Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
-
[Jeremy Garchow] “…damn autocorrect”
Or iOS Freudian slip?
Best,
Andy -
[Chris Harlan] “Andy, there was a two week delay with this year’s iPad. And, I agree that with older lines they most often just refresh. But I was responding to “Apple doesn’t announce hardware in advance.” I just don’t think that you can predict those kind of things from Apple.”
Fair enough, my comment was skewed to Mac releases. The reports that they will announce the new MacBook Pro at WWDC surprised me (and I remain skeptical that they will get time in the keynote).
[Chris Harlan] “If they want to tell you about Thunderbolt in advance, they will. They’ll talk about its eventual implementation long before it happens. And, they’ll drop saucy hints all over the place about things like Apple TV, for an entire year before its implemented. They just do it on their own terms, and with as little or as much info as suits them.”
They can do whatever they want, but recent history tells us they don’t care to spend hype capital on Macs they way they have been with iDevices. Thunderbolt wasn’t pre-annonuced. The alleged Apple TV set (as opposed to the “hobby” little black box) has been rumored for years but I’m not convinced it is actually coming. Apple rumors and press leaks are very different than an Apple press event.
[Chris Harlan] “What about the 17,000 well-placed mentions of “post-PC world” in the iPad release talk? I guess that could just be sales blather, but it seems to me that that was making a rather profound announcement about the general future of Apple hardware.”
I read all the post-PC talk as commentary on the industry at large, not a “profound announcement” about Apple’s product plans. Clearly the iOS side of things is their bread and butter now. The money is there and the hype is there. Conventional PCs (Macs included) are being relegated to niche status compared to the market for smart phones (soon to be all phones) and tablets. Don’t buy it? Look at the sales numbers. Smartphones sold almost twice as many units as PCs in 1Q2012. For the tasks the vast majority of users use a PC to do (web & email), a modern smartphone or tablet is a drop-in replacement. The things PCs will remain better at are niche functionalities by comparison, and that gap will only widen. When Apple says we are entering a Post-PC era, they mean everyone, not just Apple.
Best,
Andy -
[Chris Harlan] “They often announce hardware weeks or in some cases months before it is shipping.”
Only if it is an all new product segment, like the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010. There hasn’t been a paper launch of a new Mac since maybe the original MacBook Air in January, 2008, and that was measured in days, not weeks or months. In recent years new Macs haven’t even had press events. They just show up on Apple’s site and in Apple’s stores. All the new-Macs hubbub comes from without, not from Apple.
Best,
Andy -
[Oliver Peters] “He’s running an OS9 version (!!!) that still works like a champ. He only uses it for ProTools and has a huge investment in plug-ins, so he doesn’t want to upgrade.”
I had a feeling it was that kind of thing… Does he have a stockpile of old Macs that he uses for parts?
Best,
Andy -
[Oliver Peters] “I’m in the same boat as I need OMF for the preferred local audio mixer/Pro Tools guy.”
Is this audio guy just running a few-versions-old Pro Tools that can’t import AAF?
Best,
Andy -
[Jeremy Garchow] “A retina display, doubles the amount of pixels, therefore effectively increases resolution, but does this in the same amount of screen real estate?”
That has been how they’ve managed it on the iPhone and iPad. It is doubling the pixels on both the X and Y axes, so it is really a quadrupling of pixels. The way Apple defines “Retina Display” they need to be at a fine enough resolution that the human eye cannot discern individual pixels at typical viewing distances. This means inches for iPhones and feet for iMacs.
I fear the early going with Retina Macs will yield a lot of ugly-looking legacy software and web content. You’ll have the crisp OS X Retina HiDPI UI elements juxtaposed against suddenly muddy 72dpi everything else. Might be ugly in practice.
Best,
Andy -
[David Lawrence] “I need Gigabit, 100BASE-T doesn’t cut it. Ethernet is the one thing in this possible new laptop that I’d really miss.”
