Against Minimalism
bullshit.ist
bullshit.ist
Perhaps as a followup, bullshit.ist could do an article on the difference between "selling an adapter" and "including one in the box" and the sloppy journalistic malpractice that is deliberately confusing the two for the sake of whining...
TANSTAAFL!
Good chinese engineering seems enough: http://androidadvices.com/top-5-thinnest-designed-android-sm...
iPhone 7 is 7.1mm thick while the 7 Plus is 7.3mm thick.
And yes, aaaaaall of those have headphone jacks.
Apple is taking you people for fools.
http://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nThicknessMax=6&chk35mm...
This is just bad design/engineering based on Apple wanting to sell licensed headphone adapaters/headphones that only work with the iPhone or maybe Mac's in the future.
The wired headphones are not industry standard. That leaves you buying expensive bluetooth headphones. For me it s a big problem, because sometimes I unplug my headphones from my phone then plug it into my laptop or into another device. Now we have no solid industry accepted wired headphone connection socket. That is a shame.
The real truth here is Apple makes solid revenue of dongles, wires, docks, and now headphones. By creating their own walled ecosystem for headphones, they gain more revenue. If this wasn't the case, they would have a regular old USB jack at the bottom of the phone. They don't.
* All dongles get lost
* All Apple lightning/usb cables have horrible build quality and don't last. This will not be the exception, especially since it will be frequently crimped at weird angles.
I sorta skimmed over that bit because it seemed like a throwaway remark. It's not actually thinking about how and why the material consumption culture exists, just a statement about one of the purposes it serves him. So I didn't give it a second thought.
Is there anything particularly special about militarism that means people are looking to fill the void in their souls should choose consumer products designed to broadcast an identity? Could such consumption exist without the military dystopia the author paints? Is there another frantic activity that could distract us from the dystopia he posits we use tech as an escape from?
Or am I a just a philistine that can't appreciate why jumping on a 2-year upgrade train for more computing power in a network bound device is the perfectly remedy? Crafted exactly to distract me from the horrors of contemplating the intractable problems in the Middle East. Has product evolution found existential answers that climbing a mountain at daybreak never possibly could?
Alright, I personally like more minimalist aesthetics, but I'll hear you out.
> The truth is that we live in ridiculous times, where our reality is fiction manufactured to forward the interests of an elite few, much like the fiction that has largely become the reality of our shared world. The dystopia we were promised by Gibson, Scott, Dick, and so on has come to fruition: wealth disparity turning poverty into a death sentence, neverending war in faraway lands killing millions as the “Leader of the Free World” arms tyrants to the teeth, and an inevitable destruction of human civilization as we know it are the cornerstones of our modern reality.
???
The piece repeatedly admits that all of the old movie tech he's lauding is still bulky and impractical and terrible. It certainly doesn't seem to be endorsing Blade Runner and The Matrix as actual, human-friendly design. So what I got from it was an indictment of blankness more than minimalism. The feeling, broadly, that something is terribly wrong and that this is reflected in enforced-aesthetic devices as well as larger society.
The white cables were seen as uber-pretentious back in the day, and were a big target for muggers.[0] The very same way, 'hipsters' and techies are going to get mocked (and probably mugged) for wearing AirPods until — shock-horror — they become ubiquitous.
[0] - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03/30/ipod_this_seasons_mu...
there's a huge difference between an ugly peripheral that's bundled with a ubiquitous device (ipods/iphones) and one that is overpriced and sold separately.
add to this difference apple's declining market share, and all the reasonable outrage over ditching the headphone jack, and good luck with ubiquity
With those first perceived-as-awkward sony headphones, the utility of personal music everywhere was very high.
The thing that bothers me about on-screen keyboards and speech rec is that they are imprecise, statistical replacements for a precise, tactile device. It's hard to type on touch screen keyboards because there is no texture and tactile feedback so we rely on autocorrect to guess what we're trying to say, and speech rec is just a statistical system by its very nature. I rely on the computer to guess what I want when my fingers know exactly what needs to be done.
Heck, these days you can't get a pure Norwegian, Danish or Swedish keyboard. They are all "nordic", meaning they have 3 different letters printed on the same keycap on a couple of keys.
