Conceded for the rest of the thread: Apple is absolutely perfect in every respect - thought, word, deed, foresight, engineering, design and above all true concern for their users and the greater good of mankind. All other players are pretenders to this pinnacle of greatness.
Carry on.
It’s not a well-known series, but a key element of Brian Daley’s “Fitzhugh and Floyt” trilogy of the early 1980s was the “proteus”: a small device owned by pretty much every person that was a powerful computer, data bank, communications device, terminal and all-around second brain. There were cheap ones, and there were those made and styled for the megarich. Most were worn as wristlets, but arm bands and brooches were also noted.
Among many, many uses mentioned in the long trilogy was “turning up the screen contrast to use it as a flashlight.”
Somewhere, Daley’s shade is laughing.
Since you obviously have no idea of how advertising works in the greater model, I won’t make any snarky kool-aid comments. I will, however, point you in the right direction by noting that advertising evolves in fairly common and predictable stages. (The most typical is long form - short form - ours is best - see-want-buy.)
Apple so long ago established itself as the purveyor of cool-on-a-chip that it no longer has to make the slightest mention of it. It’s simply embedded in the ad style and logo use now. They can rest lightly on those laurels while explaining something else, like what the latest app does. They are in that enviable position of having an effective ad consist of nothing but a product shot and a logo, shared only with the highest-end clothing, jewelry and perfume makers. Even other luxury makers have to have some framing text to be as effective.
Which, really, should be a little insulting to their buyers.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Apple ad, even in the Apple II days, that didn’t just ooze cool all over the desktop whether it was self-consciously so or not.
Not really. The intended use is jewelry. Even if it’s in sleep mode, it’s still giving off a vibe.
The market for conspicuous consumption is pretty deep. And Apple has a lock on the tech end of it. Until google figures things out.
I swear, half of the financial press’ business model rests on the shoulders of purveyors of $10,000 watches judging from ad-pages. [1] This despite the fact that such high-end timekeeping is comparable to a $50, nay $15 watch. Such products, as seen from a tech perspective, shouldn’t exist. Yet they do.
[1] Hyperbole.
Does this one? Do iPhones say that?
Most tech starts out looking like toys. Lots of people called the iPad and other tablets toys when they came out, too.
I’m not convinced by this line of reasoning. Yes, people don’t wear watches as much any more because of cell phones, but that’s because current watches don’t do enough to make it worth having them as a device. It’s not like everyone decided that having the time on your wrist was gauche and it’s better to put it in your pocket, it’s just that the tech that fits in your pocket was enough better that it wasn’t worth having both.
As the tech gets better, I strongly suspect that many of the things we use our phones for will transition from the little rectangle of glass in our pockets to a little viewscreen on our wrists for exactly the same reason that wristwatches beat out pocket watches. It’s simply more convenient to glance down at your arm than it is to fish something out of your purse or pocket, if someone can make a thing that fits on your arm sufficiently functional and not-ugly.
Are we there yet? I have no idea. My gut says not quite, but how can any of us really say without having even seen or touched the watch in question?
I meant more that Apple’s biggest successes have happened when they entered a “mature” market filled with hugely flawed competitors. the iPod took over portable music because it held gigabytes of data in a pocketable size; everything else was either flash-based players which held at most 512MB or hard drive players the size of cinder blocks. The iPhone took over a market filled with phones which needed a stylus or trackball.
I don’t see the same thing here. smartwatches aren’t really a huge market, the competition doesn’t have glaring flaws in their products/the Apple Watch doesn’t seem to do anything “better” than what’s out there.
And rhe Maxi version III can be strapped to your chest: that battery will be more than enough for a long flight, including going through security.
A few years back, the alleged millionaire’s row of Park Lane in London had a problem of gangs congregating along the road and snatching expensive watches from the drivers of expensive cars as they halted. This was a particularly mean trick, as they were stealing from people too simple-minded to leave their watches at home.
Now stealing a watch can give you so much more than £2K from a fence. Stop the victim from calling the police for an hour, and you control their house, and all the riches therein are yours.
Exactly. And after you’ve fished up that phone, you have to turn it on to see the time or notifications. Then, if you want to do more than that, you have to unlock it.
Being able to simply lift up your arm and glance at your wrist is so much easier. I started wearing a simple digital watch again sometimes over the past few months to see if I could get used to wearing a watch again. Answer: yes, no problem. And it’s really useful when exercising. When I climb stairs, I used to set a timer on my iPhone for 30 minutes, but I kept checking my phone, because when you’re climbing stairs, 30 minutes is a long time. With the watch, that’s all much easier, less sweat on my phone and less risk of tripping when digging my phone out of my pocket while trying to avoid tangling the headphone cable.
One thing, though: you can’t have sleeves that are too long.
Ok, this kinda makes sense to me. I totally missed the point of the iPhone on its release, because all I saw was a big cellphone with a crappy internet browser. I thought:
[list=A]
[li]Who wants to surf the internet on such a tiny screen[/li][li]The connection speed will be awful[/li][li]The battery won’t last for shit[/li][/list]
What I completely missed was that it was actually a pocket computer. A pocket computer connected to a huge network via cellphone technology (which the lack thereof is what made all previous pocket computers pretty useless). This is what opened the floodgates for truly useful computer programs (i.e. apps), ubiquitous connectivity.
