Jonathan Ive:

The way we work at Apple is that the complexity of these products really makes it critical to work collaboratively, with different areas of expertise. I think that’s one of the things about my job I enjoy the most. I work with silicon designers, electronic and mechanical engineers, and I think you would struggle to determine who does what when we get together. We’re located together, we share the same goal, have exactly the same preoccupation with making great products.

Great story from Sean Sperte about how Sky Balloon nearly built a web browser for iPad:

It was May or June of 2010 (I can’t remember exactly) and we were loving our brand new iPads … except for the web browser, Safari. While advancements had been made in terms of its speed, we felt it still lacked in features and experience implementation – or UI. So we had the brilliant idea to make a new browser for the iPad.

Actually, I should say, I had the idea, because I had no idea what it took to build software, and I figured we could do it. You know, with our three-man team that only met for a few hours per week. And because, after all, we were only going to be building a great “frame” around a UIWebView. And Apple already did the hard part by building the renderer. And, how hard could it be? Right?

A bunch of good lessons, including choosing application ideas for iOS. While an idea may be very good in a vacuum, there are many factors to consider first—what’s possible, who your competitors are (especially if it includes Apple), and deciding if it’s best to give up on a project.

Patrick Rhone:

In my recent emergency trip this past week (brief update: My Dad is not out of the woods but the path ahead is a clear one), my iPhone 4 became my most used and primary computer for many reasons. This despite the fact I had both my iPad and MacBook Air with me and close at hand. It was the one best fitted to almost every situation I found myself in. Unobtrusive, agile, and the one with a constant and reliable internet connection.

Look at the list of things he did on his iPhone while away. That’s why these devices are such a big deal: they allow you to do things you could never have done before. They’re way beyond what a PC can do, and it’s why it’s irrelevant to sit here and judge them by a PC checklist of features. They’re different devices entirely, have different uses, and create all kinds of new possibilities. It doesn’t really matter if they’re a PC or not.

Ben Brooks:

Long story short: 4G and 4G LTE are not equals, and shame on Apple for misleading iPhone users with the 4G tag that AT&T so clearly loves to toss about.

Yep.

Yesterday, Apple announced the next version of the iPad. Appropriately, it’s just called “iPad.” No version number, no modifier, nothing. Just iPad. The iPad has become as iconic as the Macintosh and the iPod, and the name stands on its own.

We knew nearly everything about it because of rumors. We knew it’d have a retina display, we knew it’d likely have a new camera, and we thought it’d support LTE, too. I think, though, that by focusing on the technical details, it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees.

What’s especially telling each iPad event is what Apple shows after they’ve announced the iPad—the new applications they’ve built to run on it. These software demonstrations show both what Apple’s thinking and it sets the tone for application developers. When they introduced the iPad in 2010, they showed Keynote, Pages and Numbers. They wanted to show that this wasn’t just a device for browsing the web or watching video. They showed that it could be used for getting “real” work done, too. When they introduced the iPad 2 last year, they showed iMovie and Garageband. What that event said is that it can allow people to make things, too, and it is superior in some ways to doing it on a computer.

Yesterday, they completed the iLife suite by releasing iPhoto for iOS. With that release, the iPad now has the same applications that people buy and love the Mac for. It’s empowering to know that you’re buying a computer that’s really, really good at managing photos, making small films and even songs right out of the box. Think about how exciting that is for a kid, especially—if they have a Mac, they can create movies and music and photos with a surprisingly high level of quality.¹ Now, not only is that possible on the Mac, but it’s possible on an iPad. You can shoot film with an iPod touch, send it to your iPad, edit it down into a movie, and publish it online all without ever touching a computer. Or do the same with photos. In many ways, it’s a much better experience than doing the same thing on a computer. There’s not as many capabilities, some areas are still clunky, but… You’re editing a photo with your fingers. Come on. That’s awesome.

That’s what Apple is saying with that demonstration: the iPad is quickly becoming the only “computer” many people need, and it’s going to be a much better experience than it ever was on a computer. It’s this 1.5 pound notebook-sized thing that you can pull out anywhere, anytime, and write, create art, take and edit photos and video, or make music. You don’t have to worry about drivers or viruses or defragmenting the hard drive or any of that other computer crap you had to think about before. All you have to do is create. Or just watch a movie.

