See in the early days of Android I can see your point. A lot of the interface, out of the box, was clunky. To get a good experience you needed to add a new loader, change the browser, tweak with the UI. All true.
But that’s not been the case for quite a while. I’m running the vanilla flavour of pretty much everything, and the user experience is as good, possibly better than my iPad and iPhone. The ability to change things is a bonus option on the Android, and one I really wish I had on iOS without jailbreaking my system.
To use your analogy, I’ve got two cars here that are great to drive. However, only one of them lets me change wheels and tires without invalidating the warranty. Oh, and to extend the analogy a bit further, one of them is $80,000, the other is $50,000.
I’ve seen that there are two basic kinds of computer users: Fiddlers and Users.
Fiddlers want to fiddle, tweak, play with the stuff underneath the hood, shoot themselves in the foot, and restore from backup.
Users want to get shit done. Period. They don’t want to coax their equipment into doing its job.
In the old days, when you could still fix your own cars, Fiddlers could have fun hot-rodding their vehicles. Of course, they spent an inordinate amount of time futzing with them, and occasionally they’d break down even under expert maintenance just because no part is ever perfect and no one is a perfect expert. You remember the old days, when a very reliable car would make it to maybe 70,000 or 100,000 miles? Now, you can’t play with your car the way you used to, but you can get a car that will easily outperform the old cars, get better mileage, and last probably twice as long, with half the maintenance.
I knew a guy with an old hot-rod he loved to work on. It had more horsepower than anything short of a high-end sports car, got horrendous gas mileage, and you had to know exactly how to baby it to even start it since it had a manual choke and several subsystems that were linked to toggles under the dash. Beautiful car with an idiosyncratic interface. It had too much power and handled like such a pig at low speed, since it was tuned for performance driving, that any normal driver would probably drive right into the first utility pole he saw. Assuming he didn’t just plow right through the front of the house across the street while attempting to pull out of the driveway.
You’re a Fiddler. If you want to fiddle to your heart’s content, there’s nothing stopping you from “jailbreaking” your iWhatever and doing it. If you do your homework and choose the right model, many Android phones can be fiddled with too. Despite what some people believe, a lot of Android handsets are even more locked down (usually by the carriers) than anything Apple makes.
When you say: “Here’s what we think is the best idea, but, if you don’t like it, feel free to do what you want.”
I hear: “We have no fucking idea what you actually want to do with this, so here’s a bunch of settings and marginally documented features to play with. Have fun trying to actually do anything with it.”
Because: freedom! Being able to shoot yourself in the foot is attractive only when you’re pretty sure you know what to do to avoid shooting yourself in the foot, and you have first-aid training in case it happens anyway. Welcome, Expert User!
Normal people, and an increasing number of geeks — who are actually quite capable of patching self-inflicted bullet wounds — prefer not to have to deal with “freedom of choice” that comes with the non-design kitchen-sink throw-shit-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks school of device production.
Design is about making choices. Not making choices leads to a crappy experience with hardware, software, or both.
I find it fucking amusing that the company that once prided itself on “think different” now has to be defended on the basis that freedom of choice is bad.
I’m defending them on the grounds they are better products that work better for me. In my very recent experience apple apps have better quality and design (of the type I want).
And as the Nexus 7 32GB with 3G seems impossible to buy, even from the Google Store in the UK, on the grounds their products actually exist. Which is a shame as people have convinced me here to give it a go.
But I could have an ipad mini in my hands today.
EDITED to add:
And I can read my favourite newspapers in full ipad editions. Android editions - if they exist - are very limited.
It’s sold out even in the UK Google Store and prior to that the trade press were saying Google were warning people they’d be waiting weeks (after charging their cards of course).
We’re basically at the level of arguing whose sports team is better at this point, so I don’t know why I bother, but this sort of thing is just silly. I have plenty of choices available with my iPhone. And you aren’t “shooting yourself in the foot” by going with Android. They’re simply two different types of device, each of which has their pros and cons, and preferring one over the other is something over which reasonable people might disagree.
People get so worked up over this. “Depressing.” Pff. Save your depression for something that actually sucks, like, I don’t know, the fact that all of the classic holiday TV specials now have bits cut out of them to make room for the additional commercial time needed in the 2010s.
