People often mix marketing and sales. For me marketing is about "understanding your market". You wanted an iPhone because His Steveness knew what many people were looking for in a phone.
(The other parts of marketing, IMO, are getting the right message across at the right time - to those right people. The storytelling is the message part).
You missed the other horror of modern marketing. Using the thing sold to you, that you paid for, to trap you in endless marketing hell.
I don't mean using it, eg to visit a social media site or whatever. I mean, the device spamming you with ads and "helpful hints' about more products to buy.
Like Google and Android not shutting up about Gemini, nagging you to try it. Or dark patterns to trick you into subscribing to a service.
Right. Yeah I often do, possibly because I only have one word (marketing) for both.
I guess the storytelling is the part that I feel is overvalued. "This genius changed the world because of how he phrased it" seems like bullshit to me.
The part where you define what a good product is, this one matters. Even though I feel like there is a whole lot more luck involved than what people want to think. "Steve Jobs was a genius" may rather be "Steve Jobs was really good, and at the same time he was lucky that what he considered a good product at the time was actually perceived as a good product by the masses".
It feels like there is a lot of survivorship bias (let me link xkcd myself before someone does: [1]) that we keep ignoring. "If Musk/Besos/Zuckerberg/<name your crazy billionaire> is where he is, that's most likely because he is the best". Ok, they probably did something right (maybe?), but they got crazy lucky as well.
> The part where you define what a good product is, this one matters
From the article "It was the story of the product. And it drove what we built."
The story is what kept the product development on track - and thus made the iPhone sell itself - the story isn't about convincing the public to buy, the story was an encapsulation of the products design - refined as time went on.
Product dev can easily go off the rails - take the recent story about Jeep having Ads popup on their infotainment systems - people wondering how anybody could think that's a good idea.
If you told a story about that product feature to your family and friends - you can be sure you'd get the 'puzzled look', and you'd remove it before the car ever shipped.
Apple doesn't really do a lot of classic sales. They have people with enterprise accounts and so forth but most of what they do to tell you about products and get people to write about them is fairly classic marketing.
But to your other point, sure. There is a saying about helping to make your luck, but, yes, there is also luck in just about any career or success.
> Steve Jobs was really good, and at the same time he was lucky that what he considered a good product at the time was actually perceived as a good product by the masses
Jobs did it multiple times, though. The iPhone no doubt overshadows everything else, but the Macintosh and iPod serve as evidence that he had a recipe for successful products.
There's a whole section in the article about experimenting with different positions and weights of the haptic feedback as the dial is moved and how to tie them in to the display on the control itself.
> But how about a dial that stops turning at the minimum and maximum
That, too, is mentioned in the article ("This means you can simulate different types of haptic feedback, like different detent strengths and hard stops.").
> and doesn't need you to take your eyes away from the road at all?
Also addressed in the article ("Showing three different data types in one dial is possible but definitely the maximum. When adding a fourth function, keeping track of your position in the interface without looking down becomes too difficult.").
I feel the real problem comes when people stop publishing on the (open) web because 1) no-one is reading it directly and 2) they know their hard work will just get slurped up and regurgitated by LLMs.
This is the issue I have with the "build vs buy (or import)" aspect of today's programming.
There are countless gems, libraries or packages out there that make your life easier and development so much faster.
But software (in my experience) always lives longer than you expect it to, so you need to be sure that your dependencies will be maintained for that lifetime (or have enough time to do the maintenance or plug in the replacements yourself).
But they still look kind of off when wearing them in public (slightly bigger than normal sunglasses, cable from one ear and other people can see the light from the screens from the side or back).
And the lack of integration is a pain - the phone has to be unlocked so is subject to random taps and swipes in my pocket.
However, an Apple-built Carplay-style projection into XReal type glasses could work very well - the question being how would you control it?
XReal seems super interesting. They at least have the vague shape of something that could see mass adoption.
I think it is not totally necessary to have it be impossible to tell you are wearing the things. Like walking around with earbuds or portable headphone was unusual at some point (even the walkman is less than 50 years old, right). They just have to not look deeply goofy, like current VR-pressganged-into-AR headsets do.
Businesses aren't as resentful as individual developers; IMO the difficulty is that it's really hard to make compelling content.
iPhone suits simple use cases, chat, video, audio, remote controls, utilities, simple games, and with controllers medium complexity games
iPad will do any phone or laptop app, plus high complexity games with a controller
Watch will do data displays, notifications, very small remote controls
Headset? AR, VR, cinema. But right now, that means "Occulus games, first party virtual display, and the kind of static AR content that's theoretically possible on an iPhone but very few actually use*", and AVP is 7 times the price of Meta's headset.
