When Apple revealed the iPhone in late 2007, with its touch screen and several native apps, some technology writers dubbed it the “Jesus Phone”. It has sold more than 1.5bn units.
This makes the iPod the musical and technological equivalent of John the Baptist. The device was quickly superseded, but it prepared the way for the great innovations to come. It showed consumers that technology could be beautiful and that the most enthralling possessions could fit in the palm of a hand.
Tag: Apple
The company has made it extremely difficult to use web-based technology on its platforms, and it hopes developers won’t bother
Apple’s move to restrict development on iOS will be interesting to watch.
The evolution of the Apple keynote is understandable. Apple is a global company that changed computing by putting little ones in all our pockets. Their new phones are big deals by virtue of the fact that they’ve sold more than 2.2 billion iOS devices since their debut in 2007. iPhones changed how we communicate with one another and seek information; they’ve addicted us, tethering us to our jobs and helping us feel both attached to and alienated from one another. So it makes sense that we pay attention when the company dreams up a new iteration. Plus, they’re exceedingly shiny and the cameras can turn any point-and-click amateur taking photos of their goofy dog (me!) into Annie Leibovitz.
Ive, Apple’s Chief Design Officer, is leaving the company. He leaves a legacy that made its products hard to repair and impossible to upgrade.
I wonder what the outcome would be if the design process started with sustainability and developed from there? I like Jason Kottke’s measured approach to this change.
Apple claims that AirPods are building a “wireless future.” Many people think they’re a symbol of disposable wealth. The truth is bleaker.
Describing the Apple AirPod headphones as if from the future, Caroline Haskins breaks down the impact of the device. She touches on the quality of production, the materials used, the short battery life, the inability to properly recycle them, their social standing and their position within the Apple ecosystem. This post is similar one on Amazon Echo. Is this another one to add to Jony Ive’s list of legacies?
Eighteen years after its launch, iTunes is going the way of the 8-track—but we’ll never forget the joy of compiling our first digital music libraries
Alyssa Bereznak discusses the growth and demise of iTunes.
Really, in a lot of ways, the iPad Mini feels like the one true iPad, and the others are all just blown-up siblings that don’t quite know how to take advantage of their larger displays.
How IBM bet big on the microkernel being the next big thing in operating systems back in the ’90s—and spent billions with little to show for it.
Another interesting piece of technology history that has been simply incorporated into ever present.
Traditional maps are half shapes, half labels—but satellite and AR maps drop the shapes, and keep just the labels. And this spells trouble for Apple… Remember what we saw earlier: Apple is making lots of shapes out of its imagery. But Apple doesn’t appear to making labels out its imagery. Nor does Apple appear to be making labels out of its shapes.
Justin O’Beirne reports on Apple’s New Maps and considers whether they have closed the gap on Google or produced the wrong map altogether?
📓 Seams vs. Stitches
In an article discussing the state of Macbooks and iPads, Baldur Bjarnason discusses the difference between seams and stitches when it comes to design:
Seamlessness isn’t pretty; it’s opaque and obscures the underlying structures of the tool you are making.
A stitch or a seam isn’t ugly; it’s an affordance that exposes the design, construction, and make of what you’ve made in a way that lends itself to learning.
Beauty and uniformity are two entirely independent characteristics. Seamlessness can look ugly and stitches can be pretty.
Good design can only be seamless when it has just one job to do. Add more jobs and seamlessness becomes a hindrance.source
Last year, Apple outraged independent technicians when they updated the Iphone design to prevent third party repair, adding a “feature” that allowed handsets to detect when their screens had been swapped (even when they’d been swapped for an original, Apple-manufactured screen) and refuse to function until they got an official Apple unlock code.
Now, this system has come to the MacBook Pros and Imac Pros, thanks to the “T2 security chip” which will render systems nonfunctional after replacing the keyboard, screen, case, or other components, until the a proprietary Apple “configuration tool” is used to unlock the system.
Even by the time of the Macintosh, Apple’s strengths were becoming clear. The company was not the trailblazer: the Apple II was not the first microcomputer, and the Macintosh was not the first with a GUI.
Instead, it was the company that brought concepts to the mainstream. And that is what it did almost 20 years after the Macintosh, with the product that remade Apple and put it on the path to becoming the world’s first trillion-dollar company: the iPod.
When the decision was made to move away from Google, and create their service, my feeling is that it was on a less-than-ideal timeline and they needed to come up with a solution that would get it out the door. Partnering with a bunch of companies to launch who have all the data you need makes a lot of sense when you have no experience or infrastructure to do this, and it’s beginning to look a little embarrassing that the iPhone can’t do turn by turn directions.
Collin, not sure if you have read this post from last year by Justin O’Beirne. He discusses the addition of ‘Areas of Interests’ to Google Maps and explains that the challenge for Apple is that these AOIs aren’t collected — they’re created. And Apple appears to be missing the ingredients to create AOIs at the same quality, coverage, and scale as Google.