I voted the way I did because Altavista->Google seems larger (and more useful) to me than N80->iPhone. But I know that some people will feel entirely the other way around.
The iPhone is a glorified Blackberry with shackles added. The iPad is a Blackberry with a larger screen, and shackles. iTunes is "Napster with a way to pay the artist". The iPod itself is "a walkman with a hard drive".
Apple hasn't done anything original, or unique. They've made incremental improvements, to the point where iTunes was briefly the first-and-only usable service in the paying-for-downloads market, but in every case they've been rapidly eclipsed by other companies not suffering from their ideological blinders and their obsessive need to prevent the user from doing anything *useful*.
In Apple's defence I'd say that they've been excellent at making things polished to the point where they appeal to the mass market.
I used several MP3 players before the iPod came out, and none were as usable as it was. Same with Blackberries and the iPhone - the touch interface is better than anything I've seen from RIM (although personally I prefer various things about Android, arguably you wouldn't have seen those changes to the smarphone market if Apple hadn't dragged it forward).
They make kit that's not shit and embarrassing to explain to non-spoddy types.
So many conversations contain the phrase "I'm sorry. Computers are just rubbish." and yet we put up with it. (And of course computers being rubbish and hateful keeps me in work)
You know, when the Android phone did one or other thing (pulling in another GCalendar or something equally trivial) I actually found myself waiting for the other shoe to drop. As if in return for some consumer device working properly I had been so conditioned to cynical disappointment by the general hatefulness of the things that I fully expected the thing to catch fire out of spite.
Yes. They make computer appliances. I find this offensive sometimes (I want something I can tinker with), but I also understand that this makes them better for the general population.
I believe it's still true that the Mac Pro I had until recently was the most capable and reliable Unix workstation I've used. (out of a NeXT, a couple of currant-buns, one or two HPUX boxen and a set of Deadrat and FreeBSD machines)
The Mac Mini is nearly as good, but it's let down by the speed of the HD.
But the same flaws exist with Apple. E.g., my gf and I wanted to play a video that was on her IPod on my computer. So I went to copy the file, and was faced with a folder full of incomprehensible filenames. Maybe I had to install ITunes? But even there, we weren't sure if it would end up syncing with her device, modifying what was on there.
I've seen OS X crash ("it's a driver problem"). I've seen an Apple laptop refuse to wake up from sleep, and refusing to reboot until the battery was left to run out (because you can't even take the battery out). When I first tried to use OS X, I didn't know what the red/yellow/blue traffic lights were meant to do, because I didn't even get any popup text with the mouse.
An IPhone couldn't even do something as simple as copy and paste for years, and I believe still can't run anything like Swype. And you have to explain to people that they've now got to charge their phone every day "I'm sorry, that's how smartphones [apparently] are". If someone's got an IPod Shuffle, you have to explain that their replacement headphones have to be bought from Apple.
Nothing here is anything worse than problems with other companies, but it's also no better - it's all the same kind of embarrassing stuff you have to explain to non-spoddy types.
Useful? Apple has long had strengths in education, with writers, in music production, graphic design, and in publishing. All areas where the quality and attention-to-detail that characterise Apple products are appreciated.
"Always been" is a bit strong. Adobe may have owned the high-end pixel-pushing market with Photoshop, but Illustrator spent a long time playing catchup with Freehand, before Adobe twice bought Freehand, and eventually killed it. The DTP market was ruled for years by PageMaker (later bought by Adobe and killed), Framemaker (later bought by Adobe and turned into a niche product), and Quark, before Adobe introduced InDesign.
For professional video editing, Adobe's Premiere is an also-ran in a world of Avid and Final Cut. And Adobe do nothing in music recording and production.
And most of the above would be running on Apple hardware for serious work.
Not why you bring up "power user" and "custom workflow", since both would apply to high-end use of Apple kit.
Not why you bring up "power user" and "custom workflow
Because Apple actively cripples non-default workflows and removes all ways for a power user to do things by a different, faster, or more efficient way, of course.
Mac's have shipped with automation software for almost twenty years. Most applications are scriptable, and custom workflows can be developed with regular Unix scripting languages, or with GUI tools like Automator. Macs ship with a rich Unix userland, with most of the tools and languages that you'd expect.
Microsoft and Adobe apps, among many others, are highly scriptable on the Mac.
In what way does Apple "cripple non-default workflows and remove all ways for power users to do things by a different, faster, or more efficient way"?
working in education and working on the set up of a county wide windows active directory covering three academies and their associated primary schools, we had a request for one lab of mac machines for the art department. They got their machines, but i'm still trying to get them to integrate into our AD setup and actually do something useful. They might be nice to look at, and work as standalone machines, but see if you actually try and get them to play nicely with others, they just suck.
The AD integration tool they supply, you can see 1000 objects. That's it. It doesn't distinguish between users or computers, and it definately doesn't use the directory structure we put in place. I gave up in disgust and left it to a point where i have more time.
well in this case yes, it's usefulness does depend on it's ability to play well with others. We have it so that a student can go to any machine in the building, and they get their home drives and preferences given to them. In the mac lab they always have to go to the same machine, and all the files are stored locally. We've already got the infrastructure in place, so it'd be nice if we didn't have to reinvent the wheel. Given the scope of the what we do, we don't have the time currently to devote to getting it all working together.
after reading your post, I'm going to add to my "google is the best improvement in the past 10 years" to saying that Apple may well be the best improvement for the next 10, simply because it pays the artist.
Except there are other services that pay the artist more, are more user-friendly, and produce a better product.
iTunes was the first product that got record companies to start doing what everyone had said they should be doing for half a decade - but it wasn't an original idea, it still isn't a good implementation of the idea, and other people have done it better, since, in ways that are better for the artists because they involve less Apple Tax.
well I'm just hoping that there will be some competition, amazon and apple are such 900 pound gorillas that you wonder if they care about innovation sometimes.
Rhapsody and Amazon are the big ones. Even the Zune store pays more than iTunes.
With iTunes' market share, I would have thought that artists' earnings from iTunes were higher than elsewhere.
Total earnings, maybe - iTunes making up 65% of the market does tend to indicate that you're going to get those smaller pieces *more often* from them, and that could easily add up to more total money.
But you still earn more *per purchase* if you don't sell via Apple. If your product is available in two places, the one that isn't iTunes makes you more per sale.
