Comment by willvarfar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by willvarfar | Hacker News Reader

I was at UIQ back when the iPhone "happened". It really was as pivotal for the industry as he says. I quipped that the iPhone made us irrelevant and Android made us redundant.

I was surrounded by people with strong ambition and vision, at UIQ, Symbian, at our owners Motorola and Sony Ericsson, who wanted to build the iPhone and knew how to build the iPhone long before the iPhone was announced and before they knew anyone else was doing it.

We knew all about capacitive displays, finger-touch and so on. To be honest my own vision was tainted by Flash-based UIs and the mechanics of that, but the Flash demos I was trying to enable were fancy iPhone-like UIs. The artists had the design ascetic that was the iPhone to a tee.

But the phone manufacturer upper management were essentially very traditional hardware manufacturers with traditional channel relationships and techie vision was never given much attention.

Not taking away from Apple, not saying actually I could imagine it having turned out any different. Its simply that Apple didn't have the management constraints. Apple created new teams to make new products. The entrenched phone makers made existing teams punch out variants and incremental refreshes of the same tired formulae.

I imagine it was much the same in Finland too.

The big question is, without Jobs, will Apple settle into defending what they have - and punching out variants and incremental refreshes of it - or will they have fresh ambitious restarts?

Well they do have that "Special Projects" division.. I'm sure they'll be cooking up something nice for 2014.. at least I hope so

Yours is not an uncommon sentiment, but it’s not really a fair picture: Observers often see the Apple of the past decade as releasing a category-definer every few years (iPod, iPhone, iPad), and awaiting the next one (iWatch! iScreen!).

Really, though, Apple's blockbusters of the 2000s are best seen as one continuous thing: the iPod paved the way for well-designed, vertically-integrated mobile devices (that it was a music player is almost incidental) and the iPhone and iPad are really bookends of a single smart device revolution.

Seen this way, Apple has had two world-changing category definers in its history, the Mac and the iOS device. That’s one every 24 years, if we count to the midpoint between the iPhone and iPad introductions. Will they do it again? Maybe, but I wouldn’t expect it to be just around the corner.

Huh whatnow?

The original iPod (and modern iPods minus the Touch) don't run iOS at all. The iPod gave Apple the time to stall until they could build what Steve wanted to make in 1999, but the world didn't have the capacity to create yet.

These days, Apple is the forefront of both industrial design and fabrication capacity. They aren't in the past—they are in the present and they are moving the world along with them, not waiting for it to catch up to them anymore.

Your parent is grouping iPod/iPhone/iPad. Yes, the original iPod didn't run iOS, but he's just using it as a moniker. We could call them iDevices if that pleases you more.

The iPod wasn't just an infusion of cash to keep the company alive, to me it really looks like the start of the whole mobile line that today runs iOS.

"they are moving the world along with them"

You tried iOS 7, didn't you? I sure hope they are not using "Apple Maps" to move themselves and the world.

Apple Maps has come a long way since the iOS 6 launch. Google Maps is still undoubtedly better, but Apple have been working hard on it.

iOS 7 is not bad. People are still afraid of change (look at what they said about the original iPhone, now look where we are) but ultimately it was in need of a refresh.

But they are not "moving the world" in any way except for hardware. iOS 7 is derivative.

True, even the hardware iterations aren't exciting. Rebranding the 5 as the 5C is disappointing.

Where Apple do lead is in software, Android is getting better for the regular user but it's still not even close. Vertical integration works.

for varying definitions of "regular users" and "works"

iOS7 is more like iOS6 than any it is anything else.

iOS has certainly adopted features from other platforms over time. But what has been adopted in the other direction is far greater.

If you are referring to the removal of skeuomorphic style elements, then it's true that android and windows phone were always less skeuomorphic than iOS, but that's irrelevant to the technology.

> Google Maps is still undoubtedly better, but Apple have been working hard on it.

The big difference is that Apple only allows Apple to make things better, where Google allows the world to do its work for it.

Example: The URL for the Boston subway system (the T) is "mbta.com". Nearly every single T stop showed up as "mTBa.com" in Apple Maps when it was released.

In the intervening time, they've fixed maybe 1/3 of the stops to be the correct URL - and almost all of that 1/3 in the last two months. (I've been watching, because I thought it was interesting.)

First of all, you'd think if they fixed one, they'd fix all of them.

Second, this is the sort of thing that when you report it to Google Maps team gets fixed within DAYS.

Again, Google has had a lot longer to get this right. I still use Google Maps whenever possible but Apple are hiring for multiple positions in my country for Maps staff shows they're at least /trying/ when we don't even have an Apple store.

It depends on whether upper management gives special projects the importance they need or not. Almost every large company has a research division, but in most, it is the playground where they keep the guys that are too smart and competent to fire, but that have ideas too radical for main divisions' heads to accept.

UIQ3 was amazing, and my M600i had the greatest keyboard on any phone ever. Thanks for making the OS for one of my favourite smartphones :)4

I miss that keyboard, I really do prefer physical keyboards to software ones.

  design ascetic

The words are supposed to be "design aesthetic".

Maybe they're going for something extremely minimalistic.

I really thought phone manufacturers at the time where aiming for better Windows Mobile phone, and had nothing like the iPhone in mind or at least nothing more than a napkin corner with a 'moon' tag attached to it because some R&D/Designer broke someone's b*lls enough to get a little attention.

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