumer f…

That's not what Xiaomi does.

They do have designers and program managers whose job is to decide which submitted ideas should be implemented and which should be discarded (and I'm sure a majority is discarded).

In fact, listening to your users (as compared to just doing things you think are good) is the basic idea of Lean Startup and other agile methodologies.

You're not supposed to put users in a driver's seat but you are supposed to listen to their feedback.

Apple's weakness is that they don't listen to users (or at least I don't know of a channel where my feedback would be likely to catch Apple's PM attention). I understand the challenge of trying to listen to users at Apple's scale and they're extraordinarily successful regardless, but it doesn't mean that you can't get meaningful feedback and meaningful ideas from your user base. Xiaomi is a proof that it's possible.

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#35

Post by cantankerous » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 3:06 AM UTC

I find it really impressive that a company can roll out incremental changes to 100,000 devices in a week. I wonder if the author somehow got it mixed up and the updates to each weekly device aren't necessarily a week old. It's just rolling updates hitting every batch every week. That would make a little more sense. I think some other people have said in the comments that some changes just wouldn't fit into a week's time span. I suppose it would also make sense if all the changes were somehow tiny in nature.

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#36

Post by glassheart » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 3:23 AM UTC

kkowalczyk wrote: post #32

37prime wrote: post #29

Company like Apple COULD make different phones every week but there is no reasons why they wold want to do it. It is highly impractical for many reasons. Imagine IF Apple just made one iPhone in different color each week. Then imagine if Apple tweaked the internals each and every week. They’d be supporting at least 52 different versions of iPhone every year. The weekly “design, build, redesign and build” process shou…

So if we apply your logic to software, a "thoughtful R&D process" of yearly releases (also known as "waterfall software development") is better than agile process of shipping frequently and tweaking your future features based on customer feedback. Etsy ( http://codeascraft.com/2011/02/04/how-does-etsy-manage-devel... ) and just about any web dev shop disagrees with you. There's nothing different about hardware. In fa…

If a website makes an update, all users will get the new version as soon as caches expire. Something like an iOS update can also reach a large majority of users within weeks. Hardware that you've already shipped will remain in customer hands, obviously unchanged, yet still need to be supported through the warranty period and beyond. I don't understand why you would say that's nothing different. Your QA department would need to test software against many more versions of hardware, your software engineers would have to fix those bugs, and your after-sales support staff would have a harder time as well.

Also, it's not as if other companies ship exactly the same hardware throughout the lifecycle of a product. New suppliers are added, parts that have been identified as a return driver are reworked, and even major mid-life changes (consider the slim versions of each PlayStation as an example) happen as a matter of course.

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#37

Post by vzhang » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 3:40 AM UTC

If their products are crap, who cares how often they release them? But take a look at what they are offering for $300:

Specs: http://www.gsmarena.com/xiaomi_mi_3-5678.php

Design: http://www.gsmarena.com/xiaomi_mi_3-pictures-5678.php

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#38

Post by adamb_ » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 3:51 AM UTC

What are they changing? Are we talking "this week's model has softer bezels" or "this week's model has a new FM radio"?(which they do btw.)

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#39

Post by enscr » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 4:00 AM UTC

Reading the article makes me feel that Xiaomi was a fun experiment started by the billionaire founder that turned out to be a successful venture.

It sounds very interesting to innovate hardware at that pace... and why not. Taking input from the users with such a fast turnaround is awesome too.

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#40

Post by 37prime » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 4:21 AM UTC

kkowalczyk wrote: post #32

37prime wrote: post #29

Company like Apple COULD make different phones every week but there is no reasons why they wold want to do it. It is highly impractical for many reasons. Imagine IF Apple just made one iPhone in different color each week. Then imagine if Apple tweaked the internals each and every week. They’d be supporting at least 52 different versions of iPhone every year. The weekly “design, build, redesign and build” process shou…

So if we apply your logic to software, a "thoughtful R&D process" of yearly releases (also known as "waterfall software development") is better than agile process of shipping frequently and tweaking your future features based on customer feedback. Etsy ( http://codeascraft.com/2011/02/04/how-does-etsy-manage-devel... ) and just about any web dev shop disagrees with you. There's nothing different about hardware. In fa…

Aren't we talking about hardware? It is a lot easier to patch software.

Hardware? Not the case. It is not practical to keep changing hardware when the production is larger than what Xiaomi is currently delivering.