I still don't think Google has the culture to create a good consistent UI, something that has pretty much always been Apple's strongest asset - the reason I keep using Apple products. I don't think this will change, at least not anytime soon.
Recently I developed an app for Android, but when using the toolkit and testing on a real device I realised how much stronger Apple is in the department of software design.
That's not to say I don't like certain products of Google. I appreciate Gmail very much and I'm very likely to use AppEngine in the near future for a mobile game I plan to develop. I just think Apple is much better when it comes to UI design.
But is Google actually that good at services besides a few great products?
I'm considering moving away from Google Apps, because besides GMail, most apps are a weak and seem to have become stagnant. Google Drive, which we had been waiting for for half a decade, is still buggy, clunky and unreliable. And don't get me started on the UI and the complete inconsistency between various apps.
Yes, Apple has been consistently shite when it comes to online services, and Microsoft entered the game way too late. But I don't think Google has such a major advantage in anything else but search.
Google Apps is a blip: the vast majority of consumers have no idea what it is, what it does, or why it matters. Google Drive has its flaws, but it's infinitely better than iCloud. GMail and Search, Google's largest and oldest offerings, dominate their verticals.
I'm pretty much an Apple hardware devotee (iPhone, iPad, MBA) but their services are terrible. iCloud is Kafkaesque; iTunes Match is essentially a scam.
I agree that Google is by no means a paragon of great services (I'd actually argue that Amazon is poised to be the service king, except AWS is such a narrow vertical) but they're leaps and bounds past Apple and Microsoft.
How is iTunes match a "scam"? It accepts my music downloaded from the pirate bay as proof of purchase then gives me access to it on all my devices.
The hugest advantage is not having to manage all of that music on all the machines in our house. We just have one backup somewhere in case we need it, and then everyone syncs with iTunes Match just the music they want on their personal device.
'Scam' was a bad choice of words, but its ridiculously buggy (it accepts your music downloaded from TPB, but will only take half of an album which I legally bought and ripped to disk) and iOS playback is horrendous (both on and off WiFi.)
Interesting. I'm using ~24,800 of my 25,000 available tracks. About %90 of that is actually CDs that I ripped (I'm not really much of a pirate). I had a problem where it wouldn't accept one of them at all, and I ended up pirating that one to get it to work. The rest I was able to import ok, so my CD collection going back to the 1980s when I first started buying them I was able to import.
I have no trouble with playback on iOS. But I don't tend to stream, I tend to sync the songs I want to the device and then play them.
The one time I did have problems with iTunes match was a period where we rented a house in rural mexico. We were using some sort of fly-by-nite mexican ISP, and iTunes match had a lot of difficulty. It was really inconsistent and it sounds like this is what you experienced.
I suspect the issue there is that certain ports were being blocked, or that the ISP couldn't keep a consistent connection (Though loading web pages was fine, longer streaming connections like watching video were not.) I think iTunes match is probably sensitive to needing specific ports open and isn't great at falling back when they are blocked, or isn't great at handling frequent interruptions in the net connection (even if they are short.)
This is an area where we can do direct comparison.
Mail- Google has gmail, Apple has iCloud mail. Both have "web 2.0" UI's. I think here Apple wins hands down. Apple's support of sproutcore (what became ember.js) has given it a great lead in the ability to do great web apps. And apple's iCloud.com mail app is a good example of this.
Google "Office" vs. Apple Works - Apple wins again here in my opinion. Numbers, Pages and Keynote are much better experiences than using google's products thru the web, simply because they are native and can take advantage of better APIs. Both products provide ubiquitous storage of your data, so you can access your documents from your iPhone or your laptop. I wouldn't say Google is ahead on services there, but before Apple released iCloud they were.
I really don't think Apple has done a bad job with online services. Certainly not when compared to google. IF you look at iTunes Store-- which is actually an web service-- it is larger than anything google has, except maybe google search, depending on what metrics you use.
It's been stable and robust and usable with great UI since the store was first launched. It's certainly sold more goods than google and made more profit than amazon, I bet.
Apple took the lead with web development way back when it was NeXT with webobjects which was the first modern web development framework. They again have had the best product with sproutcore, dashcode, etc, though they've been a bit inconsistent. Its only recently that google's really tried to produce web development tech, and while go is a good attempt at a language it is written by people who felt comfortable enforcing a religious design choice on every programmer! (namely where the brackets go. I'm fine with people putting them in the "wrong place", I can still read their code. Let them do as they like, but forcing me, at the language level, to do as the language designers like? Well, that's just being assholes, and I won't use the language because of that (not to mention its crap design in some key areas.)
