Today’s the last day of an eminently providential weekend break, which is to say that I’ve been dragging myself around the house trying to rest, read a non-trivial amount of books and magazines (the latter courtesy of Calibre and a variety of web sites, but both thanks to my Kindle) and cherry-picking through the fallout of the WWDC keynote in an attempt to find some sensible reasoning amidst it all.
Alas, most people seem to believe Apple ought to indulge their particular viewpoint, and their naïveté is touching (at least) in that regard, but like Gruber, I think it’s all getting a bit much1. Apple is a huge moving juggernaut making an incontrovertible imprint on an industry that has, for much of the time, been resolutely incompetent at fulfilling users’ expectations by dint of trying to copy them.
And yet, it’s all quite simple, really. As The Economist puts it, they re-package technology in a simple, elegant form, and get paid a premium for it because they do it consistently and reliably, regardless of whether their relentless approach to iterative polish happens to smooth over the particular bits of grit that annoy you (or me).
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And this time around, you don’t have to wade through minutes of hesitant quasi-nostalgic dialogue to listen to it - five minutes will do. ↩︎