Apple hinders creativity (rant)

I’ve had it. Too much apples has made my stomach hard. Other people are waking up to this as well. After the initial ‘ooh-aah’s, iPhone is now getting really negative comments all over the world. Bad battery life together unstable software, clunky hardware and pretty slow interface (note: it looks fast, but the on-screen animations get very, very annoying after a while) start to irritate people. It still is a good piece of design and engineering in my opinion, but it’s also an extremely expensive toy full of useless fluff and cheap tricks (vibrating icons and on other mac products blinking lights etc., beer software, stock market, the list is endless)

This together with the fact that every single designer seems to be an Apple fanboy, makes me wanna cry for help. What designers think people need and what people buy, seem to be two completely different things. PC together with Windows is still the most popular platform on personal computers and iPhone is not as popular as the article below this post makes it appear (it’s in a very niche category of smartphones and you always need to buy a contract with the phone, so that Apple gets their money, very unappealing to most continental europeans, where you normally own the device and get the carrier separately. The marketshare is 6,5% of smartphones and about 0,1-0,3% of all the phones (doesn’t seem to be, by looking at all the hype it’s created, still it’s doing well)).

Apple is a designer-oriented brand. If would categorize and segment people, I would put it’s products together with all the other expensive crap that people with good taste buy. Give me H&M anytime rather than any similar clothes from a big-name brand. Some people have ridicolous testimonials how their life is a lot better, when they switched to a Mac. If this true, then people have weird values. With all this talk about ubiquitousness, and making things invisible the exact opposite has happened. People praise the hardware/software that was supposed to be hidden and inobtrusive. Also they are not that simple to use. It took me half an hour to figure out how to change songs on an iPod and my big fingers do not go together well with the small dial.

Remember designers: Apple is not the end-all solution. It definitely is a step in the right direction, but most of all it is just a marketing gimmick.