Where google's clearly winning? Ideological propaganda. The whole "open vs. closed" campaign has people actually believing that Google is good and Apple is evil. Apple which has never spied on its users or sold them out to advertisers.
> Where google's clearly winning? Ideological propaganda. The whole "open vs. closed" campaign has people actually believing that
Google is good and Apple is evil. Apple which has never spied on its users or sold them out to advertisers.
I am not really happy that Google is cloning all successful approaches from various companies with slight modifications to suit their own purposes. First Facebook, now Apple. Where is that amazing, creative, innovative company I once admired? It's like Microsoft all over again.
I am not really happy that Microsoft always is the example of a boring company while they have clearly been more innovative and bold than Apple in recent years. They built alot of cool tech in their labs and also release products that arent another iteration of older products to play it safe, eg. Surface, Windows 8, Metro, Kinect
Credit to them for these products but they still lack something. I don't know what exactly but we are talking about a company that innovated and still wasn't able to move a lot of units around! Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 have been so so, Surface RT did not sell well compared to competition.
their main problem is being late to the party imo. Windows 8, Phone 8 and the Surface Pro are pretty excellent. We are seeing the first generation of proper laptop/tablet hybrids that could really change the way we see computing. Those products might not come from MS directly, eg. Thinkpad Helix, but they enabled it and i think its awesome to be able to choose from hundreds of different devices.
Innovation is not just about being different, its about being different successfully.
I give credit to MSFT for ... finally, after 2 decades... trying to innovate. I don't think they will be successful with these products, but possibly they can iterate on them until they are successful.
This is a lot more than google has done, and you're right, people should make the comparison to 1990s Microsoft which used FUD to kill innovation in the industry.
Fortunately, Balmer seems to have killed that ability in 2007 when he said there was no chance the iPhone would be successful.
Maybe MSFT has turned a corner. And unlike google and everyone else, they actually have a license from Apple to use multi-touch, etc, so they're actually legitimate competitors.
You do realise that Google didn't invent self driving cars and that they aren't even leading the industry.
Mercedes Benz demoed the technology nearly 20 years ago and will be shipping cars along with Audi, Volvo etc en masse over the coming years. In fact every single notable car manufacturer has had their own program in place for decades.
Firstly, the car companies have been shipping for the last few years many of the key systems of an autonomous car. Even some of the cheapest cars can self park and auto brake in the event of an impending collision. Adding more sensors and better control systems builds on this.
Secondly, nobody knows who is leading the industry. But we know it's not Google since all of the car manufacturers have their own programs in fairly advanced stages. And due to the consolidated nature of the industry key technologies are shared within the groups. So if Google has no one interested in their technologies and they don't make cars then how will they ever lead anything ?
Google glass is just a bluetooth headset with a display and camera, combined with a SIRI like service.
People seem to think it's a competitor to the iPhone, but it's an ACCESSORY that needs and iPhone to connect to the network.
Worse, it has no technology (other than miniturization) that hasn't been done many times before-- I first saw a "glass" type system in the 1980s.... and that one actually had a computer on board!
I personally don't think it's a competitor to the iPhone, and I haven't seen this opinion around as well, so maybe it's an opinion shared just by Apple evangelists?
I've seen mp3 players, laptops, software stores and smartphones way before Apple did them, so should we blame Apple for being a copycat? Let's wait and see if it reveals itself as useful or not.
If someone gets it about right already, why would I want to change it up? Change for changes sake is generally bad. If someone has a good idea for a feature or interface, then hell yeah I would hope others would emulate and refine it.
Apple sell hardware and Google sell ads, everything else is just semantics. They may be competitive in certain areas but they are making money in completely divergent ways. Companies like Google and Amazon are able to use the Chinese electronics contractors to get products to market without the huge amounts on R&D that Apple had to invest. That is only a threat to Apple if they are unable to make innovative new hardware that can't be replicated quickly.
I could look for links that prove my point but whats the point? That information is naturally opaque. I believe that R&D costs are likely to be lower because I see such a huge number of new devices coming from companies without the clout of Google or Android. If Google are spending amounts equivalent to Apple on the pixel they are doing something wrong.
Apple is vastly more efficient at R&D than google is, in part because Apple's products are so profitable, that it's R&D as a proportion of sales is "small".
