Clarus

ravnorodom said:

Greedy executives from Pantone company. Adobe needs to create their own color swatches and ditch these blood sucking leeches. 

That is an impossible solution, Adobe has little influence here. Pantone is a proprietary industry standard used well beyond software. It was used in design, commercial printing, textiles, etc for decades before personal computers ever existed. A more realistic solution is everybody switch to another widely used color system, but none of them are open, all developed by private companies.

bonobob said:

Good.  The ungrammatical “Think Different” has always annoyed the hell out of me. 

It’s supposed to. The fact that it annoys you means it worked…it was effective in getting your attention, which was the entire point of them doing it that way. Bad ad grammar did not start with Apple, it has been a known branding strategy industry-wide for decades.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/advertisers-attract-attention-with-grammatical-errors-1.2764884

The other reply about it being easier to trademark is true too. Many “normal” words and “correct” phrases were already trademarked by somebody long ago. And your lawyers will tell you that your multinational brand must be legally available in all countries you do business in, which makes it even harder.

It was probably much easier to trademark “Flickr” than “Flicker”. Also this is why Amazon is full of nonsense-word brands; a Chinese tech gadget company will never be able to trademark “Apple” in the US but can get away with selling “Reddfruit” USB cables.

I have other ElGato gear like the CamLink and the Key Lights, and they’re mostly good products. But I could not justify a Stream Deck. I don’t think the value is really there. I mean come on, all that money for just 12 buttons? With a USB-A cable that doesn’t plug directly into most current Macs? That the article says needs to be plugged directly into a Mac, when many Macs only have as few as 2 USB-C ports? (I run everything through the USB ports on my hub so I only have to plug 1 cable into my Mac) With no HomeKit integration whatsoever, a big complaint of mine with their wireless Key Lights?

For those who have an iPad or iPhone, there are many better solutions that cost much less. I use Touch Portal, an iOS app offering a fully configurable programmable grid of buttons to control everything from OBS to Photoshop. You can set up many more buttons, they don’t have to be square, and can be much bigger than on a Stream Deck. As an iPad app, it works wirelessly, not using up any USB ports. The article says the StreamDeck doesn’t travel well, but Touch Portal is not a bulky box, it travels as thin as the iPad it is on. Sure there is a Stream Deck app, but Touch Portal is a cheap no subscription price. The iPad is already on my desk, the StreamDeck would compete for the space on my desk. The ONLY thing Touch Portal gives up to Stream Deck is the tactile feel of the real buttons. In all other respects, if you have an iOS  device, an app like Touch Portal is a much better deal.

GeorgeBMac said:

Samsung had been making smart phones since the 90's and later the things like the Palm Treo refined the product.  The only thing the iPhone really introduced was the larger screen and replacing the stylus with a finger.

That is factually incorrect. The iPhone introduced several innovations that are not covered by your comment.
The stylus was not merely replaced by “a finger.” The iPhone screen supported multi-touch gestures. That was huge. Nobody else had it. Because, the entire concept of multi-touch was just a tech demo that wowed everybody a year earlier (watch the 2006 TED talk video of it by Jeff Han) and that used an entire table. Everybody who saw that talk assumed multi-touch desktop screens would not be a reality for a few years. Yet 12-13 months later, here is Apple giving you multi-touch...in a handset! A single point stylus cannot match multi-touch.

Some other iPhone innovations were not in the hardware but were purely Apple recognizing that the entire ecosystem needed a major overhaul to really unleash the potential of the device. Before the iPhone, the OS and apps were controlled by the carriers. Nobody thought much about OS updates for their phones, especially major OS upgrades that would radically improve the phone. That came with iPhone, because Apple took the unprecedented step to negotiate ownership and control of the phone OS. The only reason the carriers agreed was they thought the iPhone was going to be some niche that would not affect the industry much, but when the iPhone blew up, the carriers found they did not have control over this hugely successful device, and Apple suddenly had all this leverage that Samsung etc. did not. Similarly, when the iPhone finally allowed apps, Apple took the unprecedented step of wresting apps away from the carriers.

You might nitpick a point or two here and there, but the fact is that with the iPhone you had an overall new combination of innovation found nowhere else: A multitouch display, an OS that would get significant fixes and upgrades, and later a wide selection of third party apps that was not under the control of the any individual mobile carrier.

citpeks said:

Apple is secure now, but it's not the same hungry, risk taking company it was.

I strongly disagree with this. Apple has done several things in the past few years that are in the same category of “the industry thinks that’s a dumb risky overpriced idea, the next Apple failure” that turn out to be the opposite.

Apple Watch
AirPods
Apple Silicon Macs

The first two were roundly criticized, even by Apple fans, as unnecessary and overpriced. But both are now very popular products and heavy contributors to bottom line growth, especially because both work best with Apple services, which is recurring subscription income, turning that into another contributor to bottom line growth. Like the iPhone and MacBook Air, now that AirPods are a success, the design of wireless earphones from other companies suddenly look suspiciously like AirPods. Because Apple took a big risk that changed the game...again.

Changing the processor architecture is something most computer makers would never consider doing. Apple did it twice in its “hungry, risk-taking” days, and once again now...just like the “hungry, risk-taking” days. If that wasn’t enough...if another computer company was to change processors, the chances are vanishingly small that it would be their own design. Yet that is the latest, and most radical, risk that Apple has taken today. Yet like the earlier Apple risks that we worship so much, Apple took the risk of the M1 switch because the potential rewards are so massively huge, and we are definitely seeing that in the astounding power per watt/power per dollar ratios that the M1 is bringing.

(and yes I went to several MacWorlds and owned a Power Computing desktop)