It's Dieter Rams, and he's been a big inspiration to a lot of designers (including Jonathan Ive). He actually said "only a few companies", and then mentioned Apple.
There are other companies, but few in the computer / consumer electronics business.
I think the key is that most companies treat design as an afterthought, or an expense. It's completely irrelevant to most users, but look at most PC laptops - they have a nice, glossy lid and front bezel. But the bottom cover seems like a minefield of stickers, covers, fan openings and screws. There is no design there. The design job ended with the obvious, visible parts.
Again, completely irrelevant to most users as they will never look at the bottom cover. But it speaks a lot about how these companies think about design - and why Apple is still the only company with a unibody laptop design.
I think this goes to show just how much thought has been put into small stuff like this. For instance, there is no need for the the sleep indicator to indicate anything when it's off - simply because you know the laptop is alive when the screen is on (the indicator lights up solid white when the screen turns off). However, the battery indicator button combined with a stripe of lights show a function - the level of battery capacity left - so they need to be visible even when they're off.
With the old Powerbooks and MacBook Pros, the hinges on the top of the lid would extend magnetically just before the lid closed. These are the small gems that makes you smile when you're interested in product design.
I haven't found minimalism to impact usability myself, but there's clearly some instances where they have given the user a task of figuring someting out. For instance, a friend of mine never figured out that the top button on his iPhone locked the screen until I told him.
I would actually bet that's a case of Apple relying too much on familiarity. It's in the same place as the (more clearly marked) lock switch on iPods and roughly the same size and shape, so logically it's the lock, right? Except that won't work if you didn't have an iPod.
Don't worry, there's still plenty of features that most people don't care about that techies can have mile long threads about.
- You can't change the battery
- It doesn't support 3D glasses and 4K cinema resolution
- No 20MP camera with flash and replacable lens
- There is no noticeable lag when running applications in the background, so it's actually not "true multitasking". You can't run 100 apps in the background.
- Can't install apps without jailbreak (or dev license)
- Doesn't have a nanoSD card
- No USB port
I think a slightly better comparison is if most other car makers had really lousy automatic transmissions that used 30% of the fuel, and VW waited to announce a car with an automatic transmission until they had one that worked really, really well and was just as efficient as a manual transmission.
All I can say is that I feel sorry for you in the US.
In Norway, I get 16MBit DSL at my cottage (yes, half an hours walk from the nearest dirt road). We don't even have any net neutrality laws, and there are only two nationwide DSL providers.
The general bandwidth you get is irrelevant. The central question from the perspective of net neutrality is whether there is any traffic shaping upstream of you.
Which is why Safari IS actually multitasking. You can leave it, launch another app, go back to it and be right back where you are. Sometimes Safari doesn't quit and you're back in a millisecond. Other times the OS closes the browser in the background, and you will have to wait a few seconds while Safari reloads the page you were visiting.
It's surprising how few people realize that the built-in apps (Mail, iPod, SMS etc) run perfectly in the background. The lack of multitasking is limited to 3rd party apps, which helps explain why most iPhone users never complain too much about the lack of real multitasking.
But Safari being multitasking only solves the "browsing -> other -> back to browsing" case, right? "Something else -> Safari -> back to the first something else" needs the something else to be multitasking enabled or good at storing its state.
Trying to predict what the users will and won't ever need to switch to and from and back to again is a crap shoot in general. Sure one can get it right much of the time, but why not just suck it up and make the overall solution better so there aren't those cases where one guesses wrong.
From the outside, this feels like a bizarre, "accept no criticisms of an Apple product as valid" kind of thing. Stuff like Browser Duo and mini apps make it clear that the longer Apple doesn't solve this in general, the more other developers will put together "do x and y at the same time" applications. Does it really seem better to have these kludges than a general solution?
"something else" -> "web browsing" -> back is handled by the application wrapping the Safari web browser using the included browser control in the API.
Good point. I was just doing an inversion in the example to simplify the argument mechanics a bit.
But doesn't that wrapping rely on something else's developers realizing that the user might want to go off to the browser and back? What if it wasn't Safari in the middle but any one (or three) of the numerous other programs the user might want to take a side trip through. It gets back to the crap shoot of trying to guess every multi-application use case that will be wanted. All this to defend not putting together the general solution which is entirely doable to begin with.
I'm not in the US so I can't recommend any particular provider. http://www.voip-info.org/ has a lot of information about both providers and equipment.
- For hosting the PBX yourself without learning Asterisk or FreeSWITCH, I can recommend Askozia PBX, which is based on m0n0wall: http://www.askozia.com/
I've also used FreePBX-based systems like TrixBox CE, which are more full-featured and more customizable, but might take more effort to upgrade.
- For reliable faxing, make sure your VoIP provider supports the T.38 protocol and get an ATA (analogue adapter) that supports it. You can then set up T.38 passthrough in your PBX.
- For equipment, I'd recommend going with one of the "known" brands. I've used Linksys SPA9xx and Snom phones, but read forums to see what people recommend for the PBX you choose. Keep in mind that a lot of the buttons and features on the phone might not work "out of the box", depending on the PBX you choose. I'd stay away from no-name brands unless you have tried them yourself or have very good recommendations.
Yep. I think so. When you get big enough not to care, you inevitably stop caring. At some point, you become evil, and the smartest guys usually don't want to work for the evil company.
That being said, I this is a good thing - other companies may be forced to out-innovate Apple and pay as much attention to detail as they do, and maybe these companies will attract all the talent they need to make it happen.
Exactly right. Life is in fact devoid of meaning except for the meaning you choose to apply to it yourself. This includes playing computer games, spending time on facebook, climbing mountains or a career ladder and having a wife, children and a happy dog.
