tht

While skeuomorphism is helpful for transitionary periods, there comes a point where designs can be refined. Generation Z, or kids born between 1997 and 2012 have largely grown up online, with many of them having interfaced with smartphones and tablets from a young age. This goes doubly so for Generation Alpha.

How do you know this is true?

This was the narrative at the time, but it just sounds stupid. Was it a post-hoc rationalization from UI designers to change UI "fashion", and that bled into the media?

Humans are humans. We have like the most homogeneous set of behaviors across 8 billion beings and even across 50,000 years of time. You can magically transport someone from 20,000 years ago to today and they will adjust, and have many of the same mannerisms that we have today.

Remember reading above these "tourist" items being sold in Roman Britain. Like a pen, and their were inscriptions on them that were, in effect, saying the very tourist thing to say, like "I was in Britain". Or graffiti of all kinds from thousands of years ago that were just trolling people.

danox said:

If Apple is so far behind, why are the Six flies of the Apocalypse (Google, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Spotify, and Epic) constantly buzzing around Apple to redesign or get access its ecosystems? And if they don’t get in, they petition the EU/DOJ, crying about unfairness and damage to their business plans.

Yeah. When all these LLM chatbot companies sell their own phones and computers, that's basically when we know Apple is in a fight. As it stands now, the media is overdramatizing the importance of chatbots to Apple. It's like saying Apple needs to have its own search engine or social media business or they will be doomed. How can that be an actual take when these chatbots need phones, laptops, desktops, tablets as their user-facing interface?

The tech media does think that voice only interfaces are awesome for some reason. It's like they think it is the endpoint of computing where we just are talking to them, and magically, everything comes out the way we want it. It's something I totally disagree with. If a device or service is voice only, it fails as a mass market device. It's the least dense information medium for humans. Nobody will be doing anything serious with voice only interfaces.

It does kind of sound like Google is an afterthought in the chatbot wars? They do have branded phones and computers, but nobody takes them seriously right now? Have to wait for the outcome of the DOJ trial?

9secondkox2 said:

Wonder if this means this years iPhone will e a bigger deal than first thought.

Well, the cameras have seem to wrought rather large protrusions such that they are now camera bars. They will be talking camera performance to justify that. Camera performance has been so good for the past several models that the 2025 models will be the last gasp. Improvements in phone camera performance is now for a niche of pros, not amateurs, but they will make it a big deal. Sensor shift stabilization on all cameras? 48 MP for all cameras? Other fancy photography and video stuff I have no interest in.

If they increased iCloud storage tiers to 10 GB for free, 100 GB for $1/mo, 500 GB for $3/mo, and 3 TB for $12/mo, I think that represents a huge win for mainstream consumers in the photography and video features.

The rumored thin iPhone is obviously a big deal. It's time for such a model after 10 years of not trying for thin. I think it will sell better than iPhone mini and Plus models, combined. It's been a long time since Apple has chased after "thin".

The Pro models will have a more "unibody" design it seems, where the camera bar half will be part of the band, supposedly. This represents a huge hardware design change. For the past several years, iPhones used an internal mid-frame structure for internal components to mount to, enabling the front display and back MagSafe glass to be easily removed and replaced. If the camera bar is not part of the case, hmm, how will those internal components be mounted?

The UI changes could be the biggest win if they made good GUI design changes and it's not just a skin. Too much of the UI is now live, where touching it does something. That needs to be detuned, especially the lock-screen hot areas and the generic slide gestures. They should get rid of the slide to the left to bring up the camera gesture from the lockscreen. The long press on the camera and flash-light icons should be sliding switches, or a sliding switch with a path. There should be notification and control center handles. Notification and control center panels should appear on the app switch UI, which I would prefer the app windows not to have an overlap. Just simply fine-tuning the UI would be a huge, best feature in years type of change.

mikethemartian said:

Hasn’t frosted glass been done before?

On macOS, they had frosted transparency for a couple of releases. Still there in some places. 

dutchlord said:

Thickness and weight are statistics which don’t bring value for customers and are no innovation. Please bring smart mailboxes to the iPhone/iPad, release a fold iPhone.

Er, thickness and weight are features in of themselves. They sell products. There are points of diminishing returns, but Apple does indeed design for thickness and weight and customers buy their products because of it. They obviously have to choose what set of features, including software, that they can concentrate on.