The same is true of the iPod and of the iPhone. To me, that doesn’t diminish from the fact that those are/were best-in-class products, but the ubiquity is absolutely based on fashion.
The same is true of the Apple Watch. Of course the irony here is the Apple Watch was very much marketed as a fashion accessory first. That didn’t work. When the messaging pivoted to health and those capabilities got better then the completion (and there is no Android Apple Watch competition. Fitbit is the closest.), adoption spiked. But again, there is a still a very strong fashion component, even tho that isn’t a large part of the marketing anymore (the attempts to target luxury fashionistas have shifted and that has IMHO made for a better product all around). You don’t get a smart watch. You get an Apple Watch.
Au contraire, that was _vital_ to shifting the public discussion. Right at the beginning, public sentiment was "what? >$400 for a watch? are you crazy?" To stifle that thinking, Apple brilliantly went for the fashion accessory approach and announced the absurdly high-end Watch Edition at >$10,000 ... suddenly discussion went from "$400 is too much" to "$10,000 is absurd, but I can do $400."
Once the Overton Window for watches was shifted away from "vs $5 cheap watch" to ">$400 is reasonable", then Apple could shift the discussion to "...and look at all these other things you get besides time!"
They couldn't get to "...and health" until they got to "...reasonable price." Having achieved both, people buy an Apple Watch for all occasions, because ... well ... it's what sensible tech-connected people do.
Offering a handful of $10,000 Watch Edition probably segued into $1B in profits from associating the product line with high fashion. Nobody is ashamed to wear an Apple Watch with a 5-digit suit.
If not, I recommend you testing out this specific scenario. For a lot of the ones I tested, it becomes an exercise in patience and frustration. There were even some that refused to pair with more than one device at a time at all, meaning that every time you switch a device, you have to do the whole pairing process again. And that wasn't 10 years ago, i tested this less than 2 years ago.
And even the whole pairing process is annoying. Best case scenario, you can just pair them using the standard bluetooth settings on your phone. Worst case, you have to deal with some custom app (that you have to install on your phone) and do the steps from there (looking at you, Sony; I love your WH-1000XM over the head line of headphones, but ffs this is just bad UX). Contrast it with AirPods, where you just need to open the case and put them close to your iPhone. You do it once and then completely forget about having to do this ever again.
P.S. if your other device is an Apple one as well, it gets even more seamless. You don't need to pair it in that case, you just switch the audio output device on your macbook from speakers to airpods, which are already present on the list of audio devices (as long as you paired it with another apple device of yours first).
Could not agree more. I love the WH-1000XM3s (and loved the XM2s before that), but the UX on this stuff is just so frustrating.
Talking about seamless, the 3.5mm jack is far more seamless and robust to me. I wonder how long before they seal that hole on the only apple product (of the ones I use) that has it yet ... the macbook.
I don't believe Airpods would be any better in that scenario.
A huge percentage of our species gladly trade money for, objectively speaking, very minor improvements in convenience or experience. Apple has been taking this fact to the bank for 30 years. You may not have the same preferences, but you're probably in the minority. FWIW.
Only a second if your kids don’t have it, or you didn’t leave it at home, or...
With AirPods, one does not need track down the other device.
I'm philosophically aligned with Linux but not with Android.
I've tried both Windows and Mac, I just like Ubuntu better.
I believe there are higher end non Apple devices that have solved this.
I’m glad it’s worked well for you, though. I figured someone must being a good experience with it.
I'm wearing a pair I bought over a year ago, and using multiple devices at the same time is as easy as just turning them on.
The way it's been done for decades.
I dont think it's fashion so much as not looking stupid. Airpods aren't cool, they just don't look bad.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-airpods-review-wireles...
>The biggest downside? Their sound is just OK. AirPods produce a perfectly average sound that's clear in the mid-tones and is good for podcasts but doesn't pack much in the low end. And because of their open design, sound isolation is terrible. There's also no noise cancellation, so you'll be stuck hearing traffic or crowds around you. The Jabra Elite 65Ts produce much better sound at about the same price. Even budget alternatives like the $80 Anker Soundcore earbuds offer just-as-good sound for half the price.
