It’s been about a year since I made the decision to convert entirely to iOS for my mobile needs and shift to MacOS for everything I do computing, using Windows only for gaming. I have had some brief moments of remorse for my ex, Android. I still have my Google Pixel Fold and Samsung Z Fold5. I even broke them out for a couple of months over the summer to see if the love was still there. It worked until I watched the iPhone 17 announcements and then I was over it. But Android is still trying. Showing up at parties she knows I’m going to be at in that favorite black miniskirt. Digital Trends ran an article this morning that indicates that Samsung’s rumored trial-fold may go to wider markets than the suspected China + South Korean deployment we’ve heard of. And still I am unmoved.
Many I’ve heard from this year feel that Apple has gotten “boring”. This seems to be mainly oriented around the notion that there are no whiz-bang features that break the veil and hit the zeitgeist as “new”. This may be true. The creeping incremental blips of iPhone improvements certainly do not feel like they are racing along at Formula One speeds. But one of reasons I do not regret my choice is that those updates and improvements that do arrive are largely reliable. At least the ones that I care about. I’ve been a die-hard digital ink user since it stated showing up on TabletPC and PDA’s back in the 90s. Despite that life-long love for that functional paradigm, I found that over time I just fell more and more out of love with my foldables and the Galaxy Ultra. I stuck with the Galaxy Note for four models and then graduated to the Ultra and the Fold as soon as it incorporated S-pen functionality. But so often the functionality would become broken, unreliable, unexciting. The innovations were often initially exciting but my ability to rely on them, especially in a hobby-life that is heavily dependent on digital production work-flows, much less my actual work, became too low for me to maintain interest in the science experiments vs GSD (getting shit done).
I used to criticize Apple, and the iPhone particularly, for being guilty of emphasizing form over function. But the truth is that the things that we might think of as just formative become so reliable that their functionality congeals over time into a tool-fabric that is an accelerator to GSD.
While my thoughts on this topic vectored in the direction of my tech life this morning, I also struck on the gaming allegory to this as well. I feel like this is a principal problem with Xbox too. Maybe in some ways, right now, they are the Android of the gaming market. I had a responder to one of my threads over the weekend say that Xbox was constantly making “amazing innovations”; that, as the scrappy tail-end underdog, they were consistently bringing better innovations to the table.
That may well be true. But it is only impactful if people care about them. If they break the veil of people’s perception of usefulness and being a value-add. Quick resume is probably a great feature for some people. But I never use it. And what is clear from the metrics of market-share is that less than 10% of a market exceeding 310 million console players thinks it is important enough to warrant buying an Xbox.
I see that a lot of Xbox fans are infatuated by the novel. By the anticipated improvements from the HarmonyUI. By Bazzite. By configuring your gaming PC to emulate the simplicity of functionality of a gaming console. But I think they miss the point that most users find these science experiments just that.
Novel. And do not acclimate to them even when they are productized. And so I think that the notion that Xbox is conditioning its die-hard faithful console user-base to transition to PC may be a dubious enterprise. Xbox has brought a lot of innovations, or at least normalized them. Cloud streaming. Access via subscription. The offset joystick controller configuration. There were even more in the OG Xbox and 360 ea. Xbox Live. The hard drive. Network connectivity. And in those eras, those innovations mattered.
But most consumers just want good games. They don’t care if they can access them via novel delivery mechanisms and low-cost access points. They just want good ones. Whether they be first-party, third-party. They want them to look good. To feel special. They want them frequently and reliably.
I think the market reality is that until Xbox delivers on that, the “amazing innovations” won’t matter. They will always be the purview of the uber-uber-geek. The person who builds a Raspberry Pi to do the same flippin’ thing that some other COTS device that is already on the market could do. And while it is cool to say that your dog can roll over 4 times out of ten that you tell them, most prefer the dog that will sit and heel 10 out of 10 times.
Rounding Off Infinity 