Meanwhile, Apple is investing $10B this year in CapEx, and while a couple billion of that are for server farms, the new HQ and store upgrades, many billions are going into the equipment and tooling necessary to make Apple products.
People seem to think you just call fox con and say "I want 100 million mobile phones by monday!"
Apple's "R&D" includes the investment in being able to scale a manufacturing business to the point where it can sell twice as many devices as the previous year, for several years running.
This is under appreciated by people who look at no-sales devices like the google Nexus and claim that google is in the lead by some arbitrary criteria.
That is a false comparison. Google's business is to make money on ads, not hardware sales. The R&D at Google is for a completely different purpose and much harder to measure in terms of efficiency for an outsider.
From the original quote [1], what Apple does is "design" while what Google does is "web services". Design is more fragmented than web services and thus easier to break into. If Google + design -> Cupertino while Apple has only to master "web services" the war has already been won. Given how premature that seems, I'd say the core competences identified and thus the analogy as a whole appear to be stacked.
If design is so much easier, then why have all hardware manufacturers failed so miserably to match Apple over the past two decades?
Anything from phones, mp3 players, monitors, tablets, laptops etcetera, they all look cheap, plastic and designed without love and attention to detail. And yes, that includes Google's Nexus range, which aren't ugly but won't win any awards either. It should be possible, look at B&O or Loewe in TV and audio for instance, albeit that they sell at a premium way higher then Apple's. And by the look of it, it's not others they haven't been trying to imitate Apple (hence the lawsuits).
As far as I can tell, getting design right is very, very hard, and takes a broad commitment to excellence most companies are lacking.
And if one company has very conspicuously ignored design and the basic notion of delighting their users with products that aren't just functionally great but make people fall in love with them, it has been Google.
The design of the latest Chromebook is a huge leap, surpassing manufacturers that have attempted to match Apple for years, and comes completely out of left field from a company has so far shown little sign if even having any feeling for design.
It's also a pretty blatant copy of the Macbook. Given the history you outline (which I agree with) I think the huge leap for the pixel came from Apple. Just like the huge leap from a blackberry clone to an iPhone clone that android took over the course of 2007-2008.
Your link to patrik gibson's twitter shows how silly the original hypothesis is.
For instance, Apple's stores are still powered by WebObjects because WebObject is still one of the best web frameworks in the world.
Do people say that Amazon is "bad at the web" because obidos and gurupa were designed in the 1990s? They're worse than WebObjects by a wide margin. How about all the companies whose web services are from the 1990s?
Including google!
The rest of his examples are cheap shots or simply based on ignorance.
For instance, Game Center having trouble under heavy load is an exceptional event not a daily occurence, and lets not forget the weeks of cummulative time that google has had gmail down because of issues over the years, and all the mail people have lost and the fact that google will just blackhole people's accounts for no reasons and then when it happens you have no way to get your data back.
The rest of it is misunderstanding or misrepresentation.
In other words, this is just more propaganda in the endless google good, apple bad, ideological war that was started to try and cover the fact that android is a blatant ripoff of iOS.
the big question is though, can Google also be awesome in Services going forward?
i am loyal user of chrome, gmail, search, youtube, maps, picasa - in this order. none of which is younger than what, 5 years?
innovation in those items? gmail got a new UI, but else?
where are the BETA products? used to be the awesomeness of Google. ever since Page took over, they've been killing the small, useful things. ok, they want to be apple. google glass, cars, chromebooks - big ambitious things, big bang approach. nothing below 1500 usd.
of course there is android, but that one is slipping away - samsung, amazon, chinese manufacturers - all are eating it up and taking ownership.
how come amazon is the premier cloud provider, not google? how come dropbox is the premier storage provider, not google? they are moving from a (ad-supported) knowledge company to a product company. more money there i guess. still makes me sad.
Google was always a search and ad company, and this refocusing lets the company go back to its roots while other companies build on Google's progress. Microsoft thrashed about and did a lot of damage when it was where Google is now. I prefer this approach.
Google Chrome initial release is September 2, 2008. So it's less than 5 years old. Also Android, Google+/Hangouts, Google Voice are pretty nice and yes, ChromeOS is getting better all the time.
Sure, the innovation in those items are pretty much non-existent (except for search which improves often with very interesting new features), and i think thats perfectly fine. I'd much rather have them focus on "futuristic" things such as Glass and Cars than have them trying to become the leaders in cloud providing, storage etc.
