It's interesting to see a number of mid-California culturalisms that creep into Apple products. I find it mostly amusing, and only slightly annoying.
There are probably a dozen, at least. Here are a couple of examples off the top of my head:
For a very long time, when you asked Siri the temperature, if it was above 80°, she would add the word "hot" to the end of it. "It's 81 degrees. Hot." Where I was living at the time, 81 degrees meant a light sweater was in order.
When I lived in Chicago, Apple's headphones were worthless in the winter because they were made of plastic that was perfectly bendy in Silicon Valley's climate, but would turn into the equivalent of unweildly coathangars attached to your ears in actual winter conditions. I don't know if that's still the case, as it's what made me switch to wireless headphones years ago.
Even today, where I live in the desert, it's not unusual for a current model iPhone to go into thermal shutdown (with the appropriate warning on the screen) on a perfectly normal spring or summer day, even though I don't use a case. But I expect (hope) that's about something involving electronics that I don't understand.
Most of what you describe is less a California thing than an inherent challenge in building a consumer product that:
A) has mind-boggling amount of compute available wherever you go in an insanely small form factor
B) no active cooling meaning you need to be able to vent the heat out of the CPU/RAM/GPU into the ambient environment
C) battery thermals are impacted by temperature
D) hit a price point that balances what people with pay vs margins and how much value you’re willing to invest in any given feature of the device.
It’s more useful to view this as engineering trade offs that would be made regardless of where the engineers are located physically. The engineers that need it are supplied with ovens and freezers to test out different physical environments. These are trillion dollar companies. The equipment or having staff experience and access the right environment isn’t a challenge nor a blind spot.
Those who are downvoting this, can you please explain yourself? Everything in this post is factual and exactly how engineers design products. What specific aspects of what's being said here is disputable?
Designing a phone is a million tradeoffs that boggles the best of the minds. It's an insanely difficult problem.
I visited Austin in the summertime and after a day of 100+ humid weather, the evenings go down to the lower 80s/upper 70s. It felt like a jacket or a light windbreaker would’ve been needed.
And this is coming from someone who normally lives in California. I guess the body adjusts to the climate of the region after a couple days.
After a few weeks in a very hot place, your body adapts and you get used to it. If the temperature that day suddenly drops 20 degrees to 81, you might need a sweater.
A thousand times yes. Someone might counter that the Unicode consortium accepts requests for new emoji, and that the paid membership needed for deciding which emojis get accepted is not filtered.
BUT! I haven't seen a mention of which languages the submissions have to use. In fact, the process seems to be only described in English. That puts any culture where English knowledge is limited at a disadvantage. How is that even acceptable in an internationalization organization that influences worldwide standards?
Assuming you know English and want to be a member. To give voice to your culture when it comes to accepting emojis. You need to pay them 75 USD. Okay, that might be hard, but let's assume you managed. You click "join", and... It turns out you need a credit card. Not a local bank account, not even an IBAN account, not an e-peso, not anything that covers the methods of payments the little people use in half the world (there are even places in Europe where credit cards are somewhat expensive for people to have).
This obviously favors cultures where people are:
- rich
- English-speaking
- have easy access to credit cards
My pet theory says that Western sensibilities have led to a persistent lack of an emoji for 𓂸.
So yeah, please let's abandon Unicode emoji and let people decide from the bottom up.
> determined by a big company (or by a standardization committee for that matter)
In practice the big companies are more in charge. Apple changed the pistol to a water gun (mentioned in the article and at [0]), and now all the big emoji sets from Google/MS/FB/Twtr/etc. also have a water gun instead of a pistol.
Apple also succeeded at preventing the rifle emoji and the Modern Pentathlon emoji (which contained a rifle) from being included, apparently with support from MS.
It's pretty stupid how every other big tech company follows every single bad decision that Apple makes. Removing 3.5mm jack, removing pistol emoji, notches in screens, and now getting rid of chargers.
I personally do everything I can to boycott Unicode emoji. Some platforms like Slack/Discord allow for adding your own emoji which is nice. Language should not be controlled by a single entity.
Apple deliberately and unilaterally made the decision to represent this as a water pistol, despite this being clearly not representative of a typical pistol.
It's expected for individual entities implementing the Unicode emoji specification to exercise some amount of artistic merit, but if they're not at least in good faith attempting to represent the same type of object that the specification calls for, they are saying that they do not care about the decision that the Unicode Consortium made to allow emoji to be used to represent objects of that type, and that they should be the ones with the power to choose what can and cannot be said with emoji.
Appel's modification could be disastrous if an Apple user sends a message intending "let's (squirt gun) the kids!" and it's received as "let's (pistol) the kids!"
Just about every platform now permits sending images and even gifs of your choosing if you need to send someone a bagel pictogram that won't be misinterpreted.
There's one more standard, but you could say that about any standardisation effort. These things take a really long time, trying again isn't a bad thing.
Most software standards (and even hardware to some extent) aren't that complicated, if you absolutely nail your design people will switch and yours may dominate. If it doesn't then there's no real harm done because no one's going to use it.
If your goal is to unify emojis (or reduce variation in emoji), and you create an entirely new set of open source emojis different to other sets of more widely used open source emojis, you have increased variation rather than reduced it.
The xkcd works because unless everyone is willing to adopt the new standard, then you further fragment the market. There is zero evidence that the dominant players want to converge here (except maybe if everyone adopts their design!).
