[edw519]

"we design for ourselves"

Be very, very careful here. You can just as easily lose your shirt as you can come up with a hit. What your users will buy and use may be very different from what you think.

What sometimes works in the consumer market often doesn't work in the business to business space. There are cemetaries full of companies that designed for themselves, especially in software.

When I hear someone like Steve Jobs say he doesn't do market research, it reminds me of people saying they don't watch TV. Yea, right. Not in public anyway.

Sometimes I think posts like this are just part of the big PR machine to maintain the "Apple mystique". Would you bet a billion dollars of someone else's money without talking to anyone first?

[sfphotoarts]

"it reminds me of people saying they don't watch TV. Yea, right. Not in public anyway."

I'm not sure why you find it hard to believe people when they say they don't watch TV? This is very common in SF. People just have too much else going on in their lives. Its really not as unbelievable as you think...

[plinkplonk]

"it reminds me of people saying they don't watch TV. Yea, right. Not in public anyway."

Fwiw, I don't want watch tv. (And I know a few people who choose not to watch TV) Too much of a time sink. I don't even own one. The one practical difficulty I found is that most game consoles seem to work with TV sets (and not with monitors, of which I have a few lying around the house) so I don't have a game console either.

[icefox]

I don't watch tv, exercise every day, get 8 hours sleep, read a classic novel every month, invest wisely, only listen to "good" music and never pop, never use a windows computer, never get sad, volunteer every other month, don't gossip, can live with waiting to find out which game console to buy after the market decides, never impulse shop, don't need the latest iphone, run a marathon every year, always dress in style, best friends with my in-laws, have a perfect marriage, eat the healthy choices at restaurants, never laugh at other peoples misfortunes, never send "funny" emails to my friends, always ignore spam, don't take photos of my cat...

[plinkplonk]

@icefox, (abstractly) amusing, but I don't quite get it.

Is this some kind of American cultural assumption (that everyone watches TV and is lying about it if they say they don't)? I know many people (who can afford TV s) here in India who don't watch TV. Of course there are many people who are addicted to Tv as well, but someone not watching TV doesn't seem to evoke the kind of response in your post.

oh btw " "I don't watch tv, exercise every day, get 8 hours sleep,.." check, check and check. Is this so unusual?

[icefox]

My wife and I like to take walks and when we lived in Oslo Norway we would always see other people out walking around. But when we moved back to the states it seems like walking is only reserved for those who need to exercise. Walking around in suburbia I can often see house after house that has one room with the "TV glow" in a window. There is some truth to every cultural assumption. No matter how bad TV is, it does have entertaining properties.

""I don't watch tv, exercise every day, get 8 hours sleep,.." check, check and check. Is this so unusual?"

If you ask someone a question that has a negative social aspect they are very likely to push their answer in the direction they think is socially better. While there will be some truth, the answer is probably more like:

I watch 0-3 hours a night of TV (mostly depending if netflix movie arrived that day or what tivo recorded), I exercise two (more likely), maybe three times a week, and get 6-7 hours of sleep a night.

So to answer the question, doing everything I listed is unusual, much more likely there is some truth mixed in. While I don't take tons of photos of my cat, I do have some photos of her going nuts trying to get to the squirrel on the other side of the porch window (who couldn't care less that she was there).

[modeless]

The American cultural thing you're missing is that it's now considered gauche to brag about how you don't watch TV, even if it's true. For a while not owning a TV was fashionable; now there's a stereotype of "goody-two-shoes" people who go out of their way to avoid watching TV and brag about it repeatedly to anyone who will listen.

[plinkplonk]

"The American cultural thing you're missing is ... there's a stereotype of "goody-two-shoes" people who go out of their way to avoid watching TV and brag about it repeatedly to anyone who will listen."

Thanks. very enlightening. Thanks. very enlightening. Hereabouts "I don't have a/watch TV" is neutral statement, not bragging.

[Hexstream]

I can understand you're skeptical of anyone who tells you they have a few "strangely healthy habits", or whatever you want to call those, but believing that absolutely nobody says the truth completely when they claim it, that's another story.

(My apologies if I'm not being clear)

[bitwize]

Modern consoles have HDMI out; many modern monitors have HDMI in. Of course you're on your own for audio.

[philwelch]

I route mine through my computer's line-in and use passthru. Though you could hook it up to speakers directly.

[ido]

I don't watch or own a tv either, and I know several people like that.

[adamhowell]

I always think of Google when I think of this.

A new webapp gets used by Google employees internally first, and you tweak it based on their feedback. But even with 10,000 potential employees QA'ng an app, you still get stinkers like Page Creator and Notebook.

Why? I think it's because no one can stop something from being released at that point. I'm guessing at Apple they either involve employees at an earlier point (judging by their secrecy w/ the iPhone I don't think this is true) or cancel more late-stage products, regardless of the lost time and money.

[nostrademons]

Googlers are also about the weirdest population you can get outside of religious cults. They tend to skew technical and often focus on details, which can distort your feedback when the average user just wants something that works and doesn't make them feel stupid.

[timcederman]

Steve will happily kill projects at any time if he doesn't agree with them.

[rdrimmie]

This is true, but stinkers like .mac and using the iTunes store for App developers still make it through in a place where the standards are much higher.