It sounds like despite their reach and promotion, their sales lagged for Cards - which suggests they didn't quite get the product fit right either in cost or UX. The demand certainly was there.
I'd also say that a fancy printed card-in-envelope is sort of a weird product anyway, no matter how nice the paper is. Its naturally competing against other card-in-envelope junk in your mailbox, and while it was maybe a little bit of a novelty, I don't think I've ever personally thought "wow, this person really put effort into this" when getting a printed card. I'd much prefer something handwritten. That's why we focused on the much-cheaper postcard-style cards, which also still gave that little hit of novelty (hey, something in the mail!), without trying to be something it wasn't.
This is classic Steve Jobs. Sheer force of will.
Modern processing machines (AFCS) capture both a visible and UV image of the mailpiece, so it's fundamentally changing the image processing software to have it look for the barcode on the UV side if it can't find one on visible. The downstream DBCS sorters already read secondary barcodes that are applied by the AFCS which happen to be in UV ink.
Further, USPS benefits from the same idea to hide a barcode for marketing (junk) mail. When combined with a handwriting-like typeface, it makes letters look personal and gets people to open them more. Same psychology where mailers apply a bulk-rate stamp instead of using a permit imprint.
It's a very Steve Jobs/Apple case where it sounds like a minor detail that requires crazy advances, but under the covers, it's very technically feasible, and importantly, can exploit economies of scale.
For letter encoding, they used to have 55 centers, in 2014 it became one, in Utah. A large part of it is OCR getting better and deciphering most handwritten addresses.
Another part of it is simple consolidation: it's trivial to send images over networks, and due to how mail has to be sorted together for dispatch, the demand tended to be peaky. Consolidation lets you exploit different timezones. (Slowing down the mail also gives a big benefit because you can spread the load over the whole day)
I’d imagine most companies would laugh someone out of the room for suggesting something like that. That’s why those other companies seem like the Temu version of Apple.
A separate part of the same talk was about a different screensaver. The flyovers through the cities and how they used math to figure out the exact time and place for the lens flares so they would be real. They also talked about removing all the billboards/ads from the buildings.
It was all just great stuff.
I appreciate it SO MUCH. I remember on the 7 or 8 when it happened how totally blown away I was.
Now there’s less visual/symbol spam in my daily view of an object I (and billions of others) use constantly. This stuff is way more important than people think.
Honestly only dumbasses wouldn't appreciate these small things that accumulate to a big difference, just instinctively downvoting from bumache just because it's Apple
I remember the moronic Samesung ads that made fun of the iPhone 4 or 5 for moving the headphone jack to the bottom of the phone.. not realizing that it made it easier for people it put in their pockets while letting a headphone or charging cable go straight up.
The magnetic chargers for Apple Watch also do not have lights. Neither do the USB-C cables for iPads and AirPods. I assume the newest AirPod cases still have charging lights though.
Since we lost the on-MacBook charging lights (RIP).*
Apple Watch: set watch on charger or tap watch screen to check status. Same for iPhone. Tap AirPods case to see charging light as well.
*Guess I’ve survived without this, but it was a bummer my first Mac without it.
Ooh, “Your Apple Watch is fully charged.” notification on iPhone, that’s nice too. (Can sometimes just charge while showering/etc. and not think about it though.)
I'm seeing this style of argument on the rise: "only an idiot would disagree". It reminds me of an old professor of mine that would use "proof by intimidation", where he would begin the proof with "As any fool can plainly see..."
It makes for terrible discussion.
When you're gonna go down anyway might as well go down with a middle finger up
Sometimes it's how you say things, not what you're saying.
There's always gonna be a moron somewhere who can't handle something, no matter how carefully you choose your words.
Minimalism is difficult and expensive to achieve. Some people consider that effort worthwhile.
https://www.theknot.com/content/hand-cancel-wedding-invitati...
If you're one of those people I could absolutely imagine you'd care about a visible barcode on an envelope. They kind of have to be premium products because if they’re blah then people will just use evites, which are better in a bunch of functional ways. The product relies on its differentiators.
"When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."
That's typical executive lack of awareness of the skills and roles of the little people charged with fulfilling their grand vision.
We are talking about fundamentally unreasonable people who make literally insane products. Some called them insanely great.
We don’t want reasonable choices. We want change.
Here’s to the crazy ones.
(It breaks my heart that most in Apple management these days are quite thoroughly sane.)
As for the design details, the proof is in the pudding. If they sold well then the person with this idea understood the vapidness of his customers to the point of contempt. But I am reminded of how things like design evolve from being there to solve a problem to over time becoming the problem itself that needs solving and the actual focus. But I don't think this is a good way to deal with things.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-did-van-hale...
As an aside, I did think the M&Ms story was just a band being a diva until I heard them explain it like this. It's actually brilliant.
We can of course disagree, there's no harm in that.
Isn’t there variance in how long a venue’s contractual obligations will take to fulfill? One weekend someone needs you to spend X hours coordinating on sound and lighting, the next weekend it’s .5X hours? (Correct me if I’m wrong here if someone knows.) If they get the M&Ms right and they triaged appropriately, seems like a little indicator they scheduled enough people to work long enough to make it through the whole rider.
