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Comment by res0nat0r | Hacker News Reader

Apparently you can't do a lot of things with it if you have tattoos on your wrist:

http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/344b3o/anyone_with_ta...

This kind of reminds me of the 'Better off Ted' episode, where the company's new motion detection system does not detect any of the African Americans in the office.

> This kind of reminds me of the 'Better off Ted' episode, where the company's new motion detection system does not detect any of the African Americans in the office.

Which is itself a reference to real-life results involving motion detection/computer vision/image processing (this was a particularly bad problem in the earlier days of the field, but still persists today to some extent).

Here is a great video showing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM

I think I just like their banter.

Right, because people who have chosen to get dark tattoos are just like people who were born with darker skin.

Both cases illustrate how the technology fails to adapt to the physical world.

Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FFRoYhTJQQ

You're tattooing it wrong.

But seriously, how could Apple not test this?

I have a feeling that the Apple of old would have caught this instantly, when it was largely the boutique brand for creatives. Today's Apple? Not surprising at all.

I'm not sure that's the case. This feature (which is entirely optional and can be disabled) is looking for skin. Metallic ink tattoos don't look like skin, and only a small percentage of people have such tattoos on their wrist. However, a massive percentage of people have hands that are shaped like hands, and yet the Apple of old made a mouse that doesn't seem to be designed for anything even remotely resembling a human hand.

They've literally always been form-over-function. They may have caught this issue and said "those people can disable this completely optional feature".

Their “puck” mouse design was intended to ameliorate RSI by encouraging a grip with only the fingertips. Unfortunately, nobody got the memo about the “proper” way to hold the mouse, and tried to grip the mouse the same way they were used to... which of course sucked. (And it was also difficult to guess the orientation of a round object.)

It’s definitely a bad design especially given the context of existing mice, and a case of poor communication, or insufficient user testing, or even hubris maybe. Your dismissive summary of their intentions is not at all fair, however.

I make no judgment of their intentions. Merely stating that even back in the day, Apple was known for making some questionable design decisions. Good intentions or bad intentions, it was not a highly functional mouse.

I do grip mice "properly" with just my fingertips, and the puck mouse still felt incredibly horrible.

I like the way you found a new way to say "this never would have happened under Steve Jobs!" Nice work.

The Apple of old (and by that I mean Steve Jobs) decided to tell people they were holding their phones wrong rather than launch a device which worked no matter how you held it.

No I mean a 80s and 90s hacker culture where weirdos were valued and guys with tats would be testing things. Apple today just seems way too button down, for good or bad.

Not only do you need a tat, but you need a tat covering the skin under the watch that's done with metallic ink. What fraction of people with tats have such a tattoo? I have a lot of friends with tats, but none that meet those criteria.

The iPhone 4 did work no matter how you held it, as evidenced by its long tenure (sold for 4+ years), and high sales and customer satisfaction ratings.

If you carefully held it in a very particular way, you could make it lose a couple bars. Jobs said: there's no reception problem, just don't hold it that way. It turned out he was right.

The Apple of old almost went bankrupt.

Depends how old you want to go. For me is Woz's AppleII kind of Apple which was exceptionally quality driven and economically was a great success.

For a long time they were incredibly successful while Woz and Jobs were active.

Oh boy, in a world that is focused on productivity (aka deliver asap something even if it is partially broken) and not too much of quality, this can happen very easily.

ASAP? The watch had been in progress for many years and was even announced and demonstrated publicly 7 months before it started to ship. It was definitely not rushed out the door.

Sorry I was focused more on the making process than the actual product. This happens with software more often than with hardware. I started to work as a hardware test engineer back in the day, and I know how hard is to deliver something without problems like this.

Seems like they tested every other factor though: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204666

They do explicitly note that you may need an external heart rate sensor band in some conditions if the pulse oximeter isn't working for some reason.

The proclivity of hipster-douches with full sleeve tattoos in tech makes this even more shocking.

All jokes aside (I can live with the downvotes), I could see this easily falling through the cracks for a company new to wearables. What about hairy arms? What about skinny arms?

No it means you can't use wrist detection to auto-lock because the metallic pigments in some tattoos interferes with passive skin sensing. There's an option to turn it off.

How many people have metallic pigment tattoos on their wrists?

a lot?

How many watches don't work on people with tattoos on their wrists?

How many optical pulse oximeters don't work on people with tattoos on their wrists.

The watch works fine.

> How many optical pulse oximeters don't work on people with tattoos on their wrists.

AFAIK, very few, because optical pulse oximeters usually go on fingertips or earlobes, even ones that are attached to wrist-mounted displays.

thats dishonest/apple fanboyism. The watch doesnt work as advertised.

Edit: on people with dark tattoos.

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