The whole premise of this article is so wrong. If Jobs were alive we wouldn't have had this presentation in the first place.
First up, under Jobs phablet iPhones would have been out of the question. He would have flat out rejected those, because he was simply wrong about some of the assumptions of phone design and would be a lot slower to admit that than Apple did without him.
Second, the Apple Watch would not have been what it was now. For the first time in tech, Apple is second in execution with a more complicated product - one with a more complicated, information dense interface that requires two input methods to operate [1]. I'm not insinuating that Apple Watch will be an inferior product (I think it's more likely the opposite), but I don't think the execution of the product is something Jobs would have let happen in the same way.
But that's all okay! Apple is going in a different direction, and it just might actually be the better direction to go in. I'll be buying my first iPhone later this year, and I very much doubt I would have done so if Jobs was still as influential as he was.
This deification of Steve Jobs is incredibly annoying to me. The annoyance I feel when people say "what would Jesus do?" is the same annoyance I feel when reading these articles about "what would Steve do?". This article is just one level above fan fiction and it has gotten more than 450 votes. Ugh. He was a pioneer in the field, but let's appreciate him for what he's done and not for what he should have been doing today.
Apple should have released a single iPhone 6. A larger screen than the 5S with the physical dimensions of a much smaller phone. Look how much smaller the LG G3 with 5.5" screen is compared to the 6 plus with 5.5" screen. I just bought the G3 on Amazon for $49.99 on contract and LG has a promotion for a free additional battery and battery charger. Hard to pass up that deal.
I'm not sure why I was downvoted. Releasing a phone with a larger screen while minimizing the bezel so the phone is only minimally larger than a iPhone 5S would have stuck with Jobs original philosophy. If LG could do it, I'm sure Apple could too.
This ignores that Apple regularly changed direction under Jobs:
* No-one wants an iPod that plays video
* No-one wants a small tablet
* The original 3.5" iPhone is the right size (Jobs may not have lived to see the iPhone 5 launch but would have known it was coming and approved it)
He was a notorious flip flopper. He'd be a dick about it (surprise!) and take credit for things he'd previously been against, but he often changed his mind and a larger iPhone isn't out of the question.
Once you get to an iPad Mini being OK with him, I don't see why we think he'd have objected to the large iPhone.
EDIT: Thinking about it, the principal of multiple versions / sizes of a product was well established before Jobs left. MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros, desktop Macs, iPads, multiple sizes of iPod (Classic, Nano, Shuffle, Touch). Frankly the iPhone was about the only product where you weren't forced to take a specific shape / size.
I still think the "why" of the watch was missing from the presentation, and a lot of his points were spot on. My wife called me all excited about it and I kept asking her what it did and she didn't have a clue.
But I'm not sure it matters. My takeaway from reading your post was "Google released a watch? Oh...who cares." So I think you're right, Apple is still doing more right than wrong. I just don't think of Google as a product company, the Android brand mostly belongs to other manufacturers in my mind, and the overall impression is still that they are all making iPhone knockoffs, even if in many cases they are objectively superior. There's still nobody around who can do a product release like Apple.
> There's still nobody around who can do a product release like Apple.
But they might just reusing old fame. another one or two non-revolutionary product releases and , and their launches might become like everyone else's.
> I still think the "why" of the watch was missing from the presentation, and a lot of his points were spot on. My wife called me all excited about it and I kept asking her what it did and she didn't have a clue.
Sounds like the presentation didn't need a "why", then? ;)
I agree entirely. I think the same can be said of iOS 5 as well, the way they finally moved away from skeuomorphic styling.
I am really surprised to see such an information dense UI, and I'm actually quite pleased they've taken this approach. I'd much rather see everything I need to see at a glance than have to navigate to the correct screen.
I'm also pleasantly surprised to see a tactile user input device (the crown) rather than just a lousy touch screen. It's something else I wouldn't have expected from Apple.
I frequently find myself getting into arguments with designers about good design, and they are of course all Apple fanbois and always hold it up as proof of my wrongness. If they're consistent (honest?) then they'll be disappointed with this product. I'm curious to find out if that happens.
With the near-canonization of Jobs, people forget that his version of the right answers changed all of the time. Remember how awesome the PowerPC was due to the "velocity engine"? Not 18 months later, Steve was on stage pitching the amazing performance of the Intel Mac.
The whole business of iOS devices is shifting away from revolution towards evolution. The first big hint of this was when they shipped the low-margin iPad Mini. Earlier this year, Apple begin talking about how transformative apps are to people.
I think the watch and phablets reflect this -- people who watch alot of video will appreciate the bigger phone, and the watch is a whole new way to deliver app functionality.
Yeah, it went from a kind of interesting analysis of the presentation and then fell over into fan fiction, even referencing the author's previous fan fiction pieces as some sort of weird Steve Jobs head canon. Yikes.
> The annoyance I feel when people say "what would Jesus do?" is the same annoyance I feel when reading these articles about "what would Steve do?"
Interestingly Tim Cook has repeatedly said that Jobs' instruction to them when he was leaving was never to ask this, but to trust their own judgement. His fans may ask this but Jobs at least was smart enough to see the folly in it.
Obviously the problem with this is it creates a paradox. If I ask what would Jobs do, then Jobs wouldn't ask what Jobs would do. But if I follow that advice and don't worry about what Jobs would or wouldn't do, I start asking again, what would Jobs do?
First up, under Jobs phablet iPhones would have been out of the question. He would have flat out rejected those, because he was simply wrong about some of the assumptions of phone design and would be a lot slower to admit that than Apple did without him.
Second, the Apple Watch would not have been what it was now. For the first time in tech, Apple is second in execution with a more complicated product - one with a more complicated, information dense interface that requires two input methods to operate [1]. I'm not insinuating that Apple Watch will be an inferior product (I think it's more likely the opposite), but I don't think the execution of the product is something Jobs would have let happen in the same way.
But that's all okay! Apple is going in a different direction, and it just might actually be the better direction to go in. I'll be buying my first iPhone later this year, and I very much doubt I would have done so if Jobs was still as influential as he was.
This deification of Steve Jobs is incredibly annoying to me. The annoyance I feel when people say "what would Jesus do?" is the same annoyance I feel when reading these articles about "what would Steve do?". This article is just one level above fan fiction and it has gotten more than 450 votes. Ugh. He was a pioneer in the field, but let's appreciate him for what he's done and not for what he should have been doing today.
[1]: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/09/smartwatch-wars-the-app... - the comments contain the gem "What kind of bizarro world are we in now where Google releases the clean, minimalist UI and Apple releases the information-dense but cluttered one?"