Why I seriously doubt Apple’s technical expertise sometimes…

Let’s get this straight, I respect Apple’s core software team tremendously. OS X and Leopard have some astonishingly smooth features, immaculately programmed. This post isn’t aimed at the guys behind the OS.

But around the core team, there are some idiots. I’ve expressed my frustration with some of the decisions made by the team behind Apple’s web page creation software several times over on All About Symbian. Making it easy for beginners to create web pages is a laudable aim, but implementing it in such a way that the user’s text is simply rendered as a huge image is crazy, inelegant and farcical. What a waste of bandwidth. And how is Google’s robot going to index these pages if there’s no text?

The latest example of lunacy is that I’ve just popped onto Apple.com to grab the official demo video (apple_iphone_guidedtour_20080115_848x480) for the iPhone January 08 update. Great video, great update. But the video was a 121MB .MOV file, zipped up into a 120MB ZIP file. What on EARTH was the point in trying to compress a highly compressed video file? Just to confuse more users? Maybe someone ‘thought it was a good idea’ but didn’t actually turn on their brain, or think to check file sizes afterwards? I suspect it was simply that the person on Apple’s web team didn’t actually understand the technology well enough to know that file compression is a complete waste of time and energy on media files that are already compressed to within a inch of their life.

And all this rather begs the question, what other naive assumptions and decisions have been made by some of Apple’s employees? Not too many, I do hope.

  • http://www.nokiacreative.com James @ Nokia Creative

    I my be speak out of my ignorance here, but wouldn’t the whole ZIP download issue be linked to ensuring that movie downloaded, rather than opening in another window?

  • http://www.nokiacreative.com James @ Nokia Creative

    Sorry about my grammer! What a doofus!

  • http://www.allaboutiphone.net Matt Radford

    I think whether the movie opens or downloads depends on the filetype associations on the end-user’s computer, but yep you could be right.

  • http://3lib.ukonline.co.uk/ Steve Litchfield

    But surely if someone wanted to download the movie, they’d just do ‘Save link as’ or similar? Why waste everybody’s time and processor heat re-encoding a .mov file – I still don’t get it!