It’s this device that isn’t a computer in the traditional sense of the word, because it’s approachable and easy to use and just doesn’t feel like a computer. It feels closer to something tangible and real. That’s the vision, and while we’re not there yet, we’re surprisingly far along. Consider that five years ago, none of us had even used an iPhone in person, and today, we’re using a touch-screen notebook-sized computer that can do all of this. That’s where Apple is heading, that’s where we’re heading. I couldn’t be more excited.

1. When I was a kid—which wasn’t that long ago!—we ran around with an old camcorder from our parents and shot little movies. We had no way to edit them, and yet it was still some of the most fun and expanding experiences I had. The process of thinking through a story, where we were going to shoot it and how, and actually doing it—it’s a wonderful thing for kids to be able to envision a goal and accomplish it. Any Mac available today comes with capabilities I only dreamed of then, and that’s so exciting for kids. Kids can literally shoot a movie or make a song, publish it for the world to see—and the world will see it. I believe very strongly that encouraging children to be creative not only can help their self-esteem, because they learn that they can create something and are capable of great things, but also turns them into different people. By getting that idea very early, the idea that you are capable of building new and wonderful things, you start to think about work and the world differently. [↩]

MG Siegler:

“Apples to oranges! Apples to oranges!” I hear you. But you’re wrong. Apples to Apple. Stats like this do matter because they show where we’re headed. It’s not necessarily that the iPad is beating the PC, it’s that iPad beat the PC in under two years of existence. This drives PC people batty, but the numbers don’t lie. PC sales have peaked. In many cases, they’re going the wrong way. The iPad is just getting started.

What’s more likely — 5 years from now, your primary home computing device is a PC? Or 5 years from now, your primary home computing device is a tablet? Just two years ago, this question would have been an absolute joke. Now it’s a joke to think it will take a full five years.

TechCrunch has a great photo of the new iPad’s Retina display next to the iPad 2′s. Open the image in a new tab—you can really see just how crisp text is on the new screen.

Jim Dalrymple:

It’s impossible to put into words just how good the Retina display is on the iPad. It’s not just images that look sharper, it’s text too. Reading a Web site or an iBook on the iPad’s display is incredible. Even the home screen on the iPad is crisper and sharper than I expected.

Apple’s posted the video for today’s special event.

We have computers which fit in our pockets and are the size of a notebook, and they are dramatically different than the personal computers that preceded them. They have cameras, microphones, accelerometers, gyros and GPS. People can use them almost anywhere and unlike PCs, people enjoy using them, too.

There’s a huge potential audience because so many people use smartphones and tablets, and yet a lot of the new applications we end up talking about are meaningless to them. We talk about new social networking and productivity apps, and we get really excited about them for a couple of days, and then we forget about most of them. There’s a glut of them and a glut of discussion about them, but they’re doing very little for regular users.

Why is so much of our discussion centered around new services and apps that aren’t going to be around in a year and aren’t going to do much to improve regular people’s lives? Why are we building so many new services and apps that try to solve problems that don’t really exist when there are so many other niches we could make dramatically better for people with these devices?

Look at what Square is doing for small businesses and shops. They just introduced Square Register, which turns an iPad into a cash register-replacement. Customers can pay with cash, credit card, or just by the customer’s name. It’s not only convenient for customers, because they can buy, say, a coffee at coffee shops they visit often without ever pulling out their wallet, but also empowering for the business. Because all sales go through a single well-designed computer system, they can track what’s selling better, what sells better at certain times of the day, how sales respond to different incentive programs they’re implementing, et cetera. Square provides very detailed information to businesses that had no data at all beforehand.

That’s what Square is using the iPhone and iPad to do: they’re giving more power to small businesses and making the experience better for customers. That’s really exciting and it genuinely makes people’s lives better, by making it easier to operate a business or a little bit more enjoyable to be a customer. They’re taking an industry—payment processing—that hasn’t changed much in years and is really boring for most of us to talk about, and they’re radically changing it. That’s awesome.