A smartwatch still has an uphill battle though, because it has to carve out its own niche, without trying to replace the smartphone. And I’m still not convinced that even Apple can make this happen…
I remember when Jobs announced the iPhone, he spoke of it as three different products:
As it turns out, listening to music is an afterthought, and even a cool phone is still just a phone. It was the third of those “products” — along with the App Store — that turned the iPhone into a business larger than the whole of Microsoft. I don’t think anyone really saw it coming.
While I am not surprised that the Apple watch is mediocre and over-priced I am quite surprised at how average it looks. I expected Apple to at least introduce an elegant and groundbreaking design. As it is Motorola and even LG have much nicer looking smartwatches.
I think it will be another year or two before smartwatches become really useful perhaps when high-quality, reliable health/fitness sensors are built into them. The Apple Watch at least brings a lot of hype and attention to the category which will help move it forward.
That’s a matter of taste, but I think the Apple Watch looks better than the Moto 360 and the LG G.
The 360 is too big for most people, I think. It’s a 46mm circle, so that’s a surface area of about 1660mm^2. In contrast, the small Apple Watch is about 1250mm^2. That’s a big difference. And the little cutout on the bottom of the 360 looks really tacky to me. I do like that it’s got a round face, but it’s a bit too much like wearing a diving computer all the time.
The LG looks better to me, but still not as good as the Apple one. The bezel isn’t even all the way around, which makes it look clunky and poorly designed.
Obviously, those are opinions. I don’t love the look of the Apple one either.
remember when Apple fans used to deride people bickering over specs?
Apple doesn’t tend to advertise based on technical prowess, that’s true, but in fact, today’s Apple products are generally ahead of their competitors technically. The idea that Apple is selling overpriced, over-marketed “cool” products that are only average technically is at least a decade out of date.
I got into Apple products 10 years ago because OS X was a usable desktop Unix, and I could run all my favorite command-line Linux/Unix applications. If you walk into the MIT computer science building today, you will see that about 75% of the computers are Macs. That’s not because all the professors got taken in by the marketing.
The 2013 MacBook Pro was the first laptop ever shipped with a high-DPI (“Retina”) display, and comprehensive support for it in the OS. Apple laptop displays have always been rated at or near the top for color reproduction and image quality.
The camera on the iPhone 6 and 6+ is widely considered the best smartphone camera on the market, for image quality. This has been the case for the last several generations of iPhone.
The fingerprint sensor introduced with the iPhone 5S remains the absolute best on the market.
Apple designs their own iPhone CPUs and GPUs in-house. The A7 processor introduced the iPhone 5S was 6-12 months ahead of anything else on the market. Here is a quote from Anandtech, hardly an Apple fanboy site (Final Words - The iPad Air Review)
Apple doesn’t market its products based on these technical specs - they never have, and probably never will. They market the products based on what they allow you to do, not how much RAM they have or how wide the memory bus is. But it’s not as if they are hiding the technical specs because they are somehow inferior to other products on the market. In many cases, it’s quite the opposite.
Incidentally, my thoughts on the Apple Watch:
It makes perfect sense to me, I don’t really like pulling my phone out of my pocket to see why it buzzed. The idea of just glancing at my wrist to see what happened is very appealing.
I am 27 and I wear a watch, mostly because I keep careful track of what time it is and what I’m doing.
The pricing of the Apple Watch (starting at $350) is totally reasonable, given that all the other smartwatches on the market suck, look like engineering prototypes and still cost up to $300.
The battery life of 18 hours strikes me as perfectly adequate, especially since it will reportedly charge in about 90 minutes. I can’t imagine any stretch of more than 18 hours where I would actually care about the battery lasting longer. And even if it dies, it’s not like it’s my phone, I can still get by.
The pricing of the “luxury” Apple Watches is completely ludicrous, vaguely disgusting and makes no sense from any perspective whatsoever. I have no idea why Apple wants to position themselves into the market of obscenely rich wasteful morons. Who in their right mind would spend $10,000 on a $350 piece of electronics, surrounded by $800 worth of gold, that’s made in China? At least with a Rolex or something you are nominally paying for some old-world Swiss craftsmanship, not 5 minutes of time from Robot N469D on Assembly Line 6-B in Shenghuan.
Apple did not sell 1 iPhone for every 10 people on the planet (700M total as of this month) by marketing only to the ultra-rich. This makes no sense to me at all, especially because the prices for the normal Apple watches are pretty reasonable.
I don’t think that is true. For example the Note 4 released around the same as the iPhone 6/6+ had better hardware than they did: better screen and battery life, comparable processor and camera and a range of hardware extras like the IR sensor, microSD card slot etc. The most detailed camera comparison I have found by Phone Arena put the Note 4 slightly ahead of the iPhone 6+.
I’m not sure how that applies to my comments. Apple’s philosophy has always been that design matters. Size and shape and materials are all considerations, and sometimes they win out over things like clockspeed and memory and storage. Which is totally consistent with my comments.
Or by “specs”, do you just mean “things that can be measured”. I provided the surface area measurements to reinforce my claim that the 360 is just too big to look good on most wrists.
Hijack but were you 12 when you started posting here?
Sure, it’s not universally true for every product and every spec. Though I seem to recall seeing benchmarks that placed the iPhone 6 ahead of it’s competition at release - I guess the Note 4 was technically only released about a month later.
Nevertheless, the point stands: Apple is not simply using marketing and “coolness” to sell mediocre hardware at high prices. Their hardware is competitive by itself, even though their marketing does not emphasize the technical specifications.
Yes, indeed. It’s rather painful to go back and read some of those threads.