The original iPhone was released June of 2007 and changed the very idea of what a mobile phone was. It was a “blockbusterâ€
The original iPad was released April of 2010, nearly three years later, and changed the very idea of what a mobile computer was. It was a “blockbusterâ€.
Now Apple has to — as in, MUST — come up with something equally revolutionary in less time in order to stay “relevant�
I quote Patrick Rhone, because Apple isn’t really going to speak for itself in this case. I’m sure I could find a relevant quote from Steve Jobs, or Tim Cook about Apple’s product philosophy, but I’d rather quote James Murphy. “You Wanted a Hit†is a song about how James Murphy as LCD Soundsystem doesn’t feel the need to make music for the sole purpose of being succesful as a pop musician. Certainly, he’s not going to deny success, but he’d rather make what he wants to make. Otherwise, “it ends up feeling kind of wrong.†This is the advantage of being an independent artist, with independent distribution, and being beholden to nobody except yourself.
Apple may be beholden to its shareholders, but it doesn’t act that way. That’s why they can spend their time making products designed with cutting edge manufacturing technologies. That’s why they can get away with charging hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for “commodity†products. That’s why they can iterate and improve on the same small, core stable of products year over year, rather than throw out products of every imaginable size, shape, color, feature set, and price point. Apple is not their shareholders’s baby. Their customers may get to take the products home, but Apple isn’t its customers’s baby either. Apple is beholden to Apple, and Apple alone.
This is different from any other publicly traded company out there, and certainly different from any other company in Apple’s field. This totally fucks with the heads of people whose job it is to understand how companies work, so that they know where to put their money—or more likely, other people’s money. These people need patterns, regularity, a systematic approach, and something that doesn’t require extra work on their behalf. It makes their job easier to know that every company works the same way.
Apple doesn’t care about making other people’s jobs easier. [1] Apple doesn’t care about making its own job easier. Apple cares about making great stuff. And it works.
The other problem is that hits are transient. Back to music: how many one-hit wonders are there? This is Wikipedia’s list of one-hit wonders from 2000 to 2009 alone. They have lists for every decade since the 1950s. Some of these artists went on to have long, succesful careers, but never hit the heights of their lone hit. Others burned out, or faded away. Remember the PalmPilot and the Treo? Look where Palm’s at now.
When the pressure is constantly on you to make a “hit,†it affects the quality of the work. You question everything. You file down the sharp edges. [2] When you try to make something that appeals to everyone, you run the risk of making something so beige and indistinct that nobody either wants or cares about it. The pasts of music and technology are both littered with these failures—products that tried to be something for everybody, rather than everything for somebody.
So, yeah, Apple doesn’t “do hits.†It just so happens that some of the things they do become hits, but that’s never the aim. As long as the money keeps rolling in, they’re on the right track, no matter what some Wall Street analyst says—much like a record company executive.
Unless buying Apple hardware makes someone’s job easier. ↩
The corners around the indentation where you can grab and lift the screen on this MacBook are pretty sharp… ↩
Eighteen inches by sixteen inches. Roughly two square feet, of which about 40% is taken up by a 15†MacBook Pro. This is my desk. Well, it’s actually a folding table. And it’s in a tiny bedroom, in a tiny two-bedroom apartment, occupied by four people. That’s not a lot of room to work.
At my job, I have a 27†iMac, and a full-sized desk. For what I have to do there, I can make good use of the space. I can keep two browser windows open, side-by-side, or a text editor, and a browser window. Trying to do the same thing at home is a little cramped—but doable. [1] I’d rather be in the office when I work at my job, because it’s a space more conductive to what I have to do, both in terms of hardware and environment. Studies prove it.
At home, when I’m working for myself, it’s a lot easier to fit everything into two square feet, or a 1440×900 display. Working like this, you have to work lighter—less stuff plugged into your machine, for example. [2] Run your software in ways that maximize the space available. Lion’s full-screen mode is made for this, but there’s other tools out there that help as well. Moom is a neat tool that hijacks the Zoom button to display window positioning options. You can even set it to resize your application window on a custom grid. It’s the closest you’ll get to a tiling window manager on OS X.
Another application that helps me maximize desktop space is TotalFinder. This is a small extension to Finder that adds tabs to the UI. It’s especially handy when doing heavy-duty file management. Open a tab for a source, open a tab for a destination, and press ⌘-U. Suddenly, you have a split window, with both your folders side by side. If you’re old-school enough to have used Midnight Commander, this will be instantly familiar.
