I remember the first time I went into an Apple Store.
I was looking at a 17” PowerBook, salivating at the screen and performance but struggling with justifying the price tag. An incredibly nice lady walked up to me and asked if I had any questions. I told her I was thinking it over as it was a large purchase. She beamed and said “Of course, that’s totally understandable. In fact it takes on average 3 visits to an Apple Store before making a purchase”. It was the smartest, nicest, most low key way of saying don’t feel pressure…you’ll be coming back, and then you’ll buy the machine you’ve always wanted.
Very on brand. And surprisingly still not really copied by others.
It isn't copied by other consumer electronics companies because none of them have the brand value of Apple. Microsoft tried the model with its own chain of stores but failed pretty quickly. Most tech is better suited for Best Buy-like megastores where shoppers can browse and try a bunch of products and brands in one go. And for phones (at least in America) most people still prefer to go to their carrier store.
Go outside of tech though and the Apple Store experience is commonplace. Apple itself copied the concept directly from high end fashion houses.
Microsoft stores were abysmal. They felt like Best Buy without the convenience somehow.
I went in to try the (then new) Surface Studio (the drafting table like AIO) and they couldn’t find the peripheral knob. But it kept triggering, but it turned out employees would mess around with customers by spinning it while they used it.
Of course that’s just one store, but I walked by several and they all just looked depressing inside. Layouts felt about as poorly planned as a Best Buy or staples display, and even things as simple as lighting was harsher.
It’s just not as simple as making a store. The store has to provide the right vibe, and Microsoft don’t understand vibe.
You can trust Microsoft to make anything they touch suck. This has been a constant for decades at this point. Please give me contradicting examples, if they exist.
My second job was somehow a cool job for a remote Microsoft office.
The people I worked with REALLY tried and cared to deliver what the bigger MS office asked for, but the distributed nature of the organization combined with a lack of unifying vision made delivering something great almost impossible.
Even with dedication, the result would be half-baked Wizards and ASP "solutions" that met the punch list requirements
About a year after the Apple Store opened on Boylston Street in Boston, a Microsoft Store popped up across the street in the Prudential Center. I only ever went in to get a replacement for my Microsoft Arc Mouse that I used with my MacBook (LOL). It was a funny store because the employees felt like it was their moral duty to be the antithesis to Apple...which didn't make sense because the Apple Store had bigger crowds than they did, and that's even after Microsoft added an Xbox play area.
Anyhoo, they shuttered pretty quickly (Apple Store is still there, of course).
I remember the first time I tried to buy something at an Apple store. Usually avoid 'em cause I don't like Apple as a company, but I do like their laptops. I'd decided an M3 air was gonna be perfect as a general use laptop.
Walked into the store, waited 30 minutes for one of their "friendly, professional staff" to come up & help me, making eye contact, etc.
Eventually I had to walk up to one of them standing there and tell them I wanted to buy something. Then it turns out they didn't even have one in stock...in their flagship London store...
Literally I wanted to walk in, pay immediately & walk out. I already knew exactly what I wanted. I don't know why people laude the "Apple experience".
Their flagship shops (Especially London) are really not places you go to buy on a whim, it's why they have a booking and collection process - yes it might suck but its by far one of their busiest shops.
Well it was more the store was full of teenagers and kids generally fucking around while their parents browsed. Plenty of those parents were getting attended to by staff - even if they had bookings, it takes a spare staff member (of which there were many just milling around) one minute to ask me what I'm here for and recommend I make a booking if I had a complex request.
The conversation literally would have been "can I help you?" "Yes I want a space grey m3 macbook air, 16gb ram 512gb ssd, I will pay for it right now and then leave this terrible place tyvm". With the laptop on-hand the purchasing process would've taken as little time as it took for them to ram it into pos and for my phone nfc to pay.
The Cayenne is one of the only SUVs I looked at where the sales experience made me more interested in the brand & left me with a good impression of the dealer.
I hadn't seriously considered a Porsche until I learned they make niche parts for cars for decades - like interior bits and trim that most brands stop making/carrying after about 10 years. You can get parts for a 2002-2016 Cayenne at the dealer, but even though it shares a TON of components with the 2002-2016 Touareg you won't be able to get the parts from VW that you can still source from Porsche for those same years.
It was (is?) a really good way of letting you know you could hang around and play with the machines - at the time Computer City and similar places (which is what Apple was really trying to compensate for, many of them had few or no Macs at all) would heavily imply you should "buy or leave" if you stayed too long.
Recently i've bought the new iphone, it's not as expensive as the high end macbook, but still, not a small amount of money.
I got to the store, asked for the phone, finalized my purchase and got out, all in 15 min i guess. No second guess, no cold feet, because i had been researching smartphones for years before going with it, i knew what i would get and what i wouldn't.
Back in the day you would indeed need to go to the store to know what you were getting.
If you know how iPhones work then online research is enough, but if you haven’t played with one it makes sense to use it at the store as research, or even if you’re just curious.
Same for Android, I wouldn’t buy one without testing before, for example.
Also: The Microsoft and Chromebook displays at electronics chain-stores have seriously stepped up their game in the last 10 years or so. Before that it was a shitshow, with keyboards missing keys and the OS crashing on demo devices that would be otherwise perfectly usable machines.
"if you haven’t played with one it makes sense to use it at the store as research"
Yep. Iphones are sluggish by design in so many ways, that I would lose my mind using one for my personal life. Scrolling on an iPhone is a bafflingly terrible experience, because they limit the speed so much you can't move around at a reasonable speed.
What are you comparing this to? I have a slew of phones near me and when I pick up an Android device it usually feels like a stuttery mess multiple times in regular use, even compared to a basic prepaid iPhone SE from 2022 which might only be 60Hz but doesn't randomly jerk around and freeze like every 120Hz Android seems to do
I'm baffled by your comment. I specifically recall getting some new Samsungs at work two years ago, so I got one to play with for a little. I was shocked by how janky scrolling felt. Just going through the android settings screen, there were "hiccups" and there was a clear lag between my finger moving and the screen moving. My iphone 7 felt so much smoother, although much older and "crufty", as opposed to the Samsung being brand new and "untouched". It was a then-current mid-range model, don't remember which one specifically.
Can you even disable UI animations on an iphone? It's the first thing I do on any phone or OS, and using a device with it enabled just feel like walking through mud.
> [The older non-iPod MP3 player] left a bigger impact on my life, really, than the iPod, because it was the thing that got me into media piracy, and led me to install Linux on an old laptop, which I used exclusively for media piracy. This increased my computer proficiency dramatically (though not to the point where I became a habitual Linux user) and set off a chain of events that made me much more comfortable with amateur web development and eventually game development.
This is such a funny end to this article that is reflected in my time too using Apple and non-Apple products. I had a similar generic MP3 player and I also got heavily into piracy (I remember it had a small screen so I tried to compress and stuff a full movie into it, which I successfully did by learning about and messing with ffmpeg settings, for example). Then when I got an early iPhone, I was flabbergasted as to how locked down the thing was (no, I do not want to sync my entire phone audio contents to iTunes), and soon after I switched to Android. Only recently have I started using a Mac and that's only because for historical reasons it's not locked down like the rest of Apple's devices, you can actually run whatever software you want on it without needing to go through a walled garden.
Macs are the only reasonable Apple product at the moment, except for the ridiculously priced accessories (headphones, mostly). Some of them are even upgradeable through tinkering, which is 2 things literally opposite of what Apple seems to want their customers to be thinking about.
