Cool New Thing was not distracting from these things.
> Polish and Attention To Detail
gets harped on at Apple because they are so much better than everything else (and charge $$$ for it), that customers and opponents don't tolerate mistakes. Maybe being perfect is actually, really too hard to reach?
The feel of the keyboard is indeed subjective (I happen to like the feel of the keyboard on the new MacBook Pro), but in this case Apple genuinely built a buggy keyboard, so much so that people are writing songs about it [1].
> if you assume that Apple genuinely believed they had a good design that just needed some tweaking to correct.
Well, that's the point where I'd call Apple's judgement into question. They should have put the breaks on new releases with the keyboard until they had a clearer picture of what was going on.
> Despite all the HN comments, Apple's made an absolute killing and charges FAR FAR higher margins for their products in part because they design them so normal people don't get totally f'd over.
Explains the butterfly keyboards: Can't get fucked over if you can't type anything to fuck yourself over!
>Funny, because I thought that the whole point of buying an Apple product is that even if you lose features and interoperability, it's incredibly well polished and thought out.
Actually you only lose features you wouldn't want in the first place and would drag the whole thing down (less battery life, bulkier, etc). Not having FM radio for example is like not having a floppy disk drive an modern PCs.
As for "incredibly well polished and thought out" it still is. For one, there's much more to a mobile OS than graphic design. How it works and feels is much more important than how it looks ("design is how it works").
Second, most of those are some guy's pet peeves, not genuine problems. If he cannot understand why a red carret matches blue text, that doesn't make it into a genuine problem. Same if he didn't get the memo that drop shadows are used to add a depth to the UI layers and thinks they are stray leftovers.
> Apple has released flawed products in the past, but they rarely (never?) include emerging tech that isn't polished enough for mainstream consumption.
I'm not sure "they screw up well-established and fully-functional tech rather than new, innovative, and risky tech" is really that good a compliment.
> Funny that when apple announced the changes, they made it sound like they were being altruistic.
Apple (and several other big tech companies) do that every time they have to give up a modicum of control or are forced to admit wrongdoing.
They will deny critical design glass in their hardware but "altruisticly" open up free repairs for a few months so their customers don't realise they're effectively just making use of their warranty when these flaws come to light. I'm pretty sure they still haven't admitted that the butterfly keyboard was a mistake.
Every time a big company pretends to care about their customers, look for lawsuits or product flaws, especially if they're in a duopoly position like Google vs Apple or Microsoft vs Apple.
> It always amused me how Apple is capable of producing so quality hardware and has so bright ideas in design, but makes so awful lot of questionable decisions in software.
> I have a MacBook Air and delete key is only 3mm apart from power key and I mishit it from time to time.
Am I the only one who thinks the first sentence is a bit sarcastic?
If Apple had released computers with the touch bar above the existing physical function keys, everyone would love it and other companies would provide a similar feature, the same way that they have all converged on the same industrial design as what Apple pioneered 20 years ago.
Instead, Jony Ive insisted on the touch bar replacing the function keys, and here we are. At least the butterfly switches are finally dead. (It only took years of worldwide embarrassment and Ive's departure to make it happen!)
>Apple's brand trades a lot on having extremely well finished products with very polished experiences
I don't fully agree with this. Did you have the first version of the iPhone? No copy and paste? WTF.
Antenna signal dropping because "you're holding it wrong!"? WTF.
The only thing you can hold to the apple brand without any criticism is the industrial design of the packaging and look of their products has been consistent and un-matched.
There are plenty of UX issues that have arisen that take away from the polished experience.
Sure I like their products, but im not deluded to think that they are beyond reproach.
> My impression of prominent criticism of the early iPhone was that it was shallow and self serving. The things competitors were saying about it, like implying it wouldn't be successful because people really wanted a real keyboard, seemed ridiculous as a serious rational.
That wasn't a ridiculous idea at all at the time. The lack of tactile feedback was (and is) a legitimate industrial design concern, and it had a learning curve that was difficult for many people.[1] I had many customers at the time who demanded continued support for their blackberries because of the difficulty they had with the iPhone keyboard. Heck, even I chose to go with an HTC device that had a hard keyboard, because I found it easier.