Google doesn't need to innovate, they can do a so-so clone, post it on top of search and 1 billion people will see it a month. And boy do they see it, over and over and over again. Now even Chrome has ads, in addition to the suite of Google services.
Chrome is not just a wrapper. WebKit requires you to implement networking, graphics rendering, font rendering etc.
There are huge differences between the different WebKit based browsers
Things unique to Chrome that don't come from the OS: V8 Javascript engine, process isolation model, networking including new protocols like SPDY and possibly QUIC [1], auto-update (for browser and all apps and extensions) Chrome sync (for bookmarks, open tabs, apps, extensions). Don't forget that the Chrome team is now a major contributor to WebKit.
Google is definitely getting better. Their search infrastructure gives them a huge advantage over Apple. I have used Google Now on my friend's Android and it is much better than Siri.
I remember someone linking to a video of Google Now (maybe it was Gruber)and commenting, "How fast should Siri be? - This fast!"
Google can put a voice over their search interface and boom, they have a Siri alternative that works on any platform(though for web only, but it can integrate with Chrome and Android very easily). Just imagine asking your Chromebook to create a new appointment, that would be a nice feature. Or just asking Chrome to do it.
The only problem with Google is that they do not have any customer care! When things go fine, everything is well and good. But one day when your GMail account suddenly stops working and gets blocked, you have no human to talk to!
Yahoo's culture conditioned by a strong personality cult is on par with Apple's own culture. They bring all the web expertise that can compliment Apple.
I think people musnderstand what it is that Apple does best. And what it is is deliver great products that focus on what the consumer needs.
Google has yet to deliver a compelling or wildly popular hardware product to the market. Google is getting really great at propaganda and hype though-- like that carefully set up PR event of brin on the subway with glass.
Glass and this computer are both misfires because glass is just a bluetooth headset with a camera-- it needs a network to work. It needs an iPhone or android device to teather too (and I still think its really going to have bad battery life.)
Same with this netbook-- it doesnt' have a real operating system, and it relies on being connected to the cloud all the time... which is impractical in a lot of ways.
The iPad is the competitor to this device, not the macbook. The macbook is a real computer you can use for development, the iPad you can use for content creation but not really hardcore software development.
The iPad is much cheaper, higher build quality, and doesn't need a network connection to really work.
Google's delivered a lot of products like the nexus, the nexus q that have had a lot of hype but haven't really been big successes.
Until they do make a big hardware success you can't really say they're learning to do what Apple does.
It's not like you just call up foxxconn and say "I want 100 million phones made."
Meanwhile, what google does best is selling customers to advertisers and search.
I'd say Apple getting good at that reasonably fast. Apple's SIRI upended search and was a big jump forward. Apple's iAds has not been as successful, but this is probably due to mobile being a hostile environment for ads (google and facebook aren't having great success yet either.)
I agree with the vast majority of what you said, but Siri upending search seems incredibly pre-emptive.
I think Siri opens a lot of doors, but 90% of the Siri use I've seen (which I admit is somewhat anecdotal, but still) is hands-free texting & easter eggs ("Siri, where can I hide a body?")
Once Apple opens up Siri's functionality a bit more and makes it actually actionable ("Siri, pre-order my usual Chipotle burrito, please.") then things are going to go crazy.
What you say is correct, but what I was trying to say (you may disagree) is that SIRI was a big jump into mobile search, and that it is a bigger move into mobile search than google's hardware projects have been in competing with Apple.
SIRI is still in the early stages and would benefit a great deal from becoming more of an App platform, but I think that is going to take some time due to the nature of how SIRI works.
As a 'UI', SIRI was pretty cool, but if you compare SIRI on an Apple device with Google Now on an Apple device, both of them use Google to do the 'search' part except that Google Now's integration with the search backend gives it more visibility in what you are trying to find.
Having used most linux distros and Mac OS X (and Windows, but I can't stand it anymore now), unfortunately Linux is very behind in user experience (not just interface, but the whole experience)
Granted, some of this are hardware/drivers issues (like getting suspend/sleep correctly, good wifi drivers, etc)
Maybe Chromebook can make this better.
- Google hand picked the hardware and can provide the best (sw) configuration for it
- Google makes the browser the center of the experience, so as long as the browser works ok, there's very little beyond that (a basic window manager, network manager, basic linux system, etc)
And yes, you're right, it's more close to an "iPad with a keyboard"
Firstly Apple does do services. They run the world's biggest media store, the world's biggest syncing platform and a semi popular email service. Sure they aren't perfect but they can be considered successes for the most part.