AirPods are the only wireless earbuds I've used that handle 2-way Bluetooth audio between multiple devices well. They also sound okay, although I have $20 wired IEMs I imported from Shenzen that are more comfortable and sound just as good.
I also think the iPad isn't terrible, although it's a bit on the expensive side.
I still run the theory that Apple has actors on staff to just “be cool at the Apple Store”. I once went into the local store during daytime in summer (my lunch break) to pick up an order. There was a very attractive young woman dancing next to the headphones seemingly testing out a pair of AirPod Max. And the rest of the store was also filled with strangely attractive persons.
I wasn’t able to verify my theory because I have a work life and don’t happen to walk by an Apple Store during working hours. But in my mind I believe it would totally be Apple if they hire extra cool folk to make the store feel more hip and not empty.
They definitely do this in bars. I've had friends that got recruited thru modelling agencies. It's not a huge stretch to think of them doing it in other types of retail too.
Bars usually have a whole funnel around getting more women in. Whether it's free drinks, quiz nights hosted by cute girls, the bouncer thing where they filter out some people.
We once had a guest lecturer who broke down the ROI of making the ladies bathrooms beautiful (but not the men's). Presumably it leads to more alcohol consumption, which is where the margins are. I think restaurants in the UK make almost no money on the food itself.
I met a girl I knew while she was doing one of those jobs and it was a very boring, normal, local kind of pub. I guess the goal is to increase profits so it's seen as marketing/an investment.
Apple products are expensive. Assuming most people inside an Apple store can afford them, they will be wealthier than the average, which means they will be better dressed, groomed, and will generally take better care of themselves than the average.
A few years back I went in to buy an Apple TV. Walked in, straight up to the Apple TV display, stood using it for a few mins, stood looking outwards towards the rest of the store, tried to make eye contact with any staff. No one paid any attention, staff happily chatting away to each other. I couldn't have looked more ready to buy without waving cash around.
Apple Store employees are definitely trained better than the average shop, but they are far from luxury.
Maybe I'm not American enough, but that experience sounds much more like luxury to me than having an employee bugging you to buy without you explicitly asking.
The Apple TV at its most expensive is $150. I remember walking into high end stores like Burberry in my early twenties, seriously contemplating the cheapest items there and also being ignored except by security.
This may be their thinking, but if so I feel that would be down to bad training.
In my experience the Apple TV skews hard towards those who have a lot of Apple products. It's priced far higher than the rest of that market. Most people buying an iPhone are buying a Fire stick or a cheap smart TV. I'd bet most people buying an Apple TV have an iPhone and a Mac.
It would be like going into a Burberry store and shopping for replacement buttons for your $3000 coat.
I'd also imagine that Apple TV is a great entry point—especially given the relatively cheap price—into the ecosystem. It's like the modern equivalent of the iPod.
Some luxury brands will play hard to get, others will fawn over customers. Different people want different experiences. How expensive the item in the catalog might change the level of service, but the brand will use a similar playbook across the entire catalog.
... or approached a human in a logo'd uniform and say, "Hello person. Can you help me, please?"
You know, like our parents and grandparents would have done at a store. With humans who shouldn't be beckoned by glaring while standing near a display.
The MP3 player I had before that iPod was a much more generic one. I've spent the last few days occasionally checking Wikipedia and other places online to see if I can tell which one it was, and I have absolutely no idea.
The business model of the S1 is just wild. It mimics the PC clone industry of the 1990s.
From the Wikipedia page:
This product is what is referred to as a 'common mold' which means many different suppliers can produce this same model. The manufacturers are almost exclusively located in China.
Primarily defined by the use of a system-on-a-chip of one of the Actions brands and some common core features, S1 products vary widely in software and hardware as well as design.
I counted 62 different manufacturers listed in the Wikipedia article that apparently licensed this reference design (the core features and basic hardware), and who then made variations to the user interface or added a feature or two, and slapped their names onto it.
There seems to have been a whole industry of MP3 Players that were essentially identical at the core electronics level in the early 2000s, and we never realized it.
I started with a 32 MB Diamond Rio PMP300, so cramped as I transcoded music to 64kbps just to cram an hour in there, but the ability to listen to music without it _ever_ skipping (I was MTBing in the summer and snowboarding in the winter) was invaluable.
Oh, good memories. Everyone had one of these at school! I think I had a 64 MB version. It was peak commodity tech at the time.
I remember getting a Creative Zen a few years later, and it was the first time when I realized how everything turns into crap with the technology advancement. No batteries, so needed USB charger to travel (USB chargers weren't even too popular back then). No mass storage support, only sync through Windows-only software, MTP was unusable on Linux, didn't work with cars or boomboxes. Video playback required converting to very specific formats, which the provided software often failed to do, needed custom codec packs. Absolutely required MP3 ID tags to even show the song in the playlist. Cool idea for a player, but the software was pure garbage. I think I broke it once and used the old player for years more.
Archos did some of the very earliest HDD-containing players back in the day, and beat the ipod to market by about a year (December 2000 launch).
My first mp3 player was a 20GB archos xs202, which I loved. Partly for being a great music player, partly for being a generic 20GB external drive when needed. I think at one point I had it set up both as a music player and to boot debian on a host PC when connected via USB...
The experience has definitely changed, mainly because of how crowded most Apple stores get. While all the devices are still in the open there is no way employees can offer a personalized experience to every shopper and wanderer. You have to now make a reservation for that.
Getting rid of the physical Genius Bar and physical specific checkout locations was the worst decision they ever made. Now people are just kind of randomly clumped around and there's no clear delineation between staff who are already busy and staff who can immediately take questions.
I think it varies a lot by location - the store I live by now is a regional store but still offers walk-in for everything except Genius Bar appointments.
If you're buying a phone or Mac or watch or Vision, they seem happy to help you on the spot or tell you where to hang out until someone's avaiailable.
I wonder if it was the Creative Nomad [1] ... I had a Jukebox that had a 6GB spinning disk in it originally. Upgrading to a 20GB drive was the first real hackery thing I did with my old RedHat box. I had to buy an IDE converter too to move between the laptop connector to the desktop.
That was also when I learned what happens if you dd a Creative Nomad Jukebox system image onto your root partition while the machine is running. The RedHat install stayed stable for about 20 minutes before weird things started failing and eventually the whole thing just locked up. Remember kids, always check you dd out file path!
My first MP3 player was the Creative MuVo. The storage part (actually, really everything but the battery holder) you could disconnect and use as a USB stick, which was also how you loaded music onto it. I (correctly) thought this was very cool.
I eventually did get an iPod, the one that was all capacitive touch buttons and wheel, the last one before the click wheel.
Looks like the 5th gen Ipod was the thing in 2005/2006, per wikipedia. Sounds like I graduated HS +/- a year or two of the author.
In that time frame... I was using sub-GB MP3 players, with MMC cards or maybe SD cards by that point. (I didn't have those massive multi-thousand song collections, so it was fine...)
Because I have pics saved in my personal folder, mine in high school/early college were:
- Classic 64MB w/ 128 MB memory card
- MPIO FL100, probably 2 or 3x bigger; I wore this on a belt holder
- Sandisk Sansa, the bulbous one, before later using some of the smaller ones. Probably still only 256 or 512 MB of built-in storage.
I loved my SanDisk Sansa. It had a specific category for audiobooks, and there were a lot of quality of life things - features that wouldn’t matter when you were listening to songs but that made listening to books on tape way better.
- If you held the fast forward button it would slowly increase the speed it fast forwarded. Not something that matters with a 2 minute song, but it really matters with an hour long audiobook section.