All of the big players - iTunes, Amazon, Zune, Napster - pay out 70%. Some of the smaller online retails pay around 60%. The real shocker is how little artists earn from streaming services like Spotify.
Who pays out more than iTunes? (Other than selling on your own website, of course.)
Apple skim 30% off micro purchases and refuse to allow people to link to their sites so that all updates have to be bought through Apple so they get their money. It's pretty incidious.
Honest question - what Apple product first replaced the WIMP interface? (If you mean phones, even mainstream cheap feature phones weren't following WIMP long before Apple; and tablets followed on from phone UIs, not that Apple were first in tablets anyway - or do you mean something else?)
I haven't kept close track of locked-down tech I'm not going to pay extra for anyway, but . . . The "wheel" control on the IWalkman may have been the very first, but the whole "gestural" interface of the iOS is outside the box.
The stunning backwardness of user interface has been a hobby horse of mine for a while. If you went back in your time machine, and took someone from the audience of the famous Douglas Englebart demo in 1968, and sat him (probably was a him) in front of Windows 7 or OSX, he'd know exactly what it was, and what to do with it.
In the longer run, it is incredibly important that Joe user now has the concept that there can be different sorts of interfaces, that WindowsIconsMousePulldownmenus =/= interface. It's one less obstacle for the next Great Idea.
Yes true they were first with multitouch (and I assume therefore the gestures?). I don't deny that, I'm just saying it wasn't the first or only change away from WIMP - phones had already moved well away from WIMP, as well as not using the mouse. So I see it as one of many evolutions in input. (My 5800 doesn't even have multitouch, and I get on just fine - to me, touchscreen itself is the far more significant change in input devices for phones, which predated Apple; and I'd rather have a resistive touchscreen, so I don't have to smear my food over the screen when I'm eating;).)
Also note that gestures aren't a replacement for WIMP - I have multitouch gestures on the touchpad of my Windows 7 Samsung N220, even though it's a WIMP GUI still of course. It's more a part of the input device, I'd say.
Whatever one thinks of the wheel, I don't see that this can count as a move away from WIMP, because mp3 players (and audio players before that) never used such interfaces. Again this sums up my view of Apple - it's fair enough saying of a company that a particular innovation was great, or a particular specific thing was done first. But with Apple, it always has to be overblown to saying things like it completely changed everything, or one particular "first" was the most important change ever.
Let's congratulate Apple for being first with multitouch. Let's also congratulate all the other companies who were first with things like touchscreens, running apps, Internet access on phones, GPS, mapping software, built in cameras, designing the CPUs that power them, developing the network infrastructure that makes it all work etc.
I agree - and there's also the point that Google is still the most used search engine by far. But for phones? Nokia themselves continued to produce improved phones since the N80 (Symbian alone actually continued to outsell Apple's phones, until Nokia themselves said they were phasing it out). And the number one high end phone platform today is, of course, from Google (with Nokia still leading at the low end).
The market that Apple lead in is mp3 players - but being the biggest doesn't mean you did anything revolutionary (as Mac OS fans have always being saying regarding Windows!) I got an 8GB mp3 player from Sandisk for £40 - the similarly priced Apple offering had 2GB, no memory card slot, no user interface at all, unless you count the awkward one on the custom headphones... and I presume would have required the use of ITunes, rather than just presenting itself as a removable drive and just working :)
Also consider how (IIRC) Google got to be number one in search with virtually zero marketing whatsoever, basically through word of mouth, when they were a small company. In the same timeframe, Apple are a massive company, and the media are hyping their products even before they are announced.
Invisible innovation maybe? But there would be no iPhone, no smartphones at all, without 3G network technology, which really arises out of Qualcomm innovation. I guess that all builds on Nokia innovation, but that's older than 10 years ago..
there would be no iPhone, no smartphones at all, without 3G network technology
The first two iPhones didn't have 3G, in fact when the iPhone2 was released Nokia were launching the 5800 which had 3G and was better in many respects.
3G is a lot less important to modern phones (or indeed modern computing) than, for example, ARM chips. For which we can thank the BBC Micro. Well, sorta, anyway.
I love my Nokia 5800 :) And I remember being confused over all the headlines in the media when the IPhone got 3G. Never mind Nokia - even my previous 2005-era dirt cheap feature phone had 3G (it had crappy battery life though. Oh wait, so does the IPhone!).
I agree about ARM - seem to be one of the more underrated companies in media coverage.
My 5800 is currently in use by miss_s_b because she dropped her N8 into a large glass of water while it was charging-this was not a happy making event. But she's actually liking it because the speakers and a fw other things she uses regularly are better-I was never as keen on the music player aspects of things, so the N8 suits me well.
But yeah, I haven't checked but I'm sure my Sony Ericsson Walkman brick had 3G when I got it. It also had bluetooth and a bunch of other features that they're still running "there's an app for that" adverts. That's what gets to me the most, TV adverts talking about revolutionary new features I've had on phones for more'n 5 years.
The back end stuff for businesses was massive. The ability to have your home computer look like your work computer and have the skills AND PROGRAMS transfer across? Huge. The unchanging UI for 8 years, universal across "all computers" with a rounding error's worth of non-matching ones? HUGE.
XP defined "minimum computer literacy" for a generation.
Sorry, Windows XP was a fantastic success because nothing better came after it for 8 years? Surely that's an indictment of Windows Vista, rather than an endorsement of Windows XP?
And while it sounds like there were plenty of useful improvements with Windows XP (I skipped straight to Mac OS via flavours of Linux so I've never used it in anger), are you really saying that the single thing that changed the world most in the last 10 years is something that let people share spreadsheet files easier, rather than, say, the Internet (e.g. wikipedia and imdb), or suddenly being able to listen to shitloads of music wherever you were?
It was such a fantastic success *that* nothing better came along for 8 years.
And yes, I think "the simple, consistent, easy interface into computers, which was the same everywhere you went, and yes happened to give you access to all the internet stuff in the same way everywhere" was pretty fucking significant.
It's not that it *couldn't* have been anything else, but it *was* XP.
I don't know if I think it's quite as huge as you say, but I will pitch in with the XP love. Clown-car graphics aside (which turn off anyway and wasn't that just the first thing everyone did?) it has made me very, very happy.
