Comment by DidYaWipe
1 year ago
Apple also cultivates "pets" who suck, but for some personal-connection or political reason have received or curried favor that results in them being retained and even promoted through Apple's organization despite high-profile and embarrassing failures. See: the Aperture fiasco. And also: Jony Ive.
When will it substantially harm the company, enough so that someone ("activist" investors?) raise a hue and cry? Developers clearly can't wield enough influence; I say this from experience.
Nor customers. Apple's shoe-horning of "AI" shit into its products to pander to "pundits" and "analysts," shames the company that once held itself out as a rebel and disruptor.
And even Apple adherents have noted profoundly slipping quality. Absurd defects persist, and new ones arise. The "AI" BS reminds me of one of my favorite longstanding Apple blunders: If you are going on a business trip and you enter all your appointments and flight info into Calendar, you're in for a surprise (and potentially embarrassment) when Apple CHANGES THE TIMES of all of them simply because you TRAVELED to a different time zone.
There is no way to tell Calendar to simply USE THE TIME SHOWN ON THE PHONE. If you set up an appointment and then travel east, you will miss that appointment (or return flight) because Apple will change the time of that appointment to make it LATER. This is mind-boggling detachment from reality, but that's where Apple operates... and far too often gets a free pass on it. Is it any wonder that its "AI" is just as bad?
The calendar thing is working correctly. Every event has a time zone attached, even if you didn't notice it or change it. If your appointments involved other people and you had sent out calendar invites, they would have noticed the wrong time.
> The calendar thing is working correctly.
Only from a stubborn, technical perspective. It's obviously not working as intended for GP. It should be easy to create "local timezone" events on Apple devices, and it isn't.
In fact, I'm thinking of pretty much all my events in local timezones. A concert at 8pm. Meeting someone for a coffee at 2pm. Flight departure times. Taking pills at 7am in the morning. Having people in other timezones involved is the exception for me, not the default.
There are many ways how you could implement a nice UI for that, and Apple offers none.
It is possible on macOS with the Floating time zone: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/calendar/icl1035/mac#i...
This doesn’t look possible on the iOS/iPadOS Calendar apps.
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Exactly. I was thinking through how I would want this expressed in the UI, and
Time zone: Local
was exactly what I came up with.
The absurd thing about Apple's approach is, as you point out, that it serves the tiny minority of use cases. Who the hell looks up the time zone of everything they're going to do when they're traveling around? I just want it to use the time shown on the phone!
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Shouldn't the default time zone for an appointment be the one of the place it is held at? For online events, the time zone of the person setting the event. Of course it must be possible to set the time zone explicitly.
I don't have an iPhone to check with but what I mean is that the time of an appointment should be displayed as 9:00 AM PST and people flying from NYC to LA should always see 9:00 AM PST when they are in NYC, at any mile of the flight and at destination.
Many people enter appointments without enough detail to say it is not going to be held at your current location. e.g for a planned vacation "3pm check for concert tickets", which will indeed stay at PST and show up on your phone at 6pm in New York.
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>Shouldn't the default time zone for an appointment be the one of the place it is held at? For online events, the time zone of the person setting the event.
I want it shown to me at my local time, so I'm prepared without having to care what offset they are.
If it's 2pm for them and that's 5pm for me, I want to see "Meeting: 5pm" at my calendar, not "Meeting: 2pm <some other place timezone>".
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Mandatorily attaching a time zone to an event is the design defect. When a person in the real world is given the times of events, he is given those in the time local to where the event is happening. And when that person gets there, his phone will acquire that local time.
So why on earth should anyone have to tediously select the destination time zone (which is not shown by default in appointments on iOS or Mac) for EVERY appointment, every time, when you nearly always want to refer to the time SHOWN ON THE PHONE? Come on, this scenario is absurd.
You don’t travel much for work do you? If your calendar is just for you, then fine. But if you have to coordinate with anyone else, you can’t be so sloppy. The phone doesn’t know what you mean unless you tell it.
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Clock time without a time zone is underspecified. It might refer to the users current timezone? Or at the time of the event? But what if you invite a user in another timezone? You’re going to miss each other by hours.
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>And also: Jony Ive.
The person who created the distinctive Apple design language, several iconic products, got tons of awards, and his designs are still guiding today's Apple products (they're all Ive-derivative still), is one of your examples of failure?
The butterfly keyboard is undoubtedly the biggest fail in hardware design of the past 10 years. They took something that we figured out in the 1970s and somehow managed to screw it up and held onto it for three consecutive generations.
You’re only as good as your last product, and Johnny Ive under the hand of Steve Jobs is a lot different than Johnny Ive under the hand of Tim Apple.
>The butterfly keyboard is undoubtedly the biggest fail in hardware design of the past 10 years. They took something that we figured out in the 1970s and somehow managed to screw it up and held onto it for three consecutive generations.
Well, while a fail, obviously we haven't "figured it out in the 1970s", as no laptop today has a (or could have a) 70s-style keyboard and be convenient.
And there are lots of things we haven't yet fixed with keyboard design, or are too expensive still, e.g.I'd like full dust protection.
