“Today, pretty much everything we use has been designed for many more purposes than we ever use it for,” Willy Trolove writes for The New Zealand Herald.
Trolove writes, “Home entertainment systems come with all sorts of extra features. Look at the remote control for your TV or your stereo or your DVD player and ask yourself how many of its buttons you ever push. Chances are the answer will be three or four, and the number of buttons on the thing will be 187.”
“Your home entertainment system is hopelessly over-designed for the simple tasks it most often performs,” Trolove writes. “Likewise, my laptop has enough computing power to send mankind to the moon and run the stock exchange. It is more intelligent than I am, but all I ever ask it to do is remember the silly words I type into its keyboard and not self-destruct out of sheer boredom.”
Trolove writes, “Your bog standard mobile phone comes with all sorts of extra features which, if you are anything like me, you completely fail to understand. My phone, for example, hosts pages of stuff mysteriously referred to as applications, and something called a minibrowser which I have no idea how to use.”
“But even the most sophisticated phones, with their cameras and their ringtones, are not a patch on the new iPhone unveiled by Apple. The iPhone will be able to do almost anything you can imagine a phone might do for you,” Trolove writes. “It can screen videos and record your conversations. It can do your banking and organise your birthday party. It can break up with your girlfriend while ordering you a pizza.”
“And yet, all of these extra features mean that the iPhone will be the most over-designed device in the history of humanity,” Trolove writes. “This is because, by and large, it will be used for the one simple task that almost every single mobile phone ever sold has been used for – helping its owner believe they are cooler than they actually are.”
Full article here.
Apple’s iPhone’s revolutionary user interface brings myriad features that other so-called “smartphones” are supposed to offer to (but instead hide from) their users due to badly conceived, ill-designed user interfaces, and Trolove criticizes Apple for fixing exactly what irks him? Trolove is right, his laptop – a lowly Windows laptop, no doubt – is easily more intelligent than him.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Glenn” for the heads up.]
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I already know I’m cooler than everyone else…this will just be icing on the cake.
“It can break up with your girlfriend while ordering you a pizza.”
Priceless!
don’t worry New Zealand, by the time an iPhone gets to your islands, it will be in its 3rd or 4th generation.
So many of them just don’t get it. As MDN says, 50% are below average. Unfortunatly, the lower half is the most vocal.
He’s right about one thing. His computer is smarter than he is…and it’s a PC
“Trolove writes, ‘Your bog standard mobile phone comes with all sorts of extra features which, if you are anything like me, you completely fail to understand. My phone, for example, hosts pages of stuff mysteriously referred to as applications, and something called a minibrowser which I have no idea how to use.'”
That’s pretty sad. However, some matches, a few logs and a blanket might be all the phone he needs.
Isn’t time to end all of the iPhone FUD articles? They really are tedious, do not say anything new and are simply worthless. It makes me wish Apple launched this thing already, I am sick of hearing about it. Now I have to wait until June to get through this, then they start up again with the “reviews” which will follow this formula:
a) The reviewer will call it cool
b) Say its well designed
c) Then ding it for the: perceived lack of keyboard, cant swap out the battery, bitch about EDGE, Cant import Office documents, and then complain about the price.
I never hear Mac folks talk about something making them look cool. The ones who are concerned with the “coolness” factor are the ones who are always measuring themselves up against everyone else; then, not recognizing their own envy, project their inadequacies on us, like we’re the ones lording our shiny gold-plated a$$holes over them or something.
I use products because I like what they do for me, not what Mr. Dumba$$ down the street thinks of me. With his logic, we should all be using abicuses because to use a calculator means you think you’re better than you really are.
Sheesh. I guess New Zealand has dopes there, too.
Sheesh. If the iPhone is 5 years ahead of the industry, then it must be 15 years ahead of New Zealand.
Willy could just tie a note to a sheep’s neck, slap it on the rump and wait it out.
He’ll get better battery life.
