Seen in Park Slope: a young couple, pushing a baby stroller, talking about someone else’s baby.
Archive for September, 2011
California
The weather in the bay area has been 72 and sunny all week, and apparently it’s like this all year long. What kind of absurd place is this? No wonder every California kid I’ve ever met in NYC is butter soft, always complaining about stupid shit like how it’s raining, or how winter is cold. I would never raise a kid in weather like this; it would like rearing a child in a zero gravity environment: once they try to step out of the airlock, they crumple. That’s why so many kids are california lifers; their weak ass constitution would betray them the moment they crossed state lines.
Apple thoughts
-I never understood the notion that Apple products are overpriced toys for the gullible and the fashionable. This seems naive to me. A computing product is not merely the sum of its parts, but how well they work together (ask anyone that’s tried to enable wireless on a laptop running Linux). You cannot disassemble an iPhone, add up the cost of each chip, motherboard, sensor, etc, subtract from the wholesale price, and call that the profit margin. Engineering and software are not free, people.
-It’s still impressive to me that Apple is a company that makes billions of dollars by designing and selling physical objects, and not just ads (Google), software (Microsoft), or assorted paper bullshit (Goldman Sachs), but honest to god real tangible goods.
- To a lot of people, well designed software is just about making it pretty. Apple shows us good design is actually about how it works.
- Is steve jobs really that great of a salesman? I have watched many of his keynote speeches; he’s not that great of a speaker. I always thought 99% of his job as salesman is done before he even walks onto the stage. That is, he always makes sure he is selling killer products. And he lets the products basically sell themselves. When you go to an Apple store, did the pimpled-face “Genius” convince you to buy a MacBook or did you just turn the laptop over in your hands 2-3 times, play with it for 5 minutes, and say “I want this”?
-The hallmark of a well-designed product is that they are the products of saying “no”. Apple goods are full of No. Someone in some Apple office raised a question, someone made a suggestion, someone disagrees, someone stays up all night to argue with someone else, hopefully ending in shouting cursing and tears, and someone makes a goddamn decision. And that’s why I like them. I want my products borne of contentious, passionate, decision making.
Apple products generally do not punt issues and say Aw let’s just make it a setting in the preferences panel and go home. That’s chicken shit stuff. And that’s why most open source software can be absolute dreck, because some amorphous group of developers continuously compromise until you have the lowest common denominator software with an ass interface. No one fights for the best design idea and wins.
To me, that’s what you pay for: For someone to figure out a best way to put something together, the best way it should operate. I am not buying something so I can be a fucking middleware developer just to be able to play music on my computer and watch videos of puppies.
I mean, it takes a great deal of conviction to say “fuck you mobile Flash sucks, no way we are allowing it”. It takes courage to say No. The coward’s way is to throw in every feature, no matter if it is terrible, just so you can get some checkbox in some feature list in some comparison chart.
And that’s why I have bought Apple products.
Whenever people invite me to a meal, I always wonder if I’m being lured to an intervention.
Not narcotics-based; but rather, some mixture of cad-like behavior and general nondescript douchery intervention.