Oh, XP was lovely. It took the "just works technically" awesomeness of Win2k and sanded down the corners to make it easier to use. And personally, I never minded the interface.
Windows 7 feels much the same way to me. Most of the time it's possible to forget it's even there.
I am very curious about Windows 8 for pretty much that reason. I am wondering what they are going to do to it, and whether it will make it worse, or if they will surprise me...
There are so few ways in which it could be any more perfect.
I have Windows 7 at home, so that I can play Half Life 2 and Plants vs Zombies. Almost every day I swear at it for annoying the hell out of me.
It still reboots in the middle of your game, because it applied updates in the background and didn't bother to alert you. It still refuses to install all large updates, because the partition size is too small (I gave it 20Gb, and put everything else on another partition -- how much space do you need?!). Oh, and in the time it reboots once, I can cold boot my netbook three or four times.
The mouse jerks all over the place and I cannot get it to sort itself out. Nor can I figure out how to apply X mouse settings.
The command line is shit; there's only one desktop; I can't move windows around by pressing alt and clicking anywhere in the window; I can't transfer files back and forth from my Linux partitions; every single application you install has its own updater sitting in the background trying to update; should I mention the pain I went through to install the damn thing? Windows still uses a registry, about the most user unfriendly way to store settings in existence, and sometimes you're forced to edit the registry to fix things; DirectX; I have some funny bug where all the menus on the task bar appear 10 pixels above, and I can't select anything any more, but I didn't change anything! Aaaargh!! >_<
Any of the above might be fixable with 3rd party programs, I don't know. I understand that not every one will feel this way, and might not miss or even know about the features that others feel should be there, but it just makes me feel that Win7 provides a really shoddy and basic experience, that's actually less functional to me than Win2K. I despise every minute that I'm in Windows 7, but not in Plants vs Zombies.
The mouse isn't jerky so much as the acceleration is all wrong, and I can't figure out what to change.
I needed to touch the registry by hand to install Windows (that is, if I didn't want to install XP and upgrade to 7), and there have been other things I've needed to change. The fact that it exists at all despite being a user catastrophe for 15 years is an issue.
I said reboot, not boot. Either way, it's still slower than Mac OS or Linux (admittedly not all distributions are fast yet).
Powershell? I'll have to look into that. Although it probably won't fit, since I only gave Windows 20Gb of hard drive to play with </snark>.
DirectX is not awesome, it's terrible. So bad that it's positively an anti-feature. Microsoft's amazingly incompetent handling of DirectX has pretty much led to stagnation in PC game design for several years, and a whole pile of graphics cards with a whole pile of features going unused. They got greedy, and though they could control the gaming market, but ended up fracturing it. Is it any surprise that most games are still being written for DirectX 9, because it's the only system guaranteed to capture most of the market?
I don't see why The Registry is a disaster. It's a central database of user and system settings that's designed entirely for programmatic access. If you're having to touch it at all then you're doing something you probably shouldn't be.
I'm not sure what your problem with DirectX is, as numerous people (including John Carmack, who knows waaaaay more about this stuff than I do) have said that it's a better interface for 3D than OpenGL is. Certainly, the first few versions were bad, but my understanding is that it's been a well-designed interfaced since about version 5.
I'm not certain what John Carmack's view on DirectX is, but I note that his as-yet unreleased idTech 6 engine still uses OpenGL.
The problem with DirectX is that Microsoft decided that they could get all the gamers onto Vista by making DX10 incompatible with XP with a few changes to the driver model (there was no good technical reason for doing so, especially since DX10 offered so little over DX9, Microsoft have even admitted this to be so). Unfortunately, Vista didn't attract the gamers, and many people continued to use XP, and were stuck with DX9. Videocard manufacturers designed their cards to use DX10, and then DX11, but very few games companies bothered to make use of the extra features (why, when more than half your market can't make use of them?). To add further friction, the XBox 360 uses a version of DX9, discouraging designing games with DX10 or 11, and so the XBox is complicit holding back PC gaming.
Even now, when many more people are using Win7 and DX11, games companies still aren't interested. DX was at one point great (unless you were an OpenGL fan), it was competitive, adding features, drove games design and promised to unify the market, but instead it did the opposite. DX became poisonous, and the game market is going to continue to stagnate for a while yet, until they start to trust Microsoft again (beyond the usual ways that we don't trust them).
Aaaah. I agree that they should have backported DX10 to XP. It does seem to have been entirely a marketing decision, and one destined to leave it basically unused by the mainstream.
Once XP dies off (it stops getting security updates in 2014) I suspect MS will continue to have this problem.
DirectX 10 not running on XP was painful when Vista was new, but I'm not sure it's a problem now?
I mean, surely most the people still using XP also aren't going to be the people who have the latest graphics cards anyway. Writing a game to require the latest hardware features is going to reduce your market anyway. (You can write games that work on older hardware, but you can support DirectX 9 and later versions too; both involve a bit more work.)
I've heard the argument that consoles hold back PC gaming in general - again, the hardware issue, but this would apply with non-MS consoles too.
On the other stuff, I think Ubuntu and Windows 7 are both great, and each have some minor advantages over the other in various areas. I'm not sure there's much of a difference in boot times (both are far slower than my old Amiga!), and Ubuntu if anything requires more reboots due to all the bloody updates all the time.
I believe Win7 adoption has been far better than Vista, with a large proportion of home users now using it, but I'd imagine that there are still a great many people using XP even with the latest graphics cards. Knowing how far some gamers go for performance, I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few went for XP claiming greater framerates (although I can't provide any data on that myself). And what about all those business users, running games after work? ;)
Ubuntu does claim to need rebooting fairly often, but the only time it's actually required is after installing a new kernel (and even that isn't set in stone). Often restarting X will be sufficient to bring any new libraries into play. Of course it's much easier to suggest to most users just to reboot, but it's mostly just a suggestion.
Incidentally, they've achieved 5 second boot times with Ubuntu now, with other distributions like Fedora are getting pretty fast too. I know it's not that impressive, considering how much faster these machines are compared to the Amiga, but it's not bad going. My netbook doesn't quite manage 5 seconds, but it's still pretty quick.
I've never had Win7 reboot on me without waiting for my sayso, and it lets you put off the next alert for hours at a time instead of having to click 'no, fuck off' the way I did every ten minutes with XP.
