PACMan3000
Redesigning the Apple
What if it were in your power to design something as elegant as a piece of fruit and not just any fruit, something as iconic as an Apple?
How would you design a better Apple? What is its central function? I would say the central function of an Apple is to provide sweet fruit in bite sized, hand friendly morsels. A poor designer might start off by making the fruit bigger, giving everyone watermelon sized Apples. Bigger is better, right? At least that's what you would think, but what happens when someone wants to toss the bigger Apple in lunch box so their kids can eat one at school? Now you have a problem. Watermelon sized Apples won't fit in a lunch box. A watermelon sized Apple won't even fit in the briefcase or purse that you take to work.
So you go back to the drawing board and you come up with another idea. You want your newly improved Apple to be easier to carry, so you add something that resembles a cup handle, but the new handle breaks very easily (as it is made of fibrous materials) and the people that buy your new Apples invariably resort to holding them as they hold normal Apples, in such a way that a handle just gets in the way.
And what about the core of the Apple, where all the seeds are? Wouldn't it be cool if the core was removable? So you design your Apple so that the core comes pre-sliced, so that the outer fruity layer just slides right off. As a consequence, your newly designed Apple falls apart in the user's hands and they don't hang well from trees.
The metaphor above illustrates the problem inherent in making a device that competes with Apple's iconic iPhone. Apple's success with the iPhone has less to do with the engineers and programmers at rival companies being dumb or lazy and more to do with the fact that Apple has stripped the idea of a smartphone to its bare essentials. I came to this conclusion while playing around with my new iPod Touch yesterday. A competing designer's first compulsion might be to add stuff the iPhone doesn't have: a bigger screen, another keyboard, a removable battery, but that's exactly where most competitors fall into a trap.
As illustrated in the Apple metaphor, the bigger screen may be more appealing, but now the device may not fit easily in a pocket. A "hard" keyboard is redundant with the "soft" keyboard and the lid of a removable battery might just as easily fall off or soften the integrity of the entire phone. For every new hardware feature you add to the design, you create another layer of complexity.
It is no wonder then that the most potent message that rival companies like Verizon have been able to come up with are mostly about the cell network.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=85DM-PrQ0tU
Hawking the power of Verizon's network is equivalent to moving the tree that makes the apple in our scenario above to a more fertile field, so that the juice becomes a bit more sweeter than the one on AT&T's branch.
Redesigning the Apple
What if it were in your power to design something as elegant as a piece of fruit and not just any fruit, something as iconic as an Apple?
How would you design a better Apple? What is its central function? I would say the central function of an Apple is to provide sweet fruit in bite sized, hand friendly morsels. A poor designer might start off by making the fruit bigger, giving everyone watermelon sized Apples. Bigger is better, right? At least that's what you would think, but what happens when someone wants to toss the bigger Apple in lunch box so their kids can eat one at school? Now you have a problem. Watermelon sized Apples won't fit in a lunch box. A watermelon sized Apple won't even fit in the briefcase or purse that you take to work.
So you go back to the drawing board and you come up with another idea. You want your newly improved Apple to be easier to carry, so you add something that resembles a cup handle, but the new handle breaks very easily (as it is made of fibrous materials) and the people that buy your new Apples invariably resort to holding them as they hold normal Apples, in such a way that a handle just gets in the way.
And what about the core of the Apple, where all the seeds are? Wouldn't it be cool if the core was removable? So you design your Apple so that the core comes pre-sliced, so that the outer fruity layer just slides right off. As a consequence, your newly designed Apple falls apart in the user's hands and they don't hang well from trees.
The metaphor above illustrates the problem inherent in making a device that competes with Apple's iconic iPhone. Apple's success with the iPhone has less to do with the engineers and programmers at rival companies being dumb or lazy and more to do with the fact that Apple has stripped the idea of a smartphone to its bare essentials. I came to this conclusion while playing around with my new iPod Touch yesterday. A competing designer's first compulsion might be to add stuff the iPhone doesn't have: a bigger screen, another keyboard, a removable battery, but that's exactly where most competitors fall into a trap.
As illustrated in the Apple metaphor, the bigger screen may be more appealing, but now the device may not fit easily in a pocket. A "hard" keyboard is redundant with the "soft" keyboard and the lid of a removable battery might just as easily fall off or soften the integrity of the entire phone. For every new hardware feature you add to the design, you create another layer of complexity.
It is no wonder then that the most potent message that rival companies like Verizon have been able to come up with are mostly about the cell network.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=85DM-PrQ0tU
Hawking the power of Verizon's network is equivalent to moving the tree that makes the apple in our scenario above to a more fertile field, so that the juice becomes a bit more sweeter than the one on AT&T's branch.