How is it that there are so many “tech” pundits who just don’t understand that there is a big difference between just cramming functions into a product vs. “overdesigning” something so that you can actually use those functions.
man..this guy is such an ignorant idiot and truly thinks that most people are like him..well maybe he is right but there are millions of people who will appreciate every little designed feature the iPhone will offer. This guy is a fool for missing out on the possibilities we have today…
Ego. What’s wrong with it? We purchase cars, Hummers, clothes, electronics, organic food, housewares, etc all for the sakes of what it says about ourselves. In a word… “Ego”. So what wrong with that?
I have 6 Newtons, how cool can you get?
By the way: Are the newtons already released in New Zuneland?
rwinters: “don’t worry New Zealand, by the time an iPhone gets to your islands, it will be in its 3rd or 4th generation”.
Just think of what it could do for us down here by then. Maybe it could break up a pizza, while ordering a new girlfriend.
Windows Vista will have >50,000,000 lines of code and the iPhone is OVER-designed?
I laugh, for 5.5 months, while I get my savings in order to buy an iPhone.
Trolove writes, “Home entertainment systems come with all sorts of extra features. Look at the remote control for your TV or your stereo or your DVD player and ask yourself how many of its buttons you ever push. Chances are the answer will be three or four, and the number of buttons on the thing will be 187.”
Head-up his ass. He’s proving himself that Apple’s design is necessary, useful and innovative.
The iPhone’s face has exactly zero buttons. That’s the beauty of it. There are no buttons until you need them. Contrast that to any common phone, or better yet, any common smartphones that these companies are panicking to sell off before the iPhone arrives. They all are bristling with buttons that, if you aren’t using that exact feature, just get in the way and waste space.
FUD machines are cranking away…can’t wait to see how bad this gets.
You need no iPhone to tend to your sheep!
Hes right though, all I want in a phone that texts and calls properly, everything else is just expensive clutter.
But if its going to make me cooler…
Why would anyone ever want a personal computer with more than a gigabyte HD? Why would anyone want to edit photographs on a computer? Who could ever need more than 128 mb ram
Just reminds me of the old joke:
What’s the response if you ask the time in New Zealand? About 1950.
MDN Magic word – ‘industry’, as in NZ doesn’t have any. Baaaa!
Standard Apple apologist responses:
If the Apple product lacks features that many competitors have:
“Those features aren’t needed. Apple is simplifying the product by eliminating the ability to do certain tasks or functions that many people are willing to do without. In fact, Apple is a genius for simplifying the product.”
If the Apple product includes features that many competitors already have:
“Apple makes it easier to do required functions. This is true even if many people do not actually have problems using competitor product.”
If the Apple product includes features that many competitors don’t have:
“Apple is many years ahead of the competition. This is true because more functions mean more advanced technology. If the majority of consumers don’t actually use 90% of the functions, it is because they are stupid and not because those functions aren’t really that important.”
ZZZ
fuck off , bill
I like the bottom line here: “I am a ludite. My crappy phone has stuff on it that I do not understand. Even if I knew what it was, I would not be able to
use it. The only way to make my crappy cell phone better is to make it crappier.”
An strange analogy to use too many buttons to represent too many functions, since the iPhone has one button on the front.
How is this specific to the iPhone over other smartphones? Oh, that’s right, the functions are easier to use!
One underlying reason for part of his cell phone example: many functions go unused because users cannot figure out how to use them.
The irony that underdesigned cell phone interfaces are responsible for problems cited while the iPhone interface attempts
to make function easier to access is lost on the writer.
The iPhone doesn’t make you want to use functions you do not need, but for people that want a smartphone, it makes the functions
easier to use. Implicit in that (apparently the writer needs this kind of thing said): if you do not need a smartphone, don’t buy one.
I do not need a smartphone, but I hope the visual voicemail system makes it onto every cell phone.
Hey Guys ,, on to this.. Dont worry,, I am from NZ ,,,, Will be calling them ,
We will see this change.