From years i am speculating about this thing: Apple is a service company. Computers/Tablets/Phones everything is just a locked box for profit. I don't mind profit at all. But clearly in my view so much money can be used to deliver something outstanding for a reasonable price. The Apple tax from the past was: More money for highest quality of hardware and software and unrivaled reliability. I loved this and not only used their products, i was evangelist for the brand. The Apple of today is a service company: The Apple tax is abomination and in my view disrespectful toward users. Slowing down hardware update cycles, making obvious bad design decision, locking down Mac Os step by step and blending it with iOS (there is no Mac Os software division). So shareholders are happy, management is happy, users are .... The fact that i can migrate to Ubuntu Mate after years of using Mac OS X speaks enough. I intend to evangelize the Open Source and Linux to the max. Software is the key to the Future of Human Kind and the idea that some monopolistic company wants control is ugly and old-fashioned. So if Apple wants to redeem them selves in the eyes of professionals here are some recommendations: Stop over-hyping every product. Understand that iOS is companion os. Stop 30 percent tax on developers, make reliable hardware again, fix Mac Book Keyboard, again fix it now. Stop overpricing the iPhone. But wait, who cares about this, obviously nobody. So sorry for my rant...
No, they're a company who are nervous about where their growth will come from. They aspire to be a "Services" company, but unfortunately they aren't much good at it (see the usual list of failures. eg: Maps, Siri, etc). But "Services" is a nice murky bucket into which they can sweep various kinds of revenue, and still appear to be innovating.
> They aspire to be a "Services" company, but unfortunately they aren't much good at it (see the usual list of failures. eg: Maps, Siri, etc).
The whole "Apple is not good at services" thing is an old tripe. 2012 Apple was not good at services. 2018 Apple has now consistently been growing services tremendously for several years with several notable huge successes. They are now one of the largest companies (by revenue) in streaming music (Apple Music), contactless payments (Apple Pay), software sales (App Store), etc. Sure Siri and Maps are not necessarily best of breed. But not being best in every category, does not mean you are not good at something.
Actually, the key takeaway is that some analyst last year thought they were paying $3 billion. They’re making $10 billion on services now. Hardly seems that concerning, especially given the growth and the fact that you have no idea what Google is paying them. I also fail to see how a huge and rapidly growing services segment indicates that they’re no longer innovating. Especially given their total dominance and revenue growth in their other categories.
Your comments all over this thread kinda just make it seem like you have an ax to grind against Apple.
Your comments all over this thread kinda just make it seem like you have an ax to grind against Apple.
I'll assume you're not really interested in debating my motivations for posting here. That sounds like a good way to just get into a petty internet argument.
Other than that, you make some good points.
No, I don't see Apple innovating in ways that matter to me, to be honest. Of course, that's a messy argument. They have changed plenty of things since SJ passed. Those products appeal to many people. So I don't know how to quantify it. They've certainly made a lot of money, so there's that.
As for services and Apple's focus on it: is it helping anybody? It doesn't help me. Instead I get nag screens and advertisements I didn't used to get. I get pushed to a "subscription model" I don't want. I get second rate versions of Spotify, Google Maps.
And I've seen Apple evolve from eWorld through iTools through dotMac, MobileMe, iCloud... I'm not the only person whose mouth those services left with a bad taste.
If Apple truly is, first and foremost, a "services company" as the OP pondered, then I think they really have their work cut for them.
Actually i agree, for the "nervous" part. I will be happy when greed inside decision-making processes crumbles over their heads. Who knows, may be failure is needed indeed to restart Product Thinking that Jobs was famous for.:)
Would you say they are not good at services or data science? I personally think it's the latter. Maps and Siri are pretty heavy with ML, and I won't expect these to shine compared to say Google. Services like itunes, icloud, App store, etc. are much less reliant on great algorithms, but more so the packaging and infrastructure.
Hi there. The reality is this was totally predictable. In the beginning things were simple. UI/UX is focused on creating the prototype and actual implementation was done by front-end programmers. But nobody likes to pay extra, so why not make designers code? Yes, i am one of those designers, old enough to remember frustration with tables and inline css. So if you asking your self why there are no more websites that are beautiful and usable? This is your answer: Is very rare someone with artistic abilities to have "programmers mind". Is enough frustration to deal with browser layout to expect someone to do full stack front-end dev. In the end you have mediocre designers (without basic understanding of color theory or typography) that are mediocre programmers (using all the cool JS tech, without CS basic understanding), so websites have interactive technology with design interaction from 2005:)
Well... I don't want to force someone to do that, but I'd really really really prefer if design people actually did code sometimes, so they understood the reality of what they're 'designing' from an implementation standpoint.
It may take you 6-8 hours to mockup something that is ... logically impossible, which someone 'signs off' on, then 40 hours for someone else to try to cobble together - pushing back is 'combative' and 'negative', etc.
You know how designers don't like people who ask for stuff that "pops" and then want more "pop"? Designers 'designing' stuff that creates practical impossibilities or gaps in state, etc. - programming folks hate that just as much as you hate 'make it pop' requests.
Hey - cool - you "designed" a form with 3 elements! The actual implementation options are 17 for that area. What should happen with 0 selected? Do we want notifications or help text?
Nice - that design looks really slick with 3 checkboxes in a pulldown, but you've sort of just invented a widget that doesn't really exist, will create accessibility nightmares, and you didn't show how this should behave on mobile/tablets.