I know for a fact there's software available that lets you have multiple desktops (as my workmate uses it).
I haven't experienced your mouse problems. Maybe I just have an awesome mouse (it is a pretty awesome mouse).
Although you're obviously finding it harder to navigate around, I'm finding it easier than ever before with the awesome and very pretty 3D carousel you get with Win+Tab. Further to that I love the way I can click+drag a window that's maximised and it automatically puts it on window view for me to move it.
Can't speak for the more techie stuff 'cause I'm not a techie, but then, neither are most users of Win7 or indeed basically any mainstream OS, so I'd say the logical response on that front would be: it's not made for you, techie, go use Linux!
Windows 7 is fast, user friendly, and intuitive. System settings are more rather than less accessible, and things always go exactly where I expect them to. Even the little bells and whistles that I thought were pointless (like the window frame transparency and the way the toolbar does a fade into the foreground of items when you hover over them) actually turn out to be really useful for generally speeding up my user experience when trying to juggle a billion different things at work on a dual monitor set-up.
I'm not saying that any of your quibbles don't exist. I'm just saying that if most people don't have them, they're not major quibbles. The sad fact I've learned working in IS is that a problem in development world is only as big as the number of people affected by it.
I've never had Win7 reboot on me without waiting for my sayso, and it lets you put off the next alert for hours at a time instead of having to click 'no, fuck off' the way I did every ten minutes with XP.
The alert probably came up mid-game, and it rebooted when I was on flag 47 of survival endless. I was not happy. Anyway, it seems to want to reboot a lot.
I know for a fact there's software available that lets you have multiple desktops (as my workmate uses it).
I did say that 3rd party software might solve some of those problems, it usually does (e.g. something other than Internet Explorer, a better text editor, a better word processor assuming you didn't get Office bundled with your PC etc.) Since I'm not a regular windows user though, I don't necessarily know about it unless it's already on my machine and I can have a tinker round and find it.
I haven't experienced your mouse problems. Maybe I just have an awesome mouse (it is a pretty awesome mouse).
Mine is an awesome mouse (or was when I bought it 5-6 years ago). I needed to install Logitech's software to use all the buttons, whereas it just worked in Linux. The acceleration problem is that it doesn't feel the way it should, and no end of fiddling will fix it. I know that some systems handle things differently (e.g. Mac OS does many things differently to Windows, like how it handles fonts) and there is no objective best way, but it's annoying when you can't get something so basic just the way you like it.
Although you're obviously finding it harder to navigate around, I'm finding it easier than ever before with the awesome and very pretty 3D carousel you get with Win+Tab. Further to that I love the way I can click+drag a window that's maximised and it automatically puts it on window view for me to move it.
I've never encountered the 3D carousel, but that might be because I've always used alt-tab, and you say it's Win-tab. I'll try it out.
Can't speak for the more techie stuff 'cause I'm not a techie, but then, neither are most users of Win7 or indeed basically any mainstream OS, so I'd say the logical response on that front would be: it's not made for you, techie, go use Linux!
I do use Linux the rest of the time! This is what happened when I tried to use Windows for its primary purpose (games). Seriously, I actually went out and bought a copy of Windows, direct from Microsoft, giving them money! There are some places where Windows really should try harder, like at the very least recognising that I have a hard drive with a partition it can't read without a 3rd party driver, rather than just calling it free space (and would I like to format it?). It does sometimes feel like Microsoft are willfully ignorant.
Windows 7 is fast, user friendly, and intuitive. System settings are more rather than less accessible, and things always go exactly where I expect them to. Even the little bells and whistles that I thought were pointless (like the window frame transparency and the way the toolbar does a fade into the foreground of items when you hover over them) actually turn out to be really useful for generally speeding up my user experience when trying to juggle a billion different things at work on a dual monitor set-up.
I disagree with fast, Windows spends far too much time being slow (and I've not loaded anything except antivirus and anti spyware, so it's probably not that -- maybe it's Steam?). Intuitive is subjective, and from years of using Linux I've found myself doing things in a particular way. I'd imagine Mac OS users trying Windows might have a similar experience.
I'm not saying that any of your quibbles don't exist. I'm just saying that if most people don't have them, they're not major quibbles. The sad fact I've learned working in IS is that a problem in development world is only as big as the number of people affected by it.
Well, by intuitive I meant that there are quite a few things that work differently from XP, which I've been using for the best part of a decade, and yet I had no trouble whatsoever transferring.
"The ability to have your home computer look like your work computer and have the skills AND PROGRAMS transfer across? Huge."
Um, what was stopping people doing that with 2000?
XP was basically 2000 with the most hideous default UI in computing history tacked on. It did some stuff better (wireless networking for example), but nothing that couldn't have been handled in a service pack.
XP was also of course when IE became completely integrated into the OS, resulting in massive security holes which only got fixed in service pack 2 several years later..
Um, what was stopping people doing that with 2000?
2000 didn't "just work" in the way that XP did, and was both more expensive AND had all of the complicated business-networking stuff showing through everywhere.
When your work computer was 2000, your home computer was 98, or ME.
XP was basically 2000 with the most hideous default UI in computing history tacked on.
XP was improved-2000 with a completely new GUI, yes. That's kind of the definition of a lot of OS releases. (And yes, it was fairly ugly - but easy, mostly intuitively organised, and did a lot of things better. As you say)
As I said up above: "It's not that it *couldn't* have been anything else, but it *was* XP."
As of this posting, a complete wipe-out in Google's favour... and justifiably so. Apple may make pretty consumer electronics, even more usable ones with greater esthetics, but they're not in the business of saving lives or reinventing business. Google, however, has done both... in multiple fields, no less.
-- Steve hates the reality distortion field surrounding Apple, more than the company or its products.
Google gave people access to content and services for free. They gain advertising revenue from offering access to other people’s content. I find myself suspicious of the motivations of advertising-funded businesses — Google’s users are, in the large part, not their customers. They are just information-generating assets, to be sold to advertisers. There is something unpleasant about that.
Apple’s greatest gift to us is that it made it acceptable to pay for content online. The iTunes store, and the hardware devices that interact with its content, are Apple’s most important contribution to our culture. Without iTunes, the masses wouldn’t buy music online, and the music industry would be much less healthy than it is now. Without Apple’s strong negotiating position, mainstream music would still have DRM. And without people being conditioned to pay for music online, I don't think we would have the current mainstream acceptance of paying for television, films, and books in downloadable form.
