Apple is a great copycat, but did they actually improve anything? | Hacker News Reader

Apple is a great copycat, but did they actually improve anything?

fastcompany.com

22 pointsmmarkowitz54 comments

There seem to be two different kinds of tech journalist, the kind that understands Apple, and, by extension, how hard certain things are to do, and the kind that doesn't. The latter will make statements like "But besides this latency improvement, Apple's Pencil itself doesn’t actually offer any noticeable drawing features that FiftyThree’s Pencil doesn’t."

Such a ridiculous statement. Zero pen latency is something nobody else in the history of general purpose tablet computers has ever been able to accomplish. Apple managed to do it. It's a staggeringly hard thing to do, but just like everything else Apple accomplishes, they make it look so easy that journalists are all like, "so what?"

You can make fun of Ive's breathless self-pimping all you want, but at the end of the day, Apple does the things nobody else has the stones to even try.

> Apple does the things nobody else has the stones to even try

Well now, Microsoft's been aggressively pushing the latency limits for a while now. We don't yet know if Apple surpassed them. Regardless, it wouldn't be because Apple had the stones.

FiftyThree built a tool around the limitations of the current ipads. That said, FiftyThree's pencil (which I own) isn't very good. They get a lot of mileage from fancy packaging and self-important blog posts, but I've had better experience with other vendors' pens on ipad.

Leadership. If you're doing it right, nobody thinks you did anything at all.

I love the Apple Watch nay-sayers.

In the last month - I put my Apple Watch through hell - took it swimming every day for 1 hour on vacation in a salt water pool. Spend 7 days in the furnace that is a Vegas summer. Spend a weekend cleaning out a horders house where the white band got covered in black "dirt". It never once failed me. A little dish soap and my fingers to clean the band and it's as white as the day I got it. If I did that to my Tagg Heuer watch I'd spend 2 hours with q-tips and jewelry cleaner trying to get it clean.

Plus - it let me check notifications, answer phone calls and the time without taking my phone into the pool; or without getting my phone dirty while cleaning out the house. It was get answering a phone call while in the pool and my phone was on a lounge chair 20 feet away.

I can't wash my phone; I can't take it in the pool and nor do I want to touch it when my hands are dirty. It's an incredible piece of electronics. So what - I charge it every night. Show me a real iPhone user that doesn't charge their phone every night - and if they don't, their charging it as soon as they wake up.

... This is Tim Cook's Apple now - and I think Tim Cook is doing a lot of things Steve Jobs didn't want to do (the iPad Pro stylus, the keyboard, 6plus, iPad multitasking, etc...) So there will for sure be a bit of catch-up to be done.

It's not who does it first. It's who does it better.

>It never once failed me.

Who is saying its delicate? The complaints are of its milquetoast design, lack of other designs (wheres the round face), and poor value proposition. Smartwatches are pretty tough in general. My Moto 360 has been to hell and back. This is not a problem to solve. Its been solved.

>This is Tim Cook's Apple now

and that's the problem. I think Steve's upper class fashionista tastes would have dictated more styles or a more stylish device. Cook's group is designing for the Walmart crowd. The best looking smartwatches are on Android. That's an Apple failure right there.

> Cook's group is designing for the Walmart crowd.

I'd like to know what is inherently wrong with this.

Well, historically Apple has pursued the high-end market.

Typically brands that go from high-end to low-end lose their high-end customers along the way, who don't want to be associated with low-end products.

Saying they are going for the walmart crowd represents a cheapening of the product, cost cutting, mass production approach that leaves behind what many people like to believe about apple (that it is much more artistic, concerned more about making the best product than selling a product to the most people)

There is nothing wrong with being in either market, but shifting between the two markets can be bad for business in that it's likely to lose previously loyal customers.

Yesterday's event saw a Hermes Apple Watch - what's to say next year when I upgrade, I'm not buying a Gucci Apple Watch or Diesel Apple Watch or Lucky Brand Jeans Apple Watch.

An all black watch with the Gucci "links" embossed on the band would look damn good with my Gucci wallet.

How many years do Android watches have on the Apple Watch? 2? 3? Re: it's not who does it first. It's who does it better. This year was Hermes - next year - ?

And after market bands so far are crap - my wife bought a black milanese band from Amazon - $20 - clasp opened while walking down the strip in LV and almost lost the watch / shattered on the concrete sidewalk - the quality is still there - it didn't die with Steve Jobs - it's still a 1st generation product - time is needed to iterate / improve.

Your Tagg Heuer watch is timeless ; your apple watch, should you wear it in 2017, will make you look as if you are losing the race to keep up with the Joneses.

If the worst thing about a product is that the new version will be much better, that's about as good as it's gonna get.

