Comment by rotub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rotub | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR via Article Summariser (Chrome extension):

Ive is uncomfortable knowing that a hundred thousand Apple employees rely on his decision-making-his taste-and that a sudden announcement of his retirement would ambush Apple shareholders.

The Apple Watch-the first Apple device with a design history older than its founder, or its designer-was conceived "Close to Steve's death," Ive said.

John Gruber, an influential Apple blogger, has written that the prices may be "Shockingly high ... from the perspective of the tech industry," but perhaps "Disruptively low from the perspective of the traditional watch and jewelry world." Sebastian Vivas, the director of a watch museum maintained by Audemars Piguet, the Swiss manufacturer, recently described his industry as unperturbed by Apple's plans: "We're not afraid; we're just a little bit smiling." It would be a greater threat, he told me, if men widely accepted that they could wear gemstones without a time-keeping pretext.

Ive has begun to work with Ahrendts, Apple's senior vice-president of retail, on a redesign-as yet unannounced-of the Apple Stores.

That's a criminal disservice to some incredibly insightful writing.

Care to write a better summary ? I'm sure many would be interested and upvote.

Read it. It's an awesome piece.

I started reading it ,but didn't find it very interesting. A summary would be surely far more interesting.

Personally, I find the brand of his sunglasses and the cut of his pants to be irrelevant. They may help paint a picture of the man (if you're familiar with the brand names or the latest styles), but for the most part they are a part of the narrative I could do without. I'm not reading a novel where I must paint my own picture of the characters, I'm reading a news article related to tech. A picture would have sufficed.

Long form narrative requires long form attention and a decent chunk of time. This piece is competing against 29 others on the front page of HN (and another 10-15 which hit the front page and subsequently fell off since I last logged on), and I prefer a concise summary to see if there's information I want or need from this article.

References to the sunglasses brands and the style of objects with which Ive surrounds himself are part of the message the reporter is trying to get across about the relationship between Apple and luxury brands - a story which, as Apple positions themselves to try to replace Cartier and Rolex on celebrity wrists (because those endorsements are critical to Apple avoiding creating a 'geek watch'), places Ive's role in intriguing light. The question, for me, is how much of that is the reporter emphasizing that because they themselves find the relationship interesting - and how much is that Apple's spin to try to reassure the bling-centric part of the watch market that Ive really does understand luxury brands.

As someone who finds all the airport-mall-style silk, perfume and diamond brands completely baffling, Apple's move in that direction - from design to designer - is a little concerning.

It provides the gist of a puff piece, if it was done automagically then all the better!

The Apple Watch-the first Apple device with a design history older than its founder, or its designer-was conceived "Close to Steve's death," Ive said.

That presumably means the Watch is going to be the last Apple product Steve had any significant influence on. Where they go from here will be interesting to watch (no pun intended).

My reading of that sentence is an assertion that the Apple Watch is the company's first device that has a design legacy older than the 20th century. In other words, computers and cellphones and tablets are one kind of design challenge, something like a watch (or, say, a sword or a desk or a bicycle) represents a different type of thing for Apple to have to design and sell.

I find it hard to believe that anything Steve said four years ago, at the inital moments of beginning to conceive of the product, could be considered to have had any material influence on the final design and functionality of a new product brought to market this year. It's well known how heavily Apple iterate on and radically re-imagine their product designs throughout the development process.

Not bad, any pointers what technology is involved to build such a summariser?

The Wikipedia article[1] is actually a pretty decent overview. In short, the simpler versions are extractive -- selecting full sentences from the source, based on supervised or unsupervised machine learning over features such as sentence position, length, similarity to the overall document, etc.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_summarization

I'm glad you gave a summary in the comment, the article is pretty extensive.

It is but well worth the read. Highly enjoyable.

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