- If you went to listen to something else but then you came back to the audiobook, it would open with the section you’d been listening to highlighted, and if you selected it it would pick up where you’d left off. If you accidentally skipped forward you could back out, move back to the previous section, and it’d do the same thing - starting where you’d been.
- On top of that, you could add more storage with microSD cards!
> We were fascinated with the Apple store in the mall because it was essentially an interactive luxury goods store where they'd let you actually grasp all the luxury goods with your teenager hands.
The secret being, of course, that they're not actually luxury goods. Like many things at the mall, it's a high-margin doodad sold to people in the proverbial impulse aisle of life. Dippin' Dots, knock-off watches, Build-A-Bear workshop - all in same vein of "looks expensive but is cheap to make" no different from the iPod.
I think the American shopping mall is one of the things that helped me contextualize Apple's brand identity. Apple does good marking in isolation or on a screen, SF Pro looks very stunning and the Apple logo is chic and simple. But so is the Cartier logo. And the Rolex storefront. Or any of the other genuinely valuable things sold at malls. It's the marketing that people respond to, not the value of a good.
I largely agree with you, but I think one of Apple’s secret sauces (and they aren’t the only one) is that while their products are to some marketed as luxury items, they are in fact coupled with extremely high utility which is a somewhat new concept, in my view.
The iPhone or your equivalent Android device truly is one of the most useful inventions humanity has ever created, especially for the era that we currently exist in.
Outside of urban centers, the only other device that is similarly valuable is a car, but the average American new car purchase costs 65 times the average American new phone purchase. While there is obviously a lot of nuance here, this makes phones feel downright cheap (or conversely, cars downright expensive) compared to imparted value.
> while their products are to some marketed as luxury items, they are in fact coupled with extremely high utility which is a somewhat new concept, in my view.
Well, a Rolex has extremely high utility too. It's just that it has much less utility than a digital watch you can buy for $23 from Casio. The purpose of spending the other $59,477 [ https://www.rolex.com/en-us/watches/sky-dweller/m336935-0008 ] is just that you can say you did.
Apple products are similar. They have high utility that is nevertheless not as high as competing products that are much cheaper. All of the value is coming from the luxury branding.
I don’t agree at all. Neither is Rolex high utility, nor is anyone fooled that an analog watch which sets you back 3-4 orders of magnitude more than digital/smart watches should be higher utility.
Products competing directly with Apple products offer, at best, equivalent utility and performance for no more than 1 magnitude cost difference. Flagship android phones have cost about the same as iPhones for the better part of a decade and macbooks are often price competitive with a similarly specced ultra books. It’s understood that cheaper phones and laptops have similar utility for the average user, but some aspect of performance or quality is often a tradeoff.
Rolex is not high utility, it is harsh environment. Real Antarctic expeditions, mountaineering, pre-GPS flight and navigation, SCUBA diving, sea navigation, desert navigation, etc. You could rely on your Rolex not to be the component that fails and gets you killed or lost.
Of course, like the SUV, often it's actual use case is a far cry from what it is actually capable of doing.
That comment has a typical HN form: agree with the parent poster, but make an unnecessary arbitrary new distinction so that you’re acceptably argumentative.
Except mechanical watches fail all the time. The sapphire glass shatters, or a strong impact disrupts the movement, or a user doesn't screw down the crown and water enters the device. They require expensive regular services.
Rolex has a long history of being a tool watch, and mechanical watches can be used in a lot of neat ways, but I would never want to depend on one in a life or death situation without fully understanding a backup plan.
I feel like you're saying something like,"That expensive painting is inferior in every way to wallpaper, which covers the wall more effectively and durably, at a fraction of the cost."
The Rolex (or luxury watches in general) are pieces of jewellery that also tell the time. The more expensive ones have some combination of
-more expensive materials
-better finishing
-superior craftsmanship (including more intricate complications)
The goal is not just to tell the time, it's to wear a piece of artistic craftsmanship. (Though I would agree that other brands are a better example than Rolex, and some people do indeed just buy expensive watches in general and Rolex in particular just to flex. As some do with art.)
Apple products have intensely overengineered insides that are (single-digit) years ahead of the competition in performance and security. Giving them that high margins causes engineers to do enough work to keep up.
It's like how Google is pointlessly overengineered even though literally nothing they do affects revenue since they're a monopoly.
Smartphone hardware is almost completely useless because of the software. At this point it's pretty obvious that the potential (but unrealizable) utility is just more of the luxury illusion they're selling.
In my pocket, I have a wallet, timer, alarm clock, calculator, telephone, atlas, directory, camera, stock broker, flashlight, tape measure, television, music collection, encyclopedia, transit time table, library, notepad, and translator. How are these utilities an illusion?
I regularly notice bugs when using iOS Mail; one that springs to mind would display one email's body with the header info from another email, it seems to have recently been fixed but was easily reproducible for weeks if not months.
> covered in ads and defects to the degree that you're better off without them
Someone is deluded, and it's either all of the people using these apps despite being worse off due to doing so... or it's you. (And we're talking about actual utility apps, not something that you could dismiss as a dopamine trap.)
Firstly it's all very intentionally coupled together. There are strict rules around how the UI and notifications are used specifically so that they can sell your attention.
Secondly I think the only thing I really miss that's particular to smartphones is the map. Everything else is either a dumb gimmick or actually bad and all of it is to just get you're attention so they can sell it.
Great! The fun thing about social problems is that you, yourself, can make routines and picky-preferences in life to avoid most of them for yourself! You could start today by taking away HackerNews from your routine - as well as other platforms and sites that perpetuate behaviors that meet your criticisms.
If you do, you'll find that you'll stop feeling the need to project your scorn for the things you voluntarily surround yourself with!
Well, with that in mind, have you noticed the problems you speak about going down in life? Was I right about the core of what a social problem is - and how it can be fixed?
You're 100% correct to talk about your criticisms still, but you read as if it was still a problem in your everyday life, so I gave a suggestion more apt to that scenario. It didn't translate well, I apologize!
I think it is the lack of a non-touch keyboard, not a social problem.
I have an Android phone with a physical keyboard and it is a totally different mindset when you can "check in" and communicate with the device/through the device without constantly checking/fixing the touchscreen/dictation errors.
Kind of a counterpoint?: they weren't luxury, but they were higher-end. Newer tech, more metal... I didn't have an ipod in this timeframe (got a 2nd gen iPod touch in 2009), so instead had a half dozen cheap, plasticky, LCD, low-storage MP3 players.
Regardless of your argument and I do mostly agree with it, I do think that most things referred to “Luxury Goods” are, in fact, the ”high-margin doodads” you are referring to. At least colloquially, things like Chanel perfume and Luis Vuitton are exactly what you describe, and by most people’s definition, “luxury goods”. (I did not downvote, but notice you have been. I suspect it’s mostly the Apple Army aha)
Apple stuff has always been expensive, yes, but it's not "luxury". You get what you pay for. Apple products are the best in their category, despite the surprisingly organized hate machine that has existed forever.
Well, usually. There have been some absolute low-quality fiascos like the whole butterfly keyboard thing.
But one thing that really stuck with me was a few years back when I was making a spreadsheet of standard tech choices available for new employees for a startup, and almost all the Linux or Windows laptops out there that I could trust to last out of the box as long as a (non-butterfly-keyboard) Macbook had a baseline of 1080p screens, with upcharges just to get to 1440p. It might be better these days, but I felt like I was taking crazy pills just trying to find a certain baseline of quality for tech that would be getting used all the time every day.