Perhaps some of column A, some of column B. On the minimalism axis, you could never have a super thin phone if it had a slide-out keyboard on it. I'm OK with that trade-off, but the market isn't, apparently.
http://us.blackberry.com/smartphones/priv-by-blackberry/over...
Thousand dollar phones with $100 month services. $159 earbuds. Think we are all in the matrix.
And we are almost definitely in a computed universe.
^ Assuming they continue their trend of mediocre sound quality.
Out of curiosity, where did you start? Any recommendations? The extent of my hardware is custom PC and raspberry pi. I'd love to mess with more than just plug and play.
I'm still in search of good textbooks on the topic (SICP is to CS as ____ is to EE? Recommendations anyone?) but I've gotten some value out of "Make: Electronics"[1] as a non-academic, beginners guide.
I hope this helps!
[0] http://www.fourwalledcubicle.com/LUFA.php
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Discovery-Charles-Pl...
(I say this as someone who would like his phone to have a headphone jack, and doesn't personally want a new iPhone—and, on a more personal note (I'm a several-generations-out-of-date Android user not much affected by current iPhone trends), who hates the direction of macOS and wishes it were possible to live in the land of Snow Leopard forever—but also has reluctantly to concede that Apple has a better track record than I do for predicting and shaping the tech marketplace.)
Eventually, sure. If they made poor decisions for a long enough period of time, their customers would probably go elsewhere. But what I'm talking about here are the odd one-off poor decisions here and there. It may be true that 90% of Apple's customers really want a headphone jack. If that were true, I'd say removing it was a poor move, even if that entire 90% collectively goes, "Well shit. I guess I'll have to live with this overpriced and clunky wireless crap." No product is perfect. You can make a good product worse and still have people say, "Well, it's still good enough I guess."
yet i know a 2-decade-long apple user who has felt the final nail in the switching away from the walled garden coffin from the removal of the headphone jack, and i'm sure he is far from alone.
eventually, gradually, incrementally, apple will convince people to leave their walled garden, and they certainly aren't winning many converts with these moves.
Quote is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLvvzktuVY8
I don't really think the headphone jack is the start of some grand decline or anything. I'm just saying you can't wait a year, look at strong sales of the iPhone 7, and conclude that it was good decision to remove the jack or that you were particularly visionary to have done so.
By having a inside track at big media, and spending massive amounts on advertisement.
You know what I'm interested in? Innovations in radio technology. Why can't I get a phone with built in mesh networking? No some weird bastard wifi hack, but an honest to goodness mesh networking solution maybe with a STANDARD interface? Some way for my phone to talk directly to a friend's phone without any need for a central authority to regulate our communications.
That would be ground breaking.
Like Bluetooth? Like wifi ad hoc (what's the hack involved)? There are chat/file transfer apps for both of these "mesh" networks on the App Store. They are reasonably popular amongst K12 students when school districts get overzealous with filtering.
What do you realistically want that these don't provide?
No. That's for us to do. Not to buy.
It seems like the author just wants to be able to buy his own self-expression through his devices.
By making their devices generic, Apple has (perhaps inadvertently) encouraged individualism.
All those other examples the author shows are SCREAMING for attention. They demand the limelight. and like all things that scream for attention, soon they will get none.
And on top of that, items like that have to have SOME aesthetic, which means they become fashionable, which means they have a "shelf life" of acceptability. No one wants to be seen dead with one of those god-awful matrix phones, yet an iPhone 4 still looks relevant today...
It's possible, I suppose, but there's something frankly terrifying about everyone looking the same. It's a staple of dystopian fiction, and I think one of the authors' points is that we get the same effect, albeit smaller, when everyone's devices look the same.
Such a policy existing in society at large, whether de facto or de jure, would of course be a different matter entirely. But I don't know that it is reasonable to argue that this is the case with devices, either. While there are certainly places to be found where uniformity of style in personal electronics is the norm, my experience suggests that they are actually quite rare, and hardly approaching any degree of prevalence that would make this a reasonable concern. Perhaps it would simply do the author good to get out more.
Aspirationally speaking: I agree. Practically speaking: everyone is already buying it.
It might even be a paradox of Apple's success that the author is writing what he is. Apple's popularity is, in no small part, due to selling people a statement to make.