Putting things away when you don’t need them, or aren’t using them is essential when working and living in a small space. The same goes for a computer. Spirited Away is an old, small, simple menu bar app that hides windows after you haven’t been using them for a while—one minute by default. You can tell it to ignore an application, but I typically allow it to put everything away. It’s just easier and more relaxing to step away from using something to find a clean desktop when I get back.
You don’t need these tools to work big on a small space, but they help. At the bare minimum, you need to just know where your windows are, what apps are running. You need to use tools that do one thing exceedingly well, and you need to think hard before adding something else to your environment. No matter how powerful, how fast, or how much storage our tiny machines have, they work better and last longer if you run with a lot of head room, and it makes your life easier too.
I tried it before with my old 13†MacBook nothing, and not only was it more cramped, but it was also more strain on the hardware. ↩
I plug a 1TB, USB powered external drive into my MacBook when I want to listen to music. I also have a Magic Mouse, as you can see in the picture, but I only use it when I need precision, like for audio editing. ↩
This is a follow-up, of sorts, to my post on knowing when you’re succeeding. Instead of going out to those who wonder if they’re on the right track, this one is for the ones who feel the need to take other people down. It’s not aimed at anyone in particular, just at the general mass of people who bring the hate on the Internets. And, to those people, I have a question. “Don’t you have anything better to do?â€
Much has been written on the psychology of trolls, even by me. I want to put that aside for a bit. Here’s the thing: all the time you invest into the whole enterprise of trolling, attacking, and insulting—every piece of negativity that you put out—whether aimed at a specific target or otherwise is time better spent creating your own thing. So, why aren’t you doing that?
As someone who’s done both, believe me, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s easier—a lot easier—to tear down rather than build up. It’s easy, and it’s fun. The frustrated reactions of an increasingly flustered victim in their attempts to defend their work, themselves, and any potential victims of collateral damage make someone feel good. Powerful, even. It’s a goddamned rush. It’s endorphins and hormones, and the thrill of it all that keeps you coming back for more. Kind of like pornography, really. It stimulates the same pleasure pathways in your brain as sex, but has a much weaker payoff. And it decreases the more you do it.
Still, some of us are simply wired to take the easy payoff. The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment is a good example of this. The experiment is simple. The researcher offers a marshmallow to a child, with the caveat that if the child can resist eating the marshmallow in the time it takes for the researcher to leave and come back. If the child can, they get _two_ marshmallows. Those children that can hold out, according to some follow-up research, go on to be more succesful as adults than those who can’t. [1]
By contrast, actually making your own thing is hard. Very hard. It’s full of false starts, detours, dead-ends, and often will end in failure. The payoff, however, is immeasurable. There’s nothing quite like finishing something, stepping back, and saying, “Hey! I made that!†[2] You become protective of what you’ve made, which is what the sort of people who attack creatives feed on.
However, this is shouting into the void. If you’re the sort of person who likes to tear down what others spend their time building up, no mere rambling essay on a blog will convert you. The only thing that will, is when time and repetition take their toll, and the thrill goes out of the whole damn business. That’s when you’ll look for an out—though it’s far better to start now.
Other studies show the original experiment to indicate a child’s ability to choose when to wait things out, but there’s a rhetorical point I’m making with this. ↩
Of course, if you are a creative type, that will be followed by “Though, I really should have done that differently… and that part’s no good at all…†↩
When I switched to the Mac back in 2005, I didn’t anticipate that I would be spending a significant amount of money on software. I came from the Windows and Linux worlds, where freeware abounded—on Linux especially. There’s certainly a non-insignificant Mac freeware community. I don’t want to ignore that, and I have a few really top shelf freeware applications that I use daily. [1] However, especially since the App Store (iOS and Mac) launched, I’ve begun spending money on applications, and I’m glad.
The app store model has problems that I won’t reiterate here, but it has the incredible benefit of taking the friction out of purchasing software. This works two ways: by putting software a click or two away, and by exerting some downward pressure on application prices. [2]According to Dan Frommer the average price of the top 50 paid apps on the Mac App Store was $26.13 in December of 2011, so it can’t be that much pressure, at least for desktop applications.
