If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)

sskogstokig 3 days ago 20 commentsRead Article on paulbuchheit.blogspot.com

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Discussion (20 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

ChadNauseam•about 3 hours ago

Apple messed up one thing about the iPad, which made me never use mine and eventually give it away. Basically, my iPad would die in a couple days if left unplugged. Because I only want to use it about once a week, that means I have to leave it plugged in all the time. Of course I or someone else inevitably wants to plug something else into that charger, so the iPad gets unplugged and forgotten about. Then, in a week when I actually want to use it, it's dead, and I use something else. The result was, I literally never used it.

loloquwowndueo•about 1 hour ago

> my iPad would die in a couple days if left unplugged.

Something wrong with your iPad then. All three of mine would easily hold a charge for more than 2 days even when turned on but unused (so asleep).

vjvjvjvjghv•25 minutes ago

Mine loses maybe 20% over 2 weeks if unused.

Retric•about 2 hours ago

They boot reasonably quickly, just turn it off.

While on they are constantly listening for a “find my” signal so it’s easy to locate. For the overwhelming majority of people it’s a good tradeoff.

Our_Benefactors•about 2 hours ago

Not a solution. Something like “shutdown after n hours of inactivity” would fix it though.

Retric•about 2 hours ago

I think in theory general case I’d rather be able to find it easily than have more charge when it’s located. You can generally use one while plugged in.

Anyway, the root of their issue is other people unplugging it, which is a bigger issue than just the iPad. Still if you turn it off before pugging it in the iPad would have ~full charge if someone unplugged it. They hold charge for months on store shelves.

ryandrake•about 2 hours ago

Or a power button that actually removes power from the device rather than just turning the display off. The "actually shutdown long press + UI" process has --just-- enough friction to make me forget to do it or not bother with it.

paulryanrogers•about 3 hours ago

Is it even possible for tablets to hold a charge so long and provide near instant wake?

Why didn't you try powering it off when done?

graeme•about 2 hours ago

I'm fairly sure my old ipad did, maybe the ipad air 2. My current ipad pro doesn't seem to work this way. I could be mistaken, perhaps I used or charged it more.

actionfromafar•about 2 hours ago

Of course it is possible. From fundamentals alone, it has space for a huge battery. Heck, many cheap laptops can sleep longer than a week and still has some power left.

jonplackett•about 3 hours ago

Read something similar the other day about the original Walkman.

The engineers wanted to add recording function, thinking it would help with sales and to only cost a negligible amount to add.

Someone cleverer said no, because if you add that feature now people will be confused what it is for. If they don’t want to record audio, they’ll think the product isn’t for them.

momojo•about 1 hour ago

I've had so much fun writing small apps in pure JS and HTML witj Gemini (no harness or agent, just the free web chat) because it's forced me to keep my index.html below 1000 lines. I love the forced constraints. It's liberating. My day job is wrangling production-level codebases of a monolith service, so my tiny web apps let me live out the fantasy of cutting features instead of adding them.

Supermancho•about 3 hours ago

Survival bias powers these "insights", 100% of the time.

keane•about 1 hour ago

This writeup looks at a successful product with a small number of features that was thereby distinguished from a field of unsuccessful products with a large number of features. Accounting for many products, considering both successes and failures (i.e. using a wide selection of data), it argues that the distinguishing factor of less features was related to the device’s popularity.

In the canonical example of survivor bias, the only bombers being examined (for their characteristics) in the original flawed analysis were the ones that made it back; the planes that were shot down (and their characteristics) were not being considered — an error.

Zak•about 1 hour ago

Sure, but how many failed consumer products can you name that solved a problem a large number of consumers actually had way better than anything that came before?

I should probably qualify that by saying that a product that looks to be amazing but costs way too much, is impossible to get because of manufacturing issues, or requires a third-party ecosystem that doesn't exist does not actually solve the consumer problem.

conartist6•about 2 hours ago

Maybe, but you can't count how many times I see it happen in reverse too. Without saying it directly, a person reveals that they believe there is nothing left to invent or that whatever is currently best established can never ever be replicated or (gasp) beaten.

admjs•about 1 hour ago

The hardest part of product management is saying no to reasonably good ideas. Bad ideas are pretty easy.

hyperpallium2•about 2 hours ago

Fewer features = smaller frame, easier to satisfy, better customer targeting.

robbak•about 2 hours ago

> For markets that have purchasing processes with long lists of feature requirements, you should probably just crank out as many features as possible and not waste time on simplicity or usability.

This was great snark.

beachy•about 1 hour ago

ERP and corporate procurement in a nutshell.