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Comment by nier | Hacker News Reader

Pure nostalgia seeing that Instagram app icon.

Alas, as always with such news:

"The EU decision will not have direct consequences for users, unfortunately, as it can be appealed to. Such an appeal would lead to a lengthy judicial process."

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> Pure nostalgia seeing that Instagram app icon

I really miss the skeumophic design of the iOS ecosystem from the early-to-mid 2010's.

It felt so premium, especially with the retina display which was miles ahead of basically everything else (especially desktops and laptops of the era).

I had to check the retina remark as my Sony Z5 premium came in mind with the 800+ppi but even before that in 2013 I had z Sony Z1 with 440ppi and I'm pretty sure other manufacturers had high dpi screens since 2010 eg. sharp's ISO3 . So "miles ahead" is not true plus I believe iphones had other manufacturing tricks that helped in the "retina" marketing hype, I believe touch/display elements been closer together etc. Not saying is was a fluke, but a hype it was for sure

The hype was what actually brought the feature to users, not only the entire apple product line was quickly featuring it, but it also forced marched the entire ecosystem.

Sony might had the hardware feature, they did not had their entire product line, neither 1rst citizen support from everyone.

I really wish people understood that, because it's what it takes to become a giant like apple, and what will be required to take it down.

We’ll it brought a new marketing term on the table - high dpi was not enough I guess - with a feature aside because this is what modern apple does.

Apple certainly deserves credit for mainstreaming some things, but they get a lot of undue credit for originating them. I have seen so many people saying that Apple or Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. :rolling_eyes:

I would argue that they invented the modern form factor of a smartphone, and a lot of the software design principles that go along with it.

If you handed a kid an iPhone 2G plus a bunch of BlackBerries and Palm Treos from 2007 and asked them to classify the devices, I bet they would only call one of them a "smartphone".

If by "the modern form factor" you mean the slab of glass with a virtual keyboard, sure. Good for them. (Actually, I didn't look; maybe somebody else did that first. But I'll assume you checked.) They also did a bunch of the "crossing the chasm" work, and they marketed the hell out of it.

But that is distinct from inventing the smartphone. Apple generally doesn't invent things; they let other people invent and pioneer the space, and then they come in with a consumer-focused design and marketing operation to produce luxury products and capture the high end of consumer revenue.

Good for them, and they've been richly rewarded for it. But let's not pretend that we should think like 7 year olds just so we can avoid being accurate about who invented what.

Apple didn't even do that first... or at least weren't alone doing that (though their competitors quickly failed for one reason or another, until Android)

Before the iPhone was shown off in 2007, Android was being built for devices that looked like BlackBerries, complete with the little trackball.

The first consumer Android devices came in 2008, looking a lot more like the iPhone than the BlackBerry-esque prototypes, but they kept the trackball because much of the software was still more suited for navigation with that than with the touchscreen.

I'm thinking rather of competitors the name of which I forgot, that came out at the same time or slightly before the iPhone, that had the new capacitive touchscreen tech (and used it for a full sized screen with a simulated keyboard), but little else in terms of "support" needed for a successful phone.

Why are you comparing phones from 2015 and 2013 to Apple marketing from 2010? The competition absolutely did catch up eventually. And if the Sharp ISO3 is the best example you can come up with from 2010, then I disagree with your claim entirely. A single, low volume halo device is not comparable to a mainstream device that sold in the millions.

The 2010 Galaxy S had a 233 PPI display compared to the 326 PPI that Apple marketed as "Retina". The 2011 Galaxy II actually regressed slightly to a 217 PPI display. These were both PenTile displays, so their effective PPI was definitely noticeably lower than the paper specs would suggest.

Even in 2012 with the Galaxy III, Samsung's mainstream flagship reached 306 PPI, which is still less than 326, but it would be roughly comparable if not for the compromised PenTile subpixel arrangement that means it didn't even have 306 PPI of clarity, nowhere near as good as a 306 PPI traditional LCD in terms of clarity.

By 2013 with the Galaxy S4, Samsung finally exceeded 326PPI with their 441 PPI display... on paper, but this was still a SAMOLED screen with a PenTile arrangement, but it was probably comparable with the 326 PPI of the iPhone 4.

The 2013 HTC One (M7) actually did have a 468 PPI Super LCD screen, which was impressively sharp, but still years later than the iPhone 4.