Jeremy was saying USB3 would provide enough bandwidth to support a GigE USB NIC along the same form-factor lines as the existing 100BASE USB2 model.
Best,
Andy -
[Joseph W. Bourke] “You may want to keep an eye on the offerings at MonoPrice. They have a huge assortment of cables and adapters, and seem to be right on the curve as far as technology goes:”
I always shop MonoPrice first for cables and adapters and whatnot. Quality commodity cables for what they should actually cost. Love it! They are great for building racks with right-sized cable lengths and even have 50/125 fiber and Cat6a now. They tend to skew home theater or IT-centric in their products, but their selection is always expanding and the prices are just so great.
I was doing a big build and they noticed how much I was spending with them and proactively upgraded my account for volume discounts even on items I wasn’t buying in large quantities. Great company!
But the products you linked are really just Mini DisplayPort adapters (which they have been selling since before Thunderbolt hit the market- I have a set myself). They just label them Thunderbolt for the sake of consumer discovery.
Best,
Andy -
[Walter Soyka] “That said, Windows phones are being really well reviewed. People actually like the Metro interface. The problem comes in when they are told that it’s the new Windows. They rather naturally expect it to work like the old Windows — and it doesn’t.”
They are well reviewed, but are not doing as well in terms of sales. That likely has a lot to do with the carriers and what they choose to push, so it could change.
[Walter Soyka] “Maybe Metro is hard-to-learn (the secret handshake gesture), but it’s easy-to-use. That’s not as good as easy-to-learn and easy-to-use, but that problem goes away shortly after release. It’s certainly not as bad as easy-to-learn but hard-to-use (which you might argue current WIMP GUIs are). That means a really rough bump when people first start using it, but acceptance (and maybe even happiness) thereafter.”
I’d call it “hard-to-discover”. There is no visual indication of an interface, so you have to discover, learn, and internalize it externally. Users aren’t going to stumble upon these gestures, especially not when using a mouse and keyboard. That makes for a very frustrating experience and a very bad first impression. Not something you want when someone is making a buying decision based on a test drive.
[Walter Soyka] “I think there are plenty of iOS actions that are totally unintuitive. Tap, drag, swipe, and pinch more or less make sense for computer users with a mouse background, but long hold? Three-finger swipe? Four-finger swipe? Five-finger pinch? Again, hard to learn, but easy to use.”
The difference is that most of those gestures are alternatives to an on-screen default input. Think of those gestures as the touch equivalents of keyboard shortcuts. They are there for the power users who learn them, but they are not the default, or worse, the only input method.
[Walter Soyka] “I think it’s kind of funny that Apple is expected to offer new and revolutionary interfaces — cars instead of faster horses and all — but Microsoft is excoriated for doing it. And the idea that Microsoft could actually be leveraging design principles to make computing better? Shocking!”
I don’t fault MSFT at all for stepping out of its comfort zone or its users comfort zone with Metro. To the contrary, it is refreshing to see them take a leap with their UI and nice looking design. I’m focused on a practical flaw in their execution that makes it very difficult (or at minimum, awkward) to navigate.
[Walter Soyka] “Microsoft has popularized GUIs with Windows 3 (and having to teach people to use them, as above), introduced the Start button in Win 95 (totally removing the Program Manager), and introduced the ribbon in Office 2007 (which everyone hated at first because it was different but got over because it is actually workable). This isn’t their first rodeo.”
Maybe the inertia of Windows’ market dominance will drag the user base into a world of invisible Metro gesture inputs, but Vista was toppled for much less egregious sins. All they need to do is add a little chrome back for the keyboard and mouse users, even if it only slides onto the screen when you mouse to a boundary. Or something. Aping 10″ tablet touch gestures on a 20″ desktop display with a mouse is dumb. They can correct that with minor UI tweaks that don’t spoil the Metro design or ruin the UX.
Best,
Andy