indefensible: john gruber

and i do think apples success is largely based on making products that just work, the marketing is nice and all but, i mean this is not jewelry (<<<), also the supply chain aspect is huge but that never wouldve been possible if the design didnt appeal to enough ppl to reach those economies of scale

There are other factors too, like picking the right products at the right time and not being afraid of cannibalization, blah blah blah.

When I was in college, they were the iPod and Mac company!

The Mac isn’t the biggest business on the planet. The iPod disappeared as a direct result of the success of the phone, but it’s possible that in an alternate reality someone else got to the phone and Apple didn’t or Apple did but never got traction or scenario C, D, E, or F.

ppl thought canceling the mini for the nano was crazy at the time!

There’s also the way Jobs thought about hiring people. That was important.

There are other factors too, like picking the right products at the right time and not being afraid of cannibalization, blah blah blah.

― markers, Tuesday, April 7, 2015 12:16 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

those both fall under the rubric of ux design imho at least philosophically if not as far as typically prescribed

yah maybe now, their late 90s comeback through the iPhone was basically releasing mostly-baked ideas and hoping people would get into them because they looked cool and had an ethos

OS X performed like crap for the first few years, but you could spend your time waiting by cleaning lint out of your iPod's moving scroll wheel

The fact that Jobs (eventually) listened to people who disagreed with him was crucial! No iPod on Windows!

steve jobs was the best "product guy" ever is all you need to know

also remember when iPods didn't have sudden motion sensors and the hard drives would fail because the read head would smack the platters

Click of death!

steve jobs was the best "product guy" ever is all you need to know

― lag∞n, Monday, April 6, 2015 9:21 PM (10 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my experience with "product guys" at 4m4z0n was that none of them seemed to have any insight into what anyone might possibly want

it's probably hard to be a "product guy"

You key word there is the 440 thing.

They don’t know how to make consumer electronics a lot of people want beyond that one thing for reading books that most people don’t care about.

amazon's firetv is currently about twice as useful as appletv, mostly due to apple not developing it much at all

Ah forgot about that. Some people seem to like it, sure! I don’t care about the Apple TV though. Or the entire category, basically.

you are apple

I was only around/working on website stuff, lots of people clearly want to buy things, trying to figure out dumb ways to make them want more things was really a pointless exercise

xpost Apple and I will diverge later this year probably, because it looks like they might start caring, and I don’t see how I will. The Watch is more interesting to me; I will be saving up for one of those, not so much with the TV.

amazon is a great product company! it just has a very low end shitty throw shit at the wall and see what (empirically) sticks approach, which is in its own way more fascinating and emblematic of our consumerist times than apple even imho

What products, lag00n?

the watch is an epic fail imho but we will see

ppl really like watching TV, some ppl really like playing video games on their TV, everyone hates their cable company, that business pretty much just putting some pieces together in a way that people will hurry up to pay for xps

I already know multiple people who aren't really into following technology who want the watch!

I will be shocked if Watch is not a disaster on some scale but then I don't really know any serious crossfit types

For me and for most of their customers, I think Amazon is about getting me the shit I need as quickly as possible. They provide a service. And, yes, they are very, very good at that, and I have Prime and buy pretty much all of my books through them. But the actual stuff they produce is . . . The Fire Phone flopped. The Kindle is good. Would you ever pick a Kindle Fire over an iPad? I don’t know anything about their accessories, but that’s small potatoes shit.

the product is amazon.com mostly but that consists of a million little things, like i set my dad up to get all his sponges and paper towels and dish soap delivered on a schedule, i order larabars and they get here the next day, thats all "amazon prime" i guess but its also just amazon the horrifying interconnected logistics macine

I already know multiple people who aren't really into following technology who want the watch!

