Yup. When jobs announced the iPod at a special event most people said "big deal, it's an MP3 player".

What they didn't look at was how great the UI was, how well it integrated with their Mac (and eventually PC) and how much better the same features that already existed elsewhere were.

I believe the same rules apply here. And the app store will be the best in town. Again.

and with the iPad: "big deal, it's just a large iPhone".

The fact that most of HN seems to hate or deride these features (like the Live Photos thing) tells me that they'll likely be a huge success and all be using them in a year.

Which is odd because you would think a community like this the actors would be forward thinking and try and see what the possibilities are. The lack of creativity isn't unique to this place or generation - Slashdot had similar sentiments years ago when they still mattered.

Alas, community like this has very little empathy for non-tech, non-dev folks. I am amused how narrow worldview can be sometimes on HN. Every kid should learn to code, because nothing else is interesting on Earth, everyone is supposed to tinker with their devices, because what's else there to do, etc. And when I state that "Inmates are running the asylum" is one of the book that changed my worldview it does not usually end well for me.

Not really odd. It's pretty normal at this point.

> most of HN seems to hate or deride these features (like the Live Photos thing) tells me that they'll likely be a huge success and all be using them in a year

If the fact that gifv videos are already everywhere (Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, Vine-sorta-kinda) didn't tip you off. It seems like people are starting to think of short, usually-silent, looped videos as just what you take to preserve a moment, instead of a photo.

Indeed, yet a see a lot of hate for Live Photos here and on other places like Reddit. It's funny.

Tech-savvy crowds are often the worst arbiters of taste, certainly the worst predictors of it.

I think because they often focus on function and do not consider form as an important factor - which has proven to be wrong time and again.

Form and function are one.