So my vote goes to Apple, for giving artists and creators an income in a world where their content can be accessed through Google for free.
When I bought an mp3 a few years ago, I was surprised about how many different places were offering them for sale. I got it from Tesco, without DRM, I believe.
I'm also not sure what you mean about being conditioned to pay for it? Lots of people are still happily downloading for free.
Regarding reading - Apple's view of a future where you can only read something on their platform and hardware is not one I like. "Get the website app for your IPad/IPhone" is the new "Best Viewed In Internet Explorer" - except worse, as at least sites usually worked somewhat on other browsers.
Altavista was already outmoded in 1995 - Hotbot had better results. Google happened to be a couple of steps ahead of the rest of the market, rather than the expected one, so once large numbers of people started using the Internet, Google was the only choice, and they hired plenty of smart people to make sure they carried on being number one. And they've done plenty of clever things since then. But nothing as brave or trend-setting, or as unexpected, as what Apple have done.
Both of the companies you cite rely entirely on the infrastructure that makes their products work. I'd say the most important 'thing' in the last ten years has been the expansion of broadband and cellular broadband. Without either of those there is nothing that Apple or Google have made that would function as intended.
The defining feature of Google was that it was the cleanest, fastest-loading website around. That's less true these days, but it worked better than anything else on dial-up.
It's all symbiotic though innit? The infrastructure is important, but without the devices and apps to utilise it, people wouldn't have been interested in broadband.
I'm answering the poll a bit selfishly because Google's had a huge impact on my own life and Apple hasn't really. I've had a smartphone since 2005, and the one I have now is fairly similar to that one and I'm still perfectly happy with it; and I mostly buy music from Amazon or Spotify or even physical CDs.
But still. Google: unequalled search (including Images etc); webmail with some very clever interface features (especially over the last year or two) and unlimited free storage (back when its competitors gave you a measly couple of meg); maps (remember Streetmap and Multimap?) and Streetview (not just for navigation - we've used it to read phone numbers off shop fronts and read parking restrictions on signs before setting out); Google Docs (office suite probably comparable to Microsoft's ten years ago, but free, accessible anywhere, and real-time collaborative - do even the serious enterprise document-sharing tools do that yet?); Adwords (pretty much defined a new business model); Picasa (I'm not aware of anything else that's both an online photo-sharing site and an offline photo manager and editor, plus it has the facial recognition); Chrome; Andriod.
Apple make shiny things that are irritatingly closed and incompatible with other things.
I think I'm too biased to count my opinion as accurate, but it seems like iPods, etc, were very well done, but that surely it was only a matter of time before someone stumbled onto a portable music player or a portable phone that wasn't awful, if only by chance. Whereas it seemed everyone accepted that search and email were supposed to be non-functional, and people proposed pie-in-the-sky ideas, but google search or gmail might never have arrived if google didn't do them. I don't know.
In the context of google vs apple, I put microsoft because vast amounts of the things that both Apple and Google have done, have been done as a reaction to Microsoft. They both, in some different and some similar ways, have spent chunks of time defining themselves as not being MS.
I agree with the article - although even that's overstating the IPhone; the original model was actually lacking basic features that even bog standard feature phones had had for years. Internet and apps were novel around 2002, and standard by 2005. I believe Apple were the first with multitouch, and some people think it had the best browser at the time, but it was just yet another phone in an industry that was going through continual, inevitable and rapid advancement, both before and after 2007. By today's standards, the original IPhone is very dated, and I don't see how the later models are revolutionary over anything else. Some people like Apple phones, plenty more like other phones.
Most of the things said in praise about Apple come down to opinion - nothing wrong with that, I love a good OS/computer flamewar :) - but it shouldn't be conflated with factual claims about who did what first, or what effect things had on the market. (Personally I disagree with claims that they make good UIs, for example. And even for looks, I think my shiny black Nokia 5800 looks far cooler than anything that has a corporate logo plastered over the front of it.)
For me, I use Google's search every day, and Apple have no impact on me (other than the hype I read about them in the media... - I find a lot of tech news of limited use these days, the way everything is spun to be all about Apple). For people in general, I suspect that more people use something from Google, than something from Apple.
I can see some argument that Apple win because phones and mp3 players and computers are more useful to people than a search engine - but that argument would put many other companies ahead of Google too.
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andrewducker) wrote2011-08-28 09:58 pm
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Apple hasn't done anything original, or unique. They've made incremental improvements, to the point where iTunes was briefly the first-and-only usable service in the paying-for-downloads market, but in every case they've been rapidly eclipsed by other companies not suffering from their ideological blinders and their obsessive need to prevent the user from doing anything *useful*.
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I used several MP3 players before the iPod came out, and none were as usable as it was. Same with Blackberries and the iPhone - the touch interface is better than anything I've seen from RIM (although personally I prefer various things about Android, arguably you wouldn't have seen those changes to the smarphone market if Apple hadn't dragged it forward).
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So many conversations contain the phrase "I'm sorry. Computers are just rubbish." and yet we put up with it. (And of course computers being rubbish and hateful keeps me in work)
You know, when the Android phone did one or other thing (pulling in another GCalendar or something equally trivial) I actually found myself waiting for the other shoe to drop. As if in return for some consumer device working properly I had been so conditioned to cynical disappointment by the general hatefulness of the things that I fully expected the thing to catch fire out of spite.
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I believe it's still true that the Mac Pro I had until recently was the most capable and reliable Unix workstation I've used. (out of a NeXT, a couple of currant-buns, one or two HPUX boxen and a set of Deadrat and FreeBSD machines)
The Mac Mini is nearly as good, but it's let down by the speed of the HD.
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I've seen OS X crash ("it's a driver problem"). I've seen an Apple laptop refuse to wake up from sleep, and refusing to reboot until the battery was left to run out (because you can't even take the battery out). When I first tried to use OS X, I didn't know what the red/yellow/blue traffic lights were meant to do, because I didn't even get any popup text with the mouse.
An IPhone couldn't even do something as simple as copy and paste for years, and I believe still can't run anything like Swype. And you have to explain to people that they've now got to charge their phone every day "I'm sorry, that's how smartphones [apparently] are". If someone's got an IPod Shuffle, you have to explain that their replacement headphones have to be bought from Apple.
