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Comment by djrogers | Hacker News Reader

> I don't believe Steve Jobs would've let the iPhone X (or Touchbar) out the door

This is a ridiculous trope that needs to die. Among the many ‘half-measures’ people whined about during Steve Jobs’ tenure are things such as the original iPhone not having 3G, the iPhone 4 antennagate, the infamously scratch prone iPod Nano, the crack prone poly MacBooks, etc etc.

Apple was never a company that produced only flawless, non-controversial products, and Steve was perhaps the most controversial and opinionated product person to have ever lived.

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Another really obvious half-measure was that the original iPhone didn't have an app store. "HTML5 is your SDK", basically, and adding sites to your homescreen was all you could do. Steve Jobs tried to pretend this was a good thing:

> And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today.

They fixed that the very next release.

Apple store is primarily a distribution/discovery channel, I would not be surprised if it started as - hey let's build a catalogue of all the websites that work well on iPhones.

At the time Google was experimenting with off-line apps with their proprietary Google gears.

At the time, Google and Apple had a very close relationship and I thought it was odd that Apple didn't implement offline web apps via gears.

Most iphone apps are, after all glorified web pages.

One might argue that it was merely to early for that, since web standards around it didn't exist and weren't provided by Apple either. Not having the required focus on the App Store could have been great!

Apple's biggest asset has always been design. On a tehnical basis Apple products sometimes beat the competition and sometimes are outdone by the likes of Samsung, Thinkpad, etc. They have dominated the American consumer market because of fit and finish, attention to detail, and overall functional beauty in design. The flaws you're speaking of are a different sort from the, frankly weird looking, notch. While executed as well as possible, its a design compromise.

The notch is a literal non-issue that only people who don’t actually use this damn device seem to complain about or even notice. I for one am happy that an entire strip of nearly-useless status icons has been shifted upward into the extra area afforded by the notch. The number of times I notice it in a given month easily rounds to zero.

>The notch is a literal non-issue that only people who don’t actually use this damn device seem to complain about or even notice.

Do you suppose it's possible that it's no coincidence that people who dislike the notch don't use the phone?

Certainly not a coincidence that everybody who hates the notch feels compelled to tell the world about it.

It’s the same story every time Apple releases a new product. People who overwhelmingly don’t buy Apple products in the first place lose their minds over some nit, while the overwhelming majority of their actual customers never seem to understand what the big deal is.

I’m not surprised at all: these people knee-jerk so hard and often, they probably can’t afford Apple products after the paying for orthopedic surgeons.

And the “ignorant Apple fanboy” narrative that seems to be the counterargument to this falls laughably short when you realize that the number of Apple’s customers has been increasing exponentially for the last fifteen years, all while they continue to enjoy the top spot in consumer satisfaction surveys across virtually their entire product line.

different shapes cause the strength to change in different ways.

certain notch designs are much better than others for keeping the screen from breaking.

Yeah I don’t mind the notch at all and never notice it.

All design is compromise.

It's "weird looking" at the moment because Apple was the first[1] with the <cough> "courage" to do this in order to integrate what's basically a Kinect into the front of a phone. But phones are already showing up that copy this solution.

[1] Well, Essential did it, but didn't commit to the degree that Apple did.

> its a design compromise.

ALL design is compromise. The options available for this design are a) stop the entire screen below the sensors b) extend the screen around the sensors or c) remove the sensors.

A gives you less overall screen space, and leads to other problems like an imbalance between the ‘chin’ and ‘forehead’ areas. Of course you could remove even more screen sapce to balance that out, but...

C means you have no Face ID, which is closer to giving up than compromising.

B is obviously the option they went with, and having used the phone for several months, I’d have to say I agree with this compromise. I get some extra screen space by moving the status stuff up in to the ‘ears’ and I still get faceID.

Except your list of misfeatures is actually a missing feature and a list of bugs. No one would claim Steve Jobs or Apple was ever perfect, just that he wouldn't have released these blatantly obvious misfeatures.

Can you think of anything similar to these weird misfeatures? I'm genuinely curious.

Hockey puck mouse.

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