Still, though it’s easier, high-priced apps still make me flinch, but less so. I can’t help but think of 1Password, which set me back $50 for the desktop app, $10 for the iPhone app, $15 for the iPad app, and $8 to upgrade to the new 1Password 4 iOS app. That’s over $80 that I’ve paid out, and Agile Bits has seen about $55 of that. [3] I’ve spend about the same on Things, my task management app, on three platforms. I’ve spent almost as much on OmniFocus. When I mention these applications to friends and family members, however, they freeze up or dismiss them out of hand.
Yes, these apps cost a lot of money. Yes, there are cheaper, or even free alternatives to them. However, the value I’ve gotten out of these applications has not only exceeded the original investment, but has me willing to pay for some of them again on other platforms—thus increasing their value to me. Then, consider the warm fuzzies value of supporting an independent developer or company that’s thrown a lot of time, effort, and skill into creating something, and suddenly dropping $50-plus on the right application feel great.
The price you pay for a good piece of software is a lot up front, but the mark of good software is that you get not just as much as you spent in value, but moreso. The security from something like 1Password is a bargain at any price. $50 plus $18 for the iOS app is nothing if you want a really good application to manage your passwords. $70 or $80 for task management is worth it when those tasks follow you around, when it’s frictionless to add them to your system, and pleasurable to use. Much free software [4] falls short in these departments.
And it almost goes without saying that if you’re pirating these applications without paying, the chances of that developer continuing to give us great work drop. Paying for it is the best way to ensure getting good software for years to come.
Adium is freeware, and arguably the best instant messaging client for the Mac. Meanwhile, The Unarchiver opens nearly anything I can throw at it, and it’s also free. ↩
I bought the original Mac app, pre-App Store, so I don’t know how much they had to give up in overhead, but I am assuming it was more than on the Mac App Store. Also, the new iOS app has increased in price to $18. ↩
One way to know you’re succeeding at something is when you make people angry.
I’m not talking about specifically aiming to make people angry. No good can come from deliberately upsetting people. What I mean is, if you’re succeeding at something, the very act of your success is going to engender jealousy and resentment among some people. Sometimes, these people will express their resentment through anger, or even sabotage. That’s how you know you’re succeeding. These people are not your friends, and if you thought they were, think again.
By way of example, let’s look at Apple. By any measure, Apple is a successful company, and yes, that success engenders resentment. Recently, a story came out that Apple is cutting supply orders for the iPhone 5. More than a few have suggested that it’s an attempt at stock manipulation, and I would agree with this line of thinking. It adds up. Because of Apple’s runaway success, it’s engendered a line of thinking that assumes its okay to tear it down for financial gain.
To take it back to the human level, there’s other reasons to attack someone else’s success beyond the merely financial. The first is simple that it makes us feel good to fling our metaphorical feces as the object of our jealous ire. It’s easy, it’s effective (to us), and doesn’t cost us anything but our time. Everyone, at least once, has thought to themselves “He/she/it sucks. The only reason they got successful is that they got lucky.” This may be a reason, but it’s far from the only one. Even if “eighty percent of success is showing up,” to quote Woody Allen, that still leaves a gap to fill. You have to do the work.
And, when you’re doing the work, and putting it out there, the one thing you want most is feedback. You ask two questions: “Am I doing this right?” and “Can anybody hear me?” Angry people answer both of those, and both of the answers are “yes.” This makes sense for the latter question, but for the former, anyone who comes up to you, unsolicited, and says “you are doing this wrong” is validation of the opposite.
I want to separate this from professional, craft criticism. When Roger Ebert says you make bad movies, he does not approach your work from a perspective of jealousy, but from a perspective of craft. This is the same of any, quality critic, in any artistic medium. When you approach your (real) friends and family and beg for harsh, serious criticism, if they actually give it to you, there should be no jealousy there. It’s those people, known and unknown, who come up out of seemingly nowhere to attack you that are the unfortunate marker of being on the path success.
However, this is not an excuse to turn around and start berating those successful people you’re jealous of. The other distinguishing factor of the people who try only to tear down the successful is that they don’t produce anything of value. It takes no effort, no talent, and no skill to simply dismiss, or insult someone or their work. To channel that jealousy, that resentment, and do something constructive with it is much, much harder. This is what separates the poo-flingers from the people you actually have to worry about, though it’s hard to tell when you’re busy dodging projectiles. Once you understand, however, you won’t have to.
