Hacker News Reader

Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

The design is function of the market. People wanted magic not function so they produced magic looking things (thin, shiny).

Now people have grown a bit, they'll ask for other values and the production will realign.

Waves and spirals

View on HN

Plato's cave comes to my mind... Also, whomever I talk to, from the most techy to least (and I'm a humanities student so nearly all my usual contacts are non-techies), I hear they want sturdier phones. Most people use protective side products like cases and films, even though the latter reduces the touch sensitivity. About half of the phones I see people use have cracks here and there. The industry thinks that people prefer thinner and cuter over sturdier and functional because most people just try to make the best use of what's available and don't bother providing feedback, public or otherwise; and those who are vocal about these new innovations are the tech-geeks and the like. (edited to add:) The market researchers probably confound the people trying to extract value from what's available on the market with their actual preferences. People can't buy what's not available, so, certainly, if all you see is sales data, you will never know that there's a public that wants a decently sized, sturdy, yet nice looking phone with decent hardware, that does not break when somebody farts close by and runs their favourite apps.

> Plato's cave comes to my mind

Do you mind elaborating on this? I'm familiar with Plato's cave and I don't see the relevance.

I'm not gkya (the parent poster) but I believe what he means is that the prisoners in the cave only understand reality as presented to them through the shadows. Likewise, we as consumers have only been offered minimalist, breaky phones with modern hardware/software, so we have grown to live inside that awful reality, and not realize the true scope of what is possible/better.

Thanks, this is half if what I meant; the other half being the inverse: the producers and the marketers have present a very remote, inorganic knowledge of their customers' preferences, only a shadow of their ideas. If they were set free from their echo chambers and cubicles, they'd see that the numbers they based their decisions are not really representative of preferences, but of choices that their clientele had to do.

And then those people go and throw theor brand new phones right into giant sturdy cases. Maybe it's time to ignore the voices that pretend people want shiny when really that's what the bloggers want to crow about.

I don't think it's true. Some manufacturers did produce less thin phones, both for better resistance and longer battery life. Nobody bought them. Maybe you're right and it's the web that influences people into buying these or maybe people just want to buy the latest and "most bestest" (whatever the metric is, nowadays its thin and pixel density ... people are into 4K now, 8K is coming too)

> Nobody bought them.

Because those phones lacked many other features that people ALSO wanted.

Fair point maybe they were cut from other features. I'm only quoting a few thin articles about the massive sales of thin but fragile devices.

I'd love to see different proportions and design decisions, I'm sure there are sweet spots

Indeed. This was the same fallacy that killed keyboard slider phones. Sure, their sales were poor... but the reason why is because they generally came out 8 months later than the non-keyboard version without improved hardware. So by the time each keyboard phone generation came out, there was already newer hardware with newer features on the market.

The thing is, everyone wants to protect their $600 “investment”. So if you make the phone bigger so that it’s more rugged, people will still put it in a case to protect the housing. So now the rugged phone is just massive and no one wants to carry it.

Now, if the rugged bits of the phone were easily and cheaply swapped, that would probably make it more appealing. But I can buy a new case for my phone for $10, so it’s hard for the rugged version to compete effectively.

If you want decent software support, you have to go with whatever the manufacturers consider fashionable.

I remember when the Motorola Droid took this strategy... at the time, Android (and in particular Motorola's Android skin) was quite a bit behind iOS UX-wise. Although I guess you could ask why it didn't dominate among Android users.

They're not equivalent. A case can often fit many phones, so they're cheaper to repair and offer more design variety. In the early 2000s, you could find cases for the 3310 everywhere, but I found very little choice for my 3410.

Yeah, it's not like advertising has any effect on consumer desire.

Or, more optimistically, sometimes people dont know that they wanted something until it was given to them.

> Waves and spirals

Like "swings and roundabouts"? I've never come across this variation.

I never saw yours either (is it a common saying ? I'm not a native english speaker anyway, that would explain that).

Common in Britain and Ireland, at least - in context it just seemed like it might be a variation on the same idiom!

Mine just come from seeing predator/prey graphs https://duckduckgo.com/?q=predator+prey+graph&t=ffsb&iax=ima...

and a really weird feeling that, indeed things do roundabouts, but it's not a perfect back-to-start revolution, the soil was raised but the people on it not so much (but they do feel they progressed). A circle that doesn't close properly is a bit a spiral.

</math-envy>

I really like your expression, although maybe not everybody would appreciate the distinction.

Or, put it on a case and have it not break when it falls to the ground

Reply on news.ycombinator.com