There's a post from me out there somewhere complaining about how the iPhone was a non-starter because it wasn't going to have MS Exchange support at launch, and I wasn't going to carry two devices around.
I stood in line to buy it at launch anyway, and carried two devices around.
That's a reasonable criticism if one sees 90+% of somewhat-capable portable Internet devices in the hands of business users who will all want/need exchange support, and assumes that's the market for such devices.
If, on the other hand, it creates a new market for such devices among people who couldn't tell you what MS Exchange is....
I always felt it was a good demonstration of staying disciplined and focusing on making a great consumer product first–looking too closely at the competition and building in a bunch of enterprise-friendly features from the start could have been a big distraction and resulted in a mediocre product in other ways.
Apple takes the Nintendo approach. Myamota/Iwata mentioned that they always try to imagine what it’s like for a non-gamer to play the game. The way they simulated that in their testing was by playing their games with their non-dominant hand (left handed). That’s what it feels like to a casual user or non-gamer. They optimize for that.
The guy that needs MS Exchange is actually a niche market (hard to believe). It’s that click wheel that brought in everybody in the world. Your mother isn’t going to figure out those Creative/Rio MP3 players from the early 2000s.
This honestly takes incredible faith in what you think is cool. I’m not good at because I usually go ‘eh, this is my thing that I’m into, and you won’t get it’. But these people don’t think like that, they go out of their way to show you why it’s cool, in whatever way possible. They are literally trying to reach people.
I hate this "your mother can't..." ageist and sexist bullshit. Maybe your mother can't. Nobody tells my mother (who is now also a grandmother) what she can and can't do.
Honestly, lots of people were able to figure those devices out. People aren't really as stupid as programmers make them out to be. But coddle them and keep beating them over the head with this and they likely just give up from being treated like shit.
It’s a manner of speaking, don’t get so woke on me now. Many people can’t figure out tech. Here comes another cliche, have you ever been the IT guy for everyone around you? Why was that? We really didn’t take User Experience seriously until about the iPhone/Apps age. That’s when people didn’t need handholding, the apps were designed well.
At best, this is ignorance. At worst, it's willful revisionism. It was the iPhone apps that drove setting HCI back almost 2 decades. Hiding functionality behind skeumorphisms, coupling file access to apps, tiny screens, reinventing the accessibility wheel. Both Apple and Microsoft had very well-regarded UI design guidelines that, if followed, made apps that afforded the same metaphors as all the other apps on the system. Then one day the tech industry decided to throw it all away in the name of graphic design and branding, not usability.
When I got the first phone I saw it as the way forward for a phone UI, and I loved the iPod app. But the thing was mostly a tech demo. It was far less useful than every other smart phone on the market at the time. Slow Internet, bare bones maps, no MMS. Way too slow of a CPU for what it was trying to do.
All worked out fairly quickly once the 3GS came around.
I stood in line to buy it at launch anyway, and carried two devices around.