But you know what? I'm fine with that. That's how competition works, and competition is what brings down prices.
And I personally find the scrolling page design (both Apple's and Google's) pretty cool. It would drive me nuts if a site I used daily implemented something like that, like if it became a trend for news sites. But to show off a new product where I'll scroll through once in my life? It's pretty slick as far as I'm concerned. (Provided you've got the CPU to handle it.)
I still love my Dash Pros. Only downside with the experience is you can't pair to multiple devices. But the UX, the look, the in-ear seal, the sound quality -- all seem to me to be superior to anything that's hit the market, and they were designed ~6 years ago.
Wow, Apple has some serious brainwashing in the PR department for you to think that they actually invented true wireless earbuds.
But the AirPod Pros have fixed up the dimensions a bit, now they look like a communication device rather than a piece of jewelry resembling a miniature cigarette.
You could say Apple took an idea and made it better, and that's exactly how it should work. Google is simply trying to do the same thing here
From my abled point of view, it's a terrible implementation; if I scroll using mouse wheel it should not be so slow. I would rather see each flick of mousewheel anchor the next or previous slide in place rather than having to do all the scrolling to get there. And that's really what this is, a vertical PowerPoint.
Enter a competitor, and now the competitor has incentive to undercut the original producer to capture their market segment, and then it's a battle between the two between the cost to produce, market price, and value of the good to consumers.
I suppose there's 'inefficiency' in that both producers are now providing identical goods, but very rarely are the goods actually identical. In this case there's also the surrounding product ecosystem of Apple and Google, which is a significant difference at the very least.
No. Competition is you inventing a better mousetrap, not copying someone else's mousetrap.
Patents, design patents, trademarks, and trade dress are all completely reasonable ways to protect your product. Failing the ability of any of those methods to product your product, I'd argue copying is fair game.
So it is competition, for sure!
There isn't a strict motive to make something better than someone else .... there's only a motive to make something that someone will buy instead of something else. Big difference.
as if airpods were the 1st rechargable wireless earbuds anyway
All I can come up with is the look. These ones from Google look way different. Are they really clones in some way?
"W1 chip makes for seamless pairing: Apple's custom Bluetooth chip, the W1, is designed to allow for automatic pairing with Apple devices running iOS 10 or later, WatchOS 3 or later or MacOS Sierra or later. And it totally delivers: Just place the headphones near your compatible device and they'll automatically be detected and ask for pairing, no diving into settings menu needed. You can also transition easily between Apple devices, toggling between the sound of your computer to that of your iPhone or iPad. For Apple Watch owners, that seamless transition between Watch and iPhone is critical, and it's one reason that AirPods are something of an appealing accessory for Watch owners. "
> They only work perfectly with Apple devices
You're correct that the seamless pairing feature only works on apple devices. On non-apple devices, they work equivalently - no worse or better really - than competing headphones. That doesn't mean that the pairing feature isn't very valuable for those of us willing to own more than one apple device.
Think the Birkin bag.
Aside of the potential risk of a lawsuit, what makes this worse is that as a partner of the MPEG-LA, they might even be in the position of compromising the MPEG patent pool itself.
Also, Chrome does support AAC which was popularised by Apple pushing it onto iPhones.
> Safari on iOS supports low-complexity AAC audio, MP3 audio, AIF audio, WAVE audio, and baseline profile MPEG-4 video. Safari on the desktop (Mac OS X and Windows) supports all media supported by the installed version of QuickTime, including any installed third-party codecs. [0]
Despite that probably being written many, many years ago, it's pretty accurate from what I can tell.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Au...
And eventually AVIF: https://twitter.com/mathias/status/1248135249663574017 & https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207750
As a somewhat interesting aside, Apple don't even support their own HEIC in Safari, so maybe they just don't have a team working on this area of Safari!
Although I'm not trying to defend Safari but webp is not a widely used format and absolutely shouldn't be being pushed at this point until I can save an image from a site and actually be able to use it in applications.
I don't need all site owners to stop trying, I just need one usable browser that ignores the attempts.
But far more of the time, what you request is impossible, because such fancy scrolljacking sites are normally utterly broken with JS disabled. The Pixel Buds page is basically just blank, for example.
Must be a subtle reference to their mobile operating systems.
