Provisionally Untitled

Thank You, Steve.

'Systems architects'

Great design and user experience must obey a system. 

Alan Kay:

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

Steve Jobs, on Apple’s Q4 2010 Analyst Conference Call:

[Q: Why do you think you have an advantage on the price point for iPad versus PC manufacturers?]

I think part of it is because we engineer so much of it ourselves. The A4 chip inside it is an Apple creation. Everything from the battery chemistry to the enclosures. And we’ve learned a lot from the miniaturization we’ve done on iPods and iPhones, and we’re a very high-volume consumer electronics manufacturer. So I think we’ve learned a lot, we’ve developed a lot of our own components where others have to buy them on the market with middlemen, you know, getting their cut of things. And I think we’re systems architects and know how to build systems in a very efficient way. So I think this is a product we’ve been training for for the last decade.

Apple is really serious.

The class I'd like to teach

Jason Fried:

It would be a writing course. Every assignment would be delivered in five versions: A three page version, a one page version, a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, and a one sentence version.

I don’t care about the topic. I care about the editing. I care about the constant refinement and compression. I care about taking three pages and turning it one page. Then from one page into three paragraphs. Then from three paragraphs into one paragraph. And finally, from one paragraph into one perfectly distilled sentence.

On the topic of ecosystems, Marco said it best:

It’s not just a matter of interface design. Apple has built an entire ecosystem to support and enrich the iPad for both customers and developers. To be competitive, a newcomer to the tablet software market needs to replicate or sidestep the need for nearly all of Apple’s major efforts, including synchronization of media and data with Windows PCs and Macs, integration with popular web services, an integrated payment system that customers will actually use at a reasonable rate, a well-stocked music and video storefront, plenty of high-quality third-party apps and fun games, a sophisticated SDK and development environment, widespread retail availability and customer support, and an assortment of good first- and third-party accessories to fulfill common needs (cases, chargers, docks, screen protectors, extended batteries) and give the device new uses (tripods, speakers, styluses, input and output adapters, wall and car mounts).

Because when normal people — not gadget bloggers and geeks like us — need to consider an alternative to the iPad, they’re not just thinking of Apple’s lack of “openness” (as Google so vaguely and poorly defines it in relation to Android) or the iPad’s lack of some individual hardware feature. Buying an alternative means giving up Apple’s entire ecosystem. That’s worth it to some buyers, but it’s incredibly impractical for many.

Andy Ihnatko:

2) You will indeed need to copy one thing: the iPad’s ecosystem.

Don’t just hand a user a tablet and then say “Good luck with that; tell us how everything works out.” No. You need to give them apps, and content, you’ll need to provide people with other devices that work well with it. Apple left nothing to chance: they released the iPad with a whole suite of slick, affordable business apps that they produced in-house.

[…]

I honestly feel a certain amount of pity for everybody who’s trying to enter the tablet market this year. In every kind of creative endeavor — and great technology is indeed a form of creative expression — there’s a difference between real art and mere technical competence. It’s impossible to quantify but which everybody can intuit it almost instantly.

The world is full of singers, painters, actors, and dancers who can expertly perform any piece they’ve seen before. And then there’s Sinatra, Cézanne, Lemmon, Astaire … and Apple. The ones who push the art form forward because their instincts push them to ask questions that have never been fully considered before. The ones who create the templates that everybody else will follow.

Getting Made The Scorsese Way

GQ:

Twenty years after the release of GoodFellas, the good people behind it—Scorsese, Liotta, De Niro!—re-create the making of the truest, bloodiest, greatest gangster film of all time