Over at Slate Farhad Manjoo has second thoughts about the iPhone 5 – and regrets his earlier cynicism:

I’ll go even further: When I pick up the iPhone 5 and examine it closely, I find it difficult to believe that this device actually exists. The iPhone 5 does not feel like a product that was mass produced. In a strange way, it doesn’t feel like it was built at all. This is a gadget that seems as if it fell into the box fully formed. If you run your hands around its face, you scarcely feel any seams or other points of connection; there’s little evidence that this thing is a highly complex device made from lots of smaller things. Instead it just feels like a single, solid, exquisitely crafted piece of machinery, and once you pick it up you never want to put it down…

Gruber, who runs the blog Daring Fireball and is an obsessive chronicler of Apple, argued that the tech critics like myself weren’t adequately valuing niceness, his word for how solid the iPhone 5 feels in your hands. He wrote:

The bored-by-the-iPhone tech press/industry experts surely value niceness, but they do not hold it in the same top-tier regard that Apple does. They are not equipped to devote an amount of attention to niceness commensurate with the amount of effort Apple puts into it. Apple can speak of micron-level precision and the computer-aided selection of the best-fitting of 725 identical-to-the-naked-eye components, but there is no benchmark, no tech spec, to measure nice. But you can feel it.

When I first read this I thought it was bullshit. But now I understand what Gruber means. With the iPhone, Apple is building products at a level of quality that may be unprecedented in the history of mass manufacturing…
He soars above the puny issues with iPhone Maps. Worth a read. By the way, this piece helps explain why people who moan about the ‘limits to growth’ are just wrong. Niceness can be built – and niceness has no limits.