New Apple Lust Objects for 2010 and onward

hey guys come on we're here to talk about phones

hah, thanks markers

I see where what I was going on about seems sweeping, but I don't intend to say that people in any country have some sort of brand loyalty or idea about product quality linked to brands, but at an enforcement level, there are different things going on

imo, let people release shit that looks the same and let the market sort it out, but the fact is that people (everywhere) don't necessarily understand what they're getting

whole thing reminds me of stories I hear from the state attorney general's consumer protection division where people are buying off-brand hearing aids through the mail and thinking they're going to be as good as ones molded to your ear made by professionals

i get so angry when i see counterfeit merchandise. culturally i cannot accept it.

i think it's a british thing.

guh, I made a big mistake in rolling my comments of off Hurting's question. People who prize whatever type of goods, branded or whatever, exist in all countries, probably in equal numbers. Legal controls make the availability of them different.

going to go wash down my foot sandwich now

I delight in getting knockoffs of expensive brands and love showing them off to people. I used to call my favorite watch a Movendi.

who amongst us has not worn the occasional pair of adibas

One of my favorite memories from my honeymoon was being at a street vendor's stall who was displaying many Monvendi watches and my wife and I figuring "they're $15, how much of a ripoff can they be?" and haggling with the seller when a cruise ship tourist came over, looked at the watches and prices and shouted "oh my god, are these REAL???" The seller, my wife and I all looked at each other and burst into laughter, through which the seller unconvincingly attempted to reassure dude that yes, these were real Movado watches being sold from a vendor's stall with no security for $15 a watch.

not much risk there, if it fails you're a few minutes late, I'd buy two

I think one of the fascinating things about that phenomenon is that we still care whether the obvious knockoff says the brand name or not

the most delightful part about my Movendi was when the dot came unglued from the watch face and rattled around underneath the crystal

sorry for snapping at you earlier, mh. i guess my rule of thumb is that where there are non-culturally essentialist viewpoints available to attempt to explain a phenomenon, go for those. i think the economics of pricing + lack of legal enforcement is more than enough to explain what is going on here. you have to remember that china is still a developing country, the wealth gap is widening, and the vast majority of people get by (somewhat comfortably!) on what would probably be considered below the poverty line here, if you didn't take into account buying power &c &c

i do think that there are some factors that make it harder for apple to really dominate the china market, not just talking about phones. windows is still the OS of choice, just like everywhere else, because it was so easily pirated. p much the whole chinese software ecosystem is built around windows. i remember back in '06 i met a yuppie in china who did have a macbook pro (this may actually have been a powerbook) but never used it because she couldn't find any good software for it or support. the dominance of windows hurts apple in ways that might not be apparent - for example, chinese character input, apple has pinyin too but most chinese users will probably be used to the windows version, though sogou does have an osx version out now. most chinese websites are designed for IE compatibility first, not chrome or firefox or webkit. the lack of resolution independence, something already built into windows 7, i think hurts apple, because there's no way to make characters bigger on the screen other than changing the resolution and making everything look low res and buggy.

that said, if you were a young chinese person buying a mac in 2013, there's probably not a lot you can't do in osx that you could do in windows. and apple definitely has had the advantage in china as being seen as a veblen good, a wealth signifier. a lot of chinese study-abroad students i see in the states use macbooks. i guess ultimately i am confused by the iphone 5c, if it's not gonna be that much cheaper than the 5s in china, seems a bit what's the point, sullies their image as an exclusive provider of luxury goods.

re: hurting's question above, i think it's easy to forget, since most all of us post and interact in an echo chamber of cultural cognoscenti elite, that there's plenty of people in america too who don't really appreciate ease of use / design / w/e, who are also just headed to AT&T and getting the cheapest smartphone they have. i think android's marketshare of 70%+ or w/e it is evidence enough of that.

also all the google apps are updating to ios 7 icons and man are they uggggglyyyyy in ios6

i read that 2nd time smart phone buyers are more likely to go w the iphone than first time

so appreciation of ease of use it seems comes w experince

the video for ios7 is pretty fucking well done

http://www.apple.com/ios/

johny ive seems high as hell

nah, I needed some snapping. I was conflating production and consumption of lookalike/counterfeit stuff pretty badly and generally glossing over a lot of things that needed detail.