And the point about hardware is completely misguided. Apple's true strength has never been their ability to build a well designed machine. It is the fact that they can do it consistently and ship it on a scale unmatched in the industry. All whilst maintaining a huge profit margin.
Until Google can demonstrate that they can actually ship a product and do so profitably then nobody will or should take them seriously.
So Google just released a laptop that is actually better than an MBA and you think Apple shouldn't take Google seriously? Good thing you're not running Apple.
Funny to read someone defending Apple based on hardware specs when Apple lovers told us for years that Apple killed specs because no one care about them and that hardware should be judged on its beauty and slickness and the UX of its software which is where the Pixel does indeed shine. As for the 32 GB, the Pixel comes with 1TB of google drive and a "save to Google drive" option.
>Apple killed specs because no one care about them and that hardware should be judged on its beauty and slickness and the UX
And you know why this works? Because Apple puts sufficiently high specs in their machines so the user doesn't have to think about it, because it doesn't stall or perform tasks slowly.
Besides, this is HN. It's an objective discussion, not a marketing one.
>beauty and slickness and the UX of its software which is where the Pixel does indeed shine
I can't speak for the Pixel here, but OSX is the best OS I've ever used so I would be surprised to see a browser-only OS match that.
As for hardware, the Air is by far the best-designed laptop I've ever seen. I know people are praising the Pixel in this regard but to me it just looks like another ThinkPad. And as far that grey bar jutting out? Come on.
>As for the 32 GB, the Pixel comes with 1TB of google drive
I knew this would be brought up but I didn't want to bash Drive in my last reply. But here we go...
Somebody shared a single .png imagine with me this morning on Drive. I went into the Drive folder they shared it in, it's empty. I reload the web interface, folder is still empty. I try to search for the file name, it's not there. I reload the page again, still can't see the file in the folder, type the file name in the search box, and it finally appears in the search bar and I can open it. When I'm done I go back out, and it still doesn't appear in the folder it's in. The only way I can access this file is now to memorize the file name and search every time.
Not somewhere I'm willing to put hundreds of GBs of data just yet.
And something that's not brought up enough: data privacy. Google employees can view hundreds of GBs of your personal files, photos, documents, etc. on Drive.
With an SSD you know exactly who can access your files, and you can still choose to back up to a cloud service that actually offers encryption if you so wish (which I do).
Drive will most likely never offer encryption because Google makes its money from knowing as much about you as possible.
That Google drive could be problematic in a few places. China, for instance. Or, say, remote Montana. Hawaii might suffer from bad latency (or not, I don't know). The Cloud still isn't electricity-reliable worldwide, and until it is, you might want to have your data locally. (And even electricity isn't reliable worldwide...)
it still has just a webbrowser as the os, less battery life and is more expensive. Those things add alot to the user experience. Its a very nice device but its not better than an MBA or other good Ultrabooks.
Forget specs, lets talk about software: The MacBook air is a real computer. You can compile your code on it. IT has an operating system. You can play games.
The pixel is just a web browser.
The correct thing to make the comparison to is the iPad, but even the iPad is more functional, since it can run apps that aren't browsers.
From a usability viewpoint, the pixel is kinda laughable... it's so arbitrarily limited, it isn't even really usable unless you're on a network.
I think Apple should take every competitor seriously and I am sure they do.
My point is that Google has a history of being unable to ship anything properly. And until we see them do so and with a sizable profit margin then they shouldn't be considered in the same league as Apple. And the important skill is not making the laptop it's in the supply chain management.
You just said "nobody will or should take them seriously" and now you're saying Apple should take them seriously. Google shipped tons of products properly, if you're talking about nexus devices, they don't even advertise those much, they're more of a testbed for what's coming.
Let's be clear about this, Google's really been in the hardware business for about what.. a year, maybe 1.5? Any product pre that was developer oriented. I don't think you can expect a company to be shipping 10 million units when it has really only started to tackle general market hardware, let alone compare them to a 30+ year old manufacturer. For starters the market adoption has barely begun in the public eye.
That said though, they are starting to do what matters most, build great products... and that is what is the start to market acceptance. Guaranteed success? No... but certainly looking like they are figuring it out.
Treat Gruber like Apple PR and it makes sense. He's seeding the conversation so an upcoming Apple announcement makes sense. Maybe another sub par app release which will be wildly outmatched by the competition, like maps.
Truncating the sentence for the title changed the meaning to something much bolder.