As a non transit user, I see the addition of the turn by turn (especially with Siri integration) as a plus and don't miss the transit at all. So I wouldn't say it is universally inferior.
3,751 karma · joined March 3, 2010
siglesias.com
The implication being that employees who work at corporations that make luxury goods don't have feelings worth considering?
You know what? Just like any startup that posts here, Apple is filled with real people who take real pride in what they do, and I can imagine that for any of the thousands of folks who worked really hard on designing this product and manufactured to absurdly low variances, the sentiment you just expressed was deeply hurtful, and, in fact, wrong. There's a lot to be impressed by here. Lots of tiny details that aren't captured on a feature checklist.
If you don't like it, don't buy it. Don't sling shit publicly on their announcement day because your pet features weren't included (1).
Also, I didn't mean to imply that leather in itself teaches you how an app works. However, once you've used an app with a distinct skin, the next time you launch that app the skin, as a sort of visual touchstone, will help you remember how you used it in the past, etc.
That key can be used in various incarnations of your app's UI, on the web, across platforms, or even in system services (like notifications or Siri's sheets) to let the user quickly make the association with your app.
It's easily gleaned from the context. Clearly he is distinguishing between stealing and copying, the key differentiator I believe to be some metaphorical notion of possession.
From this idea you can infer that Jobs is saying that you can take a solution designed for (or, by possession, owned by) a given historical problem and repurpose it so that it can now solve a new problem.
That's the only way the quote makes sense, and that's the only way you can read Jobs's reference to the diverse fields of study his early Macintosh people had under their belt before tackling computer science. It was all about repurposing old ideas to meet new challenges.
Forgive me if I depart a moment from the explicit and literal, but I fail to see how you can apply ideas from music, poetry, zoology, art, and history without "doing something totally new with it." Did 19th century bookmakers and typesetters have the faintest idea what a computer was when they were practicing their craft? And would somebody making a computer screen without the slightest notion of what really went into calligraphy know which ideas to capture in writing rendering software? This is the essence of what Jobs meant by stealing. It wasn't, hey, let's just copy our competitor but make it cheaper.
As for "stealing," it's unfortunate word choice because the original quote from Picasso was in Spanish and he didn't say it in a trade (high art) where copying could be justified as "natural evolution."
That's why his example from the Macintosh days is about applying calligraphy to rendering typefaces on screen, or why later in the interview he talks about how Apple took great pride in hiring people with a diversity of backgrounds (ex. zoologists and poets)--all to maximize the probability that someone would make an unexpected connection and hence, innovation. It's a subtle point that I frequently see people overlook here, but anybody with humanities training will tell you that there is a tremendous difference between inspiration and plagiarism.
When Samsung closes a door, they open a window. Check out the S Voice UI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGxYZXjXozc
This is the one thing that made the 4S stand out from the 4, and Samsung basically wholesale copied the UI.
This is particularly relevant because the valley's succession story du jour is Apple and whether Tim Cook et al can take the reins in the wake of Steve Jobs. The following quote struck me:
"It's not going to be easy for Yoshikazu to succeed his father at the same restaurant. Even if Yoshikazu makes the same level of sushi it will still be seen as inferior. If Yoshikazu makes sushi that's twice as good as Jiro's, only then will they be seen as equal." (32:06)
This is exactly what Apple has been going through in the last year, exacting a level of polish that is on par if not above what they released last year, but still leaving nagging doubts in the hearts of the faithful. The one thing that would silence critics and quell fears would be that something twice as revolutionary as the original iPhone be straight up imagined, developed, and hoisted by the post-Jobs Apple--just to claim par.
My personal experience with Apple Retail has still been nothing short of stellar, recently with two almost-no-questions-asked full replacements of a faulty iPad and Retina MBP. Sometimes strolling through Apple stores I have wondered if they were overstaffed, based on the simple fact that lots of people know how to use the popular devices and probably don't have as many questions as they did back when the store was mainly about selling Macs and digital cameras.
As for cost cutting, Apple has been doing it for years. Witness, for example, the radical reduction in pack-in goodies over the course of the development of the iPod. The second generation iPods came with a carrying case, remote, and charging brick [1]. The third left out the remote and carrying case [2]. The fourth left out the dock [3]. The fifth left out the brick [4].
Guaranteed if Cook had been in charge these would have been decried as evidence of Apple becoming a stingy, bean counting big corporation that lost its soul to save some money on pack-ins. In reality they were cutting fat and passed the savings on to us.
1) http://ilounge.com/assets/images/reviews_apple/ipod20gb/imag... 2) http://www.ilounge.com/assets/images/reviews_apple/ipod15gb/... 3) http://www.ilounge.com/assets/images/reviews_apple/4gpower/p... 4) http://www.ilounge.com/assets/images/reviews_apple/ipod5/5bo...
That's rather cynical. This is precisely the kind of trial that doesn't require expert thinking because most of what is up for debate is whether Samsung willfully attempted to fool customers into thinking that their products were just like an iPhone by copying the trade dress. And determining such a thing is a matter of common sense.
This reminds me of an anecdote about Brahms's first symphony:
Brahms himself said, when comment was made on the similarity with Beethoven, "any ass can see that." [1]
So it is here. We needn't pretend any longer that Samsung's designs are mere coincidence. Whether it should be punishable is another question, but under the current law this, to me, is the right call.
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._1_(Brahms)#History
Can you explain why what the earlier prototypes look like is relevant to whether they copied Apple in the final product?
Mental Binning—when we think about buying a $1 app, it doesn’t occur to us to ask ourselves what the pleasure that we are likely to get from this $1 app — or even what is the relative pleasure that we are likely to get from this app compared with a $4 latte. In our minds, those two decisions are separate.
Price Anchoring—we have been trained with the expectation that apps should be free.
1) http://danariely.com/2011/12/25/the-oatmeal-this-is-how-i-fe...
The backup email address on my Gmail account is that same .mac email address. At 4:52 PM, they sent a Gmail password recovery email to the .mac account.
Here Gmail was only as strong as the weakest password recovery email service it was linked to. I consider this a failure on Google's part.
The fact of the matter is that none of the "Apple-esque" Mac ads of the Jobs era were that effectual, and by effectual I mean resulted in moving the Mac market share significantly. I would argue that they did serve to give existing Mac users a sense of cool, and it is existing Mac users who are bellyaching about these ads the most. Hate to break it to you, but the ads aren't for us.
1) See branding for Mountain Lion http://www.apple.com/osx/
So what they did was mask the price hike with the veneer of a promotion, which is equal parts clever and cruel. Here are a couple of photos of other pricing tricks they've played:
1) http://cl.ly/image/102k133G2L3B 2) http://cl.ly/image/3a1q002M1G05