These days when Apple is copying almost everything, I hear this thing a lot "It's not who does it first, it's who does it better". And while the statement itself is true, the biases that go around what is "better" are huge. Come on, a lot of watches are doing this, and in a better manner. Moto 360 and other watches are much better, and they do all of what you have said, and you can fix any band you want to that. That's innovation. A round watch, that's innovation, they already had native watch apps, which Apple has tried to copy only with watch OS 2. They still don't have a GPS, which other Android watches have done already (including Moto 360 sport). LG Urbane looks fantastic! Really, the things that you are comparing are not awesome by any manner.

The copied features in iPhone, which its fans defend with closed eyes saying "but it's just better". Really, in how many ways you can make a phone always respond to a catchphrase? Forget about always listening, iPhone wouldn't have got even a "Hey Siri" had it not been for Google Now. There are many such things which are just blatant rip-off.

Trust me, everyone is doing awesome things AND doing them first, you just don't realize it.

Really, find an Apple keynote ever where this wasn't said.

“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.” is the classic example. The iPad was eviscerated everywhere. The iPhone was laughed off as inferior in sooo many ways to Nokia's N95. Conversely, good luck finding an article predicting that podcasts would change everything.

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Yes, they improved a lot of things. They made a lot of good ideas standard functionality and in most cases, hard-wired them into the device hardware in a way that was unimaginable before. I'd bet a lot of money that we'll look at downloads on Apple TV's app store compared to FireTV and Roku's and laugh that they were ever compared.

Really, find an Apple keynote ever where this wasn't said.

The problem of this line of reasoning is that it can be used to bin any criticism levelled at Apple. Some criticism has merit other criticism does not. Judge criticism by that. (E.g., many of the criticisms of Ping or the 5c were pretty much on the mark.)

To be honest, I recognize some of the criticism of the article. On the other hand, Good artists copy; great artists steal. In the end it is all about execution. It is interesting to see who did it before (if not for computer archeology), but if they did it better, it will fly.

Criticism is fine, but I think it's fair to set a high bar (there've been some good and worthwhile technical criticisms in recent months that pass IMO). So much Apple keynote criticism is just lazy snark. Last year, the song and dance was a constant stream of "eh, it's just bigger". Which was fair in a sense, and it scored a pedantic point for those that argued the screen was too small, but it really missed the mark in giving the sense that the iPhone 6 was (a) a great phone and (b) basically about to upend the last vestiges of Android from the high-end (profitable) marketplace.

> good luck finding an article predicting that podcasts would change everything

Wait... are you saying podcasts changed everything? I don't see any large impact on content consumption.

This post focuses on hardware which is a limited view, Apple certainly made very bold moves with respect to business. One reason I let go of my (very nice) Android phone and got an iPhone6 was that I was sick and tired of being at Verizon's whim for software updates and always had to use slightly older versions (while my friends with AT&T enjoyed a newer version of KitKat). I'd much rather deal with Apple, at least everyone's on same footing.

For me the biggest innovation that Apple did was to break the stronghold that wireless carriers had on phone innovation. Note that some others couldn't even think of this possibility (Moto, which killed it) or tried it in a half-assed way (Google).

I never agreed with idea in this passage:

"In the place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair!"

If it's a necessary evil I, for one, would want to deal with a terrible Queen rather than the Dark Lord. And I sure hope that Apple aims cable companies next.

> For me the biggest innovation that Apple did was to break the stronghold that wireless carriers had on phone innovation. Note that some others couldn't even think of this possibility (Moto, which killed it) or tried it in a half-assed way (Google).

Bless you my son.

I think unless you worked in the mobile industry in or around 05-07 you don't know how bad things were about to get.

Carriers took about 70 cents out of every dollar spent on their networks. They had been squeezing the Moto/Nokia/Ericcsons of the world hard and their new idea to squeeze harder was to go around them and buy white label phones from their suppliers (which is how HTC got big enough to become a name brand).

It was about a year before the iPhone launched that I got out of mobile because I realized the only people who would ever make any money on it were the carriers. They were getting free labor from VC-backed mobile startups ("eating their own young") and it was a losing game.

Their first phone was bad, but a conversation piece. Then the App Store launched, and they announced they would keep 30 cents out of every dollar. People in mobile danced in the streets. Finally, we can have margins! People who didn't know the situation cried foul, Evil Apple was taking a whole 30% of the profit for 'doing nothing'.

I wonder what the ramifications of Force Touch (err, 3D Touch) are for users with certain physical handicaps who may not be able to execute that particular gesture.

Apple has generally done a pretty good job for accessibility, so I'd be disappointed if they dropped the ball on this.

Using 3D Touch is wholly optional. 3D Touch merely offers peeks into views you can reach by using a regular tap.

Force Touch looks more like a over-complicated long tap which anyone using a smartphone can execute.

I haven't used it, so I don't know how well it performs, but there should be two things different with force touch.

Firstly, it gives you double the number of click options. You had short vs long, now you can have either lightly or with more force.