It feels almost like there’s this weird game that laptop manufacturers are playing to find something to skimp on with their models. Might be the screen, the screen’s antiglare coating, keyboard/chassis flex, input device quality, port placement, cooling capability, noise, maybe something else entirely, but it’s almost a rule that some aspect of the laptop must suck. Even the best reviewed models out there have some more-than-papercut flaws.
Screens have gotten better thankfully, but now the thing is to use screen panels that are only practically usable at 1.5x/150% UI scaling for some reason. It’s better than being stuck with those horrid 1366x768 TN panels that used to plague laptops, but it’s still more annoying than panels that can do integer scaling well. Given the choice between 1.5x panel and its 1x decent resolution counterpart, I’d actually prefer the latter just because it’s less trouble.
> SF Pro looks very stunning and the Apple logo is chic and simple. But so is the Cartier logo. And the Rolex storefront. Or any of the other genuinely valuable things sold at malls.
If you're against the idea of selling things that are cheap to make at high prices by relying on branding, you might not want to call Cartier or Rolex products "genuinely valuable". Jewelry is not fundamentally expensive.
I did see someone carried out of an Apple Store by four security guards (one on each limb). He had been ranting in the store about open source. I guess he probably posts here.
> Part of my brain was saying "this place is bullshit and I use it to clown on the staff," and part of my brain was saying "I want the luxury good!! and I am going to purchase it now."
I still have mine with rockbox installed. I had to replace the battery, and the clip broke years ago, but I haven’t found anything like it to replace it.
+1 for the mention of Zune. I started with a Zune, a bright green and brown one, then went to iPods. Like the author and their first Walmart MP3 player, my first MP3 player, my Zune, left a much bigger impression on me than all of my later iPods. I think there's an alternate history where Zune, with all of its weird personalization and oddness, won out over iPod's sleek luxury. In some ways I think that that alternate reality might have been a bit more fun.
That's reasonable. iPod was probably a better product overall, but I think Zune had more character. In Starcraft terms, I'd say that iPod was the pure Protoss and Zune was the primal Zerg. I guess I'd rather live on a Protoss world, but you can't deny that it'd be interesting to visit a Zerg one.
Great analogy! I still use my iPod, because for whatever reason the OG battery hasn't died even though it is a FireWire model. It also, shockingly, sounds WAY better with any pair of decent headphones than any of my AirPods including the Max.
Not a fair comparison since a wire will always have more bandwidth for fidelity, but the difference in listening experience on an old iPod vs a modern iPhone is so shocking I find that modern iPhone listening is like diet soda and is somewhat unfulfilling (I have Apple Lossless turned on, but the sound chip + low power of modern headphones + no wired connection... loses something)
I don't mean in a "vinyl is better" sense... I mean, everyone I've demo'd this to has looked at me with big eyes when they put the iPod on and listen to the same song vs. the same headphones plugged into a modern phone. It's weird, especially since the iPods of this era can't do anything close to Lossless... they're 160-192k AACs so the limited RAM cache can play a full song without pausing on an old iPod.
The trick here is that people just think whichever one is loudest sounds best. The iPod might be able to drive high-impedance headphones better than a phone too, since the phone is pretty limited there. You can always get an amp.
But I have this dongle, the exact R&D budget one you discuss, and the iPod side by side with the same song loaded (except the iPhone has way higher resolution, as menitoned the iPod is under 256kbps).
The iPod isn't louder, but it has sounds in the music and a breathiness and real, moving sensation that my recent iPhones with lightning or USB to 3.5 adapters haven't had. It's hard to explain unless you listen side by side, and now I sound like an audiophile but I am far from it - the ears just don't lie and the old iPod really had amazing sound.
That does "sound" like impedance mismatch, which is kind of like an electrical incompatibility with the headphones. The usual effect is low volume but it's not that necessarily. A headphone amp would help.
The Apple Store used to be the embodiment of everything I didn't have when I was growing up - status, the lives the people in the sample pictures had, any sort of individual money or agency - now I have an Apple Store in walking distance and can buy whatever I want. It's a nice shift, even though I still don't have the life those actors in the sample pictures or Apple ads have.
Next you’re going to tell me Jony Ive didn’t spend every day in a featureless white room meditating on the ideal form of a laptop or phone or MP3 player (a rounded rectangle, it turns out)
> When I was in high school, my friends and I had a game we used to play at the mall: we would go into the Apple store and try to make it to the back wall of the store, touch it, and exit out the front without an Apple staff person talking to us.
Idk if this is about age or sex or location but in Apple Stores in Asia I play another fun game: just stand and wait until anybody talks to me. Could take 20+ minutes no problems. I play on my phone or I try to stare down staff but they chat among themselves and make sure to not accidentally look.
If the store has only one entrance and there is unoccupied staff, they sometimes assault me with questions when I enter. But even in those stores as soon as I browsed and made a choice and ready to buy they vanish magically!
I remember the first time I went into an Apple Store.
I was looking at a 17” PowerBook, salivating at the screen and performance but struggling with justifying the price tag. An incredibly nice lady walked up to me and asked if I had any questions. I told her I was thinking it over as it was a large purchase. She beamed and said “Of course, that’s totally understandable. In fact it takes on average 3 visits to an Apple Store before making a purchase”. It was the smartest, nicest, most low key way of saying don’t feel pressure…you’ll be coming back, and then you’ll buy the machine you’ve always wanted.
Very on brand. And surprisingly still not really copied by others.
It isn't copied by other consumer electronics companies because none of them have the brand value of Apple. Microsoft tried the model with its own chain of stores but failed pretty quickly. Most tech is better suited for Best Buy-like megastores where shoppers can browse and try a bunch of products and brands in one go. And for phones (at least in America) most people still prefer to go to their carrier store.
Go outside of tech though and the Apple Store experience is commonplace. Apple itself copied the concept directly from high end fashion houses.
Microsoft stores were abysmal. They felt like Best Buy without the convenience somehow.
I went in to try the (then new) Surface Studio (the drafting table like AIO) and they couldn’t find the peripheral knob. But it kept triggering, but it turned out employees would mess around with customers by spinning it while they used it.
Of course that’s just one store, but I walked by several and they all just looked depressing inside. Layouts felt about as poorly planned as a Best Buy or staples display, and even things as simple as lighting was harsher.
It’s just not as simple as making a store. The store has to provide the right vibe, and Microsoft don’t understand vibe.
I expected they'd do better at the products with their own name on them, but I the MS Store near me didn't stock even most standard Surface devices
Plus, IIRC their return policy on what they had in stock was worse than other PC retailers
You can trust Microsoft to make anything they touch suck. This has been a constant for decades at this point. Please give me contradicting examples, if they exist.
My second job was somehow a cool job for a remote Microsoft office.
The people I worked with REALLY tried and cared to deliver what the bigger MS office asked for, but the distributed nature of the organization combined with a lack of unifying vision made delivering something great almost impossible.
Even with dedication, the result would be half-baked Wizards and ASP "solutions" that met the punch list requirements
About a year after the Apple Store opened on Boylston Street in Boston, a Microsoft Store popped up across the street in the Prudential Center. I only ever went in to get a replacement for my Microsoft Arc Mouse that I used with my MacBook (LOL). It was a funny store because the employees felt like it was their moral duty to be the antithesis to Apple...which didn't make sense because the Apple Store had bigger crowds than they did, and that's even after Microsoft added an Xbox play area.