Everyone now finds modern on-screen keyboards to be intuitive, partially because they've improved and they're larger, but also because people understand how they work. At the time of the iPhone launch, people didn't understand auto-correct or how they didn't have to worry about how their thumbs were larger than the keys.
Even Jobs himself admitted there was a learning curve: "Once you learn to trust the keyboard, it’s a better keyboard."[0]
> "Apple has lost all credibility by being utterly unwilling to admit their shortcomings. We had to wait years and years for the butterfly keyboard to drop, for magsafe and SD slot to be reintroduced."
How long did you have to wait for Google to revive Reader, for Reddit to undo 'new Reddit', for Microsoft to revert the Windows UX hodgepodge and Microsoft account requirement and telemetry, for Facebook to put your timeline back to friends and chronological order without ads, for Linux distros to remove SystemD, and all the other much-maligned changes (Google News, Twitter timeline, Wayland, Ubuntu snaps, Google Maps UX, car manufacturers and touchscreens...)?
"Apple took a long time to fix their disliked changes" has to go against the backdrop of "other (tech) companies never do it at all".
Can you spot the 'butterfly keyboard' or the 'touchbar' in there? The drop in sales forcing them to change? I can't. 2015, 2016 (touchbar), 2017 and 2018 look pretty similar to me.
> I have never been an Apple fan but I'll say this, they generally treat their customers far better than the competition.
It took a considerable amount of time until Apple admitted design flaws in iDevices (iPhones and Macbooks recently). Antennagate, Bendgate, Batterygate, the list goes on. I'm typing this on a MBP where the coating went kaboom.
> Throughout the years, apple consistently delivers great design. They seem to always define (or at least popularize) a new trend, which then storms the world and everyone copies it
To the loss of everyone. This is the same company that introduced disappearing scrollbars, just one of many dumb design decisions.
What modern design seems to forget, is that at the end of the day, people actually want to USE the interface, not just look at it.
> What frustrates me the most is that Apple never admits a mistake.
They have backtracked from decisions made, several times, and admitted to mistakes too. Apple Maps is a good example. MobileMe, the return of buttons to the iPod shuffle, price cut on iPhone... same.
The problem is that what you or I think is a mistake, it might not be one in the eyes of Apple.
A lot of the frustration I see these days can be summed up as "Apple no longer is making a product that I like, therefore it is making products that nobody likes".
Well, maybe. Time will tell. But I think they have a very clear vision about how they want their computers to look and feel (same for iPhones) and they are heading there full-speed. For some customers it will be a deal breaker, for others it might be what they need to jump ship and buy a Mac or upgrade from a Macbook Air to a more profitable Macbook Pro.
>> I assume Apple is a rational organization equipped with a better understanding than I have of its products. I know - big assumption - but let's assume it's true. What reasons would Apple as a company have for improving the keyboard, and what reasons would Apple have for not improving the keyboard?
Your question has already been answered by Apple with the current generation of problematic keyboards.
They already had a mature, reliable keyboard that felt pretty good and was not noisy. It was not "broke" and did not need "fixing".
They presumably chose to "improve" it with the current one so that their computers could be a little bit thinner and that Jony Ive could brag about the new technology in a video during a keynote.
> They'd be dumb to pause and say "oh yeah we were stupid, here's your old toys back."
Maybe I'm weird, but my respect for a company that did that would go way up, not down.
Obviously they wouldn't say "we were stupid", but I'd absolutely appreciate an admission along the lines of, "during our design journey over the past X years, we've realized our customers prefer having a full function key row on their keyboard / more ports / MagSafe / etc., so we've listened and are bringing them back!" To me, that signals a group of folks who know they are fallible, listen to customers, and do their best to meet customer needs.
But of course admitting those sorts of things wouldn't be consistent with Apple's brand. Apple is all about "we know better than you know what you want and can do no wrong". Which is fine, and seems to have created a lot of success for them, but it's always turned me off.
a Cool New Thing
> touchbars without escape keys,
a Cool New Thing
> HomePod
a Cool New Thing
Cool New Thing was not distracting from these things.
> Polish and Attention To Detail
gets harped on at Apple because they are so much better than everything else (and charge $$$ for it), that customers and opponents don't tolerate mistakes. Maybe being perfect is actually, really too hard to reach?
reply