" They took out the headphone jack, like tech journalists rumored for years and years, and are now selling you a $9 dongle or forcing you to get Bluetooth earbuds,"<p>Perhaps as a followup, bullshit.ist could do an article on the difference between "selling an adapter" and "including one in the box" and the sloppy journalistic malpractice that is deliberately confusing the two for the sake of whining...
I understand this is a rant. But the writer comes over as a desperate bully who can't stand the fact that his childhood future fantasies didn't come true.
I like cyberpunk. I like the aesthetic. But it's not how the future looks like.
There's more to the future than what people envisioned in Gattaca on the one hand, and Blade Runner, on the other.
> Unlike the blank oppressiveness of modern tech aesthetics, it was this brilliantly anti-minimalist statement that said “let’s make it obnoxious, and before you can put it away, you have to slide down the earpiece like you’re reloading a freakin gun,” and it even had all the ringtones that were used by the characters in the movie, because why not go all-out?<p>Alright, I personally like more minimalist aesthetics, but I'll hear you out.<p>> The truth is that we live in ridiculous times, where our reality is fiction manufactured to forward the interests of an elite few, much like the fiction that has largely become the reality of our shared world. The dystopia we were promised by Gibson, Scott, Dick, and so on has come to fruition: wealth disparity turning poverty into a death sentence, neverending war in faraway lands killing millions as the “Leader of the Free World” arms tyrants to the teeth, and an inevitable destruction of human civilization as we know it are the cornerstones of our modern reality.<p>???
Regardless of whether the rant is good or not, I agree that the "airpods" make you look like a huge dork, just as google glass did. I expect the SV tech types to wear them around as a badge of honor, but I doubt the urban fashionistas are going to embrace it.
The victim of minimalism I mourn the most: phones with physical keyboards. On-screen keyboards suck and no, I don't want to talk to my phone instead. I was so much more efficient on my LG Rumor dumbphone back in ~2008.<p>The thing that bothers me about on-screen keyboards and speech rec is that they are imprecise, statistical replacements for a precise, tactile device. It's hard to type on touch screen keyboards because there is no texture and tactile feedback so we rely on autocorrect to guess what we're trying to say, and speech rec is just a statistical system by its very nature. I rely on the computer to <i>guess</i> what I want when my fingers know <i>exactly</i> what needs to be done.
Just the fetishism about these devices is striking. "Our devices should be making a statement about who we are and what we do".<p>Thousand dollar phones with $100 month services. $159 earbuds. Think we are all in the matrix.
I know how I want my tech to look, with f-ing screws so I can open stuff up. I want my tech's look to follow function and I find repairability and expandability to be important functions. I get the feeling the author feels the same.
'It's really simple. We come up with a product. We try to tell everybody about it. Customer tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we're on track or not. If enough of them say 'yes,' we get to come to work tomorrow.' — SJ
I hadn't seen these before this article, and while I agree that they aren't super stylish, I don't think <i>any</i> headphones are stylish. They're always <i>something</i> in or on your ear and often with a lame cord hanging from it. And they all look as dumb as each other.<p>So I don't really see the point of ranting about <i>these</i> ones.<p>The author even points out that there's a point for their shape and size, so it's not some dumb design decision. Form was guided by function. (And I'm betting they stay in better by being longer like that, and not just centering over the ear, but that's a guess.)
Some of you might disagree, but there's this thing happening right now with the younger generation: they don't seem to worship technology like we do.<p>Which is to say, for them - it's not something 'wow cool', it just is.<p>My 6-year old is fascinated by bugs and trees a lot more than she is by her iPad.
I mean, the iPad she just uses. A lot. Like the lightbulb.<p>But she's quite neutral about all the things that we care about - the cool minimalistic design, the powerful chip inside it, the version of the OS.<p>Like it should be.<p>As a programmer, I feel very strongly about my machines, but in the grand scheme of things - especially in the time dimension - our gadgets are just tools which we use to achieve stuff, which are always getting worse as time passes.
I like minimalism, but I think we desperately need some competing aesthetics. Everyone has copied apple to such an extent that it's getting boring. I don't really agree with his notion of garish video game phones, but I think something like the old-school Thinkpads is an awesome aesthetic that got kind of lost. Like, a device that is very industrial and practical, it's not trying hard to be ugly, but they don't hide the screws either. Something like that. Basically a device that instead of trying to be a hermetically sealed box of magic, is super comfortable with its own device-ness. Something that looks like you could open it, if you knew what you were doing.
There are some interesting ideas in here, but the argument could be stronger and more clear. A writer has to be at the top of their game if they're going after something as many people have a soft spot for as Apple.
This is moronic. I'm not even going to get into the stupidity of the author's argument, but since modern devices have been paired down into the minimum combination of processor and screen, the author could conceivably buy a case with all the idiotic cyberpunk dongles he wants. The fact that nobody sells such a monstrosity speaks for itself.
Is there a better term or is minimalism just stolen from the art movement?<p>It's confused me for so long because this isn't minimalism in the art sense. But I'm not sure of a better label for it.
As a footnote: My first impression of Airpods was: Of course! These are not smaller earbuds, they are an iteration towards implants or patches or invisible computing devices in general. From that perspective they seem make more sense: Condition the user to a world with less wires, where machines get real dialog systems. The outrage over the earbuds comes from people comparing things to the past, not the future.
