Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chrisrhoden 4716 days ago
It's really difficult for me to look at something like this as someone with even the barest of comprehensions as to how complicated some of this would be to even do, much less well enough that it would make sense to put in a consumer product this year.

Oh, you're going to make the screen out of graphene? My mockups are exactly the same as yours, but instead of aluminum my case is made of diamond. I've solved the chipping problem!

To be clear, I think that these are really attractive visual mockups with some interesting concepts, but I have seen literally every one of them before elsewhere.
2 comments
starky 4716 days ago
I shake my head every time I see these because as someone that works as a product designer I know what isn't even feasible to do. These artists create work that has no basis in the real world, and add positively ignorant statements about the construction and capabilities of these devices.

I see comments like, "Carbon fiber alone is perfectly rigid and doesn't bend." and can only shake my head about how stupid this statement is. This particular mockup is one of the worst I have ever seen for being unrealistic. Feel free to create industrial design concepts, but at the very least don't comment on features that are unrealistic.

link
jotm 4716 days ago
I pity the engineers every time the designers come and say "build me THIS (or you're fired, lol)"...
link
Killah911 4716 days ago
Uh, yeah, fortunately that isn't how it typically works. In most of my experience the engineers do the innovating & ask the designer to pretty it up, or work in conjunction with the designers to make sure the final product looks & performs well.

Anyone telling engineers to build it or get fired will soon be or is already talking to an empty room, or somehow have engineers hostage

link
DigitalJack 4716 days ago
The point of imagination is that it is not limited by constraints. How can you envision the future if you are limited by the constraints of today?

Steve Jobs is quoted in the 80's as saying that they aspire to make a computer that is essentially today's macbook or ipad.[1] It most certainly was impossible at the time.

I sure like mine though.

You know what you get when you limit yourself to the constraints of right now? The IBM PC Jr.

[1] "Apple's strategy is really simple. What we want to do is we want to put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you and learn how to use in 20 minutes. That's what we want to do and we want to do it this decade." http://lifelibertytech.com/2012/10/02/the-lost-steve-jobs-sp...

link
rayiner 4716 days ago
> The point of imagination is that it is not limited by constraints.

But there's no real imagination here either. It's just a thinner, lighter iPhone, made thinner and lighter using materials that don't exist. Genius!

As an aside, this is how Jony Ive works: http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/01....

link
wmf 4716 days ago
If you're not limited by constraints, why design an iPhone? Why not design a superhuman AI that communicates with the user's brain via phased-array MRI? I would say that these kinds of concepts tend to use an undocumented and improbable set of constraints. The problem with improbable but possible futures is that there are so many of them that choosing a specific one has no predictive value.
link
na85 4716 days ago
But Steve's comment has quantifiable goals.

Make it the size of a book. Make it battery-powered. Make the UI good (they failed on that one, but moving on)...

OP's link is just "Take an iphone and remove the edges and make it lighter by using a material that doesn't exist."

That's not innovation. It's actually incredibly formulaic, and completely different from the Steve Jobs quote you gave.

link
sbierwagen 4716 days ago 

  The point of imagination is that it is not limited by constraints.
You're right. My imagination says I get an iPhone for free. No, wait! Not for free, Apple pays me $500 to take it! No wait, $500 million! $500 trillion! Wow, I'm the richest person in the world! Imagination is great!
link
jodrellblank 4716 days ago
In the next day or two, the LeapMotion input device ships[1] allowing all sorts of handwavy detection with a tiny box.

Apple have patented gesture recognition detected by the cameras for, e.g. page scrolling.

What does this "unlimited imagination" future iPhone have for an input improvement? Nokia feature-phone soft-buttons from 2002.

[1] https://www.leapmotion.com/

link