If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)
paulbuchheit.blogspot.com
paulbuchheit.blogspot.com
The engineers wanted to add recording function, thinking it would help with sales and to only cost a negligible amount to add.
Someone cleverer said no, because if you add that feature now people will be confused what it is for. If they don’t want to record audio, they’ll think the product isn’t for them.
At some point during design, one person must have said “you know, why not add a brilliant white light that turns on in silent mode? Wouldn’t that be cool?” and there was no one powerful or smart enough to stop their hubris.
Every hot summer night, I turn off my bedside lamp, and scream internally when I notice I forgot to put a dark piece of cloth to obscure the blinding white light on the fan. In these nights, I dream of sending an email to Rowenta’s customer team, and asking them to present me the head of the person responsible for this.
I am reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance lately and how technologists have made the world ugly by forgetting to keep in touch with Quality and Beauty, and this is painful reminder of it.
Ideally instead I need some stick-on semitransparent dark-alpha stickers to reduce brightness. Maybe I should use two polarized stickers, and rotate the second until brightness is perfect.
Are there non-linear solutions or HEV-sensitive photochromic solutions - so that LED brightness is low in the dark but bright enough in sunny conditions?
Some quick searching didn't find any photochromic films (Visible Light Activated) that were activated by say blue light rather than UV light. Plus it seems the chemicals don't darken as much (cf. familiar UV-sensitive glasses) and they work best with particular wavelengths (so might not work under different sources of lighting).
I will stick with cheap plastic tape/film and pinpoint holes because of advantages (tidy, colour match the device, fitting around, easy to revert).
Every drug store, bus stop and storefront in my city is painful to walk around at night.
The cycle of enshittification.
Lets say the sales do start dropping once you avoid it. At some point it will make sense to change it because most people likely want the change.
But from their pov, nothing is really different right? They are always catering to the most common demand in the market. How will this affect them or teach them a lesson?
Solves every LED problem.
Xerox, why did you think the power led on your multifunction should light up not only my home office, but the room next to it too?
I have some Black 3.0 (blackest paint on earth) I'm gonna try this with!!!
You suggest adding it as a "bonus", but for whom? Recording what on the walk? How would you advertise that along the main feature people actually buy the thing for? If not, what purpose does it serve? It's a few cents, but that's still a few cents too much if that's not what you're convincing people to buy.
Try to think of someone who didn't buy a walkman because it lacked a recording feature. What's their story? Can that easily be represented in the marketing material?
It's often easier to just throw in everything that's easy to do with little thought about cohesiveness or user experience. Leaving the record feature out of the walkman was likely a more difficult idea to push than including it and I think they were right.
Leave a subtle hong somewhere that someone clever can find out. Wait for news of the functionality to go viral and additional products to walk off the shelf bought by people who feel clever.
When I was about 10, someone lent the school a tape of Holst's The Planets for a school play, one of the other students pressed the record button, and shortly thereafter the teacher played to the class a recording of me shouting "no stop" as I rushed for the stop button having seen what they'd done just a moment too late.
Now imagine that happening by undocumented feature, where nobody knows it would happen before it does.
Though I'll admit, when I used to use cassettes, I never write protected them
Music back then wasn't cheap.
One time my older sister and I got into a fight and to get back at her, I erased side A of her Michael Jackson's Thriller cassette she had just gotten a few weeks prior. She got it replaced at the music store and the salesperson was completely befuddled by the entire situation. That one day the music was there and the next day just gone? Inconceivable!
I just played stupid at the time, but felt like a god knowing that little trick. So, sorry sis. But John C, you were the man.
Recording was the killer feature for me. I recorded thousands of hours of band rehearsals with their stereo omni mics and the media quality.
If you can find a player, you can still get the discs on Amazon which is awesome considering how disposable tech has become.
Why didn't you try powering it off when done?
While on they are constantly listening for a “find my” signal so it’s easy to locate. For the overwhelming majority of people it’s a good tradeoff.
Anyway, the root of their issue is other people unplugging it, which is a bigger issue than just the iPad. Still if you turn it off before pugging it in the iPad would have ~full charge if someone unplugged it. They hold charge for months on store shelves.
"actually shutdown long press + UI" process"
This plus if you plug it in after to charge it it turns back on
Something wrong with your iPad then. All three of mine would easily hold a charge for more than 2 days even when turned on but unused (so asleep).
I doubt the OP is making stuff up, but all my iPads (including an original model) simply don't show any significant battery loss when left unused.
I still have a first gen (!) iPad that still lasts for weeks on a single charge when locked. It is useless now, because there is no software support, but not because of the battery.
Obviously GenAI. The author time-traveled to us, stole that sentence and put it in his article. He got encoding issues on blogspot so he typed the dash himself.
Maybe there is a way to reduce incentives for AI hustlers to join a certain platform, while attracting honest contributors. But even honest contributors might have a bad day or a new project and suddenly they're out in promotion mode.