The appetite for buying the branding of individuality has existed for ages. Apple was the first to master using that style of marketing for their tech. But Apple is a default choice now, everyone uses it and everyone copies their style (or even when Apple is following a trend, everyone else follows it because Apple does).
Apple sold people the high of a luxury product everyone could have and show off. Now everyone has it, and we're all coming down. Apple is bland now, GIVE ME SOMETHING NEW!
So I don't really see the point of ranting about these ones.
The author even points out that there's a point for their shape and size, so it's not some dumb design decision. Form was guided by function. (And I'm betting they stay in better by being longer like that, and not just centering over the ear, but that's a guess.)
It's not a piece that's asking for functional products (obviously: who wants antennas back?), so it seems like a larger indictment of the aesthetic sense regardless of how specific headphones look.
Which is to say, for them - it's not something 'wow cool', it just is.
My 6-year old is fascinated by bugs and trees a lot more than she is by her iPad. I mean, the iPad she just uses. A lot. Like the lightbulb.
But she's quite neutral about all the things that we care about - the cool minimalistic design, the powerful chip inside it, the version of the OS.
Like it should be.
As a programmer, I feel very strongly about my machines, but in the grand scheme of things - especially in the time dimension - our gadgets are just tools which we use to achieve stuff, which are always getting worse as time passes.
I don't really care about the brand of my lightbulb. I also barely care about the brand of my fridge. Maybe in 30 years a phone will be just a phone, not an Android phone, or an iphone.
If I could put into as few words as possible, I still want some (initial) cleanliness in my aesthetic, but I don't want my devices to evoke safety and invitation -- I want them to look capable and daring. I want them to say "I'm a weapon against your obstacles. I will help you achieve whatever it is you do -- faster, better, more completely." My intuition tells me, however, that this might not be well received by a market, even if I knew how to cause such a thing.
Of course I'm a big fan of the cyberpunk aesthetic(s) as well. I would occasionally feel a dull sadness that the world doesn't seem to be turning out to be nearly as colorful as I'd hoped for as a kid, that when it comes to everyday objects, the world had apparently just "given up" and accepted a fate of bland uniformity. There is little market for deviant design.
It's confused me for so long because this isn't minimalism in the art sense. But I'm not sure of a better label for it.
Er? Current Apple devices have a distinctly TNG Federation feel to them to me. Now borg on the other hand...
I got excited starting this article when he mentioned cyberpunk I thought he was going to make a much more interesting point than "I wish tech looked like what I think is cooler". Instead, I really would have enjoyed a discussion about what kind of things may be possible if we dropped the constraints of minimalism. Ideas about what amazing functionality and experiences technology could deliver for those whom don't mind their technology not being as invisible as possible and instead being more, well, large clunky cyberpunky. I would have enjoyed this specifically because with my limited imagination I can't think of a whole lot of additional /exciting/ functionality such an unbounding would enable.
I grimace every time another HN article explains that menus are evil, minimalism is great, and every product should do one thing well. Because in practice, that means downloading 50 apps where 10 would do. It means calendars that don't communicate with alarm clocks, because mobile apps are 'minimal' in an environment where cross-app integration is completely impossible. It means that because no one did my "one thing well", there isn't even a way to do that one thing poorly.
There's a missing discussion about power-user tools, and what non-minimal products should look like. There are places where we should embrace flexibility, and choose good design and clear menus over removing features. This wasn't that discussion.
Standard earbuds don't fit in my ears very well, cause headaches and are constantly falling out. The image of the pen charging and pointing directly at your crotch or chest while using the device is, to say the least, non-optimal.
It seems to me that the past Apple, perfect aesthetic with great functionality (even as a non-user of Apple products, except for a macbook supplied by my company for work purposes, I must admit this is true) is slowly losing it's way in an attempt to constantly prove that they are moving in some forward direction. Whether or not forward means over a cliff has yet to be seen, but I won't suggest that there is a false dichotomy between absolute success and absolute failure either. I think that this step will lose them further market share, but they'll still make a ton of money.
Flat UI, I'm looking, in silent disgust, at you.
This happens to me all the time when I walk too far away from a bluetooth speaker in my house. Or when I have paused playback for too long and it automatically disconnects. Albeit this is on Android.