"You have an entire generation of what looks like cheap plastic toys with screens on them when we were promised a future with risk, innovation, the fantasies of Trek and Inspector Gadget laid out in front of us"<p>Er? Current Apple devices have a distinctly TNG Federation feel to them to me. Now borg on the other hand...<p>I got excited starting this article when he mentioned cyberpunk I thought he was going to make a much more interesting point than "I wish tech looked like what I think is cooler". Instead, I really would have enjoyed a discussion about what kind of things may be possible if we dropped the constraints of minimalism. Ideas about what amazing functionality and experiences technology could deliver for those whom don't mind their technology not being as invisible as possible and instead being more, well, large clunky cyberpunky. I would have enjoyed this specifically because with my limited imagination I can't think of a whole lot of additional /exciting/ functionality such an unbounding would enable.
While I refuse to have the things I own to communicate say something about who I am and what I do, I do think that there is a fine line between doing something brave and bad in design.<p>Standard earbuds don't fit in my ears very well, cause headaches and are constantly falling out. The image of the pen charging and pointing directly at your crotch or chest while using the device is, to say the least, non-optimal.<p>It seems to me that the past Apple, perfect aesthetic with great functionality (even as a non-user of Apple products, except for a macbook supplied by my company for work purposes, I must admit this is true) is slowly losing it's way in an attempt to constantly prove that they are moving in some forward direction. Whether or not forward means over a cliff has yet to be seen, but I won't suggest that there is a false dichotomy between absolute success and absolute failure either. I think that this step will lose them further market share, but they'll still make a ton of money.
As appears to be the case with all design & aesthetic concepts, minimalism taken to a logical extreme becomes self-defeating and ridiculous. This is why the ideological fads and throw-it-all-out anti-historical rhetoric that sweep the various design professions with depressing regularity are so damaging.<p>Flat UI, I'm looking, in silent disgust, at you.
I just don't trust bluetooth connections that much. If I'm on a plane listening to something I don't want the bluetooth connection to drop off and then have my music/podcast blasting out of the phone speakers. With a headphone jack I <i>know</i> that what I am listening to is private to me.
I kind of stopped reading after he said Apple is selling a $9 adapter when it's including it. I guess you'd have to buy it if you lost it tho, but then you'd likely lose your fancy headphones too.
I think the author may have missed the point of the Matrix design aesthetic. The heros of the movie all wear sleek minimalist monochrome outfits. With similar sunglasses, and remember that the cool phone from that movie was actually the Nokia 8110 not the one pictured there. The design of the Matrix was almost a minimalist reaction to the bulky steampunkish aesthetic of the 90s. In many ways the Matrix ushered in the move towards minimalist design that we have now.
> Our devices should be making a statement about who we are and what we do<p>No, fuck no.<p>You take as an example a movie based philosophically on the works of Jean Baudrillard and almost three thousand years of eastern thought and what you take away from it is that we should aspire to the opinion held by Jack in the opening scenes of Fight Club.<p>You have learned nothing.
Also that Samsung phone he likes so much looks like utter crap, and I promise that spring mechanism isn't going to last a year.<p>There's a reason those designs aren't in the real world: every single moving part is a new exciting point of failure, and our current devices with nearly no moving parts fail enough.
TM;DR (Too Medium, Didn't Read):<p>"Stuff doesn't look the way I want it too! I'm not sure how I want it to look, maybe like the Matrix? But not like the Matrix. I dunno. GIVE ME MONEY ON PATREON."<p>Oh, there is one really good quote that offsets the Medium-ness: "I want VR applications that don’t seek to simply recreate ordinary videogames, but instead drive the user into an existential crisis that challenges their mortality."
Author complains about minimalism, uses Medium to do it: a platform that doesn't support footnotes, colored text, or really anything other than a <i>minimal</i> set of features.
<i>Our devices should be making a statement about who we are and what we do</i><p>Should be? They already do! The author clearly understands very little about marketing.
Doesn't anyone else find it a small irony that the website this post is hosted on is so clean, polished, and generally reflective of the very thing he's railing against?<p>Maybe this should be hosted on a more 'rude' website. Or maybe the way tech looks and feels is partly also dictated by ease of use and not just 'because big brother said so'.
What an uninformed childish tantrum. "Like, nobody likes this! Nobody! Not a single person thinks this is good"<p>How did this get linked here, let alone 100+ people who up-voted it?
And here I am, upvoting both the post and ... mostly the critical comments.<p>Guess I really enjoy you folks discussing :-]<p>Edit: seems I didn't make myself clear, I actually enjoy reading it and feel I learn a lot from it.
> You have an entire generation of what looks like cheap plastic toys with screens on them when we were promised a future with risk, innovation, the fantasies of Trek and Inspector Gadget laid out in front of us, and instead we’re left with… well, I can put a “TIME TO FUCK” .jpg as the background of this watch and use it to harass women wearing headphones<p>Some what off topic, but this isn't really a funny joke.
I don't personally like the AirPods but a lot of people do. There's a number of articles fawning over them.<p>This post is absolutely terrible. Inspector Gadget as a fantasy? Inspector Gadget was a dork, that was part of his charm, there was nothing cool about him.
I'm not exactly pleased with the decision regarding the jack, but this misinformation has become a meme unto itself:<p>> They took out the headphone jack, like tech journalists rumored for years and years, and are now selling you a $9 dongle or forcing you to get Bluetooth earbuds, which are… bad, to anybody who cares about audio quality or battery life or actually use their phone to listen to music.<p>No, they didn't. You get a set of lightning earbuds with the phone, <i>and</i> you get the dongle for free. If your objective is to buy an iPhone and listen to things with it, you do not need to buy shit other than the iPhone.<p>And if your argument is quality and you know ANYTHING about it, then you already figured out that the dongle contains the same hardware that the phone did prior to turn the digital signal into analog audio, and that the headphones do more or less the same thing just packaged inside the buds instead of being in the phone.<p>As if any real audiophile would use the stock Apple headphones anyway.<p>I have a really hard time taking journalists seriously when they make a factual error in paragraph 1. Pressing on...