On Apple’s swings and misses

submited by
Style Pass
2022-01-20 12:30:10

There’s a trope in the Apple-using technologist world that when an Apple innovation doesn’t immediately succeed, they abandon it. It’s not entirely true, let’s see what actually happens.

The quote in the above-linked item that supports the claim: “Apple has a tendency to either hit home runs out of the box (iPod, iPhone, AirPods) or come out with a dud and just sweep it under the rug, like iMessage apps and stickers.” iMessage apps and stickers are new features in iMessage. These are incremental additions to an existing technology. Granted, neither of them have revolutionised the way that everybody uses iMessage, and neither of them have received much (or any) further (user-facing) development, but both are themselves attempts to improve an actual product that Apple actually has and has not swept under the rug.

We can make a similar argument about the TouchBar. The TouchBar is the touchscreen strip on some models of MacBook Pro laptop that replaces the function key row on the keyboard with an adaptive UI. It appeared, it…stayed around a bit, then it seems to have now disappeared. Perhaps importantly, it never got replicated on their other keyboards, like the one that comes with the iMac or the one you can buy separately. We could say that the TouchBar was a dud that got swept under the rug, or we could say that it was an incremental change to the MacBook Pro and that Apple have since tried other changes to this long-running product, like the M1 architecture.

Leave a Comment