Anyhoo, they shuttered pretty quickly (Apple Store is still there, of course).
Yet they sell Apple at Best Buy
I remember the first time I tried to buy something at an Apple store. Usually avoid 'em cause I don't like Apple as a company, but I do like their laptops. I'd decided an M3 air was gonna be perfect as a general use laptop.
Walked into the store, waited 30 minutes for one of their "friendly, professional staff" to come up & help me, making eye contact, etc.
Eventually I had to walk up to one of them standing there and tell them I wanted to buy something. Then it turns out they didn't even have one in stock...in their flagship London store...
Literally I wanted to walk in, pay immediately & walk out. I already knew exactly what I wanted. I don't know why people laude the "Apple experience".
Their flagship shops (Especially London) are really not places you go to buy on a whim, it's why they have a booking and collection process - yes it might suck but its by far one of their busiest shops.
Well it was more the store was full of teenagers and kids generally fucking around while their parents browsed. Plenty of those parents were getting attended to by staff - even if they had bookings, it takes a spare staff member (of which there were many just milling around) one minute to ask me what I'm here for and recommend I make a booking if I had a complex request.
The conversation literally would have been "can I help you?" "Yes I want a space grey m3 macbook air, 16gb ram 512gb ssd, I will pay for it right now and then leave this terrible place tyvm". With the laptop on-hand the purchasing process would've taken as little time as it took for them to ram it into pos and for my phone nfc to pay.
Porsche has the same philosophy, from what I've heard and experienced
The Cayenne is one of the only SUVs I looked at where the sales experience made me more interested in the brand & left me with a good impression of the dealer.
I hadn't seriously considered a Porsche until I learned they make niche parts for cars for decades - like interior bits and trim that most brands stop making/carrying after about 10 years. You can get parts for a 2002-2016 Cayenne at the dealer, but even though it shares a TON of components with the 2002-2016 Touareg you won't be able to get the parts from VW that you can still source from Porsche for those same years.
It was (is?) a really good way of letting you know you could hang around and play with the machines - at the time Computer City and similar places (which is what Apple was really trying to compensate for, many of them had few or no Macs at all) would heavily imply you should "buy or leave" if you stayed too long.
Circuit City was the worst. I miss most computer stores, but I felt a personal sense of satisfaction when they went under.
i wonder if it's true anymore.
Recently i've bought the new iphone, it's not as expensive as the high end macbook, but still, not a small amount of money.
I got to the store, asked for the phone, finalized my purchase and got out, all in 15 min i guess. No second guess, no cold feet, because i had been researching smartphones for years before going with it, i knew what i would get and what i wouldn't.
Back in the day you would indeed need to go to the store to know what you were getting.
If you know how iPhones work then online research is enough, but if you haven’t played with one it makes sense to use it at the store as research, or even if you’re just curious.
Same for Android, I wouldn’t buy one without testing before, for example.
Also: The Microsoft and Chromebook displays at electronics chain-stores have seriously stepped up their game in the last 10 years or so. Before that it was a shitshow, with keyboards missing keys and the OS crashing on demo devices that would be otherwise perfectly usable machines.
"if you haven’t played with one it makes sense to use it at the store as research" Yep. Iphones are sluggish by design in so many ways, that I would lose my mind using one for my personal life. Scrolling on an iPhone is a bafflingly terrible experience, because they limit the speed so much you can't move around at a reasonable speed.
What are you comparing this to? I have a slew of phones near me and when I pick up an Android device it usually feels like a stuttery mess multiple times in regular use, even compared to a basic prepaid iPhone SE from 2022 which might only be 60Hz but doesn't randomly jerk around and freeze like every 120Hz Android seems to do
You were meant to replace that iphone 3GS over 10 years ago...
I'm baffled by your comment. I specifically recall getting some new Samsungs at work two years ago, so I got one to play with for a little. I was shocked by how janky scrolling felt. Just going through the android settings screen, there were "hiccups" and there was a clear lag between my finger moving and the screen moving. My iphone 7 felt so much smoother, although much older and "crufty", as opposed to the Samsung being brand new and "untouched". It was a then-current mid-range model, don't remember which one specifically.
Can you even disable UI animations on an iphone? It's the first thing I do on any phone or OS, and using a device with it enabled just feel like walking through mud.
Yes you can from accessibility settings, but it breaks a bunch of things.
> [The older non-iPod MP3 player] left a bigger impact on my life, really, than the iPod, because it was the thing that got me into media piracy, and led me to install Linux on an old laptop, which I used exclusively for media piracy. This increased my computer proficiency dramatically (though not to the point where I became a habitual Linux user) and set off a chain of events that made me much more comfortable with amateur web development and eventually game development.
This is such a funny end to this article that is reflected in my time too using Apple and non-Apple products. I had a similar generic MP3 player and I also got heavily into piracy (I remember it had a small screen so I tried to compress and stuff a full movie into it, which I successfully did by learning about and messing with ffmpeg settings, for example). Then when I got an early iPhone, I was flabbergasted as to how locked down the thing was (no, I do not want to sync my entire phone audio contents to iTunes), and soon after I switched to Android. Only recently have I started using a Mac and that's only because for historical reasons it's not locked down like the rest of Apple's devices, you can actually run whatever software you want on it without needing to go through a walled garden.
Macs are the only reasonable Apple product at the moment, except for the ridiculously priced accessories (headphones, mostly). Some of them are even upgradeable through tinkering, which is 2 things literally opposite of what Apple seems to want their customers to be thinking about.
AirPods are the only wireless earbuds I've used that handle 2-way Bluetooth audio between multiple devices well. They also sound okay, although I have $20 wired IEMs I imported from Shenzen that are more comfortable and sound just as good.
I also think the iPad isn't terrible, although it's a bit on the expensive side.
I still run the theory that Apple has actors on staff to just “be cool at the Apple Store”. I once went into the local store during daytime in summer (my lunch break) to pick up an order. There was a very attractive young woman dancing next to the headphones seemingly testing out a pair of AirPod Max. And the rest of the store was also filled with strangely attractive persons. I wasn’t able to verify my theory because I have a work life and don’t happen to walk by an Apple Store during working hours. But in my mind I believe it would totally be Apple if they hire extra cool folk to make the store feel more hip and not empty.
They definitely do this in bars. I've had friends that got recruited thru modelling agencies. It's not a huge stretch to think of them doing it in other types of retail too.
What bars have that kind of margins? I know most restaurants don't.
Bars usually have a whole funnel around getting more women in. Whether it's free drinks, quiz nights hosted by cute girls, the bouncer thing where they filter out some people.
We once had a guest lecturer who broke down the ROI of making the ladies bathrooms beautiful (but not the men's). Presumably it leads to more alcohol consumption, which is where the margins are. I think restaurants in the UK make almost no money on the food itself.
I met a girl I knew while she was doing one of those jobs and it was a very boring, normal, local kind of pub. I guess the goal is to increase profits so it's seen as marketing/an investment.
The ones selling a lifestyle and 30 euro* drinks to people competing to get in.
(I have no idea how much a drink costs in the US so I’m using my local prices and currency for overpriced drinks)
Most likely hired by a liquor brand similar to shot girls/guys.
Maybe they have employees rotate through an undercover role, but more likely the store just attracts cool people.
Apple products are expensive. Assuming most people inside an Apple store can afford them, they will be wealthier than the average, which means they will be better dressed, groomed, and will generally take better care of themselves than the average.
Nice, a conspiracy theory I can get behind.
I wonder: what roles are they being hired for? How does Apple ensure they never talk about their work?