Nothing here is anything worse than problems with other companies, but it's also no better - it's all the same kind of embarrassing stuff you have to explain to non-spoddy types.
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The really useful media products have always been Adobe, not Apple.
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For professional video editing, Adobe's Premiere is an also-ran in a world of Avid and Final Cut. And Adobe do nothing in music recording and production.
And most of the above would be running on Apple hardware for serious work.
Not why you bring up "power user" and "custom workflow", since both would apply to high-end use of Apple kit.
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Because Apple actively cripples non-default workflows and removes all ways for a power user to do things by a different, faster, or more efficient way, of course.
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Microsoft and Adobe apps, among many others, are highly scriptable on the Mac.
In what way does Apple "cripple non-default workflows and remove all ways for power users to do things by a different, faster, or more efficient way"?
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The AD integration tool they supply, you can see 1000 objects. That's it. It doesn't distinguish between users or computers, and it definately doesn't use the directory structure we put in place. I gave up in disgust and left it to a point where i have more time.
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iTunes was the first product that got record companies to start doing what everyone had said they should be doing for half a decade - but it wasn't an original idea, it still isn't a good implementation of the idea, and other people have done it better, since, in ways that are better for the artists because they involve less Apple Tax.
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With iTunes' market share, I would have thought that artists' earnings from iTunes were higher than elsewhere.
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Rhapsody and Amazon are the big ones. Even the Zune store pays more than iTunes.
With iTunes' market share, I would have thought that artists' earnings from iTunes were higher than elsewhere.
Total earnings, maybe - iTunes making up 65% of the market does tend to indicate that you're going to get those smaller pieces *more often* from them, and that could easily add up to more total money.
But you still earn more *per purchase* if you don't sell via Apple. If your product is available in two places, the one that isn't iTunes makes you more per sale.
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Who pays out more than iTunes? (Other than selling on your own website, of course.)
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The "wheel" control on the IWalkman may have been the very first, but the whole "gestural" interface of the iOS is outside the box.
The stunning backwardness of user interface has been a hobby horse of mine for a while. If you went back in your time machine, and took someone from the audience of the famous Douglas Englebart demo in 1968, and sat him (probably was a him) in front of Windows 7 or OSX, he'd know exactly what it was, and what to do with it.
In the longer run, it is incredibly important that Joe user now has the concept that there can be different sorts of interfaces, that WindowsIconsMousePulldownmenus =/= interface. It's one less obstacle for the next Great Idea.
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Also note that gestures aren't a replacement for WIMP - I have multitouch gestures on the touchpad of my Windows 7 Samsung N220, even though it's a WIMP GUI still of course. It's more a part of the input device, I'd say.
Whatever one thinks of the wheel, I don't see that this can count as a move away from WIMP, because mp3 players (and audio players before that) never used such interfaces. Again this sums up my view of Apple - it's fair enough saying of a company that a particular innovation was great, or a particular specific thing was done first. But with Apple, it always has to be overblown to saying things like it completely changed everything, or one particular "first" was the most important change ever.
Let's congratulate Apple for being first with multitouch. Let's also congratulate all the other companies who were first with things like touchscreens, running apps, Internet access on phones, GPS, mapping software, built in cameras, designing the CPUs that power them, developing the network infrastructure that makes it all work etc.
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The market that Apple lead in is mp3 players - but being the biggest doesn't mean you did anything revolutionary (as Mac OS fans have always being saying regarding Windows!) I got an 8GB mp3 player from Sandisk for £40 - the similarly priced Apple offering had 2GB, no memory card slot, no user interface at all, unless you count the awkward one on the custom headphones... and I presume would have required the use of ITunes, rather than just presenting itself as a removable drive and just working :)
Also consider how (IIRC) Google got to be number one in search with virtually zero marketing whatsoever, basically through word of mouth, when they were a small company. In the same timeframe, Apple are a massive company, and the media are hyping their products even before they are announced.
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The first two iPhones didn't have 3G, in fact when the iPhone2 was released Nokia were launching the 5800 which had 3G and was better in many respects.
3G is a lot less important to modern phones (or indeed modern computing) than, for example, ARM chips. For which we can thank the BBC Micro. Well, sorta, anyway.
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I agree about ARM - seem to be one of the more underrated companies in media coverage.
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But yeah, I haven't checked but I'm sure my Sony Ericsson Walkman brick had 3G when I got it. It also had bluetooth and a bunch of other features that they're still running "there's an app for that" adverts. That's what gets to me the most, TV adverts talking about revolutionary new features I've had on phones for more'n 5 years.
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XP defined "minimum computer literacy" for a generation.
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And while it sounds like there were plenty of useful improvements with Windows XP (I skipped straight to Mac OS via flavours of Linux so I've never used it in anger), are you really saying that the single thing that changed the world most in the last 10 years is something that let people share spreadsheet files easier, rather than, say, the Internet (e.g. wikipedia and imdb), or suddenly being able to listen to shitloads of music wherever you were?
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And yes, I think "the simple, consistent, easy interface into computers, which was the same everywhere you went, and yes happened to give you access to all the internet stuff in the same way everywhere" was pretty fucking significant.
It's not that it *couldn't* have been anything else, but it *was* XP.
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Windows 7 feels much the same way to me. Most of the time it's possible to forget it's even there.
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I have Windows 7 at home, so that I can play Half Life 2 and Plants vs Zombies. Almost every day I swear at it for annoying the hell out of me.
It still reboots in the middle of your game, because it applied updates in the background and didn't bother to alert you. It still refuses to install all large updates, because the partition size is too small (I gave it 20Gb, and put everything else on another partition -- how much space do you need?!). Oh, and in the time it reboots once, I can cold boot my netbook three or four times.
The mouse jerks all over the place and I cannot get it to sort itself out. Nor can I figure out how to apply X mouse settings.