― mh, Tuesday, April 7, 2015 12:30 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

do you know anyone... who needs it... owned

yeah the "real things" amazon does are fulfillment and now AWS, everything else is window dressing and a just staggeringly bananaballs codebase

Didn’t Cook already admit somewhere that the market for the Watch, at the beginning at least, is limited because it requires certain iPhone models? Anyway, not predicting anything here; I have no idea what kind of numbers it’ll do the first year or beyond. But the fact that it’s $349 at the cheapest is also going to limit its market, and especially at the beginning a lot of people aren’t even going to see the point. Perhaps they never will. Perhaps with good reason! We’ll have to see.

i suspect the iwatch will do okay the first round and then not grow as expected cause it doesnt really have a crucial use case

I will be shocked if Watch is not a disaster on some scale but then I don't really know any serious crossfit types

― Clay, Tuesday, April 7, 2015 12:31 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its not even good as an exercise watch! and regardless that market is tiny

the product is amazon.com

OK, I think I was talking more about tangible goods, but if that’s what we’re talking about, I’m not shitting on their core service. I use it, I like it. Hail Jeff Bezos for all that shit.

the whole nobody needs notifications on their wrist and it's too small for anything else argument persuades me pretty strongly.

"product" is just like can u make something people want to use

are there any "the times we live in now" thinkpieces combing apple watch and health goths

turns out "no", mostly xp

(I'm just bitter b/c of my 10 months working on a totally directionless project don't mind me)

the subtext of the johnny ive new yorker article was so much as i could tell that apple let him make his watch and hire his friend because they were very afraid he would leave the company, and he likes to ride around in a bently not because hes a rich dick but because he really likes the design, as to why he likes the design that is specifically tailored to appeal to rich dicks one was left to speculate

are there any "the times we live in now" thinkpieces combing apple watch and health goths

― Clay, Tuesday, April 7, 2015 12:37 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the awl has been doing some good normcore/tech articles

The Watch will have more compelling use cases later on. Right now it doesn’t have enough sensors to give us a more comprehensive overview of our health situation. That will come later, in future iterations of the device. I’m sure there’ll be some interesting stuff happening around ResearchKit and the Watch too. It’d be silly if something wouldn’t spring up around that. And I think that we’ll also have to see what app developers do when they get their hands on an actual, full SDK and not whatever the hell they’ve had up until now. So we’ll have to wait until the fall or next year or whenever to see the fruits of some of that work. And anyway, I really need to go and get ready for bed, which is unfortunate because this isn’t actually a bad discussion (thank you all!), but I’m not sure I could actually in good faith tell anyone except people interested in the tech industry and maybe people in certain industries that they would benefit from having the Watch. I think it’s cool. I’m probably getting one. But do I *need* it? Not now. Maybe not even in the future. The market for this could turn out to be small! But maybe it doesn’t. I heard somewhere someone say something like people who have the watch find themselves using the phone less and less. The Watch could keep taking on more functionality that the phone used to have. Maybe at some point you don’t even need the phone when you go out. It’s hard to see that happening though because of screen size issues. We’ll have to see whether the Watch becomes a minor computing platform or a major one. Maybe the next one is VR. Who knows. Anyway, I need to bolt.

turns out "no", mostly xp

― brunch technician (silby), Tuesday, April 7, 2015 12:37 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im sure working there is horrible and it is a horrible dystopian company, but i still want to use it, tho tbh a lot less since i moved back to ny from vt

The Awl also has some good articles on the media. Look up Content Wars or w/e.

OK, night.

one thing I feel pretty good about in my life is not having bought anything off amazon in a few years

also I quit facebook and don't own a tv

The Watch will have more compelling use cases later on. Right now it doesn’t have enough sensors to give us a more comprehensive overview of our health situation.

― markers, Tuesday, April 7, 2015 12:41 AM (12 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

literally the majority of americans are currently eating themselves to death, i assure you there is not a big market for health tracking, im prob in the top 5% (braggin) of healthy living americans and i dont even want to track my health! like you need to a. be interested in health and b. interested in tracking things, that precludes the vast majority of people

as I've mentioned before I'm interested in the Watch b/c I want a watch

its prob not a very good watch!

i track my health by being mad at myself that i did less pushups today than yesterday