There's useful stuff if can do in specific niches, but I can't tell if e.g. "surgeons use AVP to assist during surgery" is a fluffy headline or a demonstration of value-add, and even if it's useful in this case it remains hard to figure out what this translates to in a mass consumer market.
I’m an indie app developer building photography apps because I love photography.
I don’t harbor any particular resentment towards the App Store; in fact I am fine giving Apple 15% of my proceeds (I make way less than $1M a year) to handle content delivery, refund requests, minor advertisement, etc.
I bought a Vision Pro on release, and have a number of ideas/prototypes for it.
After a few weeks of hacking, there are two simple reasons why I didn’t pursue development of them any further:
- the APIs are still really early stage (eg nothing around windowing, I’d like to build some pro photo editing apps that’d require advanced windowing functionality)
- even if I were to work around the API shortcomings, take the time to develop a full app, and then release it - then how many sales will I get at most? Maybe a thousand? Compared to the iPhone/iPad/Mac, that’s nothing.
So I figured waiting a year or two for the APIs to get better and more people to have access to the hardware made sense.
Also, I went from considering making AVP exclusive apps to making apps that work on Mac/iPad, and maybe have some bonus features on the AVP - I think that’s a better way to go about it (nothing released like that yet, still in development).
All that said, there’s something magical about the AVP’s high quality screens for photography. Seeing your photos in space right in front of you is definitely one step above looking at them on a phone/tablet/laptop screen (and one step below looking at large high quality prints of them, but that requires a different kind of effort).
You should put a link to your work in your bio it is really cool. Your name gives a clue but I only found your site after adding "software" to the search.
Not only, in general, over the last year or so, Apple has used every opportunity to antagonise and frustrate developers.
A business wouldn't care about the Vision Pro because there are but 10 people who still own one. The device is limited, extremely expensive and the software platform questionable at best - why did Apple needed to reinvent *Reality APIs instead of joining an existing industry is beyond me.
There are indie devs who still use the vision pro for engagement - flashy posts on the socials etc, but that's not enough to make a dent. Also, for many of them, this is their first encounter with AR/VR where Apple present's their achievements as novel while there are already existing ecosystems from other vendors.
You don't think it has more to do with the tech having hyper-specific use cases and being too expensive for most consumers to just casually own? Don't get me wrong, I think it is wonderful tech, but people pushing for VR/AR to be a big thing are a very siloed, vocal minority that always seems to be baffled when the latest iteration of it goes nowhere. It's because none of it has been practical enough for common consumption, yet.
Vision Pro is not a mass market device the addressable market is very small for any big investment from developers. Until the sales reach in millions Apple will need to develop themselves or pay developers to build stuff for it
My uninformed guess is that aside from the obvious glaring user base size problem, the API is too locked down to build unique, interesting apps and too different/incompatible to port existing ones like VR games.
Agreed - but in the past, Apple has been able to overcome this issue for several new products. If third party developers are understandably less enthusiastic to invest in this platform, Apple could either develop apps themself or pay third party developers to do it (what a novel concept!). But they don't seem willing to do it...
Before its release, I read that Sony had said they could produce 900,000 of the displays per year because the process was so complex. Obviously with 2 displays per device, half that is the maximum number of Vision Pros per year.
I'm guessing Apple and Sony would have invested in improving the process if it had hit expectations.
I read it a few months ago and was really impressed with how easy it was to read.
It starts out with simple stuff, like serialising data as JSON vs XML. But it moves into complex areas - like how replication and WALs work, including different ways of handling consensus when using leader-leader replication and how Spanner needs atomic clocks to handle it.
But even the complex stuff was explained in a way that I understood, which is an immense achievement.
Yep, this is my number 1 "I wish I'd read this X years ago" book.
I'm someone who has been doing this stuff for almost two decades without really knowing this is what I'm doing. I used to think what I was going to do was systems level programming like operating systems and maybe the database systems themselves (e.g. postgres, datomic etc.). But for whatever reason my entire career (so far, but I don't see it changing) has been building data systems for businesses and users.
I read the book from cover to cover and half of it was like "ohh... that's how that works, that's what I'm doing wrong" and the other half was "shit, this is something I kinda knew after trying and failing for years, and someone has just written it down in a way I never could".
The difference (in my experience) is if it works with Apple, it "just works". If it doesn't work, it will never work.
It's a binary and you generally know the answer straight away.
Some people dislike it because they enjoy looking for answers and the freedom to change how things work. Others like it because they don't want to spend their time searching and mucking about with configurations.
(The other parts of marketing, IMO, are getting the right message across at the right time - to those right people. The storytelling is the message part).