I think the real problem is just trash content - content I could produce without AI in almost as quickly. The solution is probably more about determining if the content is interesting and well written, no matter who wrote it or how.
However are the "good ones" actually hanging out on social media? Or is it just the mediocre ones who are wasting time? "Learning new things" or something being interesting is also highly dependent on one's current knowledge level and skills.
The remainder of the content is ragebait and "discussing" with others so one can feel better about themselves. It is a really nice comfort zone where you don't have to leave your work chair in order to tackle other TODOs in your life while also not feeling like you wasted your afternoon.
I feel the most true version of HN are the "Show HN" posts where somebody did some actual work and is eager to get feedback and judgement from their honored peers. Unfortunately due to AI this has been drowned by sloppy humans as well.
An upvote by the biggest idiot one knows is worth the same as an upvote by a nobel prize winner.
I also remember Apple had cared for most missing things by the iPhone 3G respectively iOS 3. Then they improved photo quality, speed and videos until the iPhone 4 respectively iOS 4/5. Similar things can be said about the iPad 2.
After that, I've had the feeling the product didn't improve anymore, because there was nothing actually useful left to add. I've used my iPhone 4 for 10 years, while Apple enjoyed adding more complexity without true benefit, except maybe the file manager and on-device image editing.
I should probably qualify that by saying that a product that looks to be amazing but costs way too much, is impossible to get because of manufacturing issues, or requires a third-party ecosystem that doesn't exist does not actually solve the consumer problem.
In the canonical example of survivor bias, the only bombers being examined (for their characteristics) in the original flawed analysis were the ones that made it back; the planes that were shot down (and their characteristics) were not being considered — an error.
It mentions the iPad, the iPod, Gmail as successful products. It mentions "laptops" (but in the description it actually includes all desktop computers, I would say) as unsuccessful products.
I wouldn't call desktop computers or even just laptops "unsuccessful products". Would you?
With the caveat of "Casually browsing the web" I would, actually. They have been near completely subsumed by Ipads or Phones.
I don't know the definition of a "successful product", but "selling billions of them every year" doesn't exactly sound like a failure to me.
Handspring and Palm sold millions of devices, and so did HP/Compaq, while Apple couldn't get traction earlier with the Newton. There's no real technical reason why the Newton was destined to fail, just as the other devices ascended and then fizzled out. There are network effects at work, society has to be receptive, and the price has to be acceptable.
Which reinforces the survivor bias, doesn't it? Often the product theories are more "look I succeeded once, so I did it right and you should copy me" and less "I was at the right place at the right time, the technology was there and society was ready for it".
But even with dramatically slower sales, that's around ~300 million sold per year. By contrast, the iPad is selling about 60 million units a year. In the US at least, the number of people that replaced their computer with a phone is negligibly low, and it's largely made up of extremely low income families.
Incidentally, phones are also headed for the exact same fate as PCs. The one saving grace they might have is that lion batteries die over time which is why Apple is quite adversarial with regards to users changing their batteries, but they are already losing that fight on multiple fronts.
Funny how it's become completely the opposite nowadays.
It was written pre-iPhone, when phones had seriously limited screen real estate.
He talks about how important it is to “weight” features, and order them by importance.
I am wrestling with this exact type of issue, right now, with a screen of my app.
[0] https://jenson.org/The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf (a PDF of the entire book. It’s a short read)
The guy who created Gmail is now 49 years old.
Why does that blow me away?
Secondly, where else does this apply beyond hardware, beyond the world of tech even?
This was great snark.
The most important innovation is in sales and marketing.
If you don't have brand recognition, your landing page has to make up for that. Making up the difference seems to be getting more difficult with each passing year. People are extremely cautious and getting increasingly so.
The average B2B user nowadays is literally triggered by anything remotely unfamiliar.
Better host a quick video demo/video add instead of drowning the user in copywriting.
[0]: Compare https://nova.app/ and https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html. Everything bellow the six highlights in the former case should be its own page.
And high traffic on a terrific landing page only tells you is that your product might be good enough.
OTOH, if you have a product that is dog-ugly, but still have people willing to pay for it, you have lightning in a bottle.
Having a "Great" product in this terms makes you subject to the whims of the crowd. As soon as they realize that your product is negative value, and/or they run out of disposable income, they will stop using it.
It always amuses me when some new device is launched and it has "bigger numbers" and "moar numbers" in every metric. And it's crap to use.
Unfortunately this article is from 2010. Apparently Apple's competition went so low, usability wise, that even Apple is forgetting what usability is.
Where NewGizmo beat OldGizmo by doing everything OldGizmo did, plus a few extra things?
If the cost is reduced — and becomes closer to zero — there's probably more chance the feature will be added ..
.. in which case, the product is less likely to be great.
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So perhaps, the key superpower in the age of LLM developed software is the ability to say no.
no, it’s never not been a superpower.
sorry, couldn’t resist some wordplay. it has always been one of the most important skills, but it doesn’t advance your career easily. enshittification happens because people don’t say no.