The command line is shit; there's only one desktop; I can't move windows around by pressing alt and clicking anywhere in the window; I can't transfer files back and forth from my Linux partitions; every single application you install has its own updater sitting in the background trying to update; should I mention the pain I went through to install the damn thing? Windows still uses a registry, about the most user unfriendly way to store settings in existence, and sometimes you're forced to edit the registry to fix things; DirectX; I have some funny bug where all the menus on the task bar appear 10 pixels above, and I can't select anything any more, but I didn't change anything! Aaaargh!! >_<
Any of the above might be fixable with 3rd party programs, I don't know. I understand that not every one will feel this way, and might not miss or even know about the features that others feel should be there, but it just makes me feel that Win7 provides a really shoddy and basic experience, that's actually less functional to me than Win2K. I despise every minute that I'm in Windows 7, but not in Plants vs Zombies.
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I've not had to touch the registry by hand in about the same amount of time.
DirectX is awesome.
And my machine boots to the desktop in under a minute, despite running far too much crap that I can't be bothered to streamline.
And Powershell shipped with Windows 7, which gives you a very nice command line.
Not being able to tell it not to reboot I'll give you.
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I needed to touch the registry by hand to install Windows (that is, if I didn't want to install XP and upgrade to 7), and there have been other things I've needed to change. The fact that it exists at all despite being a user catastrophe for 15 years is an issue.
I said reboot, not boot. Either way, it's still slower than Mac OS or Linux (admittedly not all distributions are fast yet).
Powershell? I'll have to look into that. Although it probably won't fit, since I only gave Windows 20Gb of hard drive to play with </snark>.
DirectX is not awesome, it's terrible. So bad that it's positively an anti-feature. Microsoft's amazingly incompetent handling of DirectX has pretty much led to stagnation in PC game design for several years, and a whole pile of graphics cards with a whole pile of features going unused. They got greedy, and though they could control the gaming market, but ended up fracturing it. Is it any surprise that most games are still being written for DirectX 9, because it's the only system guaranteed to capture most of the market?
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I'm not sure what your problem with DirectX is, as numerous people (including John Carmack, who knows waaaaay more about this stuff than I do) have said that it's a better interface for 3D than OpenGL is. Certainly, the first few versions were bad, but my understanding is that it's been a well-designed interfaced since about version 5.
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The problem with DirectX is that Microsoft decided that they could get all the gamers onto Vista by making DX10 incompatible with XP with a few changes to the driver model (there was no good technical reason for doing so, especially since DX10 offered so little over DX9, Microsoft have even admitted this to be so). Unfortunately, Vista didn't attract the gamers, and many people continued to use XP, and were stuck with DX9. Videocard manufacturers designed their cards to use DX10, and then DX11, but very few games companies bothered to make use of the extra features (why, when more than half your market can't make use of them?). To add further friction, the XBox 360 uses a version of DX9, discouraging designing games with DX10 or 11, and so the XBox is complicit holding back PC gaming.
Even now, when many more people are using Win7 and DX11, games companies still aren't interested. DX was at one point great (unless you were an OpenGL fan), it was competitive, adding features, drove games design and promised to unify the market, but instead it did the opposite. DX became poisonous, and the game market is going to continue to stagnate for a while yet, until they start to trust Microsoft again (beyond the usual ways that we don't trust them).
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Once XP dies off (it stops getting security updates in 2014) I suspect MS will continue to have this problem.
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I mean, surely most the people still using XP also aren't going to be the people who have the latest graphics cards anyway. Writing a game to require the latest hardware features is going to reduce your market anyway. (You can write games that work on older hardware, but you can support DirectX 9 and later versions too; both involve a bit more work.)
I've heard the argument that consoles hold back PC gaming in general - again, the hardware issue, but this would apply with non-MS consoles too.
On the other stuff, I think Ubuntu and Windows 7 are both great, and each have some minor advantages over the other in various areas. I'm not sure there's much of a difference in boot times (both are far slower than my old Amiga!), and Ubuntu if anything requires more reboots due to all the bloody updates all the time.
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Ubuntu does claim to need rebooting fairly often, but the only time it's actually required is after installing a new kernel (and even that isn't set in stone). Often restarting X will be sufficient to bring any new libraries into play. Of course it's much easier to suggest to most users just to reboot, but it's mostly just a suggestion.
Incidentally, they've achieved 5 second boot times with Ubuntu now, with other distributions like Fedora are getting pretty fast too. I know it's not that impressive, considering how much faster these machines are compared to the Amiga, but it's not bad going. My netbook doesn't quite manage 5 seconds, but it's still pretty quick.
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I know for a fact there's software available that lets you have multiple desktops (as my workmate uses it).
I haven't experienced your mouse problems. Maybe I just have an awesome mouse (it is a pretty awesome mouse).
Although you're obviously finding it harder to navigate around, I'm finding it easier than ever before with the awesome and very pretty 3D carousel you get with Win+Tab. Further to that I love the way I can click+drag a window that's maximised and it automatically puts it on window view for me to move it.
Can't speak for the more techie stuff 'cause I'm not a techie, but then, neither are most users of Win7 or indeed basically any mainstream OS, so I'd say the logical response on that front would be: it's not made for you, techie, go use Linux!
Windows 7 is fast, user friendly, and intuitive. System settings are more rather than less accessible, and things always go exactly where I expect them to. Even the little bells and whistles that I thought were pointless (like the window frame transparency and the way the toolbar does a fade into the foreground of items when you hover over them) actually turn out to be really useful for generally speeding up my user experience when trying to juggle a billion different things at work on a dual monitor set-up.
I'm not saying that any of your quibbles don't exist. I'm just saying that if most people don't have them, they're not major quibbles. The sad fact I've learned working in IS is that a problem in development world is only as big as the number of people affected by it.
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The alert probably came up mid-game, and it rebooted when I was on flag 47 of survival endless. I was not happy. Anyway, it seems to want to reboot a lot.
I know for a fact there's software available that lets you have multiple desktops (as my workmate uses it).
I did say that 3rd party software might solve some of those problems, it usually does (e.g. something other than Internet Explorer, a better text editor, a better word processor assuming you didn't get Office bundled with your PC etc.) Since I'm not a regular windows user though, I don't necessarily know about it unless it's already on my machine and I can have a tinker round and find it.
I haven't experienced your mouse problems. Maybe I just have an awesome mouse (it is a pretty awesome mouse).
Mine is an awesome mouse (or was when I bought it 5-6 years ago). I needed to install Logitech's software to use all the buttons, whereas it just worked in Linux. The acceleration problem is that it doesn't feel the way it should, and no end of fiddling will fix it. I know that some systems handle things differently (e.g. Mac OS does many things differently to Windows, like how it handles fonts) and there is no objective best way, but it's annoying when you can't get something so basic just the way you like it.