It took several years for the mainstream competition to catch up to Apple's retina displays. Apple was miles ahead of everything else. And I say this as someone who was an Android user until the iPhone X! I was not an iPhone user, but I could easily see how much better the pixel density was on iPhone 4 and for several years after that. As with most things, there are diminishing returns, and having a 20,000 PPI display next to a 500 PPI display is going to be completely unnoticeable. 326 "real" PPI is an excellent level of clarity, and I don't see much (if any) advantage to going past the ~450 PenTile PPI (whatever that works out to in real PPI) that we have on a lot of mainstream smartphones today.

Maybe you fell for the marketing hype of PenTile displays that were claiming higher PPIs than they actually had?

I compare apples to oranges. At the time apple came up with this marketing term, other manufacturers started increasing the display size of the devices making them more usable for their users. When apple decided to do that 2-3 years later, the high dpi offering started making sense but it had already convinced you of the "retina milea ahead" technology kn a 3.5 inch device So, yes new tech is extremely cool, doesn’t always mean it makes sense/provides any benefit in practice.

It was night and day difference compared to similar 2010 smartphones. Maybe you don’t care about PPI, and that’s fine, but it absolutely did provide benefits to the users in practice.

Why do you call them Apple Retina displays when they were made by LG?

That is a pointless question. Why do you call them Apple iPhones when they’re made by Foxconn?

Apple has not made displays in decades, if ever. They still contract the design to meet their specifications, and then market and sell those displays that they were involved with. That makes them Apple displays for marketing purposes.

These days, Apple sources displays from multiple manufacturers, but they end up being nearly indistinguishable because Apple was deeply involved in the design and manufacture.

It's not when you're talking about a technological lead. They didn't even make these displays or come up with the technology for them, they just paid for the exclusive right for them for a certain period of time.

It’s a distinction without difference as far as the market is concerned. Your question was just flamebait. If other manufacturers saw how important this would be, and if Apple had zero involvement with the display development as you claim, then those other manufacturers should have bought exclusivity first.

Instead, I’m sure Apple was involved in the design and development. It’s not a coincidence that the display just happened to exactly quadruple the resolution of the iPhone’s previous display while maintaining the exact same size.

Either way, nothing useful can come from this topic diversion.

> Either way, nothing useful can come from this topic diversion.

Then why do you keep commenting on it?

I was clearly signaling the end of my participation in this subthread.

I remember getting my iPhone 4 and just sitting there on the couch staring at the home screen for a good 20 minutes, in awe of just how sharp the image was.

I thought the world decided that skeuomorphism was bad in and of itself and was merely a stepping stone to more usable designs? I seem to remember there was something on the front page of Hacker News years ago talking about just how much of a relic it has become because modern design paradigms were just so much better.

I tried to find the link but this was the closest I could come up with:

https://blog.prototypr.io/i-know-you-like-skeuomorphism-but-...

...and then there's this which really brought back (horrible) memories haha:

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm

oh, yes! i remember those angry troll comments on HN as well. as if flattening all UI was the only thing that mattered and everything else was skeuomorphism.

no sweetie, not everything needs to be a pictogram. and everything you see or use online is skeuomorphism off of something in the physical world at some level. yeah, that flat design also.

Edit: Added "at some level" after helpful comments below.

If everything is something, then something isn't a useful category. Sure, all digital design is in some sense and to some extent a metaphor for real world objects. But skeuomorphism was always referring to things that were to an extreme extent following the design language of the real world, well beyond what was required by their digital constraints or expectations of the user.

That is a useful category of visual language description that is lost when you start with all-design-is-skeuomorphism. It's not wrong it's just not a useful model for anything.

oh yes, absolutely. fixed my comments above.

Yup. There’s a reason why skeuomorphism died with Steve Jobs.

ah, but flat design is also skeuomorphic. methinks it was just some strategic intellectualism with no legs to look down on everything else that people made. clever tricks of the hive mind.

> ah, but flat design is also skeuomorphic.

Please elaborate

I can see this rapidly ‘degenerating’ into “what is a chair? Is a tree stump you sit on a chair?”- or “is there such a thing as a ‘chair’, after all ‘chair’ is an abstract concept and what we sit on is physical items”-type discussions.

“It’s skeuomorphic because it reminds me of icons which are things”

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