>You’re only as good as your last product
Obviously false, as any designer (or product makers) has ups and downs. Ive had big failures in the late 90s/early 00s to o (e.g. the Cube).
If we valued people like that (and not by a weighted average of their track record) he'd never had a second or third or fourth chance - and similar for artists and other professions.
The context for this thread is about keeping persons on even when they are either no longer adding value, or even potentially detracting. In Ive's case, he absolutely created many successful aspects of Apples design language. But, he also put an over emphasis on minimalist design over function. The butterfly keyboards are one example. Was the removal of the ESC key something that happened on his design watch? The reduction of ports on their highest end pro models? Those are design decisions that have been undone as Apple realigns with the actual needs of its users rather than trying to dictate how they should use their hardware.
Exactly. When Ive ran out of Dieter Rams designs to rip off, it became clear that he only had two "ideas:"
Actually, I can think of one more idea he had:
As far as "design language" goes, I don't know which parts of it Ive was responsible for, but a lot of it sucked and continues to do so. Secret menus, peek-a-boo UI that doesn't exist unless you happen to roll the cursor across it... or plug something in...
One of my favorite Apple UI blunders was the iTunes control that disappeared if you didn't have an iPod plugged in... but controlled what happened when you DID plug it in: "Sync on connect," which was enabled by default.
Guess what happened when your hard drive went bad (or suffered some mass deletion), you replaced it, and then you plugged your iPod in?
His designs were fine when reined in by Jobs. Now they take simplicity too far to the extreme.
Yep.
> See: the Aperture fiasco. And also: Jony Ive.
> When will it substantially harm the company, enough so that someone ("activist" investors?) raise a hue and cry?
For this specific example, their stock price went up from "basically bankrupt" to "company is now worth trillions of dollars" in Ive's time.
It would take a lot to upset the investors, given the overall win rate.
> For this specific example, their stock price went up from "basically bankrupt" to "company is now worth trillions of dollars" in Ive's time.
Presumably plenty of people were employed in that timeframe.
>Presumably plenty of people were employed in that timeframe
Yes, employed to work on Jobs vision with Ive's designs.
Of course. But if you want to get the investors to force a change, the stock price has to go down.
Even if it does go down, that doesn't mean the investors will blame the right person — there's a reason why the English language retains the phrase "scape-goat" — but it has to go down or the investors will say "why would I change this?"
Edit: I originally phrased this as "if you want to get kick-back from the investors", turns out "kick-back" doesn't mean what I thought it meant.
Yeah I knew throwing Ive in there invites a skeptical response, but I really detest that guy's product-degrading mania and attitude.
And while the company obviously still thrived, Ive's intellectually bankrupt (and defective) design got bad enough to embarrass Apple even in the mainstream press. I thought this WSJ article was a brilliant dig: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...
I'm not even disagreeing with you, I agree with you that Ive was responsible for many weird and outright bad designs. (IIRC he did the original iMac's hockey puck mouse).
I'm saying the investors caring about $$$ would have less than zero reason to object overall.
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That does seem like it would be confusing, especially the first time around.
That said, you are able to fix your calendar to a specified time zone: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/schedule-display-even...
Thanks for the link, but I don't think that fixes the problem. If anything, it looks like it'll make it worse. If I'm traveling from CA to NY and I enter a bunch of meetings and flight, and then get to NY and enter some additional ones... they're going to be wrong.
I don't get the problem.
A Calendar event is a specific moment in time, it doesn't move with timezones.
So if you want to enter an event which will be at 7pm local time in NY but you're currently in CA, why would you enter it at 7pm in your own timezone? Just enter it at 7pm and select NY as timezone.
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How does it not?
If I understand what you're saying, it's that you don't want the calendar to adjust any times based on location/timezone.
What I believe tour perfect scenario to be: you enter an event for 10am (even if in a different timezone than your local), and it always shows up as 10am on your calendar, regardless of where you are.
If you fix your calendar to a single timezone, nothing updates time dynamically, and you take on the responsibility of manually translating timezone shifts.
- You're in PT
- A 9am event in PT, you add at _9am_ on your calendar.
- A 10am event in ET, you do the timezone translation manually, and add at _8am_ on your calendar.
Am I missing something?
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Agreed on the "pets" idea. I've even seen this from former Apple tech leaders. I've been one of the "pets" and it benefitted my career tremendously and, frankly, above my capabilities at the time; yet it gave me the opportunity to step in and fill out bigger shoes.
When I was there the stance on "intelligence" was that Apple doesn't advertise itself as "AI" or "ML". It just builds good products by any means and if it happens to use particular technologies, then fine. Not so anymore.
Thanks for the anecdote. I think a lot of us have been there, promoted into roles we're not quite ready for. The responsible ones kick into high gear to meet the challenge. I remember cramming a new programming language and framework when faced with a potential high-profile (public) failure for a new employer.
But when people repeatedly demonstrate that they don't have the mindset or aptitude for the role, or important aspects of it, they need to be relieved of responsibility for those aspects. I'm griping about the individuals for whom that isn't done.
I love how someone downvoted that.
"No! Keep the inept!"