Putting aside its success, wouldn't you consider the Apple Vision Pro as something pretty interesting from a hardware perspective?

You can go to any point in Apple’s history and you’ll find people saying the exact same sentence: they haven’t innovated anything in 5 years.

Almost always exactly that number. Almost always dismissing any product in that period because they’re not normalized yet, and then once they’re normalized then they’re boring and not considered.

It is impossible for Apple to be considered innovative by their standards.

Another innovation is their line of M-series chips. I'm typing this on an M1 Max and this is by far the best combination of industrial design and physical hardware that I have used over the past 20 years. I've had it for four years, three new generations of chips have come out since then and this thing chews through anything I throw at it.

A ground-breaking, industry-changing innovation like the iPhone is like lightning in a bottle. It would be insane to think Apple can capture lightning every 5 years like clockwork.

It's also easy to point to the failures as evidence, but both innovative and boring companies have failures...it's just that innovative cos have the occasional success that makes up for the rest.

(Hell, sometimes it's the same product, just in different eras, like the Newton vs the iPad.)

Yep, on one of the products I built, I use this when a person subscribes to the paid tier. It's really nice, not too obtrusive, but it's fun! Plus, it only happens on that specific scenario, so it's not overdone.

Pipedrive CRM also does this when you close a deal, they even previously had a person shooting a hoop or something, that was nice. It's rewarding!

Interestingly, George R. R. Martin still uses WordStar 4.0 [1] to write all of his books. It even predates WordPerfect 5.1 by three years (1986 and 1989).

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/14/george-r-r-martin-writes-e...

I agree with your points, but wanted to point out that the most recent iMac lineup is a bit fun and whimsy! It comes in seven different colors, and while metal it does give off a little bit of that iMac G3 feeling.

Jony Ive left Apple in 2019, but I think we're still in his era of design philosophy, will be interesting to see where Apple evolves in terms of hardware design over the next 10 to 20 years.

Wasn't that UIFaces? They're now also some sort of AI-generated faces product, but I remember I also submitted mine there and it was great seeing it pop up here and there.

www.uifaces.co pops up at the top of the search but this is not. WebArchive says it started around 2018 and the domain was registered in 2017.

I remember the services (faces, or avatar, something) but it was since the early 2010s.

Nice, I’m working on creating a demo video of a product we’re launching soon, will give this a shot!

I don’t have a constructive comment, I just wanted to point out that your phrase _“The modern sickness is the burnout of youth.”_ is beautiful and really struck a chord.

I believe the age verification kicks in because there are scenes of violence in the video itself, not because of the topic.

I run a development agency, and on a few occasions, we've had clients ask us to build features similar to what you've outlined above. One of those clients had a pretty thorough specification document that outlined how this behavior should work.

When you open the listing, it should wait a few seconds and then show you a number between 8 and 20 of people who are actively looking at this listing. If it was night-time, it shouldn't really be that much, so let's put in a number between 2 and 8.

This was of course all fake since the platform didn't launch yet. There was also a lot of other "building fake anxiety" tactics, but this one and all other got buried way in the backlog and never actually implemented thankfully.

I'm not saying that Booking.com is doing this, but I definitely hate this pattern.

Isn't this basically false advertising?

Arguably; it's not advertising the product itself (e.g. hotels). There's no rules against misreporting user or activity statistics as far as I know.

It is an interesting topic.

I never worked in a brick and mortar store but I wonder if they purposely only place 1 or 2 items onto a shelf to create a false sense of scarcity. Meanwhile they have a whole pallet of them in the back. As a customer you would never know but if it came down to taking legal action, it would probably be pretty hard to prove without a doubt this was done on purpose.

Scarcity or feeling like you're going to miss out on something (especially a deal) is a really powerful trigger. I generally ignore most advertising but man when you see that there's only 2 left of something you want on an online site, I would be lying if I said it didn't affect me. Luckily this tactic is less potent now for a number of things because so many online stores sell the same items.

Next time you go to a restaurant notice where they seat you. Usually its in the front so the place looks crowded from the street.

See my comment further up the tree. At least some years ago when I had access to the code, it wasn't deliberately misreporting statistics.

You're lying to make it seem more desirable; is there a difference between "20% more effective" and "20 people are looking at this"?

Maybe no explicit rules, but seems to run against ethics nonetheless.

As the other reply said – it's not, since no information regarding the actual listing is false.

So technically, it's not. But I agree with you that it should be labeled as such.

I don't have the same vehement hate you do, haha, but I can agree that the UX here is bad. On desktop, I usually switch between users and channels using the Quick Switcher (⌘+K) so don't really have to dig through the sidebar, but I have noticed it on my tablet and it annoys the hell out of me.

One simple tweak to that would be to have that specific user at the top in the Drafts section, but also leave the user in the Direct Messages area as well.