I've read pretty much the same take from most reviewers I've looked at. It matches quality on cheaper models, and is outpaced by competitors in the same price range.
- form factor (my powerbeats pro case is huge compared to airpods) - handoff between different Apple devices - BT reliability/connection strength (mostly down to BT 4 vs 5) - fit and finish - noise cancellation
People weigh all of these things differently to arrive at what is "best". If a broad range of wireless buds all meet someone's threshold for acceptable audio quality, the other factors will be deciding.
3 years ago, they were the first seamlessly and reliably working product to free me of the cabled ear buds mess.
Were there other bluetooth ear buds before? Yes. Were they complete and utter shit to use? Also yes.
Now, 3 years later, a few competitors arise and some are better in some ways than AirPods - but again none are better than AirPods Pro. Active noise cancellation always has a markup of around $100 no matter the brand or product. So still, these AirPods Pro are fairly priced in my opinion (AirPods + $100).
You have to actively hate on Apple for even claiming any bluetooth in-ear buds are better than AirPods Pro as of today.
Samsung etc. caught on to AirPods after 3 years - but certainly not to AirPods Pro.
Or, one might say, Apple's product is the only satisfactory product on the market. It could certainly be better; along some axes, it's strictly worse than its competitors. But along a crucial axis, it meets a minimum standard of quality—not hurting my ears—that nothing else does. Sort of like modern VR products were "better" in that they finally met the minimum standard of quality of "not making me throw up."
(You can tell that Apple is thinking specifically about this problem when nobody else is, because when they decided to add a conformant seal to the AirPods Pro, they then spent who-knows-how-much figuring out a way to actively pump air out of the ear canal to relieve the pressure imbalance you create when you shove the 'bud in there. I haven't tried those, but I'm pretty sure, from the description of the pressure-equalization tech they employ, that they wouldn't hurt my ears either.)
It's a simple vent, no pump, active or otherwise. My B&O's have not quite the same, but a flange in the silicon to achieve the same effect.
Apple charges an extra $40 for the wireless charging case - airpods are $159, Airpods with wireless charging case are $199. Earfun earbuds are right now less than $40 total on Amazon, sold by the brand, and are better than Apple's offer at 199 as far as I'm concerned.
I bought an iPod Classic later on (with 160 GB) to experience the genius usability of the iPod. Except, I didn't experience it.
The major innovation of the iPhone was that it had a capacitive touch UI (which allows finger use, gestures, etc). The iPhone did not have an App Store during release. It was missing a lot of features. It was Nokia who was the market leader around that point. I wish they fully bet on Maemo and capacitive touch instead of Windows Phone (they went the right way with the N9, but the predecessors were still too much on pen and resistive touch, or hybrid).
Right now, it is oddly enough Jolla who have a partly proprietary, partly FOSS, Linux-based OS (SFOS) for which you need a paid license for. After that, they won't track you though. The iPhone would've never sustained a big pie of the smartphone market though; it is Android which killed Nokia. Official SFOS has Android emulation.
Same with the iPhone. The major innovation of the iPhone was that it was simple to use and anyone could pick it up and use it without knowing anything about it.
I wouldn't say that's accurate. Like the iPod before it, the iPhone relied on experimentation and peer demonstration for UI comprehension. It wasn't discoverable.
My single instance of using an iPhone resulted in total failure in determining how to switch between two running apps. I kept ending up on the home screen and having to click the app's icon again.
Apples clever hack around that was to let customers get hands-on with the devices before purchase in controlled Apple Store environments where they could be nudged into thinking that they had mastered the UI themselves.
