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Comment by pentarim | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised that Google tries to promote them on catwalk instead of nerdy conferences, maybe they think it needs a bit of glamour.

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They don't need to convince nerds. They need to convince the general public that Glass is cool, fashionable, and not a reason to shun someone. If Glass is treated as weird and undesirable even the nerds will eventually fall victim to the peer pressure and stop wearing them.

Somehow I don't think Google really cares all that much about forcing it to become fashionable.

They need to if they want people to use it (and getting models at a fashion show to use it is pretty strong evidence they do want it to become fashionable).

I don't see why not. Pocket computers didn't really take off until the iPhone made them fashionable.

It hardly needs promoting with techies does it? I would buy one right off the shelf if they put it up for around 500$ and I suspect I'm not alone.

The more interesting challenge is how to make wearing the glasses socially acceptable.

I wear contact lenses and I would buy one of these without prescription glass in them. Not to use as glasses, but for the value-add. Adding features to the outdated design of the human body is a net positive as far as I'm concerned.

There aren't any with prescription glass in them. The glasses form factor is a convenient way to hide the battery in your hair.

There are/were plans to make some that would fit over existing prescription glasses, though, I think.

And to hold the glass on your face, a requirement even if there were no battery.

I wonder if he means socially accepted as in you've suddenly turned into a walking CCTV camera.

I'd feel uncomfortable if a friend brought these on a night out, but then again I think I'd be a minority here in the UK.

Don't take them to France though.

On the contrary, this may prove to be a brilliant partnership, in a evil mad scientist way.

If you understand how a trend starts, this is a perfectly logical place to attempt broader acceptance of what is, aesthetically-speaking, a bizarre fashion accessory.

There are distinct sociological strata that fashion trends progress through on their way to the mainstream and they never start at "nerdy conferences".

Is this one of those strata, though? I keep seeing "get a load of what she's wearing" excerpts from fashion shows for bizarre stuff that's never seen again.

Perhaps the goal is to get mainstream people accustomed to seeing people wearing the odd looking device. I don't think they look all that fashionable, but I could say the same about other things at most fashion shows.

Maybe by having them at fashions shows, they become fashionable? There is some kind of self fulling prophecy here....

Mainstream people don't watch fashion shows, nerds much like ourselves but who like clothes instead of computers watch fashion shows, I'd wager they were just trying to get it out there to designers and get feedback like this for free. Pretty clever of them if you ask me.

Fashion shows make the front page of news sites like seattlepi.com all the time, well beyond the public interest in fashion shows, since news sites like to show pictures.

Perhaps they learned from Apple. The iPod was seen as inferior in terms of features-for-price and the iTunes Eco system most likely did not help it among the hacker-set. So I think its appeal to the fashionable elite crowd played a large part in Apple's mainstream success to date

Maybe I'm not remembering correctly but wasn't the iPod the first MP3 player to combine a disk harddrive with flash memory? Thereby allowing it to store gigs of music when the rest were touting 64 - 128 MBs of storage?

Seems like a pretty big deal to me.

No. The early iPods used a hard drive, the later ones used flash for storage. The iPod was not the first device to provide a hard disk for large storage; look up the Personal Jukebox and the Creative NOMAD.

(I know it came post-iPod, but I loved my Creative NOMAD Zen Xtra. 60 GB drive and it would play all day on a charge, no trouble (wish my Android phone could pull that off))

Apple added the 16MB flash buffer which was less common.

User interface design is a very important feature, as were other usability differences like Firewire for transferring tracks from your computer to your device quickly.

Specs like being able to play FLAC, and minor differences in capacity per dollar, and often higher quality DACs did not matter as much as the design that made it easier to use.

It is also worth remembering that competing devices addressed the problem of a large library with search, while the iPod instead used an active matrix LCD combined with a large scroll wheel to quickly navigate the hierarchy of artists <- albums <- tracks.

I had a Creative Nomad before the first generation iPod, and even though the Nomad had larger capacity, it immediately seemed like junk in comparison.

We get stats from phone companies that complain about how much more iPhone users use their data plans, and I suspect that if had similar data for iPod we would find that users simply used their devices to listen to music more than users of competing devices.

Stylish ads may have been a large part of publicizing them, but it was the complete change in interface design that made people actually use them regardless of whether they enjoy gadgets for their own sake.

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