Everything Apple Introduced This Year Kinda Sucked | Hacker News Reader

Everything Apple Introduced This Year Kinda Sucked

gizmodo.com

21 pointssadlarry18 comments

I was half expecting OS X El Capitan to be on the list. I skipped Yosemite, so I'm comparing it to Mavericks. El Capitan is slugish in some weird way and some of the feature clean up is making things less usable.

Maybe I'm not Apples target audience, but they seem to pushing people who rely on their Mac for getting work done away. If you do email, documents and spreadsheets it won't matter if you're on Windows 10 or Mac OS X. As a developer I'm considering moving to BSD or Linux in the future, because Apple keeps messing with my desktop.

The clickbait potential for any headline involving Apple (pro or con or neither) is well-known, but for whatever reason Gawker properties seem to have been going out of their way recently to try to harvest clicks from a very specific segment of teenage Apple haters. This is what happens when a news outlet thinks that their commenters reflect their readership, it'll be interesting to see if it works for them but it doesn't exactly reflect well on their editorial maturity.

Hard to beat this as a succinct example of just that: https://twitter.com/jonyiveparody/status/674749292494491648

I actually really like my macbook. Plugging in a USB or anything else rarely happens so I don't care too much about the lack of a standard USB port.

The iWatch on the other hand, I'm disappointed. Mainly because its slow. I really wanted to be able to turn on/off my hue lights with it but it takes forever to launch the app. It's faster if I use my phone.

"lack of a standard USB port"

USB C is a standard USB port. Within 12 months the big one that you have to figure out which way is up will be legacy. Thunderbolt 3 and USB C merge into one standard RSN.

https://thunderbolttechnology.net/blog/thunderbolt-3-usb-c-d...

Have you tried any of the other smartwatches? I ask because I really really like my LG G Watch R. The specific use case you mention - I don't use Hue, but I have a Roku remote installed on the watch that I use all the time. It's two taps to get to the remote. Much faster than pulling out my phone. I also love that it looks like a real watch. Most people that see it assume that it is just a regular watch, unless I start talking to it. Maybe I just have poor taste but I really don't like the look of the iWatch - it looks like they shrunk an iPhone and strapped it to a wrist band. Which I guess is what it's supposed to look like but not really my taste, I guess.

Not trying to bash Apple here I almost always recommend Apple to friends and family even though I mostly don't use it myself, but I do think there are much better smart watches available than the iWatch.

I won a Pebble Time Steel at work, but decided not to keep it since I already have the iWatch. It'll be a Christmas gift.

A co-worker has the LG G Watch R. I really like the look of it, but I haven't used it. I was really hoping the native apps would speed up. I'm not sure if the Hue Lights app is native but, without exaggerating, it takes more than 30 seconds or longer to open the app on the watch, and sometimes it just doesn't open at all. It's faster to take out my phone and use the widget.

The first time I saw the single port I jokingly said to a friend "look, if you want to use any device you already own they'll gladly sell you an $80 adaptor". And lo and behold, its $80 (http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MJ1K2AM/A/usb-c-digital-av...).

I think they could have saved a lot of bad reviews by just including this with the laptop. They're already pricey laptops as it is...

I have to agree with most of this but I was actually pretty impressed by 3D touch and I just think it'll take a little bit of time for app developers to start using it in novel ways. I wouldn't write that one off just yet.

3D touch isn't something I have high hopes for. Everything Apple does is for the benefit of the average user, but 3D touch goes the other way. There's not real discoverability in 3D touch, of cause that's a general problem with touch interfaces.

I find it very useful in music production apps - press the pad harder, get a louder sound.

Apple has tried to move into some new categories. There's Apple TV, which is OK, but not unique. Apple has never been successful at conquering the living room. Smart watches seem to be a niche product. Huge tablets without keyboards are less useful than laptops.

Nothing really new. No roll-up screens. No augmented reality that can darken, not just lighten. No breakthrough in wireless charging. Nothing exciting in robotics, home automation, or automatic driving. Siri isn't much smarter. No Next Big Thing.

Someone didn't made his homework and forgot the battery pack?

Now that the Jobs' era products have been exhausted, I expect to be underwhelmed by more mediocre Apple products in the future. One would think a CEO doesn't have that much of an influence, but Apple hasn't put out anything better than average since Jobs died. Whether cause and effect exists really doesn't matter as the quality of products, especially software, continues to plunge.

how thorough, this article. thought provoking. wow.

gag me.

It's a weak article, but please don't make HN threads worse by posting comments like this.

Once you have 30 karma, you can flag stories when they aren't substantive or are otherwise bad stories for HN.

Wow, this moved down from position 20 to position 62 in under two minutes. Apple's spin control team is really on the job.

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