[djtango]

Something I've always reluctantly admired about Apple (as an anti-fan) is their love of details and the work they pour into so many details that people will never notice. My personal favourite is how good the iOS keyboard was ahead of its competitors for so long in the early days of iPhone.

Those are the unsung details that you notice when they're gone but are easy to take for granted.

For me at least that is some of the secret sauce of Apple...

[Cthulhu_]

Apple was never praised for its original ideas - although they had some I suppose - but always for their execution and improvement of existing ideas.

Smartphones weren't a new idea, but Apple got to work and made them better.

On that note, I was really curious as to see what Apple would do with cars, but I don't think there was enough they could do that was different or better enough compared to the huge amount of competition all trying to do the same thing. Tesla was the closest we'll get to an Apple car (car company ran like a software company), and they couldn't even do mechanical engineering properly (car body, welding, etc).

[pavlov]

As both a Tesla customer and a long-time Apple customer, there’s a massive difference in the experience.

Steve Jobs never tried to make me pay $8,000 extra for a feature that doesn’t exist yet but is just around the corner and will be totally amazing. Elon Musk convinced me to hand over that money, and five years later the feature still does nothing.

Jobs fundamentally wasn’t a liar. When I bought Mac OS X 10.0, it was rough and slow, but it did what was advertised and I was excited to remain an Apple customer to see this platform evolve. Musk sold me a steaming pile of vaporware, making me feel stupid rather than excited, and I don’t want to remain a Tesla customer.

[whiterknight]

The PR turnaround for Tesla on HN is incredible. Shows how effective peer pressure from journalists is.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

You sure that's the reason?

[whiterknight]

I think it’s a big one. They are always in tune.

[treflop]

I’d say Apple is known for original ideas, but in the details.

[nradov]

That seems like a bad example. The Apple iOS keyboard only added swiping in 2019, well after the competition.

Even the original iPhone touch keyboard was terrible compared to the hardware keyboards on BlackBerry devices. But consumers were willing to tolerate the keyboard because the iPhone was so much better in other ways.

[djtango]

I'm comparing it to all the other touch keyboards of the time. Sure they were slow to implement swiping which is why I specified early day but the iPhone came out when a lot of touch phones when LG were still trotting out resistive screens.

Even after capacitance won, the iPhone keyboard was still snappier. I think they do some smoothing of the touch contact to infer from the glancing of the contact what you might have meant. Eg where did you keydown vs keyup.

If you've ever used one of those in-app banking "security" keyboards you might notice what a keyboard with no smoothing feels like.

It wasn't until SwiftKey that Apple even had to worry about competition

[michaelt]

But consider that the pre-iphone status quo for on-screen keyboards was this: https://youtu.be/wm5omDCENPo?feature=shared&t=624

Or the Palm Pilot, which had a special 'graffiti' alphabet for handwriting recognition.

[guappa]

I thought the competition was hardware keyboards like blackberry, that were and still are much faster to use than a touchscreen.

[hedora]

I remember shopping for a smartphone a few months after the iPhone arrived. (I had just broken my openmoko, which never really could make phone calls reliably, but that was roughly my bar for cell phone polish.)

I didn’t want an iPhone, so I looked at the other stuff in stock at the cell phone stores.

I couldn’t figure out how to use the web browser on any of the display models. I ended up switching back to a nokia candybar phone until android came out.

In hindsight, one of the native linux nokia phones would have been nice, but they ran a similar OS as openmoko, and I was frustrated with that software stack’s lack of focus on being a daily driver.