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Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

Apple used to excel at making the right trade off here. Choosing what feels right over numbers.

I remember when the first Android phones with 4-inch screens hit the market, I saw someone comment online that if a 4-inch screen was better Apple would have figured that out during R&D for the iPhone and made the original iPhone 4 inches.

I hope somebody at the time replied with a picture of the original iMac's hockey puck mouse.

Apple can do amazing things, but they do also fairly regularly make terrible things.

I mean, the current Apple Magic Mouse which has its charging port on the underside is interesting as well.

Sure, but wasn't cockroach charging introduced in 2015, vs. c. 2010 for 4-inch Android phones?

What's 'cockroach charging'?

Upside-down, like a dead cockroach: https://www.behance.net/gallery/36272401/Dear-Apple-about-yo...

Ah, I see. I've never seen a phone which charges from the underside, though.

There's a pretty common use case that's basically this: get in the car, plug in the phone, and drop it in a cup holder with the charging port pointing up and all the antennas that would point skyward during handheld use are now pointing at the ground.

I still think the original iPhone was the best size. I use the iPhone mini today, and I wouldn't mind it being a bit smaller still.

It really lends itself to the phone being a tool, rather than a device for endless entertainment. It also suggests it is an accessory, with the desktop/laptop being the home base, rather than the phone being a primary device.

It really bothers me that the phone is now at the center of the ecosystem. It seems like the hub should be something that isn't as vulnerable (to theft, loss, or drops) as a phone.

Steve used to excel at it.

They were and are good at this. But the decision to ship this in this state before their typical quality bar was Tim Apple’s. He reportedly overrode the design team and demanded it ship now to enter the market and iterate in public. Even though he’s otherwise hands off with the product itself. This was all widely reported but has been missing from recent reporting now that it’s out.

It was a good call. It needs to get to early adopters and establish the existence of an alternative to facebook's metaverse vision.

The thing is, when one has a user base the size of Apple's what "feels" right actually covers a very large range of possibilities. Even when Apple "excels" and covers most of that range, there's still a ton of people left out. Which leads to every Apple thread on HN filled with users bemoaning Apple's poor choices.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

And they probably have

Idgi. What feels right has always been very high numbers.

There is a fundamntal tradeoff between FOV and image quality at any given pixel density (and there are other tradeoffs between pixel density and cost and compute power needed).

yeah. But a high number of pixels and a high number of minutes of battery life work against each other here.

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