A simple option would be to approach lower-tier influencers and offer them some free stuff to hang out, and get posts in return as well.
If someone did, would you believe him?
I hate to say it but apple store employees have a strange aura of... fertility?
Having worked in said fruit stand for several years, I can assure you that you were neither undetected nor unplayed. We kept score, too!
Okay now we need more details here, please!
A few years back I went in to buy an Apple TV. Walked in, straight up to the Apple TV display, stood using it for a few mins, stood looking outwards towards the rest of the store, tried to make eye contact with any staff. No one paid any attention, staff happily chatting away to each other. I couldn't have looked more ready to buy without waving cash around.
Apple Store employees are definitely trained better than the average shop, but they are far from luxury.
Maybe I'm not American enough, but that experience sounds much more like luxury to me than having an employee bugging you to buy without you explicitly asking.
The Apple TV at its most expensive is $150. I remember walking into high end stores like Burberry in my early twenties, seriously contemplating the cheapest items there and also being ignored except by security.
This may be their thinking, but if so I feel that would be down to bad training.
In my experience the Apple TV skews hard towards those who have a lot of Apple products. It's priced far higher than the rest of that market. Most people buying an iPhone are buying a Fire stick or a cheap smart TV. I'd bet most people buying an Apple TV have an iPhone and a Mac.
It would be like going into a Burberry store and shopping for replacement buttons for your $3000 coat.
I'd also imagine that Apple TV is a great entry point—especially given the relatively cheap price—into the ecosystem. It's like the modern equivalent of the iPod.
Some luxury brands will play hard to get, others will fawn over customers. Different people want different experiences. How expensive the item in the catalog might change the level of service, but the brand will use a similar playbook across the entire catalog.
I wonder if they’d have acted any differently if you had actually waved cash around.
... or approached a human in a logo'd uniform and say, "Hello person. Can you help me, please?"
You know, like our parents and grandparents would have done at a store. With humans who shouldn't be beckoned by glaring while standing near a display.
If your store requires keen customers to chase around after salespeople in order to buy something, it's doing something wrong.
The MP3 player I had before that iPod was a much more generic one. I've spent the last few days occasionally checking Wikipedia and other places online to see if I can tell which one it was, and I have absolutely no idea.
Might've been an S1, which arguably was better than Apple's products in many ways, and likely sold a lot more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S1_MP3_player
The business model of the S1 is just wild. It mimics the PC clone industry of the 1990s.
From the Wikipedia page:
This product is what is referred to as a 'common mold' which means many different suppliers can produce this same model. The manufacturers are almost exclusively located in China.
Primarily defined by the use of a system-on-a-chip of one of the Actions brands and some common core features, S1 products vary widely in software and hardware as well as design.
I counted 62 different manufacturers listed in the Wikipedia article that apparently licensed this reference design (the core features and basic hardware), and who then made variations to the user interface or added a feature or two, and slapped their names onto it.
There seems to have been a whole industry of MP3 Players that were essentially identical at the core electronics level in the early 2000s, and we never realized it.
DankPods on youtube has a long running series documenting these low cost mp3 players, or as he calls them, nuggets.
Oh my these devices were everywhere.
I started with a 32 MB Diamond Rio PMP300, so cramped as I transcoded music to 64kbps just to cram an hour in there, but the ability to listen to music without it _ever_ skipping (I was MTBing in the summer and snowboarding in the winter) was invaluable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300
And then upgraded to a 64MB Rio 600
https://tweakers.net/ext/i/964783073.jpg
After that it was straight up to a 4GB black iPod Nano gen 1 that I rocked for a loooooong time as it was insanely hardened and durable.
Oh, good memories. Everyone had one of these at school! I think I had a 64 MB version. It was peak commodity tech at the time.
I remember getting a Creative Zen a few years later, and it was the first time when I realized how everything turns into crap with the technology advancement. No batteries, so needed USB charger to travel (USB chargers weren't even too popular back then). No mass storage support, only sync through Windows-only software, MTP was unusable on Linux, didn't work with cars or boomboxes. Video playback required converting to very specific formats, which the provided software often failed to do, needed custom codec packs. Absolutely required MP3 ID tags to even show the song in the playlist. Cool idea for a player, but the software was pure garbage. I think I broke it once and used the old player for years more.
Archos did some of the very earliest HDD-containing players back in the day, and beat the ipod to market by about a year (December 2000 launch).
My first mp3 player was a 20GB archos xs202, which I loved. Partly for being a great music player, partly for being a generic 20GB external drive when needed. I think at one point I had it set up both as a music player and to boot debian on a host PC when connected via USB...
The experience has definitely changed, mainly because of how crowded most Apple stores get. While all the devices are still in the open there is no way employees can offer a personalized experience to every shopper and wanderer. You have to now make a reservation for that.
Getting rid of the physical Genius Bar and physical specific checkout locations was the worst decision they ever made. Now people are just kind of randomly clumped around and there's no clear delineation between staff who are already busy and staff who can immediately take questions.
Over the past few years, even if the store is empty, you are more likely to be left alone.
It's sometimes difficult to find someone to let you buy something, even.
I think it varies a lot by location - the store I live by now is a regional store but still offers walk-in for everything except Genius Bar appointments.
If you're buying a phone or Mac or watch or Vision, they seem happy to help you on the spot or tell you where to hang out until someone's avaiailable.
I wonder if it was the Creative Nomad [1] ... I had a Jukebox that had a 6GB spinning disk in it originally. Upgrading to a 20GB drive was the first real hackery thing I did with my old RedHat box. I had to buy an IDE converter too to move between the laptop connector to the desktop.
That was also when I learned what happens if you dd a Creative Nomad Jukebox system image onto your root partition while the machine is running. The RedHat install stayed stable for about 20 minutes before weird things started failing and eventually the whole thing just locked up. Remember kids, always check you dd out file path!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Nomad
My first MP3 player was the Creative MuVo. The storage part (actually, really everything but the battery holder) you could disconnect and use as a USB stick, which was also how you loaded music onto it. I (correctly) thought this was very cool.
I eventually did get an iPod, the one that was all capacitive touch buttons and wheel, the last one before the click wheel.
Looks like the 5th gen Ipod was the thing in 2005/2006, per wikipedia. Sounds like I graduated HS +/- a year or two of the author.
In that time frame... I was using sub-GB MP3 players, with MMC cards or maybe SD cards by that point. (I didn't have those massive multi-thousand song collections, so it was fine...)
Because I have pics saved in my personal folder, mine in high school/early college were:
- Classic 64MB w/ 128 MB memory card
- MPIO FL100, probably 2 or 3x bigger; I wore this on a belt holder
- Sandisk Sansa, the bulbous one, before later using some of the smaller ones. Probably still only 256 or 512 MB of built-in storage.
I loved my SanDisk Sansa. It had a specific category for audiobooks, and there were a lot of quality of life things - features that wouldn’t matter when you were listening to songs but that made listening to books on tape way better.
- If you held the fast forward button it would slowly increase the speed it fast forwarded. Not something that matters with a 2 minute song, but it really matters with an hour long audiobook section.
- If you went to listen to something else but then you came back to the audiobook, it would open with the section you’d been listening to highlighted, and if you selected it it would pick up where you’d left off. If you accidentally skipped forward you could back out, move back to the previous section, and it’d do the same thing - starting where you’d been.
- On top of that, you could add more storage with microSD cards!
It can’t be the Nomad. “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame”
I have never seen a nomad and I know that line. The nomad was famous for it as far as I am concerned.