There’s all kinds of similar opportunities available in ostensibly boring areas. Rather than build more social networks, let’s try to find something in our lives that could be dramatically better, and let’s make it dramatically better. Let’s re-make the world using these incredible devices we have.

The health industry, restaurants and cooking, architecture, archeology, education, realty—there’s all kinds of fields which could be improved by using smartphones and tablets. They’re not what get people on Hacker News or Reddit excited, but new services and apps which make things better in these fields will get a lot of regular people really excited, because they can empower them and make their work easier and more enjoyable.

It’s up to us, though, to make those changes. We have to try to understand the issues people in these fields face, and then think about how they could be improved. And then we have to build it. We have to get excited about solving issues non-geeks care about. We have every reason to, too; by trying to solve problems in fields that have been left behind a bit by technology, there’s huge potential for radical change.

And there’s also huge potential for success. When you solve real problems for people, your plan for how to make money is a lot easier: you sell it. You don’t need to worry about getting really, really big and implementing advertising in such a way that it makes enough money to grow the company without annoying users, because when you solve real problems for people, they’re generally willing to pay for it.

That’s what I want to see more of in the next few years: less talk about new social networks and productivity apps, and more work on solving real problems for regular people. I want to see more people looking around them, recognizing ways they can make people’s lives better in tangible ways, and building it. Because that’s what excites me about smartphones and tablets: they have the potential to dramatically re-shape everything we do and empower people in the process.

And it’s up to us to make that happen.

Ten One Design, the company which makes the Pogo Sketch stylus for iPad, is working on a pressure-sensitive stylus for iPad code-named “Blue Tiger.”

It looks awesome. It uses Bluetooth 4.0 so it uses little power, and because it’s pressure-sensitive, you can vary the line-width and opacity just by how hard you press down on the screen. And even better, applications built to support it will only register the pen, so you can lay your hand and wrist down on the screen without making errant lines.

If it works as well as they say, this might be the point where the iPad goes from being decent for sketching or taking notes to being incredible. I want it for taking notes in class and sketching out ideas.

Mathew Ingram:

As we’ve described before, Apple and Amazon come at the e-book market from different perspectives: Apple sees books as just another form of content that it can use to sell iPads and other devices, whereas Amazon sees devices like the Kindle and the Kindle Fire as ways it can lock people into its content ecosystem and sell them more books, movies and so on. But both are dependent on having users locked into their products, and so they make it as difficult as possible to move from one to the other.

While that is accurate for Amazon, I’m not sure it is for Apple. Apple my benefit from lock-in, but from their perspective, DRM-ed content may hurt them more than it helps by locking customers to their platform. If DRM-free content in compatible file formats becomes an expectation, then selling only protected content makes the platform less attractive, and thus could lead to lower device sales—which is their primary business.

Remember, Apple pushed music labels aggressively to sell DRM-free music on the iTunes Store. Apple didn’t need to do so, but they did. Music was traditionally sold in an unprotected format and Amazon’s MP3 Store, which sold DRM-free MP3 files, was doing well, so the expectation for DRM-free music was growing. So Apple began selling DRM-free files, too, something I suspect they would have preferred to do even earlier.

Ingram’s argument is that Apple depends on protected content to lock customers to their platform, but I don’t think that’s how Apple sees it. I think Apple wants to make their platform as attractive to customers as possible, so they want to stay on the platform. If that means DRM-free content, great; but if labels, studios and publishers won’t sell music, movies or books without wrapping it in DRM, well, alright, as long as the user experience is good enough. User experience is the primary consideration, because that’s what drives sales of new devices, which is what they want to do. Their content stores exist to sell more devices.

Note that this may mean it will be a long time until Apple sells DRM-free books. Unless customers begin demanding it, or it becomes an expectation because others in the market are selling unprotected books, it’s difficult for Apple to pressure publishers to do so. The norm for the nascent ebook industry is DRM-wrapped books.¹ So while what Ingram laments is perfectly accurate, I think it’s a slightly less dire situation than he describes. Amazon certainly has a direct interest in locking down content, but Apple doesn’t.