A bunch of brilliant engineers with no sense of how to develop a product around the said technology.
I used to be a huge critic of Samsung for blatantly copying Apple back in the early Galaxy days, but Samsung has come a long way at differentiating themselves and carving an identity for themselves that isn't all that terrible.
I'd love to see some more tech companies go the Berkshire Hathaway route: https://berkshirehathaway.com/ Metrics for load time, readability, usability, are great. :)
A) to not care how other's will perceive your website
B) enough people know who you are so well that it doesn't matter how they perceive your website
If you don't fall into either A or B, I'm sorry but you will need at least a "professional looking" website. Within that of course I agree there's still ample room for good UX and fast load times
Are you really suggesting that Google doesn’t do user tests? Google likely has a larger headcount on UX than most tech companies have employees.
My reply is to the BH thread.
Designs like this persist for a simple reason - it’s that people who like spending a lot of money on high end tech products like them.
Maybe it's because I'm on firefox?
Edit: it works in chromium, what a piece of junk.
Google is what Google does.
And it’s not webstandards.
A third company making wireless earbuds? There's an absurd number of companies doing that :)
Like any Google product, however, we have to enter it in the deadlock at launch time since it is only a matter of time before they see some shiny...
Eh, as near as I can tell like 10 brands came out at once in 2015, so it was always like that. More options aren't a bad thing.
Samsung has a lot of first with true-wireless headphones.
Wireless charging, IEM style buds and first android to have Apple style seamless pairing. They pair to multiple devices too. They also have much better battery life than both the pixel buds and air pods. Lastly, the android app itself is pretty great with decent customization and information, without looking half bad.
Idk why they get left out of the conversation.
Bragi crowdfunded "The Dash" in early 2014 (to much publicity) and released them in late 2015. To my knowledge this was the first high-profile pair of "disconnected wireless earbuds".
AirPods were released late 2016, so a full year later, so they were not the first with this kind of a product by a long stretch. By that time, Bragi already released a second stripped-down version of their product. The Pixel buds also much more closely resemble "The Dash" than AirPods.
As for product pages, I sadly don't have paper trail, but I'm sure people more into the topic can find examples dating back ~10 years for pages where the product twirls around the page while scrolling (and there is nothing more connecting the product page for the Pixel Buds and the AirPods).
And they had so-so reviews.
There were smartphones before the iPhone, there were tablets before the iPad, there were smartwatches before the Apple Watch. However, in general when Apple enters a category they set the bar for the rest of the industry (with some exceptions, e.g. HomePod and to some extend the Apple TV), because they nail the experience and the category becomes much more popular. Moreover, Apple generally dominates the categories they enter when it comes to profit margins. (And no, it is not only because people pay to carry an Apple logo.)
So, it is not strange that people compare Google Pixel Buds to AirPods. The now-iconic AirPod is what Google wants to emulate or compete with, not "The Dash" or many of the other less-visible competitors.
At some point it switched from people buying Apple as a premium brand to, as you said them just being "more popular" and leveraging that. A lot of people simply don't look much farther than they brands they already own, and this applies to Apple as well.
I wouldn't say that the AirPods were a "setting the bar" product. I'd argue that for the Apple ecosystem it was more of a "keeping the bar", with AirPods being the path of least resistance after they removed the headphone jack.
Good, I would hate for you to waste effort on something few but yourself care about. Because I doubt you'd find many that would agree that Google is really ripping off "The Dash" because they were "first!!11".
As much as it will pain some to admit, Google is ripping off Apple, not some Kickstarter project no one has heard about.
Why not agree that both Apple and Google we’re inspired by the Dash?
If this were academia, they would probably be required to site them as a source.
On mobile it's much smoother (Oneplus 7T Pro), however, it doesn't come close to how in awe I was at the smoothness of the Mavic Mini mini-site on mobile: https://www.dji.com/uk/mavic-mini
Meanwhile Apple's scrolling pages work great.
But in terms of product name, if we go based on public launch date, the first generation of Pixel Buds were released in Oct 2017 and the first generation of the Amazon Buds were released Oct 2020 IIUC.
Google Assistant was announced in May 2016, Amazon Alexa was launched in 2014.
Disclaimer: I work at El Googs but not on these products. These dates I just searched on the web within 30 seconds.