Wow, I didn’t realize springboard persists those across reboot. I guess I too have learned some stuff here tonight!
Well, not really. It is Apple’s “job” to make products people find valuable. (ok, really it is Apple’s job to make a return on investment, but Apple deliberately chooses to interpret this as making products people like to use…they are not always good at that, but it is the goal)
If they need a manual to make that happen, producing a manual is part of that job (and they still do for things like Final Cut, or mostly do for things like the developer docs that come with Xcode, and so on). For many products people won’t read a manual, so that is wasted money that could be spent on something else.
You wold read a manual about how to use the iPhone? Well I believe you. Apple even believes you. They also think you belong to a group that makes up under 1% of the market. So they don’t make a manual for you (or for me, I would read one – provide it isn’t too big). They invest that into the tutorial app and other places.
I don’t think the tutorial app is a good substitute for a manual, but way more people use it and get some value out of it then look at manuals for consumer apps.
I’m not entirely convinced this is a bad policy, although I think Apple could get some real milage out of making something maybe less polished then a manual that is more of an “info dump” that 3rd parties could turn into “the missing manual series”, and “top 25 things you didn’t know about your iPhone”. Basically stay out of the business of wrapping it up into a nice document, but be in the business of supplying information that “someone” should tell people about.
Interesting. I have good luck with power cables (watch, now that I have said that I’m going to break like six in the next two days). The last time I went to the genius bar they provided free service to my then seven year old iMac, and I hadn’t even bought AppleCare for it in the first place! (the genius searched around and found that my failed drive belonged to a serial number range that “broke a little more than Apple thought was normal” & he got me free parts and service). I did go in with the question “hey, my iMac disk broke and I’m trying to figure out what it costs to replace v buy a new one”, so he actually most likely cost Apple an iMac sale in the short term, but people tend to remember being treated well, and if I weren’t already predisposed to buy Apple products he would have given a huge boost to my likelihood to replace that iMac with another Mac later.
Hmmmm, thinking about it now, I never had any Mac that used the “right angled” MagSafe. So maybe that is the bad one? If that the one you had that broke?
Yeah. Punching Alan Dye isn’t super high on my list of life goals, I would prefer to talk him into a better design pattern, however I have significant doubt that I could get him to budge. He is a design professional after all, I’m a programmer. Still he is Apple’s current champion of that design pattern.
Actually to be honest I was going to absolutely agree about punching him, but I wrote his name down and then it became a concrete idea of me punching a specific person, and I kind of lost the desire to do it. Like I hate this design pattern, but it isn’t like punching someone who insists on smoking in my car. Gah, life is complicated.
