Apple Announces Event on October 4th: Let's Talk iPhone
loopinsight.com
loopinsight.com
I now run Android and have Beautiful Widgets showing me the correct weather. :)
The weather widget in iOS 5 is a better compromise, it just quickly grabs the weather info when you start pulling down the notification drawer.
A friend was going nuts going OMG OMG THE WEATHER APP UPDATES LIVE NOW. It turns out it just happened to be 73 or whatever degrees out at the time after he updated.
For these small things like weather updates I agree that apple needs to allow developers to update the app icon or whatever with some alert system on the home screen. It wouldn't be overly difficult to implement.
You hype the new phone with the big price tag, you mention in passing the cheaper low end model.
It’s very easy to look for supposed marks of manipulation and very easy to find many of them – even if nothing was actually manipulated. There are just too many weird artifacts and optical effects, not all of them are marks of manipulation.
What you linked to isn’t a smoking gun in any way. It’s utterly unconvincing.
I would expect this to be a very speech technology-heavy event.
Heaven help him.
Edit: That is actually factually true. Not sure why some seem to think otherwise.
Everyone is obviously pushing hard to sell their iphone4-stock now, before Joe Sixpack gets told by the news-anchor to delay his purchase for the iphone5.
It may not be the best time to buy an iPhone given that a version greater than 4 will be released, but if you specifically want version 4, then now is a good a time as any time in the past.
This reminds me of April 2010 when I wrote a couple articles about how Apple is fairly unique among computer manufacturers for charging enormous prices for old hardware and going so long without update or a price drop. In April 2010, depending on the week, you bought a Macbook Pro that was miserably outdated or a Macbook Pro that was very modern for precisely the same price.
(If you're interested: http://simonsarris.com/blog/22-mac-envy-2 )
And the other thing that geeks don't realize: this is also how most of the world thinks, and how they want their products to be.
Also re: "miserably outdated" - this, again, only applies to us geeks. For us it's disappointing to not get the latest, shiniest chipset, or this year's "it" mobile GPU. But here's the rub: the year-over-year performance increase for a laptop in the same model line is, what, 15%? A March 2010 MacBook Pro will surf the internet, access email, and hell, play games just as well as a May 2010 MacBook Pro. They are, for 99% of users, identical unless you put it under benchmark conditions.
We geeks place way too much importance in hardware when thinking about the market in general. We have to remember that nobody else cares.
Unlike a dishwasher though, it still seems like a snubbing to any enthusiasts (I can only assume that dishwasher entusiasts are few, compared to Mac/hardware enthusiasts). But Apple (like most companies) cannot simply cater to such a minority, so c'est la vie.
Take Samsung for example. They had a good branding opportunity with Galaxy S. Galaxy S - the flagship, followed by Galaxy S2, S3, and so on.
Except their marketing department took a dive off the deep-end. Instead of marketing by this simple to understand name, they now have the Galaxy R, Samsung Hercules, Samsung Attain, Epic 4G... all of which are basically the same product!
Ditto goes for HTC. No fucking idea how to tell which is the low or high-end model from the naming scheme, and no way to tell which model came before another.
Or, leaving the mobile space for one second, Apple's offerings are simple: you have the MacBook Pro, which is updated from time to time. If you look at Apple's support site the naming is pretty clear: "MacBook Pro (early 2008)" is simple to understand - and a later MBP is unequivocally a better machine than a prior one.
Compare with, say, Toshiba. In their "Satellite" line (what does that mean anyways? which line would I want to purchase? The naming gives zero hints), they have the L635, L730, E305, L740, and P740.
What the fucking fuck? Do you want your customers to go get a PhD just to figure out your offerings or what?
Sony used to be much worse, but in recent years seem to have pulled their head out of their ass and started naming their products with some semblance of sanity.
In anycase - the iPhone's naming scheme is incredibly simple to understand - perhaps it could be even better, but still miles and miles ahead of the competition.
Best of luck to Mr. Cook, but I will always miss Stevenotes no matter how great a CEO he turns out to be.