Secondly, long clicks slows down interactions. Force click should be just as fast as a normal click. That may make it way more popular.

>I wonder what the ramifications of Force Touch (err, 3D Touch) are for users with certain physical handicaps who may not be able to execute that particular gesture.

None. Force touch is like right click. A shortcut, that's not required to use the device.

Depends on the user - for some it might be an advantage to reduce input errors from tremors or limited dexterity?

Force-based gestures might be easier for some people than multi-touch gestures. More freedom is usually a good thing for adapting to unique users.

Cell phones before and after iPhone

http://bit.ly/1JZ6MwF

No Palm Treo smartphone with color touchscreen? That pic seems selective.

I agree. I think it would be cool to see a full history.

Conveniently leaving out the LG Prada and others:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

Apple nailed it hard- and software-wise, but that image is just an attempt to rewrite history.

It is square, but it was no competitor. Google around about Prada v iPhone.

If all those 'before' phones were 'competitors', why wasn't the Prada? Face it, that image is about as selective as it gets.

No Windows Mobile phones.

For Live Photos, there is something which is much more similar than gifs. Even the 'animate while swiping through the gallery' is the same:

http://www.windowscentral.com/trick-enable-nokia-living-imag...

Nothing announced yesterday really caught my attention. 3D touch will make certain applications more expressive, such as art and music apps, and that's awesome. but I don't see it having much adoption outside of that.

Games will have a heyday with it.

I forgot about games! although i'm not sure how much of a hayday it will be; ideally 3d touch would represent a progressive enhancement to the app, and not a core feature that is required for usage.

You missed the Warhammer Blade demonstration?

Force touch is like adding right click to mobile, but if you mention that then there is no story.

> Force touch is like adding right click to mobile,

That's a really amusing way to phrase it, given Apple's long history with the single-button mouse.

Actually calling it right click is severely under selling it, it has huge advantages for gaming etc. there will be apps that will not be able to be ported to android, at least not usably.

Android supports pressure sensitive touch at the API level since 2009, and There's a phone from 2015 that supports this from huawei. But they didn't create useful interactions with it.

Does it work well? If it does why didn't they incorporate it? You can have double the specs and still be a laggy nightmare.

Yeah and there's bluetooth support too. Wait no, bluetooth on Android is a horrible quivering mess that nobody in there right mind touches.

I HATE APPLE but force touch, Apple Pencil and iPad Pro made me think that Apple is finally away from the thumb of Jobs and is making things that are actually useful for some people and getting made. It use to seem like they made everything for the 90% and could care less for the last 10%.

> It use to seem like they made everything for the 90% and could care less for the last 10%.

This is an interesting take when looking historically at Apple's marketshare.

Well if you look they did this with getting 90% of their target audience. They did it with how they made things for their audience. If it didn't fit the 90% of our users will use this they didn't make it. This is regardless to market share.

Is that disclaimer really necessary?

Yes it is. People still don't see this. Look at the verges apologetics on Steve Jobs and the stylus. http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/9/9298117/apple-pencil-stylus...

The main point was this was about iPhone in 2007 and not an iPad. So apple and oranges.

My counter point: Microsoft's first tablet had a stylus and was mocked it was 12 years and a good screen away. Surface had the pencil beat three years ago. https://twitter.com/APZonerunner/status/641665840803352576/p...

And Android got rid of the press-and-hold for 'right click' long ago. Because hidden menus and settings aren't easily discoverable.

Actually it's still fairly common in 5.current, and it's used in settings, on notification bar, etc.

Also in the launcher, the keyboard, cut/copy/paste, maps, etc.

One difference I see is that there are millions of hardware with no force touch, already in market. And they will still be around for years to come. Developers will not hide stuff behind force touch, but just use it as a convenient method to access common tasks, preview stuff etc. I think this convention will stick around.

It will just improve user experience for those who use it and will not make a difference for those who dont. Kind of like pro user features.

And I am not convinced this needed a special hardware functionality. Why can't a already existing gesture of 'long tap' do all those functions?

Because it takes time to perform a long tap. Makes it slow to perform common tasks. You can force touch immediately, like a swipe.

It also has a gradient, which will be too compelling to not use in gaming and drawing apps, despite the fact that it will not run on older devices.

Except it's nothing like right click at all other than that it brings up a menu on homescreen icons.

In case you need proof - consider the multitasking gesture of pressing a little harder at the edge of the display and pulling to the side to reveal the precious app on the stack. This is a totally naturalistic direct manipulation gesture - the additional force gives the feeling of traction needed to break the friction holding the current app in place. A masterpiece of interaction design.

Also, think about the peek and pop metaphor. Obviously no right click has ever afforded this, so that rebuts the claim, but also consider that peeking is a transient state that naturally and smoothly transitions into popping based on a natural and obvious muscular affordance.

How you are comparing this with clicking a mouse button is beyond me.

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