I have no idea why they are giving this article away for free (loaded it into Instapaper and won't see ads).
Who wouldn't pay $3 for this via Stripe?
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I wouldn't pay a single cent, and I cannot conceive of why you don't understand that.
I think his question makes more sense if you read it as "Of the people who are seriously willing to read an article of this length about Jonny Ive, who wouldn't pay $3 for this via Stripe?"
> Who wouldn't pay $3 for this via Stripe?
A lot of people, I think. I'd guess less than 1% of those who would read it for free.
I wouldn't just based on the title and a summary. Having read it I would have, but how could you know it was such high quality prior to reading it?
I had to stop reading because the article seemed to meander and fumble around too much before making a point.
I'm not sure I'd pay anything to read this type of content in this format. As a collection of stories in a PDF, maybe, but not on a screen.
I say this as a lukewarm Apple fan that believes Apple is losing its way in the post-Jobs era.
Just curious, how do you believe that Apple is losing its way?
There were plenty of Apple weird/"failed" products during Jobs time: iPod HiFi, Newton, 20th Anniversary Mac, exceptionally buggy versions of OSX until Snow Leopard etc. etc.
EDIT: Apparently the Newton and the TAM weren't during Job's time! My mistake! Sorry! Time to go read Wikipedia.
Largely due to the fact they they are a) playing it safe and b) mostly reactionary when it comes to new product designs/concepts.
I have no qualms with the current product lineup, but I think that Apple, under Cook, has traded vision for certainty. I think that having more of Ive outside of cheeky launch videos would serve them well.
Interesting, I had not thought of them playing it safe. But I suppose you are right about the "reactionary" part of it to some extent. But what about software? The new Yosemite look was widely hated on release, as was iOS7 changes. (I myself like Yosemite btw)
Would you not see the Apple Watch as a risk? Or a risk in the wrong sort of way?
I think it's the wrong kind of risk - it's Apple explicitly trying to operate as an upmarket fashion brand, as opposed to Apple suggesting a fashion brand while appearing to operate as a technology company.
Watch is like to trying to sell a gold-plated Mac Pro. Suddenly the gold becomes more important than the computing.
All previous Jobs products majored in being useful. If you put an iPod inside a cardboard case with clunky switches instead of a click wheel, you'd still have a very practical music player. The clever design enhances usefulness that's already there.
Same with the iPhone. It was the first phone to pull together the phone, map, browser, email, calendar, and other features with maximum user benefit. You could make a case for competing products doing one or two items on the list better, but not for any competitor making everything work together so well as a package.
Usefulness again.
The point of Watch Edition seems to be conspicuous display of expense, with useful computing thrown in as a free extra.
That's a completely different product direction.
If Watch has limited basic usability - if the battery life is too short, if it doesn't do something insanely wonderful and useful out of the box - I think success is not guaranteed.
Very observant and interesting points, thanks. I had not thought of the prettiness/beautification as a secondary item to the purpose of the products. Thanks.
Yosemite is an upgrade on part with what they were already doing, so more of the same there.
The watch, in my eyes, is a huge disappointment. With as much time as they took to prep for the launch, I expected they would have done more thinking about how to innovate in a landscape that has failed to become anything more than mediocre.
I think it is the epitome of Apple's failure to innovate post-Jobs, and is the first of more 'meh' to come.
But what about drawing hearts to each other on it??? :-)
Only kidding. I found the Watch video to be dull and Ives' voiceover to be disappointing and desperately attempting to find highlights in a featureless item. A bit like trying to describe how wonderful a piece of blank A4 piece of paper was. I will wait to see how it fares! No doubt we'll all be shocked if it sells by the billion.
Jobs hated the Newton and killed it first thing when he came back, and the TAM was also under Gil Amelio
The Newton and 20th Anniversary Mac weren't during Jobs' time.
I wouldn't pay $0.10 for it.
This really comes off as a puff piece, likely the deluge of Apple puff pieces we will have to suffer through leading up to the watch going on sale.
You spend 60 minutes on something that isn't worth $0.10 for you?
No, I didn't spend time on it at all. Apple does not interest me.
Which explains why you are here, commenting on an article about Apple's lead designer.
I structurally read most comment threads on HN, even on subjects that I don't care about to see what's going on in the world of software and hardware without having to go and work with each and every device and piece of software out there.
Part of my job is to stay informed about lots of things that I don't have direct experience with, there is simply too much out there for any individual to experience directly.
So I use HN as a time-saving device, the collective wisdom and time invested vastly exceeds my own and it's not rare at all to find that HN comment threads are more informative and correct than the articles themselves. FWIW if a subject does interest me I'll read the article too (obviously...), and plenty of times the HN comment threads make me change my mind about what I should be interested in.
The effect of this is that I can state with some certainty why apple does not interest me without investing a chunk of cash and a large amount of time first.
Of course that wasn't what you were after, you'd like me to admit that I'm secretly interested in apple after all. But there isn't a single apple product that I'd like to own or use (I have an ancient Imac here that's been off for more than a year now), I don't want to buy an 'experience', I only believe in being able to run whatever software I want on the hardware that I own. As soon as I need to jailbreak a device in order to be able to really use it you can safely count me out and OS/X is not such a large step up from Ubuntu that it makes me want to run a different OS on my desktop than on my servers.
So as far as I'm concerned Apple is not (currently) interesting to me.
None of that screed explains why you felt compelled to threadshit with "not worth 10¢ to me". You are able to "structurally read" to see what's going on without such comments, surely.
Because the GGGP asked 'who wouldn't pay $3 for this'.
It's literally too long to read. I clicked on it out of curiosity, read the first lines, started scrolling faster and faster, didn't reach the end. But somebody will find it too short and overly interesting. Luckily we are all different :-)