[ody]

"Apple designs for #2. No other mass-consumer products company puts as much attention to detail into the fit and finish of the box—let alone the out-of-box experience."

I'm sorry but no they do not put as much attention to detail into their products as you would think. They didn't even have multitasking in the iPhone until recently! And what was the antenna problems all about?

All I see is just enough attention to detail to make people go "wow, shiney." and that's it.

[eitland]

This actually holds true for Macbooks/Mac OS X as well. I've been using a MBP for over a year now, and "attention to detail" is hardly the first words that comes to my mind.

A few examples:

* Different shortcuts in different programs.

* "Home"( * ) and "End"( * ) mapped to different key combinations in different programs. (No, not just 3rd party apps, apple apps too.)

* Holds true for hardware, too: ctrl is positioned differently on small and full size keyboards.

( * ) Of course, there are no home and end, but one of <fn>+<arrow key>, or <cmd>+<arrow key> or <ctrl>+<arrow key> will usually work. The only text movement combination that works almost in all apps are <alt>+<arrow key> which jumps by words. Of course, being unix, <ctrl>+a and <ctrl>+e works everywhere (?) but they can't be used together with <shift>

[steveklabnik]

I'd actually argue the opposite; Apple pays so much attention to detail that they figured out that multitasking isn't really important, so they could just do it later. Copy and paste is awkward, it isn't absolutely necessary, they could just do it later.

Even the antenna thing: only the tech press knows anything about this. Apple said that just under 2% of people returned an iPhone 4. During that whole scandal, I asked my friends that haven't ever heard of HN, "What do you think about the iPhone 4 antenna problems?" and they had no idea what I was talking about. Even among those of my friends that have iPhone 4s, only 2 out of 5 even had the issue at all, and lately, my Nexus One's antenna has been acting up...

Apple is good at making MVPs, and then improving upon them. Eventually.

[ody]

Being a curious one, I had a look round your site as listed in your profile. You say have a Nexus One, yet your personal site, Watch.Steve, releases the tutorials in "iPhone + Apple TV" format and the filenames have iphone in there.

Just an observation ;-) Prompted mainly by the strange pointless dig at the Nexus One which had no relevance to the conversation or OP.

[steveklabnik]

Yep. The site was originally a copy of the code for Railscasts, which does the same thing. I'm a life-long Mac user, but I do own a Nexus One, because I absolutely refuse to do business with AT&T.

I don't think the dig was pointless. I'm not an EE kind of guy, but from my understanding, basically all modern cell phones can have their antennas interfered with through touching the bottom of your phone. But the way that the iPhone 4's case was designed increased the severity of the interference... my Nexus One does the same sort of thing. Just yesterday, I was talking on the phone, and when I tried to hold it with my shoulder rather than with my hands, I was told that I "sounded like I was underwater." This is almost 100% reproducible.

[ody]

Interesting about the Nexus One. I've got the Desire which, when I get out of my reception-less flat, I'll test for that problem.

I think the first time I tried holding it on my shoulder I dropped it so never held it like that again :-D

[ody]

2 out of 5 is a really big issue and a massive lack of attention to detail. I really don't see how you could think otherwise.

[steveklabnik]

My personal sample of 5 people is not large enough to draw any conclusion from, either way.

[jscore]

I'd say 99% of Apple's target market were fine without multitasking plus it's a nice battery saver.

And this is coming from a hardcore Android fan with a Nexus One.

[trustfundbaby]

> I'd say 99% of Apple's target market were fine without multitasking plus it's a nice battery

I disagree. I think they put up with not having it believing it would come soon, or didn't realize how bad not having it would be (I know that last one describes me).