Holding out for a Jobs: Tim Cook still auditioning for position of Apple god

Re: All about money

>Steve Jobs wasn't interested in the user experience. He was interested in the perceived value of his products.

The two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the easiest way to up the perceived value of your products is to make sure they have some value to begin with.

Felix Dennis had the same model of microwave in each of his homes around the world. This was because he couldn't be arsed with relearning how to heat some food. Being wealthy, he could afford to remove such minor annoyances from his life. Some microwaves are easy to use, some are just unaccountably awkward.

Jobs did care about the user experience - in the products he used himself (as Mercedes Benz and Sony will testify), as well as those his company sold. If you are going to differentiate your products, it makes sense to differentiate them in area you care and think about. If you are overly sensitive to shit, careless product design, then use it as an asset. This is no less true just because Jobs also wanted to makes lots of money (though his first billion came about by accident, because he financially supported the animation side of Pixar when really he wanted their hardware to be adopted by hospitals).

Of course, the PCs I steered my dad towards buying in the nineties were for gaming, where the more MHz and MBs the better the user experience (in this case, the user experience was shooting hellspawn in Doom at a decent framerate)- you'd want them to be as high as possible for the £. So most PCs were sold on those numbers, and money was saved everywhere else - there was simply no motive for a company to invest money in smoothing off the rough edges. Were these 486-era PCs user friendly? Hell no. And whilst I learnt some skills and aptitudes as a teenager which have since been useful to me, I would had sympathy for someone who just wanted to write and print a letter, for example. I also used Acorn Archimedes and Macs from LC IIs to PowerPC models in school, consoles from Sega and Nintendo, and there was plenty to appreciate in them.

There has been plenty that Apple has done that isn't mere fairy dust, and offer tangible benefits to the user experience. Would Jobs then (maybe over-) sell it? Yeah, that was his job. That should be the job of anyone in his position.

Good design costs time and money, and for a company to make that investment it has to see a return.

I've never owned a Mac, iPod, iPhone or iPad, so perhaps I'm more familiar (and the breeds contempt) with the occasional problems and rough edges of competing products - DOS and Windows PCs, iRivers, Androids. I've encountered so many clumsy and arbitrary design choices I've lost track. Like many people here, I have the experience to skip over many of these issues, but for many laypeople they appear more like hurdles.

Re: The Apple II was certainly practical

I built one - much more fun, but it was a *lot* more soldering that I had bargained for :).

What I found interesting at the time (before floppy disks) was that a cheapo cassette recorder was far more reliable at recording and playback than a "proper" HiFi one. Never quite worked out why.

Re: The Apple II was certainly practical

>I fell for hype and bought one. I soon got a better computer.

I would have thought that most people who bought a computer in that era soon bought a better computer! :)

Heck, it's only in the last few years that I haven't felt the need (have seen no huge benefit to my using of productivity software) to upgrade. For most of the last twenty-five years, none of my current computers has quite seemed quick enough, but the five year old model I'm using now is alright!

Re: The Apple II was certainly practical

What computer introduced "soon" after the Apple II was offered 80 column text and a floppy with significantly more than 100KB? It was years before you could get either of those things.

Now if you bought the Apple II a few years after it was introduced when it was an old and tired design that was easy to do, but it wasn't like there was competition that got around those limitations back when the Apple II was new.

Re: Cook is not seeking to be a deity

Agreed, Cook isn't trying to make himself in Job's image. Whilst jobs didn't get involved in social issues, Cook has been outspoken on issues like gay rights. Cook's Apple is already different to Job's Apple.

Re: Holding out for a Jobs: Tim Cook still auditioning for position of Apple god

Given the hero worship being given to Elon Musk at the moment I'd say that he would fit in quite nicely as the next Apple Diety.

Apple to buy Tesla and get a new CEO?

Re: Holding out for a Jobs: Tim Cook still auditioning for position of Apple god

They may be seen as being slow to innovate, but really there is no point in 'innovating' for innovation's sake - iPods, iPhones and iPads were all refinements of existing products. Indeed, I get the impression that Apple didn't really want to release a watch until batteries and SoCs improve, but felt they had to stake their claim on a nascent market.

Again, it should be self-evident why anyone who thinks they know what the Next Big Thing is keeping it themselves. Our home computers are fast enough, and have been for some time. Our mobile devices are almost as fast as our computers. There are some new forms of man/machine interaction around - LeapMotion, RealSense, Kinect, Project Mango - but none that yet feel like a must have.

Re: Nobody needs a smartwatch

I don't need any of the current smart-watches, but I might consider one in the future if it offers some basic functions without any of the current downsides.

The Apple Watch does too much for my tastes, and its most interesting feature - ApplePay - doesn't require the power-hungry colour screen. It is not ApplePay itself I find interesting, but the concept of a device I can potentially use in place of physical keys, cash-cards and passwords (I prefer to carry cash, but its reassuring to have a backup).

The simple functions that I would like on a watch include being able to 'page' my phone (for when it drops down gaps in sofas), receive notifications, and use the watch to control media playback on another device. These features can be implemented on watches that boast a battery life of over a year - as Casio and Citizen have demonstrated.

My other criteria are more my personal taste: a small watch, simple dial, waterproof, stainless steel, sapphire crystal, rotating bezel. A bezel could function as both rotary input (volume control etc), and also as Direction Pad (up down left right - or Fwd, Back, Pause etc) without one's fingers obscuring the display.