> The tech crowd tends to look at devices as bricks with feature lists attached to them, but consumers don't.
That's one unusual conclusion. One could argue that the main difference is that the tech crowd knows what they're buying better than average misinformed consumers.
We have a saying where I live. Billions of flies eat shit every day, but that doesn't mean so should we. Apple certainly doesn't sell shit, their products are great for sure. But there are also a lot of valid criticism to be made. And breaking record sales doesn't mean, in any way, the criticism is any less valid. You're confusing two very different things.
I understand here at HN people can get very personally offended if I even hint that Apple's sales success might not be exclusively a result of technical engineering or design innovation. But doing so would be unfair to Apple's sales and marketing team. Who are genius at what they do, and deserve a lot of recognition for their important role in driving sales.
> That's one unusual conclusion. One could argue that the main difference is that the tech crowd knows what they're buying better than average misinformed consumers.
Or people just don't care about the "other stuff." Most people just want something that makes calls, sends text messages, surfs the web/facebook/twitter, and plays games. I see the latest Samsung commercial about the S3 and I really don't care that I can bump to share playlists (1. because I barely listen to music on my phone and 2. who actually makes playlists anymore?) or the list of 20 other features that I'll never use. I don't even care about 4G/LTS because 3G is fast enough and I'm not going to pay more for less data from the carriers.
I disagree that it's an unusual conclusion... it's been my general experience, which is why I brought it up. Tech-savvy people tend to undervalue user interface and holistic design quality and overvalue individual features and overall feature count, in particular features that they're specifically looking for often without fully realizing how that feature fits into the larger picture.
In other words, nerds tend to have tunnel-vision. This isn't surprising, they're usually specialists. I'm just sayin, it doesn't lead to accurate predictions of the larger market.
Furthermore, this fact is valuable in determining your own (perhaps nerdy, myopic, or short-sighted) biases in your own market or business strategy.
That's one unusual conclusion. One could argue that the main difference is that the tech crowd knows what they're buying better than average misinformed consumers.
We have a saying where I live. Billions of flies eat shit every day, but that doesn't mean so should we. Apple certainly doesn't sell shit, their products are great for sure. But there are also a lot of valid criticism to be made. And breaking record sales doesn't mean, in any way, the criticism is any less valid. You're confusing two very different things.
I understand here at HN people can get very personally offended if I even hint that Apple's sales success might not be exclusively a result of technical engineering or design innovation. But doing so would be unfair to Apple's sales and marketing team. Who are genius at what they do, and deserve a lot of recognition for their important role in driving sales.