Unless there is a giant visible indicator that you are connected to the bluetooth device, there is always going to be a level of uncertainty that is bad, imo. You just can't beat a physical plug.
The headphones I use say "connected" and "disconnected" so it's not happened to me personally. iOS also has an indicator of what output it's going to use right next to the play/pause on the lock screen.
Also to be honest I'm not that considerate a person and don't really care if I accidentally disturb the people next to me for a few moments.
Regarding wires, I've got the opposite problem now to where I'm so used to wireless headphones that if I used wired ones I'm liable to try and walk away from the device without unplugging.
To charge and listen to music simultaneously I need the dock AND a pair of headphones with the "antiquated 100 year old so obsolete" headphone jack.
What I mean is, how often is the scenario where you need to be charging the phone AND listening to music a major need? Like, between iPods, iPhones, and Android devices, for me it's almost always been a one or the other scenario. The phone charges at night when I sleep, and it's music during the day. Or I charge while at work where I use the computer for music. Charging tethers me to an object that cannot shift with me (computer, wall, etc) and I rarely am in a sitution where it's a necessity for me to be able to do both at once.
Truth is the only time I have ever wanted to charge and listen to music, I just used a bluetooth headset while I was cooking in the kitchen.
Now, I understand the purpose behind the argument - it's not so much the practicality as it is that user choice has been removed needlessly. But argue that - this idea that a huge major feature was removed and it spites users is ridiculous. Yes, so is Apple removing the 3.5mm audio jack, but I don't really see the value in trumpeting an absurd scenario as a major reason you need to have both ports.
I'm not all that invested in this since I likely can't afford a new iPhone anyways - maybe once they're on the iphone 9 I can afford to be upset about not having a 3.5 mm jack. But I would imagine Apple isn't making this decision blind. I'm sure they have numbers to show that the majority of iDevice users just use the provided headphones, and the 3.5mm dongle is pretty much a half-assed solution for those outside of the majority. But I don't think that Apple is really worried about the "obsoleteness" of the 3.5mm, and I'm gonna guess they have the data to show their users aren't en masse worried about it either.
- Driving in the car on a long road trip, using the phone as audio source & satnav.
- On a train journey, taking advantage of the charging point, whilst listening to music.
- At work all day on a computer on which you are not allowed to install music/iTunes.
Anyone who works in an office is likely to want to do this.
Belkin Lightning Audio + Charge RockStar™ http://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-F8j198/
Also, I think you misspelled "ubiquitous, universal standard" headphone jack. The idea that it's a step forward to have headphones that only work in a single company's products is really interesting.
No, fuck no.
You take as an example a movie based philosophically on the works of Jean Baudrillard and almost three thousand years of eastern thought and what you take away from it is that we should aspire to the opinion held by Jack in the opening scenes of Fight Club.
You have learned nothing.
There's a reason those designs aren't in the real world: every single moving part is a new exciting point of failure, and our current devices with nearly no moving parts fail enough.
The Nokia 7110 which was inspired by the first film had the spring loaded mouthpiece was a great phone.
(The phone in the actual film wasn't spring loaded IRL)
And you're right about spring and slider mechanisms. There were a couple of Palm designs (the Zire 71 and Tungsten T3) which used them. They were nifty, to be sure. They were also plagued by issues revolving around mechanical failure of the Kapton ribbon cables used to connect the electronics in the two halves of the device. There's a reason beyond aesthetics why nobody really makes anything like that any more, and why moving parts in general are less and less frequently encountered in hardware that's expected to withstand its owner's lifestyle rather than being cosseted as in the past.
"Stuff doesn't look the way I want it too! I'm not sure how I want it to look, maybe like the Matrix? But not like the Matrix. I dunno. GIVE ME MONEY ON PATREON."
Oh, there is one really good quote that offsets the Medium-ness: "I want VR applications that don’t seek to simply recreate ordinary videogames, but instead drive the user into an existential crisis that challenges their mortality."
> but instead drive the user into an existential crisis that challenges their mortality
Quote [1]:
> The most horrifying form of torture/punishment in the known Universe. The Total Perspective
> Vortex (it's so mind bogglingly terrifying it even gets Capital Letters) is a small,
> featureless steel box, barely big enough for one man to stand in.
