> iPhone wasn't successful because of its beautiful design Relatively speaking I think that gave it an edge which helped make it successful. I don't think Apple products in general have the best most usable designs, but they do have the most beautiful, most stylish most sophisticated-looking designs. People want that because a device like phone is part of their identity.
It's the “hardware”, stupid
91–100 of 124 posts
Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid
#92Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid
#93I would love to know if Ives was truly foundation to the iPhone, or if he was more given the overall idea and polished it with the final look/feel (which is also important). Who was the exact individual that had the vision for glass multi-touch screens and sick gesture like effects (scroll). Perhaps the team just sat around a table and came up with the vision. Or maybe it was Jobs, but clearly there were some good vi…
Jobs and Ive were at the core of all the product design. There were multiple articles about Jobs spending most of his day with Jony looking at prototypes Jony's team had devised and giving critiques and feedback. Then they would iterate on what Jobs said. Of course the engineering team had to figure out how to make Jobs suggestions real within the physical and technological constraints they were working with. > I thi…
Jarvis, please make me a sandwich.
Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jobs and Ive were at the core of all the product design. There were multiple articles about Jobs spending most of his day with Jony looking at prototypes Jony's team had devised and giving critiques and feedback. Then they would iterate on what Jobs said. Of course the engineering team had to figure out how to make Jobs suggestions real within the physical and technological constraints they were working with. > I thi…
Maybe Altman will serve that taste savant role, and they will be a good combo. I'm optimistic they will produce something that: * doesn't have ads, (we are the customer, not the product) * makes our lives more fluid and easy * delivers on the vision for what computers always could be Jarvis, please make me a sandwich.
Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Who was the exact individual that had the vision for glass multi-touch screens and sick gesture like effects (scroll). Like almost all new products later thought of as 'visionary' innovations, the first iPhone built on pre-existing ideas but integrated them particularly well and added some excellent new refinements. It's easy to forget that the prior five years had been a crucible of in-market experimentation betwe…
> It advanced the "premium pocket phone" bar up to a new level but I didn't see it as unusually visionary. Have you ever encountered a product you saw as "unusually visionary"?
So I've thought a lot about new tech product innovation including speaking, writing and teaching about it. When people have been kind enough to use 'visionary' in relation to a product I led, I thank them but reject the term and then try to turn it into a teachable moment about the thought processes, systems and relentless execution necessary to create results someone might someday describe as 'visionary'. I'm generally opposed to the trend in media and pop-biz-lit to deify outstanding new product development as somehow ineffably mystical. At best, it helps no one get better at doing this hard thing, and at worst, it's pulling up the ladder after we've climbed it.
The novel insights and intuitions which some people call 'visionary', in my experience, always seem to come after intensive research, deep study of prior work in the field and constant hands-on, practical experimentation. So I credit them as the indirect (but expected) result of the rigorous process of making and shipping cool new stuff. That said, I do think of Steve Jobs himself as one of the best natural tech product innovators I've ever met. Another example I cite as a significantly notable step change was SpaceX's understanding that the way to engineer exponentially more mass to orbit per dollar was pioneering a substantially different process of rocket development. That's more a process than a product - but that's kind of my whole meta-point.
If your question was basically to try to call out "guy who didn't think iPhone 1 was unusually visionary at the 2007 launch, doesn't think anything is visionary". Well... you win. But it's more because I think most new products in new categories are 'visionary' in some ways. It's just that the majority of new visions fail commercially. Semantically, 'visionary' probably best parses to a synonym for novelty and 'newly different' doesn't necessarily equate to good, so it's not useful as a threshold metric for product success. However, I do think the iPhone business overall is certainly one of the ten most innovative and successful new product businesses our industry has ever seen. But that doesn't change the fact that many knowledgeable observers at the original launch didn't see it that way - because it wasn't that yet. Twenty years of incredible success and constant iteration tends to obscure that the original product - as innovative as it was - wasn't what its descendants became. And the victors tend to rewrite history and our collective memories obscuring the context the 1.0 was created in. Standing there in the Apple booth, I DID think it was really good, bold and different. I told someone that night I expected it would probably be my personal "product of the year" - and recall this was in early January. My comment above was because just being a fanboy exclaiming how visionary a product is informs nothing and helps no one.
Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I wouldn't put it past that. It could literally feed Android into an llm context window and probably redesign it to be even better and it already is. Android still has weird laggy jumps and just is not that smooth. Even on the new pixel devices.
Is this... a joke?
Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid
#97I would love to know if Ives was truly foundation to the iPhone, or if he was more given the overall idea and polished it with the final look/feel (which is also important). Who was the exact individual that had the vision for glass multi-touch screens and sick gesture like effects (scroll). Perhaps the team just sat around a table and came up with the vision. Or maybe it was Jobs, but clearly there were some good vi…
Jobs and Ive were at the core of all the product design. There were multiple articles about Jobs spending most of his day with Jony looking at prototypes Jony's team had devised and giving critiques and feedback. Then they would iterate on what Jobs said. Of course the engineering team had to figure out how to make Jobs suggestions real within the physical and technological constraints they were working with. > I thi…
Ives is not that person he is too nice.
Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid
#98The article buries the lede on the only point that matters with these "AI" hardware devices. They need to solve a problem their customers have, and all the devices these companies have released so far don't do anything that a smartphone can't easily do.
For me the interesting part was that OpenAI's only viable option for a mobile OS is Android, while Google is their main competitor.
Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
The iPhone was the first really well done general purpose computing phone. It had a real web browser, a real music player, apps that didn't suck. Adoption was huge because the design was great, but we would have just seen the same thing transpire over a number of years if iPhone hadn't been created. I know a lot of people basically who were basically saying "finally"
> but we would have just seen the same thing transpire over a number of years if iPhone hadn't been created. Maybe, but I’m not certain we would have converged on a single form factor. Only Apple had the retail, marketing, software, hardware capabilities, discipline, and incentives to throw everything behind the minimalistic design and single form factor and turn it into a hit. Everyone else was splitting their effor…
It's strange to think it was only 4 years after the initial release that he died.
Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid
#100The article buries the lede on the only point that matters with these "AI" hardware devices. They need to solve a problem their customers have, and all the devices these companies have released so far don't do anything that a smartphone can't easily do.
What problem? All these AI devices seem like a solution in search of a problem.