61–67 of 67 posts
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When was that brief period in the 2000s where ska got really popular and "skanking" re-entered the public consciousness as a dance style? Because I could imagine that inside Apple people thought of the "silhouettes dancing with iPods" ads as "skankPod" ads. That would make "Skankphone" a pretty obvious nickname for a phone project.
The term had been current for a while: Rockafeller Skank by Fatboy Slim was 1998.
I think it's incredibly interesting that Apple is one of but a handful of companies that seems to enjoy a steady proliferation and preservation of its past company lore, both in the popular media and amongst technologists. People take a great deal of interest in the historical artifacts this company produces; for an outsider, it really stands out as unusual. I can only think of a few other companies that manage this…
It may be because Apple's mission has been to design what they consider to be revolutionary products, not from a hardware specifications standpoint, but from a design and UX standpoint. At least Steve Jobs' Apple did that with iPod, iPhone, and iPad and even the iMac to some degree. The Apple Watch may be viewed that way in a few years but it doesn't seem like it yet.
The MP3 player was the evolution of the CD player, which was the evolution of the walkman, which was the evolution of the boom box etc...going all the way back to minstrels. Music and its transportability have always been a big deal and improving that core function is a big deal.
The watch....time is important, but it is solved problem in that space, and it's not clear that it makes any thing else better (i.e. you implicitly need to use two-hands to control a watch interface, you can handle a phone with just 1).
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Don't forget, the iMac G3 had five plastic color cases for some reason. Apple also sells a range of iPhone/iPad cases. Also, a major early selling point on the iPad was the magnates to better integrate with a case.
"for some reason" Yeah, cars should only come in one color, right?
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A lot of the ipods were overpriced and underfeatured. They were shiny, but didn't always work as well as competitors. I once bought a video ipod - that was a mistake. And no radio? Crazy.
Apple has a long history of ditching features that power users demand and call omission "crazy", then seeing the industry ditch those same features a few years later. Floppy drives. CD drives. Ethernet ports. Flash support.
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If you buy a device that lacks flash support, and five years later everyone else finally gets around to trying to stop making things in flash, then it was a stupid idea for the device to lack flash support at the time you bought it. Sure, a device can still be wildly successful even if its missing something important, but that doesn't magically make it a good idea at the time it was done. The replacements for flash s…
Apple's ditching Flash with essentially no downsides beyond short-lived and short-sighted marketing mockery from competitors is evidence it wasn't a "stupid idea". Flash still suffers from poor performance to this day, let alone back then, and even on full desktop devices (hell, it'll turn on a Mac Pro's fans). Flash on phones was a miserable idea to start with.
I was basing my opinion off of my personal experiences. For years after IOS devices hit the market, flash dominated certain types of content on the web. The lack of flash support meant that a user couldn't really view these sites on an IOS device.
Also, in spite of flash's performance issues, for a long time it seemed to perform better than HTML5-based video players. Youtube's HTML5 player remained an opt-in experimental feature for so long for a reason, it simply didn't work as well as the normal player.
It looks more like a production iPhone running the (leaked) internal testing OS.
Lots of iPhone prototypes have surfaced with blank backplates, or IMEI inscriptions as a bunch of Xs. There's nothing separating this hardware from a production piece, which wouldn't be the case with the true prototype phones.
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The point is it was still a huge success.
No: that product was not a success. A later product in the same product line released years later that had more benefits and fewer limitations became a huge success, but the original iPod was actually a flop that only held on to its mediocre sales due to brand loyalty, and its limited storage space and requirement to sync via a physical FireWire cable (as opposed to even USB) were in fact key to this failure. (In par…