No cop out here with “oh just tell them you’re ignoring it”, treating the whole doc as a serious thing to get through or they can find another venue that will.
Edit: apparently to even deal with Van Halen you’d have to deal with not three 18-wheelers of gear, max, but three times as many! So you’d need way more hours I bet. Also an alternative that might rub some less the wrong way: some redditor (or liar) claims they’d put something really dumb mistake in their riders and good venues would essentially bring it up first thing.
I used to work as a developer at creative agencies and saw this all the time. There were developers who had a hard time believing that they should implement designs to the pixel because they thought a bit of padding didn’t matter so long as they got the important items right. They were almost always the ones who ended up missing important details (copy, working forms, performant databases etc.)
This whole exercise sounds like a minimalist circlejerk that was only possible in a ZIRP environment.
This isn't about the Apple Card. It's about an iOS app called "Cards" which lets you physically mail personal cards straight from your iPhone.
Why did interest rates matter to Apple, a company famously averse to extended or significant borrowing?
Reminder that Jobs is not a good role model. A lot of his decisions were erratic and based on what might as well have been undiagnosed BPD.
That’s what makes Apple different than other tech companies. They have an extreme attention to detail that extends even to their packaging.
And it was often for details that didn't matter. Like the exact shape of the curve of the plastic housing of some long-forgotten iMac. People just want computers that work and that don't look like total crap, they don't even notice the corner radius or whether the motherboard (excuse me, "logic board") is aesthetically pleasing according to the genius that took one class on calligraphy at Reed College.
Details that don’t matter to you might matter to someone else, and vice versa.
I once saw him absolutely dismantle, over the course of an hour, an intern that made the mistake of asking one stupid question.
Money solves all their problems, if it doesn’t solve everyone else’s then fuggem
"Indeed, they were paid, but just not as much splendedly as you, your highness!"
The iPhone was long after Apple was a majorly successful company that people wanted to emulate.
Microsoft also never just gave Apple money for no reason. They settled Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation by agreeing to continue to develop Office for the Mac and to purchase $150M in non-voting Apple shares, and both companies agreed to cross-licensing of OS patents.
They also weren't on the brink of bankruptcy when they made the iPod either - the original iPod launched in 2001 which was ~4 years after the Microsoft investment you mention (that happened in 1997).
Apple actually launched the highly successful iMac (the colourful ones) back in 1998, and it was arguably the success of that which restored Apple to having good profitable. I.e. it was already well on the 'up' by the time the iPod launched and propelled them to even greater financial success.
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided… It’s the sound of failure.”
Ah yes, that notorious -96dB noise.
I’m guessing he’s referring to early CDs when both mastering and player DACs had digital roughness. Or maybe he’s talking about digital clipping which was deliberately being introduced in the 1990s to create loudness.
Why wouldn't radio stations just normalize all digital files they're playing to one default volume / loudness? Then "louder" digital songs would only be worse quality / fewer dynamics, but not louder at all.
Sounds like the radio stations are very much complicit. (Also: why are tv or radio ads always so much louder than the rest of their program?)
The loudness war wasn’t about normalizing to 0db vs -3db, but rather about dynamic compression which is a process that raises the volume of softer sounds without affecting the loudest ones as much (or at all). It’s what you use to make the breathiness of a singer’s voice, or a drum kit’s hi hat, more present in a recording.
I emailed Eddy Cue when the shutdown was announced and he agreed it was a great app but confirmed it wasn’t popular enough.
I don’t think I’ve sent a card since.
Bonus points when you send them from a country people have to search a map to locate.
The software in this space is execrable (I wrote a TeX tool to do it based on a CSV and it would've been okay if they'd allowed it to run on the server as each order came in, but they insisted instead on ganging things up which added complexity and made the files large enough that csvtool in TeX had a hard time working through them), and dealing with the USPS can be quite thorny, but as noted, customer relations is a potential minefield and managing customer expectations could get really expensive (once we had to pay $800 to have a single card delivered same-day because it was that or lose the contract).
I also argued that we should integrate the preview, generating a pixel image of the actual addresses from the typesetting system so as to push the responsibility for address verification onto the customer, but even though we were doing that for custom order books in a separate project by a different department it was shot down as an unnecessary complexity.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-legend-bill-at...
Something like I send details to an endpoint, pay $1/3/5 or whatever, and a letter is mailed?
Postgrid is one I've used for personal projects.
https://touchnote.com/us/welcome/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/touchnote-personalized-cards/i...
Like many Apple products, it was a really neat service, but was a PITA to deal with internationally.
This and the photo prints service were the two that really made me ignore the pompous advertisements during the Keynotes. The photo books were also gorgeous, just extremely late, pricey, and dealing with UPS was utterly to exotic for the receiver. I ordered twice and gave up.
Learned to wait for what Apple would actually do outside of their bubble.
I seem to recall my co-founder being somewhat more optimistic about the whole thing. And sure enough, we found that the announcement really only seemed to boost awareness.
Apple Cards was an extremely limited and flawed product, and we already had some distinct technical and feature set advantages. It was clear Apple didn't have their heart in it nor know what they were doing. When they retired it shortly thereafter it wasn't a shock, and I ironically recall feeling somewhat sad.