"Apple are stupid" anti-meme.

[thorfinn]

Hi. I keep seeing a lot of "Apple are stupid" comments going around the place.

Don't get me wrong - there are certainly a lot of rabid and stupid Apple fans out there. But there are a lot of rabid stupid Google fans, or Microsoft fans, or Linux fans out there too. There's plenty of stupid to go around for everyone, and it's not magically unique to Apple.

This "Apple is stupid" meme seems to primarily be based around the idea that Apple's latest product release doesn't have some common feature that "everyone else has", and therefore they must be stupid.

The lack of certain common features in a variety of their products is not stupid on Apple's part. It's an absolutely crystal clear, conscious, heavily researched, deliberate, end user tried and tested decision to keep the feature set and number of options down to a useful minimum.

The simple reason for that is that they do not wish to present the average consumer and user with choice paralysis. Most normal people open up a common application or system options dialog box and go, "argh, what the hell do I have to tweak, I see six million options none of which are what I care about?"

That's what Apple are avoiding. If you open up an Apple product, the odds are you'll be able to figure out how to use its basic functions without needing to read a manual or search for instructions. Contrast that with my latest recently work acquired Nokia phone, where I, a hardcore geek who has owned several Nokia phones, had to open the manual to figure out where the power button was.

This difference is precisely because they're willing to cut features that "everyone else has" when they are reasonably certain those features are not actually a common use case, and particularly so when there is some alternative method to get to that use case that isn't too bad.

Yes, that means that you (and me, and everyone) probably have some pet desired feature or features that don't exist in Apple Product Du Jour.

You know what? That's fine with me. And if you don't like the featureset offered by a particular product, nobody is making you buy it. There are plenty of options elsewhere.

That kind of gap is also what the third party software market exists to fill - whether it's the hundreds of thousands of apps on the iOS app store, or a similar volume of mac freeware and shareware apps, or the vast volumes of Windows and Linux applications out there, etc.

I don't know any geeks using any operating system who don't immediately go and install a bunch of third party stuff to make things go the way they want to. And the set of stuff they install? All different for each of them. Doesn't matter what OS you're using, everybody does that.

Essentially, the fact that some product doesn't have some features you desire doesn't make it stupid. If you need those features, then just get them elsewhere, don't complain that product is stupid, when those features are available from somewhere else.

So can we stop calling Apple (and anyone that happens to use their stuff) stupid now?

Thanks.

ETA: I totally don't mind if you call Apple annoying for what they're doing. That might even be true. Stupid is just not factual.

Comments

Wishful thinking!

[(Anonymous)]

"So can we stop calling Apple (and anyone that happens to use their stuff) stupid now?"

Wishful thinking, Thorf! :)

H

Re: Wishful thinking!

[thorfinn]

True that. :-)

[lirion]

Don't get me wrong - there are certainly a lot of rabid and stupid Apple fans out there.

This is my core problem. The evangelism is cult like, as though Apple products are some sort of special kool-aid. I don't think apple users are stupid*. I resent being treated as stupid by apple users for making my own choice not to go that road.

* caveat, except those who want an apple product because it's the new shiny trendy flavour of the month, who tend to be the most evangelistic and the least informed. But I am aware that while vocal, this is a minority group.

[thorfinn]

*chuckle* Well, yeah. Stupid is everywhere though.

The evangelism is mostly the same thing as with any recovery type thing, mostly from people traumatised by decades of horrible abuse from Microsoft software. Suddenly there's this Apple thing which appears to actually feel *good* to use, instead of be horribly confusing and ugly every step of the way... Of course they want to run around and tell everyone about it. :-)

Doesn't make it any less annoying though, it's true.

ETA: As I just said over on faceborg, feel free to call what Apple does and those fans do *annoying*. I'll pay that. "Stupid" is just not factual.

[rone]

Apple is stupid, just not for the reasons most whiners claim. And they're a lot more savvy than they are stupid.

[thorfinn]

Annoying as hell, I'll pay. Not doing what a lot of people want them to, I'll also pay. Stupid, I won't pay. :-)

[rone]

They make foolish and inexplicable decisions, for which 'stupid' is a handy and not inaccurate shorthand.

[thorfinn]

They make not-obviously explicable decisions. They then also have a habit of not explaining their decisions.

This unfortunately leaves them in a position where it's just plain easy to assume those decisions are foolish/stupid/whatever.

Those decisions may or may not actually be wrong, and like everybody they're going to have delegation and process problems once you put things out to callcentres, but I guarantee you the process back there isn't simply foolish.

