Saturday, January 14, 2017

Don't Peep in the Kitchen just Yet

Sometime back, while I was designing the Watch app for LookUp, my brother (and the Co-Creator of LookUp) arrived at my desk, looked at me designing the interface and exclaimed, “This Looks Terrible! I hope we aren't shipping that!”, my response to him was simple, “Don't Look into the kitchen while the food is being prepared”, I meant to tell him that while I was in the process of designing an interface, there'd undoubtedly be things that I'd change, improvise on or remove before I finish making it, and in general it's not a good idea to critique the design during the process.

Sometimes I feel the same is true with Apple bloggers and rumor websites. Sometimes, they peep into the kitchen too early, set their expectations too high, and when the final product is ultimately different, or all together scrapped, there's an altogether different slew of rumour on rumour reports.

By now you've probably guessed what the post is about: Rumors on the Apple Car. Sometime in 2015, rumor began that Apple was planning to make a car. They'd insist that the car would be ready by 2018 and have self driving capabilities and would be an electric car. Months passed, Now the ambitions were reportedly toned down, and the first version was to just be an electric car And self driving would come later. A few months later, reports started pouring in that Apple had scrapped the idea all together, and was focusing on the software instead. Confusion ensued, is Apple making a car or not? Is even Apple clear about what they want to do with their car project? (Given a new reports suggesting that they working with law makers to work on self driving tech) Apple's Famed Car project was now termed the failed car project.

What!? Failed Car Project!? Were they even making a car in the first place? This to me appears to be a Peeping to early in the kitchen problem. Apple was probably working on a car, like they work on almost everything And the rumor went out rather earlier than it should have, and the result? Everyone assumed Apple would be ready with a car. They didn't even think of the possibility that they wouldn't eventually go ahead with it, or possibly shelf it. It's as if you were told of a touch screen Mac back in 2003, subsequently being told that Apple had “toned down” the ambitions and were focusing on building a touch screen phone instead.