Apple’s bread and butter is in creating products that are so easy to use, a baby can figure it out. Literally. Check out this cute video below of a 1 year-old toddler unlocking his father’s iPhone, launching the photo app, swiping to see more pictures, and even double tapping to zoom in. Though to be fair, the baby might just be tapping furiously because he’s, well, a baby. Still, it’s an entertaining video which exemplifies just how seriously Apple takes its efforts to create a simple and intuitive user interface.
via Gizmodo
January 22nd, 2010 at 9:54 am
Heaven knows it is important to design products that can be used by toddlers because the people that are actually buying and using these products must be idiots, right? I figured they were designed at least for 1st graders, but I guess not.
Apples biggest concern isn’t competition from Google, but that we may evolve into a race of people too stupid to click on the blinking icon that says “Add to Cart”.
Funny video!
January 22nd, 2010 at 9:58 am
MY daughter has been doing the exact same thing with mine. I finally bought her an iPod case which came with an ipod picture in it. You can get one from monoprice.com for $2. She loves her “pod”.
January 23rd, 2010 at 8:52 am
Bob: Are you arguing that Apple should deliberately make their products a bit harder to use? Or that they just shouldn’t have bothered to put so much thought into it in the first place, in order to have no distinguishing feature from the competition?
January 23rd, 2010 at 6:29 pm
My daughter is 3 now.
I have an iPod Touch since 1 year, and an iPhone since 6 month.
One of the two has always been used as a wake up alarm since then. So it was close to our bed, my wife and I.
My daughter comes in our bed at around 6 or 7 am every morning, perfectly awakened of course 😉
One morning I saw here playing with the iPod. She discovered by herself how to unlock it, tried every icon, and found alone what was interesting for her.
So I ripped some child’s DVDs (“Petit Ours Brun” and “SamSam” are very popular in France among our youngest population)
She found them by herself, and since I get 1 hour more sleep time every morning. She’s also drawing with “Brushes”, coloring with “Colorama”, and playing “Animatch”. 1 hour more sleep is a big deal 😉
When I was 15 I had an Apple IIe.
My mother spent hours trying to understand how a computer worked even thought I knew already she was created to live in the 18th century (and not The XXth).
She now has an iPhone. Spends for the first time ours on it, and entered, by the way in the XXI century.
Conclusion : The iPhone/iPod interface is so intuitive that a whole new category of persons became potential users. Great for our beloved company.
(Sorry for my very basic English…)
January 24th, 2010 at 4:16 pm
Cute video.
All three of my kids were able to point-and-click using a mouse by their second birthday. But they are all above average… 🙂
I started with a custom Hypercard stack on my Mac Plus originally, and eventually moved to At Ease on a low-end color Mac (LCII).
I’m glad to see that folks are producing pre-school apps for the iPhone/iPod touch – it really is a great platform for pre-schoolers – it will be interesting to see if Apple offers a ruggedized version of the iPod touch one of these days. It would be a great alternative to the $99 toy computers that one sees at the retail stores.
January 24th, 2010 at 7:52 pm
my son began laying with my iphone at about 14 months…
he’s now 2 and a half and I just bought him a refurb ipod touch… so I could get my phone back!
He navigates as well as i do, watches movies and plays quite sophisticated games without any trouble at all… he has no fear, no preconceptions – he explores freely, figures things out and uses them… its quite amazing to watch…
He’d had some of the pre-schooler apps but they get boring pretty quickly…
He prefers the more challenging games that his older brothers (10 & 15) play.
Absolute favourite is “Pocket God”. He is constantly finding new ways to manipulate it – much to the amazement and chagrin of his brothers – and shrieks with delight when he discovers something new.
At first I wondered whether this was wise, but it seems to be doing him no harm at all… They are really just highly advanced puzzles after all…
He is well developed in all areas – speech, physical activity, social interaction, etc -He is very sharp and communicative, has a great imagination for improvised play… he still uses all of the regular “real world” toys, has completely toilet trained himself… and is such a joy to be around that his day carers want to visit him on weekends!
January 24th, 2010 at 7:53 pm
oh yeah…
and Bob?
you’re an idiot
January 25th, 2010 at 4:27 am
Seems to me that the toddler was already taight how to use it beforehand, judging from the fact that he was first asked to do something before doing it (ex. “Can you open it?” “Ughhhh…(click)”)
If toddlers could really use an iPhone, then the real thing would be the toddler tapping furiously everywhere on the phone and without precision (as he did when clicking the Photo Gallery).
And yeah, it’s pretty idiotic to show that a gadget is so easy to use that even babies can use it. Like text and voice messaging was already the clique of their age.
January 25th, 2010 at 4:29 am
And oh, I forgot to say. I have zero experience over any Mac or Apple product, so for the comment above, now you know.