The number of design people I've met who can actually reconcile clean design with real implementation, usability and accessibility issues addressed is very small.
I can sure relate to this. Or my favorite question: "What happens when I click that magnifying glass in the top nav?" and they say, "Oh, I didn't think about that!"
I doubt the real answer is for the designer to code (though it's nice when you get to work with someone like that), but you sure have to ask a lot of questions, and you never manage to check everything up front. Especially anything that doesn't immediately open a new web page, at every step there are just so many input possibilities: the user clicks this button or that, clicks elsewhere, types a bit here then a bit there, presses Enter, presses Tab, presses Escape, has a screenreader, is on a phone, is on an iPad, gets an error, gets 1000 results, changes the dropdown that enabled this other control. . . . I guess you do the best you can imagining flows up front, but plan on having some iteration as you discover gaps in the design.
> I doubt the real answer is for the designer to code
I'm not saying they have to code 100% of everything, but I'm really fed up with having to deal with that sort of "well gosh that's not our issue!" hands off sort of 'design' folks.
Internal design teams that work in the same building as the implementors/devs... maybe a different experience. I'm sometimes brought in and given "mockups" from an external team, done in whatever tool of the day they use, that have little bearing on real world web implementation.
it's apparently beneath some of these folks to learn css/html and use ... you know... a web browser to mock up a web site. i don't care how much 'freedom' some tool gives you, you're just punting the hard implementation to someone else.
Came off a project recently like this - the original team had done 'weeks' of 'design' and 'planning' with an external design firm. "but plan on having some iteration as you discover gaps in the design" sounds nice, but in their mind, they'd already "thought a lot about it" 8 weeks earlier, so any implementation issues I found were somehow... my fault? my problem? "these guys are a really strong design firm..." who don't seem to have ever actually implemented anything they design, from what I could tell.
> But nobody likes to pay extra, so why not make designers code?
From the other side of the aisle, this isn't what happened.
I want to preface this by saying that in general I like designers, but there are things about your good friends that you find annoying and tease them about. So now for some teasing.
What happened was that a bunch of up-in-the-clouds designers kept denigrating (directly or by omission) developers in front of their bosses and we got tired of it. The response to "why can't you guys figure this out? It's really simple" was "Well if you're so smart why don't you implement it?"
Constructively, that translates to engineering the situation so the designers felt our pain. But on a particularly bad day the sentiment tended to be more like "choke on it."
Nice:)) Very Nice. Actually i understand it, so much that i fired a lot of brogrammers, because in the end a lot of the "heavy and impossible work" of programmers is to implement someone else's real hard work and claiming the check. So now we are all suffering together.
Not to brag about it, but those things get me a little annoyed. Not a single word that this is found near Bulgaria territory, if i am not mistaken. If something is found near Murica or Greatest Britain of all, we will be reading a different titles.:)
This is cool for animation demo. From UX stand point is almost a joke. Apple intentionally is using animations only when user attention is low. My problem with window managers are not animations. My problem is that this is old paradigm and desktop needs to be reinvented by extending and changing user experience. 3d interaction with information objects in virtual space is future. But the big companies don't care anymore. They are focused in cashing the cow and capitalizing on old ideas of Apple and S.Jobs. There is a big room for innovation but centralized investment in R&D and testing are needed. I have tinkered with this and generated some ideas, but after estimation the result is that this is too big for small dev teams. So we will wait GUI to become cool again and wait for someone with imagination and skill to penetrate the walls of reason and get the blessing from excel gods.:)
> From UX stand point is almost a joke [...] ideas
Any favorite ideas or literature pointers?
I've an interest in coding in VR/AR. But even pushing current HMDs with custom stacks, it's not, for me, yet competitive with screens. Since the hardware market is being so dysfunctionally slow to do the easy, I'm stuck to doing hybrids. Blending of screen 2D, anaglyph, and HMD. Laptop with kludged optical hand and chopstick tracking. Annoying eyewear swapping.
Point is, I've been surprised by how unhelpfully limited the 3D UX literature I've seen has been. It's almost like no one has pursued it with serious intent. That "almost a joke" resonated. Perhaps by the time someone struggles with interface devices, and a bit of code, well, you have your paper or thesis, and there's no big market, so you're done.
But with improving web dev and python ecosystems, it's now more plausible than ever to do full-stack reinvention, devices to environment to apps. No market, but something for itch scratching and joy. Still daunting, but seemingly small-team/silly-person accessible. But I'm missing that warm fuzzy feeling of knowing just how I'm positioned wrt an organized professional research effort. And the collaboration.
> 3d interaction with information objects in virtual space is future
Perhaps it is because we're interacting with 3D objects in real space all the time. Unfortunately we're still lacking a convenient and widely available device to interact with virtual objects. VR/AR helmets are not convenient. <sarcasm>Imagine the success of 2D desktops if we had to wear sensor gloves instead of using mice and touchpads</sarcasm>. Even them were not optimal. Touching a screen with a finger was so better (for low precision pointing) that for some people it's the only interaction device with a computing device.
To be fair this doesn't necessarily mean AR/VR is the future. It could mean a physical designed for computing like Dynamicland or a single device that has intelligent real-time understanding of the physical world that isn't and hmd or a phone.
I like the design. Its cool. But i cannot see the price to be reasonable. Personally if someone wants local server - mail with be not enough of a selling point for 499usd. So why not buy ds218+ (300usd) from synology and two 4tb NAS hard disks (200usd)- 500 usd? The setup is dead simple. It has mail server backup and media software.