Regarding GUIs, I have felt that way for a long, long time. Without a shadow of a doubt, “amateur” GUIs are exactly that. Amateur. Linux is a case in point (I use it daily at work), compared to both Windows 7 and OSX every single GUI for Linux is just embarrassingly poor.
And frankly, Google just cannot do GUIs. All of their products (bar their original web search, the page for which has now entered feature creep territory) have pitiful GUIs. Absolutely pitiful.
I feel the way about most “skins” that I see for apps. I’d rather the resources put towards allowing skinning and running skins was directed elsewhere. I’d also rather that functionality wasn’t constricted by the need to be able to skin it.
Well, Apple aren’t subsidizing the cost of their products (at least through slashing profit margins to wafer-thin in order to establish themselves in a competitive market) and Google are so there’s bound to be a difference. But having said that Apple haven’t become one of the most profitable companies in the world through their modest pricing policy.
I don’t agree on the part of “fewer options are inherently better.” I take the position that more options aren’t a liability so long as the defaults work well. Apple has made sure that- on iOS- the defaults work well, and chosen to curtail options/customizability. MS has made sure that on Windows Phone the defaults work well, but still offers ways to customize/personalize. I can’t say the same for Android prior to version 4. On a vanilla 4.x device, the defaults work well. Prior to version 4, you pretty much had to fiddle around with an Android device to make it usable.
That is such horseshit. You can hack their devices if you really want to, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out. Most people don’t. When even the geeks, people whose job is to make stuff, choose to go with something that’s low-maintenance, that they don’t have to hack to get to work properly, that tells you that someone is doing something right.
Think Different? So tell me, what company do you think is doing great innovative work in the tech sector? I mean, they’ve gotta be just mind-blowing if you think Apple is a humdrum conformist ghetto.
Apple took smartphones from a curiosity to a mainstream device after numerous other companies had tried and failed for over a decade. The original iPhone was so radically different that it was glaringly obvious when Apple’s success with it began to influence the design of devices from other companies. They did the same with tablet computers, various flavors of which had been kicked around for nearly 20 years without much to show for it. Guess your bar for success must be pretty high when creating two entire market sectors from basically nothing doesn’t count in your books.
Sony would like to talk to you about the Walkman/Discman, but they can’t afford to.
seriously, portable music players had been mainstream for decades. mp3/digital media players were a foregone conclusion; Apple was the first to show up with one which didn’t suck.
I don’t understand your point. That was a different technology.
If you generalize to that extent, then there has never been a new product market created by the development of new technology.
In that case, so is every other technological development. Laser disc players were not a failed product because DVDs and Blu-Ray eventually became successful?
Well, yeah, that is the point and that’s what makes it analogous to Apple’s success with smart phones and tablet computers. Apple came out with the product that made overwhelming numbers of people actually want to buy one.
Most hilarious bug ever. 4.2 actually looks a smidge rushed, and less polished than 4.1.2.
I will say however that I ran vanilla 4.0.1 for ages. I used a custom launcher, but only so I could use themed dock icons. Functionally the stock launcher has everything you could want. And I used a widget to embed settings toggles into the notification panel, which I can’t live without. Post-honeycomb Android has a very good default UI.
You claim that "Normal people, and an increasing number of geeks — who are actually quite capable of patching self-inflicted bullet wounds — prefer not to have to deal with “freedom of choice”. I point out that you’re claiming this to defend a company whose adverts used to laud those who think different. Do you not see the slight contradiction there? Nope, you probably don’t.
And while we’re pointing out your logical fails, my arguing that Android now offers as good a UI as iOS is not fucking claiming that Apple have not done great things. Did you miss the bit where i mentioned my 30 year fanboy history? So, drop the strawmen, and don’t attribute a fake stance to me. I’m not saying Apple are humdrum, or conformist. I’m saying their current mobile platforms are falling behind the competition and are overly restrictive. Clear enough?
Finally, while we’re working through the logical errors in your post, the fact that a number of groups have released jailbreaking tools for iOS doesn’t make Apple’s attempts to enforce a walled garden a good thing. Seriously, how hard is this shit to understand?
Anyone reading our posts can tell who the idiot in this conversation is. You never seem to let the facts get in your way of your making a snarky comment. But whatever, you have fun thinking Android is open.