I think cracking down on genuine counterfeiting, where people are trying to charge around the same price as a legit phone and the customer goes home to turn it on to find out it's running pseudo-Nokia lookalike software that's way out of date, is a really small percentage of the market and what I'd get genuinely pissed about if I were Apple. Rolling things out at the same time should curb a lot of that.

I kind of have the suspicion that the 5c isn't meant for markets where Apple products are seen as luxury goods. I think in the US there's a core demographic that no longer approaches getting a laptop with the idea that it's stupid to pay for a Macbook when they can get a Dell or whatever Best Buy carries so many times cheaper -- they just get a Macbook, whether it's the expensive or cheap model is the difference. I could see those people easily thinking of the 5c as the "less serious" or "not luxury" iPhone, where it's the cool one to buy your kids or yourself if you're not a "techy" person. There's probably a bunch of perceptive market research and I don't want to Gruber this up, but it'll be interesting to see who I end up seeing with the different models.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's a similar iPad in development, especially if it's somehow more kid-friendly.

do you guys think jony ive has like a little iPod-esque vaporizer or is he like an expensive glassware bro

steve jobs had a philippe starck-designed bong, it's why the boat design was so delayed

johny ive seems high as hell

can you get high off botox?

ive vapes 4 sure

usb powered vapes too ugly for ive.

http://www.ploom.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/p/a/pax-all_1.png

i read that 2nd time smart phone buyers are more likely to go w the iphone than first time

― lag∞n, Thursday, September 12, 2013 6:16 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so appreciation of ease of use it seems comes w experince

― lag∞n, Thursday, September 12, 2013 6:17 PM (29 minutes ago)

suspect this has more to do with cheapo android phones falling apart or schizing out 1 year into ppl's 2 year commitments. you don't really know how easy a phone is to use until you live with it.

the video for ios7 is pretty fucking well done

http://www.apple.com/ios/

― #fomo that's the motto (Hurting 2), Friday, 13 September 2013 08:19 (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

every apple video reminds me of daily show parodies now.

also, having spent some time with android 4.3 in the past week (wholly impressive btw), i'm stoked for ios7. ios6 is obv musty as hell, but you do forget how much joy is to be had from a new/revised ios until you chuck yourself into one.

you mean the experience of living with it xp

also, at the risk of starting a shitfight, i'm amazed at how many people call it 'eye oh ess' instead of 'eye oss'. still. yes i know jony does it.

apple comes up with the coolest pointless shit, like that thing in the video where the "layers" are 3-D when you turn the phone, total novelty feature but so awesome

idk anyone who pronounces OS as "oss" other than some nerd adherents

if you pronounce it i-os you probably mean this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_orifice_of_the_uterus

what came before ios? the hoss

#fomo that's the motto (Hurting 2)
Posted: September 12, 2013, 11:03:03 PM
apple comes up with the coolest pointless shit, like that thing in the video where the "layers" are 3-D when you turn the phone, total novelty feature but so awesome

well im sure they would argue its not pointless as conveying the visual metaphor of layers is pretty essential to the usability of the new os, or least that seems to be what theyre saying, ill reserve judgement until i use it

mostly you're like "why is this kind of transparent it's all blurry"

ya i wonder abt how busy it will feel, overall tho imho it looks like a huge improvement

someone shd make a magic eye os tho imho

I like iOS 7 pretty well overall! I have none of the GUI hate, if anything there could be a lil more configurability when it comes to the slide-up control but it's pretty smooth.

The early betas were pretty hilariously glitchy

i have to admit i have only been able to see a magic eye image once in my entire damn life :(

just look through the book man

looking down my nose at u

obv i've not used it, but i feel some (not necessarily here) are being overly harsh on ios7, given that it's essentially the first attempt at what it is. i've never seen an os that was perfect in its first iteration.

even iphone os v2 was plagued with problems (who could forget the shitty laggy crashy keyboard)

seems like a lot of the complaints are more designy eg the icon grid, colors etc rather than usability based which leads me to believe it prob works p good

haha yes exactly

They should make it so when you have a photo of a face on screen, the eyes follow you when you move the phone

the mona iosa feature

Actually the backgrounds kind if do that now

yeah, apart from lingering battery worries, ios7 is shaping up pretty great. The only thing I still don't like are the icons themselves, and it's mainly Mail and Safari that bug me

wait are there people who don't pronounce iOS as eye oh ess?