> The hopeless victims stand in the Vortex, and are suddenly shown, for the merest instant,
> the whole of the Universe: the whole infinity of creation, spanning over several trillion
> light years, and countless millennia, with an insignificant dot saying "You Are Here".
[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Total%20Persp...
> The victims, totally demoralised by their experience, fall dead from the vortex, wherupon
> they become the burden of the Vortex' custodian, Pizpot Gargravarr.
PS: That name of the custodian... never noticed it before, guess I was too young and not yet as comfortable with English.
I usually stay away from personal attacks but this guy clearly likes to hear himself talk, and clearly has a highly-inflated opinion of himelf. The result is something that feels like equal parts scummy marketing and impoliteness.
I know I shouldn't be making a big deal out of this but the patreon bit really ticked me off.
I don't think that's what it is. I think it's pandering thinly disguised as gratitude and pedigree. Otherwise stated, I think he wants us to believe that the market values his work, but I don't believe it actually does. That's the "scummy marketing" bit.
And to be clear this is all intuitive. I can't point to a single thing and say "see? that's proof positive.", but the overall impression I'm left with is very, very negative. Taken in the context of his shoddy writing and "fronting" in the photograph, it suggests a kind of person I truly have trouble appreciating.
I'd love to be wrong about this, though. The point is that the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts, and my visceral reaction is quite strong and quite negative. At the very least, this guy presents poorly, which is problematic for someone in his line of work.
Articles like this have always existed, and sometimes people listen too.
For example Ornament and Crime (arguably the first paper espousing minimalist design)... http://www2.gwu.edu/~art/Temporary_SL/177/pdfs/Loos.pdf
I guess my point is it's unfair to dismiss opinions as invalid just because they're opinions.
Should be? They already do! The author clearly understands very little about marketing.
Maybe this should be hosted on a more 'rude' website. Or maybe the way tech looks and feels is partly also dictated by ease of use and not just 'because big brother said so'.
I'd be interested in how the costs work out for designing and manufacturing a phone. Are we near the point yet where we can get them built cheaply to spec? Are the parts commodity enough now that putting one together in the shed is do-able?
Sales will tell how bad some decisions are.
How did this get linked here, let alone 100+ people who up-voted it?
Guess I really enjoy you folks discussing :-]
Edit: seems I didn't make myself clear, I actually enjoy reading it and feel I learn a lot from it.
Some what off topic, but this isn't really a funny joke.
This post is absolutely terrible. Inspector Gadget as a fantasy? Inspector Gadget was a dork, that was part of his charm, there was nothing cool about him.
> They took out the headphone jack, like tech journalists rumored for years and years, and are now selling you a $9 dongle or forcing you to get Bluetooth earbuds, which are… bad, to anybody who cares about audio quality or battery life or actually use their phone to listen to music.
No, they didn't. You get a set of lightning earbuds with the phone, and you get the dongle for free. If your objective is to buy an iPhone and listen to things with it, you do not need to buy shit other than the iPhone.
And if your argument is quality and you know ANYTHING about it, then you already figured out that the dongle contains the same hardware that the phone did prior to turn the digital signal into analog audio, and that the headphones do more or less the same thing just packaged inside the buds instead of being in the phone.
As if any real audiophile would use the stock Apple headphones anyway.
I have a really hard time taking journalists seriously when they make a factual error in paragraph 1. Pressing on...
Except if you want to listen to things while charging the phone (which happens when you are on the plane/train/...).
Other than that: fair point!
Hopefully iPhone 7 will be forward compatible with Bluetooth 5, and will really spark the market for good quality Bluetooth 5 headphones with longer battery life.
Although the box is dopey, it's probably quite important to keep people from loosing the airpods, and to make it easier and quicker to charge them. You know that the box also contains a battery right? There's 24 hours of capacity there.
Oh, good! Thank you for mentioning this - I haven't found time to watch the full keynote and probably will not do so, and I did wonder how annoying it would be to use just one AirPod at a time, so's not to block both ears and severely hamper my situational awareness. It sounds from what you say like this is a use case they've put some thought into, and that's good to know.