> We were fascinated with the Apple store in the mall because it was essentially an interactive luxury goods store where they'd let you actually grasp all the luxury goods with your teenager hands.
The secret being, of course, that they're not actually luxury goods. Like many things at the mall, it's a high-margin doodad sold to people in the proverbial impulse aisle of life. Dippin' Dots, knock-off watches, Build-A-Bear workshop - all in same vein of "looks expensive but is cheap to make" no different from the iPod.
I think the American shopping mall is one of the things that helped me contextualize Apple's brand identity. Apple does good marking in isolation or on a screen, SF Pro looks very stunning and the Apple logo is chic and simple. But so is the Cartier logo. And the Rolex storefront. Or any of the other genuinely valuable things sold at malls. It's the marketing that people respond to, not the value of a good.
I largely agree with you, but I think one of Apple’s secret sauces (and they aren’t the only one) is that while their products are to some marketed as luxury items, they are in fact coupled with extremely high utility which is a somewhat new concept, in my view.
The iPhone or your equivalent Android device truly is one of the most useful inventions humanity has ever created, especially for the era that we currently exist in.
Outside of urban centers, the only other device that is similarly valuable is a car, but the average American new car purchase costs 65 times the average American new phone purchase. While there is obviously a lot of nuance here, this makes phones feel downright cheap (or conversely, cars downright expensive) compared to imparted value.
> the average American new car purchase costs 65 times the average American new phone purchase
and you keep a phone 1-8 years but a car 3-20 years or 4x as long? seems like a bad ratio
> while their products are to some marketed as luxury items, they are in fact coupled with extremely high utility which is a somewhat new concept, in my view.
Well, a Rolex has extremely high utility too. It's just that it has much less utility than a digital watch you can buy for $23 from Casio. The purpose of spending the other $59,477 [ https://www.rolex.com/en-us/watches/sky-dweller/m336935-0008 ] is just that you can say you did.
Apple products are similar. They have high utility that is nevertheless not as high as competing products that are much cheaper. All of the value is coming from the luxury branding.
I don’t agree at all. Neither is Rolex high utility, nor is anyone fooled that an analog watch which sets you back 3-4 orders of magnitude more than digital/smart watches should be higher utility.
Products competing directly with Apple products offer, at best, equivalent utility and performance for no more than 1 magnitude cost difference. Flagship android phones have cost about the same as iPhones for the better part of a decade and macbooks are often price competitive with a similarly specced ultra books. It’s understood that cheaper phones and laptops have similar utility for the average user, but some aspect of performance or quality is often a tradeoff.
Rolex is not high utility, it is harsh environment. Real Antarctic expeditions, mountaineering, pre-GPS flight and navigation, SCUBA diving, sea navigation, desert navigation, etc. You could rely on your Rolex not to be the component that fails and gets you killed or lost.
Of course, like the SUV, often it's actual use case is a far cry from what it is actually capable of doing.
You don't think it's useful to know what time it is? Where does "Rolex is not high utility" come from?
That comment has a typical HN form: agree with the parent poster, but make an unnecessary arbitrary new distinction so that you’re acceptably argumentative.
Except mechanical watches fail all the time. The sapphire glass shatters, or a strong impact disrupts the movement, or a user doesn't screw down the crown and water enters the device. They require expensive regular services.
Rolex has a long history of being a tool watch, and mechanical watches can be used in a lot of neat ways, but I would never want to depend on one in a life or death situation without fully understanding a backup plan.
Nice, now please do you have anything to say about the $1000 monitor stand?
I don’t believe there is any product that is functionally equivalent to the iPhone while being much cheaper.
All of the cheaper options make pretty significant trade offs. Ones that you might not care about, but that others do.
The same can’t be said for a Rolex where the much cheaper options are better in every way other than flexing.
I feel like you're saying something like,"That expensive painting is inferior in every way to wallpaper, which covers the wall more effectively and durably, at a fraction of the cost."
The Rolex (or luxury watches in general) are pieces of jewellery that also tell the time. The more expensive ones have some combination of -more expensive materials -better finishing -superior craftsmanship (including more intricate complications)
The goal is not just to tell the time, it's to wear a piece of artistic craftsmanship. (Though I would agree that other brands are a better example than Rolex, and some people do indeed just buy expensive watches in general and Rolex in particular just to flex. As some do with art.)
Apple products have intensely overengineered insides that are (single-digit) years ahead of the competition in performance and security. Giving them that high margins causes engineers to do enough work to keep up.
It's like how Google is pointlessly overengineered even though literally nothing they do affects revenue since they're a monopoly.
Smartphone hardware is almost completely useless because of the software. At this point it's pretty obvious that the potential (but unrealizable) utility is just more of the luxury illusion they're selling.
In my pocket, I have a wallet, timer, alarm clock, calculator, telephone, atlas, directory, camera, stock broker, flashlight, tape measure, television, music collection, encyclopedia, transit time table, library, notepad, and translator. How are these utilities an illusion?
The few among those things that even reliably function are covered in ads and defects to the degree that you're better off without them.
The illusion is that you're getting a computer and not a collection of knickknacks and appliances.
Almost none of those things have ads on the iPhone. All of them function reliably.
I regularly notice bugs when using iOS Mail; one that springs to mind would display one email's body with the header info from another email, it seems to have recently been fixed but was easily reproducible for weeks if not months.
I mean, you're getting advertisements in your iWallet.. so...
I'm not as that was US only but yes that was outrageous and hopefully never happens again.
> covered in ads and defects to the degree that you're better off without them
Someone is deluded, and it's either all of the people using these apps despite being worse off due to doing so... or it's you. (And we're talking about actual utility apps, not something that you could dismiss as a dopamine trap.)
Firstly it's all very intentionally coupled together. There are strict rules around how the UI and notifications are used specifically so that they can sell your attention.
Secondly I think the only thing I really miss that's particular to smartphones is the map. Everything else is either a dumb gimmick or actually bad and all of it is to just get you're attention so they can sell it.
If you don't want notifications you can just turn them off.
I’m genuinely curious what your view on the unrealized potential is! I would love something new to hack on.
It's a social problem not a technical one.
Great! The fun thing about social problems is that you, yourself, can make routines and picky-preferences in life to avoid most of them for yourself! You could start today by taking away HackerNews from your routine - as well as other platforms and sites that perpetuate behaviors that meet your criticisms.
If you do, you'll find that you'll stop feeling the need to project your scorn for the things you voluntarily surround yourself with!
Yeah I actually don't own a smartphone at all. I don't know why you think I shouldn't talk about them after making that decision though.
Well, with that in mind, have you noticed the problems you speak about going down in life? Was I right about the core of what a social problem is - and how it can be fixed?
You're 100% correct to talk about your criticisms still, but you read as if it was still a problem in your everyday life, so I gave a suggestion more apt to that scenario. It didn't translate well, I apologize!
I think it is the lack of a non-touch keyboard, not a social problem.
I have an Android phone with a physical keyboard and it is a totally different mindset when you can "check in" and communicate with the device/through the device without constantly checking/fixing the touchscreen/dictation errors.
Kind of a counterpoint?: they weren't luxury, but they were higher-end. Newer tech, more metal... I didn't have an ipod in this timeframe (got a 2nd gen iPod touch in 2009), so instead had a half dozen cheap, plasticky, LCD, low-storage MP3 players.
