Bike-shedding is effort wasted on things that are irrelevant, like if an electronics startup paid this much attention to color. In Apple’s position as a fashion company as much as a tech company, and at Apple’s scale, they can and do invest hundreds of people’s time in making sure that the paint jobs are as good as they can get them.
The original bike shed was at the gate of a nuclear power plant.
In the anecdote, the “board” spent its time debating what color to paint it because that was something they understood, as opposed to safety coolant system engineering, for instance.
Given the original anecdote, perhaps it’s less that the thing is not relevant, more that (a) it’s not the critical thing to worry about, and (b) it’s getting discussed because that’s all the decision makers are familiar enough with to debate.
I was still looking at Apple as mainly a tech company, the “style” thing I reguarded as a distraction. We’ll see if they’re be able to keep their current valuation by ignoring their tech roots. And yes, I am bitter because just the other day an iPhone of our family experienced the infamous “white screen of death” for not having sufficient storage space left (it happened on a restart), the phone is one-year old. I hadn’t seen such low quality in a mass-produced OS since the days of Windows Me and Windows 2000.
That was the last OS I used for which the acceptable troubleshooting solution was to “format the disk”. 20 years later and I came to the same point with this iPhone 7, thought that we had left that behind us. And I can’t even do it myself, I have to wait for the local Apple service store to open, which it won’t until January 6th (the phone broke down on December 27th). But hurray! for the new color, I guess.
Sometimes it baffles me, the amount of sound and fury regarding the rose gold iPhone etc. For me it’s a utilitarian device but I know it’s not that for everyone.
Coming from a different country it is really difficult to understand why someone would keep their money for themselves instead of helping their families. Over here families thrive and fail together.
My friend has worked in a number of different pre-school facilities throughout Boston and most of them had a carved out screen based activity (usually tablets) for at least part of the day. I'm sure the science is still out but in practice it seems ubiquitous.
A coloring book teaches a billion times what a coloring app can teach. How materials feel, how to use haptic feedback to not break a crayon, how objects create sound as they touch, how different materials interact (eg pencil vs crayon), how friction changes based on force normal to the surface, how materials hardness affects abrasion and changes the shape of the crayon, how different items have different colors and how these can transfer between materials, etc...
Kids 2 to 4 should not be using screens. They have too much to learn.
