
Apple is a great copycat, but did they actually improve anything? - mmarkowitz
http://www.fastcompany.com/3050943/apple-event/apple-is-a-great-copycat-did-they-improve-anything
======
vinceguidry
There seem to be two different kinds of tech journalist, the kind that
understands Apple, and, by extension, how hard certain things are to do, and
the kind that doesn't. The latter will make statements like "But besides this
latency improvement, Apple's Pencil itself doesn’t actually offer any
noticeable drawing features that FiftyThree’s Pencil doesn’t."

Such a ridiculous statement. Zero pen latency is something _nobody else in the
history of general purpose tablet computers has ever been able to accomplish_.
Apple managed to do it. It's a staggeringly hard thing to do, but just like
everything else Apple accomplishes, they make it look so easy that journalists
are all like, "so what?"

You can make fun of Ive's breathless self-pimping all you want, but at the end
of the day, Apple does the things nobody else has the stones to even try.

~~~
kzhahou
> Apple does the things nobody else has the stones to even try

Well now, Microsoft's been aggressively pushing the latency limits for a while
now. We don't yet know if Apple surpassed them. Regardless, it wouldn't be
because Apple had the stones.

FiftyThree built a tool around the limitations of the current ipads. That
said, FiftyThree's pencil (which I own) isn't very good. They get a lot of
mileage from fancy packaging and self-important blog posts, but I've had
better experience with other vendors' pens on ipad.

------
lsiunsuex
I love the Apple Watch nay-sayers.

In the last month - I put my Apple Watch through hell - took it swimming every
day for 1 hour on vacation in a salt water pool. Spend 7 days in the furnace
that is a Vegas summer. Spend a weekend cleaning out a horders house where the
white band got covered in black "dirt". It never once failed me. A little dish
soap and my fingers to clean the band and it's as white as the day I got it.
If I did that to my Tagg Heuer watch I'd spend 2 hours with q-tips and jewelry
cleaner trying to get it clean.

Plus - it let me check notifications, answer phone calls and the time without
taking my phone into the pool; or without getting my phone dirty while
cleaning out the house. It was get answering a phone call while in the pool
and my phone was on a lounge chair 20 feet away.

I can't wash my phone; I can't take it in the pool and nor do I want to touch
it when my hands are dirty. It's an incredible piece of electronics. So what -
I charge it every night. Show me a real iPhone user that doesn't charge their
phone every night - and if they don't, their charging it as soon as they wake
up.

... This is Tim Cook's Apple now - and I think Tim Cook is doing a lot of
things Steve Jobs didn't want to do (the iPad Pro stylus, the keyboard, 6plus,
iPad multitasking, etc...) So there will for sure be a bit of catch-up to be
done.

It's not who does it first. It's who does it better.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>It never once failed me.

Who is saying its delicate? The complaints are of its milquetoast design, lack
of other designs (wheres the round face), and poor value proposition.
Smartwatches are pretty tough in general. My Moto 360 has been to hell and
back. This is not a problem to solve. Its been solved.

>This is Tim Cook's Apple now

and that's the problem. I think Steve's upper class fashionista tastes would
have dictated more styles or a more stylish device. Cook's group is designing
for the Walmart crowd. The best looking smartwatches are on Android. That's an
Apple failure right there.

~~~
drdeadringer
> Cook's group is designing for the Walmart crowd.

I'd like to know what is inherently wrong with this.

~~~
unprepare
Well, historically Apple has pursued the high-end market.

Typically brands that go from high-end to low-end lose their high-end
customers along the way, who don't want to be associated with low-end
products.

Saying they are going for the walmart crowd represents a cheapening of the
product, cost cutting, mass production approach that leaves behind what many
people like to believe about apple (that it is much more artistic, concerned
more about making the best product than selling a product to the most people)

There is nothing wrong with being in either market, but shifting between the
two markets can be bad for business in that it's likely to lose previously
loyal customers.

------
saturdaysaint
Really, find an Apple keynote ever where this wasn't said.

“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.” is the classic example. The iPad
was eviscerated _everywhere_. The iPhone was laughed off as inferior in sooo
many ways to Nokia's N95. Conversely, good luck finding an article predicting
that podcasts would change everything.

\---

Yes, they improved a lot of things. They made a lot of good ideas standard
functionality and in most cases, hard-wired them into the device hardware in a
way that was unimaginable before. I'd bet a lot of money that we'll look at
downloads on Apple TV's app store compared to FireTV and Roku's and laugh that
they were ever compared.

~~~
danieldk
_Really, find an Apple keynote ever where this wasn 't said._

The problem of this line of reasoning is that it can be used to bin any
criticism levelled at Apple. Some criticism has merit other criticism does
not. Judge criticism by that. (E.g., many of the criticisms of Ping or the 5c
were pretty much on the mark.)

