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Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

> …Also products made by companies that are equally "soulless" (they make these things to make money just like Apple)

I have to strongly disagree. Pianos, guitars and other instruments have a long and rich history that connects the past to the present. A long arc of human progress and creativity, with some of the most sought after instruments today being rooted in a deep history of human craftsmanship.

Cameras also have a rich history, but don’t belong in the same sentence IMO.

While you can find soulless products to buy, those are only a subset of what’s on offer.

I enjoy using Apple products, and will probably even buy this iPad because I need to upgrade. But it sits in an entirely different category than my cameras and musical instruments.

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Musical instruments have nothing on the deep history of consumer electronics.

The entire arch of human history from the first rock picked up our ancestors leads up to the most complex things ever conceived by humans. Requiring a globally distributed intellectual exchange, thousands of years of scientific and technological advancement, commerce, etc.

Focusing on just the physical assembly of complex parts ignores not just where those parts comes from, but also everyone living and dead that contributed to the software which makes it more than odd object. And even that glosses over the continent spanning electrical systems used to power em etc.

A tablet, laptop, etc is the ultimate expression of history warts and all. If they seem soulless it’s because they aren’t just a product of a single culture.

Hard disagree. The history of consumer electrics goes back maybe a century, but we've been studying and progressing the field of music for tens of thousands of years.

Pianos guitars and violins were crafted by hand! Materials were chosen with care and cultivated over decades with the express purpose of providing a certain character to an instrument! The complexity of a harpsichord or piano was insane in a time before supply chains, and they were designed to last centuries and be passed down between generations! That's just the fancy stuff, stringed instruments can and have been made by anyone, and innovation has come from surprising places! Almost anybody can change the balance, or experiment with covering up holes or adding random metal components to see how it affects the sound. All this effort and knowledge and time goes into something created FOR FUN. You can't eat a piano or use it for any reason other than changing the way people feel, yet music has been around since language was first invented or possibly even earlier.

An iPad is a homogenous blob, it's components broken down and reconstituted at a molecular level, none of it's original character remains. They are the pinnacle of design, but there's not much room for expression left. They last a few years at most before becoming museum pieces or trash. They're impressive in their own right, they showcase human achievement like nothing else. I'd argue they have a less colorful history than music, however.

> An iPad is a homogeneous blob

A homogeneous blob wouldn’t do anything. You’re discounting complexity because it’s not staring you in the face.

> History of consumer electronics goes back maybe a century

Ceramics go back 9,000+ years and people where making glass 4,000 years ago but that history doesn’t count because…

Capacitors, batteries, metals, etc each have their own long history of development without which you didn’t get an iPad.

> The complexity of a harpsichord or piano was insane in a time before supply chains

They don’t use glass, ceramics, etc. It only seems complicated because you have some idea of all the steps involved. Meanwhile you can’t conceive of everything involved in making just the machines required for a single component.

> A homogeneous blob wouldn’t do anything. You’re discounting complexity because it’s not staring you in the face.

Sorry, my phrasing was poor. As a product line, iPads are homogenous. If we both order one, they will be nearly indistinguishable. Their component materials have been homogenized before manufacturing to remove as much of the character of the original sand or rock as possible.

> Capacitors, batteries, metals, etc each have their own long history of development without which you didn’t get an iPad.

These were not developed with consumer electronics in mind. Electricity itself was only discovered 300 years ago. Electronics absolutely built upon the shoulders of giants, but I don't believe they can claim all human progress as their own. The iPad air doesn't have 5000 years of history because that's when we started refining metals.

> Meanwhile you can’t conceive of everything involved in making just the machines required for a single component.

My work makes optics for the chip industry, so I like to think I have better idea than most, but I haven't been to anywhere like Shenzhen yet, so I may be out of touch...

> Their component materials have been homogenized before manufacturing to remove as much of the character of the original … as possible.

You also just described musical instruments. The goal is for them to sound identical to similar instruments and a great deal of effort controlling humidity etc falls under that umbrella. People in an Orchestra want specific sounds not just random character from their instruments.

> These were not developed with consumer electronics in mind.

By that token the harpsichord wasn’t invented with the piano in mind. There’s nothing wrong with this view, but it drops the ‘rich history of musical instruments’ to the work of a tiny number of innovators.

> Electricity itself was only discovered 300 years ago

Electricity (static shocks, lightning, some evidence for primitive battery etc) was known about since antiquity though obviously we only recently learned how to exploit it.

> The iPad air doesn't have 5000 years of history because that's when we started refining metals.

The rich history of glassmaking is directly relevant to the iPad and provides some of its most valuable features. If we discount that then the history of musical instruments again becomes one of a tiny number of lone inventors.

Apples to apples comparisons favor electronics here.

> You also just described musical instruments.

Some. My experience has been that the diversity of instruments dwarfs that of electronics, with the possible exception of early Nokia phones. I bet this is largely driven by product lifecycle, as my saxophones are each over 10 years old and have been refurbished more than once. High-end professional instruments are often one-of-a-kind.

> The rich history of glassmaking is directly relevant to the iPad and provides some of its most valuable features.

I agree, but again I think it's a problem of intent. Glassmaking was improved to make decorations, then storage vessels, then optics, then cookware and labware, then electronics. Meanwhile people have been making bone flutes and leather drums for longer than they've been able to write about it.

> I think it’s a problem of intent.

The intent to create musical instruments is a tiny fraction of the history of woodworking etc. If you’re looking at things that narrowly there’s nothing particularly interesting left about em.

With that mindset a hammer has a much longer and richer history than a Tuba and musical instruments are just a trivial edge case crated as little more than novelty items.

