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Re:How Apple Scaled Back Its Titanic Plan to Take on Detroit by coldtea on Monday October 17, 2016 @11:09AM (#12725640)
There were internal projects with no direction all the time under Steve as well.

Heck there were even EXTERNAL projects with no direction, like the Apple TV (still flailing around), the Apple Cloud offerings (only got robust in the last 2 years or so, and the most touted part back then, the "office"-like iCloud apps are universally ignored), the Apple boom box, and other things besides.

Re:How Apple Scaled Back Its Titanic Plan to Take on Detroit by digi_owl on Monday October 17, 2016 @11:40AM (#12726003)
I can't help but wonder that during both runs of Jobs at the helm, Apple was basically making products tailored for the wants of one man: Steve Jobs.

Supposedly the iPod launched with a idiosyncratic equalizer, apparently tuned to Jobs tastes.

Re:How Apple Scaled Back Its Titanic Plan to Take on Detroit by chipotle_coyote on Monday October 17, 2016 @01:15PM (#12726982)
I don't think I've heard a story about the equalizer, but I think in general you're right. It worked out that Jobs hit on products that were successful enough of the time, but "idiosyncratic" seemed to be one of his defining characteristics. A few of Jobs's products were so wildly successful that we tend to forget or gloss over the ones that, well, weren't so much.

I think idiosyncratic also describes Jony Ive -- but as a pundit (possibly John Gruber?) put it on a podcast recently, Jobs was a better editor. He was good at zeroing on what made designs work rather than merely beautiful. If I have any major criticism of the post-Jobs Apple, it's that they seem to prioritize aesthetics over functionality. I know that's a knock that critics made against them long before the Tim Cook era, but I don't think it was really true until post-Forstall.

(And no, I don't mean losing the headphone jack. I mean more things like the entire UX of the new Apple TV, from the beautiful user interface which makes navigating through multiple seasons of a TV show an endlessly scrolling nightmare compared to the previous model's design to the thin, elegant, ergonomically disastrous remote control. Ive seems particularly drawn to the notion that thinness and symmetry are more important than usability.)

Re:How Apple Scaled Back Its Titanic Plan to Take on Detroit by SysArchitect on Monday October 17, 2016 @01:19PM (#12727039)
What app causes you issues with scrolling through multiple seasons?

A lot of apps let you select the season from some sort of "drop down" or display a list of seasons vertically and let you scroll through individual episodes horizontally within that season...