To be honest, I recognize some of the criticism of the article. On the other
hand, _Good artists copy; great artists steal._ In the end it is all about
execution. It is interesting to see who did it before (if not for computer
archeology), but if they did it better, it will fly.

~~~
saturdaysaint
Criticism is fine, but I think it's fair to set a high bar (there've been some
good and worthwhile technical criticisms in recent months that pass IMO). So
much Apple keynote criticism is just lazy snark. Last year, the song and dance
was a constant stream of "eh, it's just bigger". Which was fair in a sense,
and it scored a pedantic point for those that argued the screen was too small,
but it really missed the mark in giving the sense that the iPhone 6 was (a) a
great phone and (b) basically about to upend the last vestiges of Android from
the high-end (profitable) marketplace.

------
Jun8
This post focuses on hardware which is a limited view, Apple certainly made
very bold moves with respect to business. One reason I let go of my (very
nice) Android phone and got an iPhone6 was that I was sick and tired of being
at Verizon's whim for software updates and always had to use slightly older
versions (while my friends with AT&T enjoyed a newer version of KitKat). I'd
much rather deal with Apple, at least everyone's on same footing.

For me the biggest innovation that Apple did was to break the stronghold that
wireless carriers had on phone innovation. Note that some others couldn't even
think of this possibility (Moto, which killed it) or tried it in a half-assed
way (Google).

I never agreed with idea in this passage:

"In the place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark but beautiful
and terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the
foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair!"

If it's a necessary evil I, for one, would want to deal with a terrible Queen
rather than the Dark Lord. And I sure hope that Apple aims cable companies
next.

~~~
hinkley
> For me the biggest innovation that Apple did was to break the stronghold
> that wireless carriers had on phone innovation. Note that some others
> couldn't even think of this possibility (Moto, which killed it) or tried it
> in a half-assed way (Google).

Bless you my son.

I think unless you worked in the mobile industry in or around 05-07 you don't
know how bad things were about to get.

Carriers took about 70 cents out of every dollar spent on their networks. They
had been squeezing the Moto/Nokia/Ericcsons of the world hard and their new
idea to squeeze harder was to go around them and buy white label phones from
their suppliers (which is how HTC got big enough to become a name brand).

It was about a year before the iPhone launched that I got out of mobile
because I realized the only people who would ever make any money on it were
the carriers. They were getting free labor from VC-backed mobile startups
("eating their own young") and it was a losing game.

Their first phone was bad, but a conversation piece. Then the App Store
launched, and they announced they would keep 30 cents out of every dollar.
People in mobile danced in the streets. Finally, we can have margins! People
who didn't know the situation cried foul, Evil Apple was taking a whole 30% of
the profit for 'doing nothing'.

------
sirkneeland
I wonder what the ramifications of Force Touch (err, 3D Touch) are for users
with certain physical handicaps who may not be able to execute that particular
gesture.

Apple has generally done a pretty good job for accessibility, so I'd be
disappointed if they dropped the ball on this.

~~~
vidyesh
Force Touch looks more like a over-complicated long tap which anyone using a
smartphone can execute.

~~~
Someone
I haven't used it, so I don't know how well it performs, but there should be
two things different with force touch.

Firstly, it gives you double the number of click options. You had short vs
long, now you can have either lightly or with more force.

Secondly, long clicks slows down interactions. Force click should be just as
fast as a normal click. That may make it way more popular.

------
aet
Cell phones before and after iPhone

[http://bit.ly/1JZ6MwF](http://bit.ly/1JZ6MwF)

~~~
danieldk
Conveniently leaving out the LG Prada and others:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada)

Apple nailed it hard- and software-wise, but that image is just an attempt to
rewrite history.

~~~
aet
It is square, but it was no competitor. Google around about Prada v iPhone.

~~~
FireBeyond
If all those 'before' phones were 'competitors', why wasn't the Prada? Face
it, that image is about as selective as it gets.

------
danieldk
For Live Photos, there is something which is much more similar than gifs. Even
the 'animate while swiping through the gallery' is the same:

[http://www.windowscentral.com/trick-enable-nokia-living-
imag...](http://www.windowscentral.com/trick-enable-nokia-living-images-
pureview-luima)

------
meesterdude
Nothing announced yesterday really caught my attention. 3D touch will make
certain applications more expressive, such as art and music apps, and that's
awesome. but I don't see it having much adoption outside of that.

~~~
heartbreak
Games will have a heyday with it.

~~~
meesterdude
I forgot about games! although i'm not sure how much of a hayday it will be;
ideally 3d touch would represent a progressive enhancement to the app, and not
a core feature that is required for usage.

------
happyscrappy
Force touch is like adding right click to mobile, but if you mention that then
there is no story.

~~~
chimeracoder
> Force touch is like adding right click to mobile,

That's a really amusing way to phrase it, given Apple's long history with the
single-button mouse.

~~~
baldfat
I HATE APPLE but force touch, Apple Pencil and iPad Pro made me think that
Apple is finally away from the thumb of Jobs and is making things that are
actually useful for some people and getting made. It use to seem like they
made everything for the 90% and could care less for the last 10%.

~~~
aganders3
> It use to seem like they made everything for the 90% and could care less for
> the last 10%.

This is an interesting take when looking historically at Apple's marketshare.

~~~
baldfat
Well if you look they did this with getting 90% of their target audience. They
did it with how they made things for their audience. If it didn't fit the 90%
of our users will use this they didn't make it. This is regardless to market
share.