Regardless of your argument and I do mostly agree with it, I do think that most things referred to “Luxury Goods” are, in fact, the ”high-margin doodads” you are referring to. At least colloquially, things like Chanel perfume and Luis Vuitton are exactly what you describe, and by most people’s definition, “luxury goods”. (I did not downvote, but notice you have been. I suspect it’s mostly the Apple Army aha)
I don't buy this argument at all.
Apple stuff has always been expensive, yes, but it's not "luxury". You get what you pay for. Apple products are the best in their category, despite the surprisingly organized hate machine that has existed forever.
Well, usually. There have been some absolute low-quality fiascos like the whole butterfly keyboard thing.
But one thing that really stuck with me was a few years back when I was making a spreadsheet of standard tech choices available for new employees for a startup, and almost all the Linux or Windows laptops out there that I could trust to last out of the box as long as a (non-butterfly-keyboard) Macbook had a baseline of 1080p screens, with upcharges just to get to 1440p. It might be better these days, but I felt like I was taking crazy pills just trying to find a certain baseline of quality for tech that would be getting used all the time every day.
It feels almost like there’s this weird game that laptop manufacturers are playing to find something to skimp on with their models. Might be the screen, the screen’s antiglare coating, keyboard/chassis flex, input device quality, port placement, cooling capability, noise, maybe something else entirely, but it’s almost a rule that some aspect of the laptop must suck. Even the best reviewed models out there have some more-than-papercut flaws.
Screens have gotten better thankfully, but now the thing is to use screen panels that are only practically usable at 1.5x/150% UI scaling for some reason. It’s better than being stuck with those horrid 1366x768 TN panels that used to plague laptops, but it’s still more annoying than panels that can do integer scaling well. Given the choice between 1.5x panel and its 1x decent resolution counterpart, I’d actually prefer the latter just because it’s less trouble.
> SF Pro looks very stunning and the Apple logo is chic and simple. But so is the Cartier logo. And the Rolex storefront. Or any of the other genuinely valuable things sold at malls.
If you're against the idea of selling things that are cheap to make at high prices by relying on branding, you might not want to call Cartier or Rolex products "genuinely valuable". Jewelry is not fundamentally expensive.
ArchOS MP3 player. Jukebox. Back before the big companies (Creative) discovered the concept.
https://www.amazon.com/Archos-Jukebox-6000-Player-Drive/dp/B...
I can imagine that sprinting out of an Apple store in the US would work out better for some people than others...
I did see someone carried out of an Apple Store by four security guards (one on each limb). He had been ranting in the store about open source. I guess he probably posts here.
Loved the honesty of this line
> Part of my brain was saying "this place is bullshit and I use it to clown on the staff," and part of my brain was saying "I want the luxury good!! and I am going to purchase it now."
We used to play this same game at the Disney store, back in the 90’s
Mall Disney Store employees were micromanaged about the number of entry/exits vs. sales, which was measured by shift, so they definitely noticed!
Best mp3 player I ever had was the SanDisk sansa clip. Just loaded music off an ad card and weight almost nothing. Worked great.
I wish even one thing I use everyday were as nice as a Sansa Clip+. Solid yet lightweight thick plastic with indestructible buttons.
I still have mine with rockbox installed. I had to replace the battery, and the clip broke years ago, but I haven’t found anything like it to replace it.
We had the same game in high school, except for a clothing retailer. The Apple Store didn’t exist yet.
+1 for the mention of Zune. I started with a Zune, a bright green and brown one, then went to iPods. Like the author and their first Walmart MP3 player, my first MP3 player, my Zune, left a much bigger impression on me than all of my later iPods. I think there's an alternate history where Zune, with all of its weird personalization and oddness, won out over iPod's sleek luxury. In some ways I think that that alternate reality might have been a bit more fun.
iPods got out of the way and could be used in your pocket
I got a Zune and immediately realized MS had no idea why people liked the iPod
Different folks like different things, but I don't think a big menu of lowercase text is more fun than the iPod in any of its variations
That's reasonable. iPod was probably a better product overall, but I think Zune had more character. In Starcraft terms, I'd say that iPod was the pure Protoss and Zune was the primal Zerg. I guess I'd rather live on a Protoss world, but you can't deny that it'd be interesting to visit a Zerg one.
Great analogy! I still use my iPod, because for whatever reason the OG battery hasn't died even though it is a FireWire model. It also, shockingly, sounds WAY better with any pair of decent headphones than any of my AirPods including the Max.
Not a fair comparison since a wire will always have more bandwidth for fidelity, but the difference in listening experience on an old iPod vs a modern iPhone is so shocking I find that modern iPhone listening is like diet soda and is somewhat unfulfilling (I have Apple Lossless turned on, but the sound chip + low power of modern headphones + no wired connection... loses something)
I don't mean in a "vinyl is better" sense... I mean, everyone I've demo'd this to has looked at me with big eyes when they put the iPod on and listen to the same song vs. the same headphones plugged into a modern phone. It's weird, especially since the iPods of this era can't do anything close to Lossless... they're 160-192k AACs so the limited RAM cache can play a full song without pausing on an old iPod.
The early iPods had _really good_ DACs. Do some reading up on on them.
Still do. The $10 USB-C dongle is better than many audiophile DACs. After all, it has a bigger R&D budget than the entire industry.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...
The trick here is that people just think whichever one is loudest sounds best. The iPod might be able to drive high-impedance headphones better than a phone too, since the phone is pretty limited there. You can always get an amp.
But I have this dongle, the exact R&D budget one you discuss, and the iPod side by side with the same song loaded (except the iPhone has way higher resolution, as menitoned the iPod is under 256kbps).
The iPod isn't louder, but it has sounds in the music and a breathiness and real, moving sensation that my recent iPhones with lightning or USB to 3.5 adapters haven't had. It's hard to explain unless you listen side by side, and now I sound like an audiophile but I am far from it - the ears just don't lie and the old iPod really had amazing sound.
That does "sound" like impedance mismatch, which is kind of like an electrical incompatibility with the headphones. The usual effect is low volume but it's not that necessarily. A headphone amp would help.
The Apple Store used to be the embodiment of everything I didn't have when I was growing up - status, the lives the people in the sample pictures had, any sort of individual money or agency - now I have an Apple Store in walking distance and can buy whatever I want. It's a nice shift, even though I still don't have the life those actors in the sample pictures or Apple ads have.
> even though I still don't have the life those actors in the sample pictures or Apple ads have
(nobody does -- don't forget there are bounce lights and 20 people just out of frame...)
Next you’re going to tell me Jony Ive didn’t spend every day in a featureless white room meditating on the ideal form of a laptop or phone or MP3 player (a rounded rectangle, it turns out)
I think that's totally accurate, actually.
As recently as I've been in an apple store, the goods were out for people to touch.
> When I was in high school, my friends and I had a game we used to play at the mall: we would go into the Apple store and try to make it to the back wall of the store, touch it, and exit out the front without an Apple staff person talking to us.
Idk if this is about age or sex or location but in Apple Stores in Asia I play another fun game: just stand and wait until anybody talks to me. Could take 20+ minutes no problems. I play on my phone or I try to stare down staff but they chat among themselves and make sure to not accidentally look.
If the store has only one entrance and there is unoccupied staff, they sometimes assault me with questions when I enter. But even in those stores as soon as I browsed and made a choice and ready to buy they vanish magically!
Reads like a confession of a deprogrammed cult member, and probably is.
weird, nowadays I struggle to find someone to help me at my local apple store (SF Union sq)
I mean, yeah, an Apple store in the heart of downtown full of tourists is bound to be pretty busy
Steve Jobs would have loved this story.