Comment by Axien | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Axien | Hacker News Reader

Apple had a design philosophy that a device should do one thing only. That is why the iPod was so amazingly successful. It was just a music player. No meeting planner or contacts list. Just played music.

This design simplified things and allowed each button to serve a distinct purpose.

With the iPhone, the design philosophy carried. The iPhone could change itself via running different apps. To switch between features you had a single giant button at the bottom. But each app should do one thing. So it was either a phone, calculator, GPS, or Rolodex. But never all at the same time. And never more than one thing on screen at the same time.

They started to get away from this, such as using a volume button to take a picture. Or displaying a video inside a window. I would argue overall it makes things more complicated.

Apple added contacts, notes, calendars, photos, videos, podcasts, and games over subsequent revisions. From day 1 you could use it as a FireWire drive in addition to a music player (5GB when USB flash drives were still measured in megabytes and likely going over a 1.1 bus instead of a 2.0 bus). It might have had a game or two at launch but I can’t honestly remember at this point, but either way games for iPods were also sold through iTunes in a later revision.

iPods were best used as music players but they were pretty much always multi-function devices. In a world where Apple didn’t follow it up with iPhones: music phones and camera phones were finally starting to converge in a way that would have eventually eaten the iPod’s and point-and-shoot camera market’s lunches.

> "To switch between features you had a single giant button at the bottom. But each app should do one thing. So it was either a phone, calculator, GPS, or Rolodex. But never all at the same time."

On the Apple Watch they've taken this philosophy a little bit too far, in my opinion. In several cases you have apps that are conceptually very similar (such as the "Find Items" app and the "Find Devices" app) ... really these are so similar that they should be the same app, yet they are separate, which clutters up the app launcher with huge numbers of apps. And an over-cluttered app launcher is, by nature, more difficult and slower to use.

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