Good point.
I remember when the glass Apple shop on Boylston opened I got a kick out of the immediate modification to make the glass staircase opaque as a result of customer feedback that some women found it discomforting. And the shiny, happy, smiling young people in their Apple tee-shirts pushing dusters across the glass floors to maintain the appearance of operating-room sterility. Insufferably smug support people but what option did they have with the job title Genius Barista?
...
This is what I mean by "brand stylists". Software-driven devices are
not machines, and are not sold as machines. They are sold as personal fetish objects, with the intent that the buying and owning experience outweigh all other considerations.
An iphone is a combination of not very many modules: A screen, a battery, a couple of radios, and a bunch of software. Physical interfaces--buttons, i/o connections, headphone jacks--all that--are expensive because actual people (or the machines they make) have to physically make and put those things together and because they are slightly more likely to break and require hands-on warranty service, so they design out those things as much as possible. The more of that functionality that can be pushed to software, and the less that requires work in three dimensions, the better.
But many buyers (Naisbitt's "high-touch" population) want something physical. A smartphone has as little as possible that is actually physical, but the physical form is therefore the centerpiece of the sales effort. So, they hire first-class designers to make it look cool. Ergonomics are terrible, no matter what they say. My iphone 8 escaped the drawing board with the volume control opposite the sleep button, so that humans with opposing thumbs must contort their hands to press one without accidentally pressing the other. Their answer is to find ways to get rid of more buttons, and then force software updates that render the device useless long before it's physical life is up so that we have to "upgrade". This is also a cost-reduction strategy.
The first iphone was sold one what it could do--ads showed people using it. Now, Apple stores are all about image and buying experience, like high-end audiophile stores that sell stuff on the basis of myth and lore.
To me, the fundamental strategy of tech development is to eliminate the need for engineers altogether, except as a back-room exercise to come up with new tech from time to time. It's all about the branding.
Now, back to Leica. Leica has taken a page from the branding exercise, it is true. But their cameras are still traditional cameras. They have real physical controls that trained photographers will appreciate, and provide the user with technical controls that require experience and training to understand. They fit the hands. They are precious, by which I mean they succumb to what I see as the classic German engineering fault--they are too finely engineered to be manufactured and serviced easily and affordably--but they avoid the severity of German design that I see in, say, German wristwatches like the currently very popular Nomos brand.
In the dimension of machines favoring those with experience and training, the Pentax is the king. It has a range of physical controls that trained photographers can actually use. My 645z is an excellent
camera, not just an excellent digital image capture system. But it is not a beginner's camera, nor is it aimed at those users who want or believe the software can replace their need to possess some technical skills. If we say that the DSLR is fading, it's because it's a throwback to cameras operated by those with training and experience, who are seen by those who don't have such as middle-aged fat guys or old men with white beards. That's all about
image.
The mantra "f/8 and
be there!" came from photojournalists (of the Vietnam War, as I recall) who claimed to eschew the dominance of technique over subject. Interpretations of Henri Cartier-Bresson's
The Decisive Moment makes the same point. But don't for a minute believe that Cartier-Bresson or those photojournalist didn't understand the technical aspects of what they were doing. What they were saying is: Understand technique so well that you don't have to think about it consciously, and then focus on what is important: the subject.
The (nearly) whole of current photography equipment design has been trying to bury the technique into assistive (or user-replacement) software, so that the users can imagine themselves as artists rather than mere photographers. More and more, even the timing and pointing aspect is buried in software--now photographers are videoing events in 8K and then selecting decisive-moment stills from the video stream. As often as not, the person shouting "f/8 and
be there!" doesn't know what "f/8" means or why it was used by those photojournalists. These are the same folks who imagine themselves experts in audio when they don't know the difference between frequency response and clipping.
Personally, I would love to own a Leica S2 with a range of lenses. I would
vastly rather own that than the Hasseblad or the Fuji medium-format digital cameras, which are a further push in the direction software dominance over user-controlled machine. The Pentax 645z is now 7 years old, an eternity in technology. But it is still an extremely effective camera--still one of the best on the market. It has had such long legs simply because it is more machine than software, such that the age of the software in the machine is no hindrance to a trained photographer. A Fuji with only electronic viewing will not have such long legs, as demonstrated by Fuji now having three or four models in the series. But Fuji has proved that when the line is no longer meeting their business model, they will drop it. Pentax has been more devoted to its customers over the years, even if it means a smaller market and fewer updates.
(Ironically, the Pentax, despite its dominating focus on the three-dimensional machine, is the least expensive of any of them. That's perhaps because they don't keep changing it, but it's also because the knowledgeable are not as easily swayed by branding exercises.)
That said, Pentax and Nikon are the two companies that have adopted this trained-user-oriented approach, and are probably in the most trouble of the current major manufacturers.
Rick "for whom using a camera with serious intent is in part an expression of long years of learning" Denney