That would, indeed, be awesome. I take the iPad almost everywhere, so I have no need for an iPhone which is little more than an iPad Nano. Thing is, I need that "little more" - the phone part - as well, and want it as a separate device which I _can_ have everywhere. It's back to the "just a phone" desire, a device focused on making phone calls with Apple design sensibilities. Take an iPod Nano, insert a bigger battery & cellular chip, support Bluetooth headsets, sell millions.
Methinks coincidence though. Four icons is just enough to get the invite info across in a cute way, and there just isn't another suitable way to arrange them (a 4x1 line? not for advertising).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxWSIDoE8Hk
(I can't find better videos at the moment, but they're around.)
More likely, they've made improvements that distinguish the iPhone in an Apple-esque way, and probably increased the likelyhood that iOS maps could be switched to say, Bing in a more direct fashion.
So beautiful.
But I won't hesitate to pay a bit more for a quality Apple product.
Some things just don't make sense. :)
It’s true that some unkempt people are very careful about their work, and some people who are late for an interview are on time for work. So I would personally probe further to make sure this is not a sign of a deeper lack of commitment.
Careful attention to detail in marketing materials doesn’t automatically mean careful attention to detail in product development. But you know, I doubt it’s a coïncidence that Apple's marketing materials are clean and simple, and they don’t play the “Intel Inside” sticker game, and they are restrained in the CrapWare they allow on their OS X machines, and so on and so forth.
So if you show me a busy, confused marketing item, I won’t automatically refuse to buy the product. But I will certainly probe to see if this is an anomaly or whther it is representative of their approach to product development.
I suppose in your metaphor it would be: "Next time somebody asks you why you prefer Jim to his colleagues, show them how he dresses. Explains everything."
I think your formulation is reasonable and measured. I totally agree that Apple's marketing reflects something about the company. But the GGP comment is hyperbolic at least, sycophantic at worst. If I asked you why you like Apple products and you showed me this invite, I would probably disregard your opinion.
It's the kind of comment that makes many Apple fans seem like cult members, at least to me.
The example that comes to my mind is how the original Macintosh was packaged. Someone at Apple had taken great care to design the “Opening the box and setting up your computer” experience such that the right booklet was the first thing you saw when you opened the box, the power cables, keyboard, and mouse were layered under the documents in the right order to set them up, and by the time you lifted the computer out and put it on your desk, it all seemed very natural to plug things together and turn it on. Their attention to the details of the unpacking experience demonstrated their approach to macintosh product development in the late eighties.
That being said, “X explains Y” normally suggests to me that X carries enough information that you can deduce the important things about Y from it. I wouldn’t personally suggest their marketing materials explain their products, so we agree on that.
Fashion is a visual language and everyone is, deliberately or not, communicating something with it. If you communicate that you don't care about fashion, that's not a problem. If you communicate that you can't really afford very fashionable items, obviously, that's not a problem either. However if the way you dress is telling me that you don't care about yourself or your environment, that could be an issue.
Make of that what you will... But appearances are often deceiving and it is, in my opinion, reckless to not remind yourself of that from time to time.
Like in this instance, and you'd be right, too.
The Android world (the HTC Sensation being the first to pop into mind) has finally surpassed the iPhone 4 in camera and video capture quality.
I imagine Apple will leapfrog them again as usual for a healthy competitive market.
Can you show me a review that honestly shows new Androids beating an iPhone4 in actual results despite the megapixels?
When you just about max out the quality of a given MP value with given hardware constraints, as I think the iPhone 4 has done, the only real way to go up is increasing MP.
I can't be bothered to dig up some review for you, as my observations come from personal experience. Your best bet is to look for HTC Sensation reviews with unmodified example shots and videos.
I guess we'll see next week whether that was the real device or not.
I do not think we will stuff like that before we have 3D screens on our iPhones, though.
I am not a big fan of 3D currently. I just don't see it as good for small devices and it is hard on the eyes. I really think that the other uses for computational photography would make for a killer feature on a main stream phone.
I disagree only b/c this creates accessibility problems for some users.
Capacitive buttons create accessibility and usability problems for all users. They look great in demos and quick previews. They're crap for use.