Except this was exactly how the original iPhone handled app-switching. It was only by getting people used to that paradigm that modern smartphones were even able to introduce mobile multi-tasking. At the time of the iPhone's release, Blackberry was king and switching apps was a matter of hitting the "Back" button over and over again until you got back to the main menu of the Blackberry OS. On some models, you could click on a scroll wheel/ball and click "Go back to App Launcher" (or something similar). Precisely what the iPhone did was give people a home button.
Ever since Web 2.0 it was clear to me that a touch-based UI would win if you used a web browser; it was Apple's capacitive touch UI which was the killer feature. Nobody had such even though Mozilla was experimenting already with a mobile browser (Fennec). (For some use-cases, a keyboard is still desirable though. E.g. a Pebble during sports is better usable than a touch-based smartwatch.)
You don't need to know what Ogg Vorbis is; I knew because I ripped my CDs to Ogg Vorbis. I already paid for these. It allowed me to save even more space compared to MP3 and AAC.
None of these things, in any way, take away from how simple the first iPhone was to use. Once again, you missed the point completely.
The only thing that came close to the usability and reliability of an iPhone in 2007 was the Blackberry.
FWIW, I never used the original iPhone for a long period of time, but I did use the iPod Touch, and I did have usability issues with it (not in hindsight). Something simple as blocking ads, for example, it could not do without jailbreaking. I call that a design issue. That Google does such, is to be expected as it is their main source of income. Apple? Not so much. Multitasking was also something to forget about.
Unless you have some kind of argument that actually addresses the premise that the iPhone was successful because it was the easiest smartphone on the market to use and had high discoverability, you're going to keep missing the point by responding with features that you wish it had when it launched.
The only major innovation the iPhone was using, was a capacitive touch UI. iOS wasn't polished, as it lacked many basic features. Yet the UI was good enough and simple to use. Nothing I wrote here above is in contradiction with each other. The only thing you appear to disagree on is the importance of these missing features. If they had these features from the beginning, perhaps Apple would've released too late, and the market would be saturated already (as touchscreen devices were coming to the masses regardless).
You are describing missing functionality, but you are not refuting the claim of iPhone's simplicity of use.
There were plenty of things the iPhone couldn't do. Among these that it could, the experience was years ahead of the competition.
I already addressed that in my first post in this subthread:
"[...]
The major innovation of the iPhone was that it had a capacitive touch UI (which allows finger use, gestures, etc). The iPhone did not have an App Store during release. It was missing a lot of features. It was Nokia who was the market leader around that point. I wish they fully bet on Maemo and capacitive touch instead of Windows Phone (they went the right way with the N9, but the predecessors were still too much on pen and resistive touch, or hybrid).
[...]"
Apple spent around 40-50m on the initial rollout, a sum completely unheard of in the industry. And they bested themselves every iphone release since.
Even today, closest contenders are far from that mark.
HTC may have had a touch UI, but they didn’t have a capacitive touch screen (did the XDA use a stylus? I’d wager it did).
More importantly, Apple was the only company willing to:
* commit all their resources to a single UI and single phone
* write their own operating system for said phone to have control over its fate and optimize for that UI
* offer a sales experience where people could discover the phone, see how it worked, and get expert help, with sales people who actually knew about the phone and weren’t offering users the choice of three dozen competitors at the same time
This "Apple is only good at marketing" idea is vastly off the mark.
The camera on a $1000 iPhone is not good enough? For what? For whom? The cameras on mid range smartphones are amazing, these days. A $150 China phone or $250 West phone is great these days. It is basically adequate for a whole lot of use cases, including normal day to day usage.
Also, smartphones with multiple cameras are, in a way, unrealistic. There's quite some lack of realism in today's cameras, akin to autotune.
It is also not possible to take an objectively great photo. Everyone has different biases, interests, quality thresholds, etc. See e.g. [1] for a (result of a) blind test.
[1] https://tweakers.net/reviews/7566/blinde-test-smartphonecame...
OK.
> [...] Phone cameras are important.
Your preferences != other people's preferences.
The former is subjective, as for the latter - what's the competition to which they are favourably priced?
