Envy isn't a pretty thing
It is interesting that when a company grows to a certain size, no matter how it is considered in leaner times, it becomes the object of ridicule and scare campaigns. Rightly so, perhaps you might argue. Multi-National's need an ombudsman watching, scrutiny, questioning of procedures. I have noticed with Apple computers that, especially since the i-phone properly brought the company into the public realm, that journalists and laymen alike find ways to drag the products down to the same level as everything else. Perhaps that's the problem - people traditionally pick on the extremities of society be them clever and geeky or misguided and foolish. Moving recently, I stumbled upon a 16 year old Macintosh Computer tower and monitor in its no frills plain cardboard box which made me think about how the company has evolved since the days of using the classic at School.
Along with stumbling on Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan on late night TV as a teenager, the dawning of the iphone was genuinely a life changing moment - and I don't mean that frivolously. When we were studying product design in the mid-nineties we were working to briefs that were basically saying - 'look, we have small chips now, memory is physically small, camera's are getting smaller' and we were designing hand held gadgets that were certainly not as smart as phones now, but were getting there. Talking about products that were performing many functions in one - an area electronics companies like LG, Samsung and Sony have avoided like the plague for want of destroying market share, jobs and ultimately the company as a whole. It baffles me that Nokia, for having the leading interface and instigating design competitions would miss having a properly intuative product that can perform all the functions of camera, phone, music player, games console.
Without knowing it, and for ten years, I had waited for this particular product and what, future gazing from the nineties would you think to be the public reaction to the iphone? Hysteria? Condemnation? Love? Or just that people get pissed off with the fact that covering an area on the case will interfere with reception. It's not ideal but check through the instructions for every other mobile phone you've had and it'll mention an area where you should avoid holding it. Maybe we should just go back to zip drives and mini discs for a bit - and remember how good we've got it.
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