Re:Apple Introduces What It Calls an Easier to Use Portable ...
by jimbokun on Tuesday October 25, 2016 @01:29PM
(#12789819)
"...because honestly it doesn't seem to me like it actually is or should be the "hardest" part at all."
Think about the amount of "empathy" that went into the first iPhone. All of the work to design an efficient way to display information and navigate on such a small device. Pinch to zoom. Inertial scrolling. Virtual keyboard to maximize screen space when you aren't typing. Swiping to navigate. Both dreaming up solutions like this and then making them real is extremely hard work and requires a lot of skill, talent, and knowledge.
It's not clear to me that making a smaller hard drive or a faster CPU or a screen with more pixels, are necessarily harder problems to solve than the kind of user experience problems Apple tackles. (Or used to tackle, depending on your view of post-Jobs Apple.)
Think about the amount of "empathy" that went into the first iPhone. All of the work to design an efficient way to display information and navigate on such a small device. Pinch to zoom. Inertial scrolling. Virtual keyboard to maximize screen space when you aren't typing. Swiping to navigate. Both dreaming up solutions like this and then making them real is extremely hard work and requires a lot of skill, talent, and knowledge.
It's not clear to me that making a smaller hard drive or a faster CPU or a screen with more pixels, are necessarily harder problems to solve than the kind of user experience problems Apple tackles. (Or used to tackle, depending on your view of post-Jobs Apple.)