On the other hand if you bring in the skills required to craft precision objects and the culture required to support such endeavors then tablets are clearly more wondrous.

I'm not claiming all of woodworking as the history of musical instrument making, just that which was explicitly involved in the creation of musical instruments. We've been making musical instruments for a very long time. To your point though, I bet the history of hammers is even longer!

I think we're probably arguing semantics at this point. I totally agree that the amount of raw effort and technological progress that goes into tablet making dwarfs that which goes into an instrument.

>Musical instruments have nothing on the deep history of consumer electronics.

no, man. have you never experienced music in a personal way? not a recording, not a concert, but as a living cultural joy shared and created together among strangers and lovers both in the same moment - it's so beautiful, so overwhelming in a way that nothing else is.

and so often it involves a musical instrument, you know.

and it can be a story, a lesson, it is all political. people kill and die for this thing every day, and every day in history.

instruments may be more electronic these days and i enjoy my share of electronic music and computer music. but physical, acoustic instruments will always be the icon.

i think a piano or a guitar has already made more history than remains to be made by anything.

the first cultural memes were songs

Bit of a side note, I was trying to understand why the history of craftsmanship feels different for cameras compared to say pianos. One variable here is definitely the fact that I work in lithography and cameras are a sister industry. Familiarity diminishes the mystique of something. But I think it's a bit more about time. Each advance in piano technology had it's "moment" so to speak. New refinement in pianos were slower to develop due to many reasons, but the prestige of pianos remains the same. But unlike cameras each generation of pianos got an entire human lifetime to be explored, sometimes even multiple lifetimes. It's cultural impact got time to be normalized and then commented upon. None of that has happened for cameras. Things changed so fast we didn't even get a chance to explore all of the options.

An argument against my amateur analysis is of course scale. Pianos were being explored by maybe a million people and only a fraction of that fulltime. Cameras are basically a part of life for a large portion of humanity.

In addition to what others have said, I see a budding revolt against "millennial modernism" here.

For those who haven't heard this term, it basically refers to the Apple aesthetic: sparse, minimal, utilitarian, and clean.

Flat UIs and Material design (out of Google) are other examples.

This ad is basically a millennial modernist manifesto. Down with complexity. Down with variety. Simple, clean, minimal.

Contrast this with the noisy cyberpunk aesthetic that was pretty common in technology before Apple 2.0 and Jony Ive and can still be found in the gaming PC area, or the 80s-90s skeuomorphic aesthetic that dominated UIs until the later 2000s.

When Millennial modernism came to prominence it was itself a revolt against noise, clashing styles, and overwhelm. I personally liked it for that aspect. But I can definitely see how it can also be soulless. IMHO the worst thing I can say about it is that it seems associated with authoritarianism. Like Brutalist architecture it's kind of an authoritarian aesthetic because it comes about by having a dictator who says 'no' to almost everything and enforces a very rigid auteur approach. Once established it also tends to remain unchanged because there's not much you can do with it. "Theming" possibilities are pretty much restricted to light and dark mode.

I myself have mixed feelings (about millennial modernism not the ad, which is awful). The biggest thing I like about this style is its association with reduced cognitive load. The biggest thing I don't like is the association with authoritarianism.

Edit:

Just realized that the Cybertruck is an ode to millennial modernism, and might just be kind of a shark jumping moment for it. This ad would count as another shark jumping moment. Maybe it's on its way out.

>Just realized that the Cybertruck is an ode to millennial modernism, and might just be kind of a shark jumping moment for it. This ad would count as another shark jumping moment. Maybe it's on its way out.

The problem with the Cybertruck isn't its design (although people did mock that, comparing it to vehicles from PS1 era graphics), but that it is a poorly constructed vehicle.

I didn't like the advert and I'm not a millennial.

It was repulsive.

The issue for me is not about minimalism, so this reframing is not appropriate in my case.

Millennial modernism doesn't mean the generation. It's the industrial design and UI aesthetic that took hold around the turn of the millennium. AFAIK Jony Ive, one of its main architects, is a genX-er. Generationally I associate it more with genX since it took hold when that generation was entering higher levels in the corporate world.

I do agree that there is more wrong with the advert than this. I was just pointing out something nobody'd brought up.

Thank you - I understand what you are saying, and feel like I agree. I would thumbs-up in ascii if it were appropriate here.

I may be over sensitive to generational comments as I've been 'feeling my age' for several months. And the comment you posted makes sense to me better now. <3

I'm sorry but this sounds like internet bubble nonsense.

A budding revolt? Equating an iPad to authoritarianism?

I think I understand and agree with some of your concepts. I see a trend back towards analog things and low tech devices, but that's a pretty simple and understandable trend. I don't think it has anything to do with authoritarianism.

Fuji Heavy Industries would like a word about pianos, guitars, trumpets, and, if we're honest with ourselves, everything else on that press.

Though the tone of the ad was still... Orwellian: imagine a hydraulic press, stamping on human creativity, forever.

The stress ball emoji getting destroyed with its eyes popping up. That was real depressing.

That’s how it feels when inflation made basics jump up 50% and it feels you’re being slowly crushed.

Seeing this is an Ad for one of the world’s richest Companies, the lesson I got is the rich are slowly crushing the median.

Don’t buy their crap.

He! Thanks for downvote. Someone really loves Apple.

Nah, they're probably mad at the economic, interpreted as political, message more than anything.

If they're mad at that, then they'd be mad at themselves for having a zoomorphic stressball and squeezing it themselves --which, who knows, is possible, but unlikely to be the case.

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