[lnr]

If this were on Facebook I'd press the "Like" button.

[thorfinn]

Heh heh. :-) I posted it to facebook too. Long thread over there... Not at all sure how comments on that note will show up. I flagged it as "everyone", but I don't know how FB privacy and comments interacts.

I expect the comments will be public, but if half of them aren't, the conversation may not make sense. :-)

[lnr]

I *think* comments inherit the settings of the posts. And wow, that *is* quite a lot of comments.

[thorfinn]

Yeah, people that say facebook doesn't have discussion are smoking something.

Sure it mostly has random gossip, but occasionally I actually discuss things there. :-)

[damien_wise]

The simple reason for that is that they do not wish to present the average consumer and user with choice paralysis. Most normal people open up a common application or system options dialog box and go, "argh, what the hell do I have to tweak, I see six million options none of which are what I care about?"

I have a simpler reason: Apple are control-freaks and think they can use their heft to direct the market. Witness their recent shift against Flash. Sure, it has its problems (haha, not as unpleasant as the problems with PDF. No, I have no sympathy for Adobe, BTW). Apple's hand has guided the way people think about MP3s and paying for music online.
Apple are big on their systems being a "walled garden", and if they can offer a limited range of features/services to promote their own flavour, they will. Call it a "silo" in business-talk, or if you're less kind, monopolising a niche.

I don't think Apple stupid at all -- I think this is a carefully calculated move. It's business. It's a somewhat unpleasant, bordering on broken, business-model...but it doesn't seem to be hurting their bottom-line enough yet for them to take notice (I think they'll continue to rise for as much as 15-20 years).
I choose not to play their game, though...no Apple products for me, and I don't miss 'em one bit.

This is all aside from the zealous, monomaniacal support from Apple fans, IMHO (though, I think the air of exclusivity is part of what they thrive on). If Douglas Adams had yet another shot at re-writing HHGTTG, he wouldn't make Nokia phones the annoying, bleepy gadget that everyone has and parades-around with (an update in the film on digital watches in the boko), he'd single-out the iPhone.

[thorfinn]

*nod* I'm very happy to agree that if you have the features you want, at the price you want, from other people's stuff, you should definitely go with that. :-)

As far as Apple using their heft to direct the market... it wasn't all that long ago that Apple was considered dead in the water, ripe for Chapter 11 and bankruptcy. You have to consider how they *got* that heft, and it wasn't by spending money on advertising.

They got that heft by giving people a simple gadget to do a simple job - the iPod and iTunes. Everything prior to that was really really annoying to manage, even for geeks. I remember, it was a massive pain managing MP3s by hand, trying to compress the heck out of them and sync them via a shitty special cable and horrible software to some other random device.

Your average ordinary person had no chance of making sense of a iPod V1 period MP3 player from anyone else. Give them an iPod and iTunes, and it all "just worked."

Sure, it was a bloody expensive item... but people bought it, because it Just Worked. And the price came down, and down, and down, as it always does.

They've done exactly the same thing with the iPhone. Your average consumer has no idea how to work a Nokia phone and access all the features. I can hand my iPhone to a 3 year old who's never seen one, and they can figure out how to use it.

[gths]

The only reason I got an iPod (after they'd been out about 8 years) was that they were more or less monopolising the demand for small hard drives. (I don't even use iTunes to load it up, because it sucks.) I will admit it's very good at doing its core task without fuss but beyond that, eh. I will say if the next-gen iPad has the same dpi as the new iPhone it's going to be a killer e-reader. (It probably already is, but I've got other priorities for my disposable income at the moment.)

But that is the one thing I do like about them is that they actually make the UI a priority because they know they're making consumer toys and so it's best to make it elegant and intuitive. It's taken years for the desktop Linux people to catch onto the idea that, well, it shouldn't be an afterthought, but neither is it easy to do, so they probably ought to be given some slack.

It's funny that Douglas Adams got brought up because he was a Mac freak and he'd love all this stuff, but he'd probably still take the piss out of it. :)

[thorfinn]

*nod* I don't have an iPad, nor am I likely to get one, mainly because I recently bought a MacBook Pro. The iPad has its awesome featureset... about 70% of which I get on my laptop, 20% is covered by my iPhone 3G, and about 25% will be covered by the iPhone 4 when I eventually get one.

In a year or two when I want to replace the laptop, I won't - it'll be iMac + iPad, which will give me the same feature coverage, but more convenient.