Although you're obviously finding it harder to navigate around, I'm finding it easier than ever before with the awesome and very pretty 3D carousel you get with Win+Tab. Further to that I love the way I can click+drag a window that's maximised and it automatically puts it on window view for me to move it.
I've never encountered the 3D carousel, but that might be because I've always used alt-tab, and you say it's Win-tab. I'll try it out.
Can't speak for the more techie stuff 'cause I'm not a techie, but then, neither are most users of Win7 or indeed basically any mainstream OS, so I'd say the logical response on that front would be: it's not made for you, techie, go use Linux!
I do use Linux the rest of the time! This is what happened when I tried to use Windows for its primary purpose (games). Seriously, I actually went out and bought a copy of Windows, direct from Microsoft, giving them money! There are some places where Windows really should try harder, like at the very least recognising that I have a hard drive with a partition it can't read without a 3rd party driver, rather than just calling it free space (and would I like to format it?). It does sometimes feel like Microsoft are willfully ignorant.
Windows 7 is fast, user friendly, and intuitive. System settings are more rather than less accessible, and things always go exactly where I expect them to. Even the little bells and whistles that I thought were pointless (like the window frame transparency and the way the toolbar does a fade into the foreground of items when you hover over them) actually turn out to be really useful for generally speeding up my user experience when trying to juggle a billion different things at work on a dual monitor set-up.
I disagree with fast, Windows spends far too much time being slow (and I've not loaded anything except antivirus and anti spyware, so it's probably not that -- maybe it's Steam?). Intuitive is subjective, and from years of using Linux I've found myself doing things in a particular way. I'd imagine Mac OS users trying Windows might have a similar experience.
I'm not saying that any of your quibbles don't exist. I'm just saying that if most people don't have them, they're not major quibbles. The sad fact I've learned working in IS is that a problem in development world is only as big as the number of people affected by it.
True. Meh :P
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it's loaded with Vista.
the temptation to swing either way [XP, 7] is vast. Just waiting to see whether I can get away with Ubuntu at uni
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Um, what was stopping people doing that with 2000?
XP was basically 2000 with the most hideous default UI in computing history tacked on. It did some stuff better (wireless networking for example), but nothing that couldn't have been handled in a service pack.
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2000 didn't "just work" in the way that XP did, and was both more expensive AND had all of the complicated business-networking stuff showing through everywhere.
When your work computer was 2000, your home computer was 98, or ME.
XP was basically 2000 with the most hideous default UI in computing history tacked on.
XP was improved-2000 with a completely new GUI, yes. That's kind of the definition of a lot of OS releases.
(And yes, it was fairly ugly - but easy, mostly intuitively organised, and did a lot of things better. As you say)
As I said up above: "It's not that it *couldn't* have been anything else, but it *was* XP."
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-- Steve hates the reality distortion field surrounding Apple, more than the company or its products.
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Apple’s greatest gift to us is that it made it acceptable to pay for content online. The iTunes store, and the hardware devices that interact with its content, are Apple’s most important contribution to our culture. Without iTunes, the masses wouldn’t buy music online, and the music industry would be much less healthy than it is now. Without Apple’s strong negotiating position, mainstream music would still have DRM. And without people being conditioned to pay for music online, I don't think we would have the current mainstream acceptance of paying for television, films, and books in downloadable form.
So my vote goes to Apple, for giving artists and creators an income in a world where their content can be accessed through Google for free.
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I'm also not sure what you mean about being conditioned to pay for it? Lots of people are still happily downloading for free.
Regarding reading - Apple's view of a future where you can only read something on their platform and hardware is not one I like. "Get the website app for your IPad/IPhone" is the new "Best Viewed In Internet Explorer" - except worse, as at least sites usually worked somewhat on other browsers.
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It's all symbiotic though innit? The infrastructure is important, but without the devices and apps to utilise it, people wouldn't have been interested in broadband.
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But still. Google: unequalled search (including Images etc); webmail with some very clever interface features (especially over the last year or two) and unlimited free storage (back when its competitors gave you a measly couple of meg); maps (remember Streetmap and Multimap?) and Streetview (not just for navigation - we've used it to read phone numbers off shop fronts and read parking restrictions on signs before setting out); Google Docs (office suite probably comparable to Microsoft's ten years ago, but free, accessible anywhere, and real-time collaborative - do even the serious enterprise document-sharing tools do that yet?); Adwords (pretty much defined a new business model); Picasa (I'm not aware of anything else that's both an online photo-sharing site and an offline photo manager and editor, plus it has the facial recognition); Chrome; Andriod.
Apple make shiny things that are irritatingly closed and incompatible with other things.
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They haven't dominated the last ten years in the same way.
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I meant that Microsoft are important because Apple and Google have partly defined themselves in relation to MS.
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In that case, kinda. I see it more with Apple than Google, but yes.
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I agree with the article - although even that's overstating the IPhone; the original model was actually lacking basic features that even bog standard feature phones had had for years. Internet and apps were novel around 2002, and standard by 2005. I believe Apple were the first with multitouch, and some people think it had the best browser at the time, but it was just yet another phone in an industry that was going through continual, inevitable and rapid advancement, both before and after 2007. By today's standards, the original IPhone is very dated, and I don't see how the later models are revolutionary over anything else. Some people like Apple phones, plenty more like other phones.
Most of the things said in praise about Apple come down to opinion - nothing wrong with that, I love a good OS/computer flamewar :) - but it shouldn't be conflated with factual claims about who did what first, or what effect things had on the market. (Personally I disagree with claims that they make good UIs, for example. And even for looks, I think my shiny black Nokia 5800 looks far cooler than anything that has a corporate logo plastered over the front of it.)
For me, I use Google's search every day, and Apple have no impact on me (other than the hype I read about them in the media... - I find a lot of tech news of limited use these days, the way everything is spun to be all about Apple). For people in general, I suspect that more people use something from Google, than something from Apple.
I can see some argument that Apple win because phones and mp3 players and computers are more useful to people than a search engine - but that argument would put many other companies ahead of Google too.
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But yes, Google's definitely more useful to me.
Oh, and hi. We have some interesting people in common, I'd generally take that as a recommendation, not that you seem to update any more.