How come we have such high expectations for argument quality for every other topic other than how "apple is better" - it has reached the point where I read it and I almost jump to astroturfing conclusions. Fortunately for Apple their fans are dedicated enough to astroturf for free!
They certainly connect easier and more reliably than my over-ears, bought around the same time (flagship Sony noise cancelling ones). As for the price, as Wikipedia documents and many others have mentioned, they were priced lower than most other truly wireless earbuds when they launched. Since then the field has grown more competitive, which is good for the consumer.
As well any Apple main product this day in my opinion. Good and decent products, but severely overpriced. Nothing close to as revolutionary as they were in the early days. Look at functions in new models of iPhones or hardware upgrades in Macs, they are not new or exciting. These days they are so much alternatives, it's a wonder to me why Apple is still so popular. It has to be a fashion or prestige feeling in my opinion. And it's only a matter of time before that dies out in my opinion.
When it comes to multitasking, the WebOS card metaphor won out and even came to iOS.
WebOS is now a smart TV OS
I preferred the Creative Zen Touch to the iPod from the same year (2004), because:
- it had a great UI (similar to the iPod's, but the scroll area was vertical instead of circular)
- I could load music onto it easily (no need to use a special app)
IIRC Apple and Creative had some litigation about the IP for the UI, although I don't recall the details.
EDIT: I agree with your point about the iPhone.
Then I found that my airpods were under the couch and I immediately switched back.
Edit: added Windows clarification
Apple added on their own crippling DRM after that.
iRivers, Cowons, and Samsungs were a head above it without any doubt. They were just never marketed in US.
Same with Smartphones. Japanese phones had all features of a smartphone a decade before the rest of the world, but they never bothered to market them outside thinking of outside world being "not advanced enough" to culturally absorb a phone as an integral lifestyle element, and not as a work tool.
https://www.cnet.com/news/apples-ipod-spurs-mixed-reactions/
This forum thread from the 2001 release is pretty funny:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...
Absolutely: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...
The Reality Distiortion Field turned out to be in this guy's head :) Seriously, many technical people underestimate the power of "bringing X to the masses" by making a beautiful, easy polished, effortless UX. UX (usually) trumps functionality.
> #13
> iCan't believe it!
> It's now at the online Apple Store!
> $400 for an Mp3 Player!
>I'd call it the Cube 2.0 as it wont sell, and be killed off in a short time...and it's not really functional.
> Uuhh Steve, can I have a PDA now?"
A quote for the ages... :D
Growing up during the rise of the ipod, it absolutely was a status symbol first and foremost. Owning a zune gave you more ridicule in middle school than not owning an mp3 player at all. People were buying earpods without even buying an ipod, just to have that white cord dangling out of their ear.
Maybe older generations saw it as good tech only, but for late millenials, the ipod's popularity was due to an obsession for vanity. These were the years where everything had to be either lacoste, abercrombie, hollister, american eagle, or a 6 inch tall polo man, after all.
Part of the airpods success is that they tap into this obsession toward vanity harbored deep within millenials, who have also moved on from mall brands to gucci/balenciaga/supreme/insert bougie brand of the decade.
It was a status symbol for you and your teenage friends. Life expectancy is currently around 80 in the developed world and teenagers don't really have disposable income, so teenagers weren't really driving sales. Apple made cool commercials and cool colors because they could.
I actually bought different headphones because of that ad b/c I thought it was so stupid, but do go on.
The iPod was better than any competitor it faced ever. The UI with the click wheel was completely unmatched. Maybe the Zune, years later, came close, but Apple absolutely crushed it with the iPhone and iPod touch.
The iPhone was leaps and bounds ahead of its time, to the point that the then King of the hill, BlackBerry, didn’t even think it was possible. And the smoothness of the UI was completely unmatched. The pocketPCs of the time were clunky messes. The iPhone’s UI was so far ahead that it’s now the default UI for every phone.
And finally, the AirPods are a far superior experience than the alternatives. In addition though, the AirPods are extremely competitively priced.