I do hope the Ubuntu folks get somewhere - it may be too late though. If they'd got going a few years earlier, maybe there's a chance they could have picked up some decent consumer market share.

What I also hope is that Google manage to pull themselves out of the nerd groupthink vortex that they're in... but their recruitment process is set up to reinforce that groupthink extremely heavily, and I see no sign of that being likely to change.

[vatine]

I'd go as far as saying that not to include cut&paste in the first-gen iPhone probably was not the most-well-thought-out UI decision in the world. Stupid? Can't comment, it may have been that it was left out for an actual, sane, reason rather than "who'd want to cut&paste?".

[(Anonymous)]

Perfectly well thought out. The only reason they've added it, frankly, is because of the degree to which it became a common way of poking fun. The iPhone UI is actually worse now, for the addition of it.

Which is to say, for most common user tasks c&p is unnecessary. It's an edge case, which they consciously lost from functionality in order to get an optimized usage path on touch screen use. Which has been compromised in the current incarnation, but such is life.

What's funny to me is that Thorf provides discussion around exactly this point in his original post, but still people feel the need to jump in and say "Hur hur! Cut and Paste!" - which simply illustrates that there's a huge portion of the audience who can't differentiate between features and usability.

Whereas the market can (and does) - people tend to prefer the more usable approach. The funny thing is, they're unable to articulate why they prefer it - which leads to people calling them "stupid" and "zealot" - whereas they're actually simply pleased with a computer that works in a way they understand.

M.

[thorfinn]

Who needs cut and paste on a mobile device when your primary use cases have nothing to do with text entry?

As M says, they sucked it up and implemented something, purely because it was such a talking point.

They did the same thing with Spaces under Mac OS X, which also sucks as a result. It's a shitty compromise.

Totally agreed on the failure of people to be able to articulate why they prefer a usable thing to a less usable thing.

Things that aren't immediately usable are perceived as frustrating/confusing/annoying, and people can sometimes articulate why, because they can point to whatever is frustrating/confusing/annoying.

Usability is all about not being in the way, and things that don't get in people's way are invisible to them.

So things that are usable are just "ahh, I like it!"

[vatine]

I have (limited) cut & paste in my mobile. I am actually trying to remember a mobile phone I've had in the last 10 years that didn't have it and can't remember a single one. They did the Rather Neat "look for anything that looks like a phone number, provide a contextual menu to add it to Contacts, to Dial or to the Destination field of a new text message" on all received text messages and is a PERFECT use-case for something similar to cut&paste. Those phones have been (in order) some random Nokia (a 6150, I think), an Ericsson (an R320s, I am pretty sure) and my current winmob monster.

Not having used an iPhone (no, really, never), I can't tell you if it had something similar, but from the frustration iPhone users near me expressed, it didn't provide even this.

[thorfinn]

*nod* It's a perfectly fine feature to want to have - but as I said to someone else on faceborg, the problem is partly that for Apple, given their position on wanting features to be at absolute minimum "good", and preferably "brilliant", they must test/design/build/iterate/integrate all features from scratch.

They can't simply throw the job at one programmer who then goes "okay, I'll build something and we'll see how it goes."

They have to run it through usability engineering, iterate several possible designs, user test those things, see how those designs integrate or not with the entire rest of the product range... That's a huge amount of work, for even something so apparently simple as cut and paste. Several person years, is my guesstimate, for any feature at all, no matter how apparently trivial.

iPhone 3G (and iPhone OS2.0) had already sucked up so much of the company's engineering talent that Leopard was being delayed, and delayed, and had it's featureset cut to the point where it was barely going to be worth releasing... Of course they cut cut and paste off the feature list.

[(Anonymous)]

Okay, this is hilarious. You're saying you've never used the phone, have no hands on experience with the UI and usability, and still feel it's necessary to point out that Apple is thinking things like "Who'd want cut and paste?" and that these are borderline stupid.

Uh huh.

See, not only is this an excellent model of *exactly* the kind of thinking Thorf is countering, it's just weird to me that you feel the need to comment on such things despite having no useful experience. You're just repeating what you've heard at that point, and it's that sort of echo chamber effect that results in the public perception that C&P was a problem. When in fact, it's not.

Oh, btw - the iPhone does provide everything you've listed above (contextual understanding on numbers and web addresses wherever they fall) and yes, that's the perfect use case.

Out of curiosity - what makes you feel compelled to post on a thread like this?

M.