1. It’s possible, though, that self-published authors will become more popular and a larger part of the market, and if they tend toward DRM-free books, the market could force large publishers to abandon DRM protection. [↩]

Robert Hoekman on designing user interfaces for “experienced” users and adapting them for unexperienced users:

Now comes the part that too few people who make design decisions realize: while John and Jane have different problems and are different types of users, their needs are identical. In short, they both want to get the hell off this screen. John is unconfident, and Jane has other things to do. They both need the screen to make sense. They both need the task flow to be obvious. They both need to just get past it.

In large part, I think this underlies a lot of Apple’s success. The Mac has been derided for years as a toy because it’s simple to use. There’s this idea that for something to be useful and powerful, it has to be complex and confusing, and that because the Mac isn’t (at least in comparison to Windows), it must not be a serious tool for serious people doing serious work.

But by being simple—by making interfaces that are, for the most part, approachable by regular people—Apple’s made for a more enjoyable experience for power users, too, because they don’t have to fight the computer. Instead of spending time getting everything set up precisely how they want it and cleaning their computer of junk and navigating complex interfaces and all of the other pain Windows causes, they just work, and the computer gets out of the way. That’s a big deal.

Of course, these kinds of users find new ways to fiddle (to-do applications, for example), but it’s a useful frame for analyzing how to design interfaces. Designing so it’s easy to use for the less experienced isn’t necessarily at the expense of power users.

Jesse Hicks has a very good look at Research In Motion, from its founding to now. Add it to Instapaper and read it, because it’s insightful as to why they are where they are now.

One part particularly caught my attention:

Meanwhile, the devices had changed slowly, incrementally, just as Lazaridis wanted. (Balsillie called it “managed evolutions.”) He and his team had already cracked the hardest engineering problems; successive phones offered refinements and improvements. This iterative process let the company respond to carrier demands for distinguishing features, even minor ones. And a slow development process gave customers a feeling of familiarity: they weren’t being bombarded with new and confusing features. The strategy was simple: keep the current users happy, and let the BlackBerry name do the rest.

The assumption which underlies this philosophy is that mobile carriers and corporate IT departments are their customer. Slow and iterative is good if they’re your customer. The resulting philosophy is that mobile phones have basically reached the right form and function, and new versions from here will be iterations that improve, but don’t fundamentally change, the mobile phone as we know it.

That is the reason why RIM failed. They thought they had a commanding position, because their brand was strong with companies and individuals, and all they had to do was sell to carriers and IT departments. But ultimately, carriers and IT departments were not their customers. The end-user was, but they were locked behind the carriers and IT departments.

This slow change and unresponsiveness to their real customers opened them up to someone who went directly to the consumer, doing an end-run around the carriers, and made a device so unique and convincing that consumers would be willing to pay a premium for it. That company was Apple.

Apple wasn’t blinded by those assumptions, so they made a mobile phone which was really a little computer, and one that was nothing more than a large touchscreen. What we should learn from RIM is not just that you have to move faster than the competition. “Moving faster” is meaningless. If you’re not moving in the right direction, you’re only moving faster toward failure. What we should learn is that your basic assumptions for your business—what your skills are, what business you’re in, and who your customer is—are the most important decisions you make, and they’re decisions you might not even be consciously making.

RIM’s led them to believe that slowly iterating and creating a lot of marginally-different models with confusing names was the best strategy. Apple’s led them to believe that mobile phones are really just a subset of personal computers, that software is what’s most important, and that they should create a mobile phone that’s simple to use—and make it as simple to buy as an iPod. And now Apple’s the most important company in the mobile industry, and RIM is a failed company.

Five years. That’s all it took. Your assumptions matter.

Dan Frommer:

If Office is the only thing worth buying a Windows tablet for, no one’s going to want to buy a Windows tablet. Microsoft needs to give people many more reasons than Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to buy Windows tablets. So selling Office for the iPad shouldn’t get in the way of that. And anyway, it will be many years — if ever — before Windows tablets are selling in nearly the volume that iPads are. ”Sitting out” the iPad could actually become a real risk for Microsoft and the future of the Office business.

Yep. And Office for iPad could be a trojan horse if done right, too—make Office the standard on iOS like it is on PCs, and when Windows 8 tablets are released, that makes it a lot easier for people to switch to them. If Office isn’t necessary for these post-PC devices, it makes a lot less sense to switch to Windows 8 tablets.