Agreed. I find it incredibly frustrating that twitter invents its own emoji, which aren't even emoji, but images. So they don't copy+paste properly. They're also miles behind slack and discord in terms of not offering a nice way of searching emoji.
Anyone can install a different keyboard with its own emoji pack no?
Emojis are part of font packs which are pretty standard and open via Open TrueType, no? Apple isn’t quite as simple to do that with (albeit possible via 3p keyboards, custom per-app fonts, or custom device profiles), but it still feels like I’m not understanding your complaint.
Which has always been the case for fonts. Just because I write a letter ‘T’, there’s no guarantee how you’ll see it. It’ll look very different in Windings.
Yes. But just because it's a problem for fonts doesn't mean we should have the same problem for emoji. If you don't care if emoji look different, then that's ok, but please don't blame me for caring about their exact appearance.
Which is fair but you can't have "the one true rendering of emojis" and also have "people/platforms can use different emoji packs if they want." Someone who uses a different pack than you might have a different intention as a sender and as a receiver your message to them might be misinterpreted.
> As with all emojis, depictions of the bagel emoji vary by vendor. While the bagel's cousin the Doughnut generally appears with chocolate frosting, WhatsApp shows this as a strawberry flavor instead.
This is an interesting claim. I assume they mean that WhatsApp shows the doughnut with pink frosting. But pink frosting is common on actual doughnuts, and it is almost always unflavored, not strawberry flavored.
I remember complaints about Apple's original design looking like a bagel from some midwestern bagel factory, I thought it was fun that they improved it based on feedback.
The 'watering' down of the pistol was more annoying - if only because it ruined one of my favorite emoji combos: neutral face with pistol pointed at itself. Water pistol doesn't have the same effect.
I'm surprised all vendor variants seem to show a sliced bagel -- either closed with a filling or two separate halves with or without a filling.
A bagel is not necessarily sliced, and a good fresh bagel can be beneficially eaten like a pretzel without slicing it at all.
If I were the designer given the brief "generic iconic bagel", I would not have it sliced at all, thus avoiding the question of whether or what filling. I would put some seeds (sesame or poppy, either way) on it, to help distinguish from a doughnut.
And yet, all actual variants are sliced. Odd. Does unicode provide a suggested schematic for these, that perhaps suggests sliced?
Apple's original wasn't that bad, at least it was close.
> Provided each vendor design conveys the concept of a bagel in a sufficiently clear way, the job of the emoji is done.
Microsoft and Samsung's just look like donuts cut in half. Twitter, no clue what that is.
> Our bagel was drawn by someone who has eaten a bodega bagel before.
Google's stylized version is certainly recognizable. As far as eating a bagel from a bodega (which most of the time are plain with no seeds), if you want the good stuff you're going to a bagel shop in Brooklyn.
As a New Yorker I may have put too much thought into this. ;)
Interesting that Google's bagel has sesame seeds on it.
As a native New Yorker (Brooklyn born, back when it was still a shithole, and not infested with people from the I-states), I always got the salt bagels.
For those lactose intolerant out there, Tofutti makes a great no-lactose cream cheese alternative pretty widely available (Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods) that weirdly does a great texture-wise match to “real” cream cheese.
Were it not for the indentation in the middle, that would look entirely like a "laskiaispulla" or semla, with whipped cream in between. I sense future confusion in the Nordics, especially with smaller font sizes. :)
Sometimes it’s fun to find little ways to slip emojis in to an otherwise professional environment. I enjoy using eyeroll and fire emojis pretty regularly in PR comments. Keeps it light
I strongly oppose that. PRs should be without emojis, you're not there to play emotional games. If you make a statement, the receiver of that statement should consider that to be objective, straight forward and well meaning.
If you need to use emojis in code reviews, you have distrust, or perhaps other bigger problems in your team.
Ask yourself this question "Why do I need to add an emoji?" and introspect the reasons. Usually those reasons are "Well, what if other person is offended by this? What if my statement is too strong?".
It’s more just joking around with each other. Sometimes I’ll leave comments like:
“Had no idea you could use x library like this, awesome! :fire: :party: just make sure you’ve also considered y!”
Or if somebody made a simple typo that they’ll easily recognize, they get some kind of silly emoji.
Of course it’s different for comments like “This function seems to be doing too much, making it hard to read, I think it should be refactored to work like ...”. Those ones aren’t like the lighthearted ones, so it would be inappropriate to use emojis there.
There are probably a dozen, at least. Here are a couple of examples off the top of my head:
For a very long time, when you asked Siri the temperature, if it was above 80°, she would add the word "hot" to the end of it. "It's 81 degrees. Hot." Where I was living at the time, 81 degrees meant a light sweater was in order.
When I lived in Chicago, Apple's headphones were worthless in the winter because they were made of plastic that was perfectly bendy in Silicon Valley's climate, but would turn into the equivalent of unweildly coathangars attached to your ears in actual winter conditions. I don't know if that's still the case, as it's what made me switch to wireless headphones years ago.
Even today, where I live in the desert, it's not unusual for a current model iPhone to go into thermal shutdown (with the appropriate warning on the screen) on a perfectly normal spring or summer day, even though I don't use a case. But I expect (hope) that's about something involving electronics that I don't understand.