LEGO: The Apple of Toy Companies

[Hapori Tohu]

Fast Company recently had the opportunity to join the LEGO Future Lab at their yearly team retreat. The resulting article provides some interesting insight into the R&D branch of the company that has been responsible for things like LEGO Games, Fusion, and Ideas. It's a really intriguing read and definitely worth going through to learn about how LEGO continues to innovate and be a leader in the toy industry. I look forward to seeing the products they hinted were coming out this year!

 

View the full article

[masterchirox580]

Yeah but lego aren't quite the liers apple are.

[Deadalus]

Apple? Seems more like an insult to Lego than a compliment.

[fishers64]

What's wrong with Apple? Other than they suck at word processing compared to Microsoft and can't be bothered to design a keyboard with a Ctrl key and a Backspace?

 

What I found to be more interesting was that one of the Bionicle innovators made the Future Lab team and that sugar was banned on the Lego campus. The latter struck me as particularly odd - keeping sugar in your blood actually increases brain performance, so not sure why they did that. 

[Gatanui]

Yeah but lego aren't quite the liers apple are.

So when is the last time Apple has blatantly lied about anything in a way that made them stood out from any other tech company? 

 

Apple? Seems more like an insult to Lego than a compliment.

What's wrong with Apple? Other than they suck at word processing compared to Microsoft and can't be bothered to design a keyboard with a Ctrl key and a Backspace?

I'm not sure what you are talking about with the keyboard but to answer your question, some people choose to hate Apple because "applez are copycats and ios sucks and android is soo much better and cheaper" just as some people choose to hate Microsoft because "M$ is restrictive, expensive and Windoez and IE are the worst things in the world and tiles suck" or Google because "googlez steals all your data and sells is to the highest bidder, also android phonez are laggy and suck". But honestly, I think we should leave all the irrational fanboy hate against other tech companies out of BZPower, there is enough of it on other places on the Internet. Let's just agree all tech companies have done and do bad things and good, some are better at some things than others but they all have things they are good at. Let's talk about LEGO, which is what this topic and place is about after all. Edited January 12, 2015 by Gatanui

[Boidoh]

How in the world is LEGO the "Apple" of toy companies? The article says that LEGO continues to innovate, all I've seen Apple do is change some small technical details and release iPhone/Pad/Pod *insert number here*. If we're talking innovation, LEGO is the Nintendo of the toy industry.

[Jobber]

How in the world is LEGO the "Apple" of toy companies? The article says that LEGO continues to innovate, all I've seen Apple do is change some small technical details and release iPhone/Pad/Pod *insert number here*. If we're talking innovation, LEGO is the Nintendo of the toy industry.

You basically summed up the entire mobile industry right now, not just Apple.

[Laughing Man]

the difference is that Lego won't break into your home and put the new U2 album into your record collection.

[Art Vandelay]

How in the world is LEGO the "Apple" of toy companies? The article says that LEGO continues to innovate, all I've seen Apple do is change some small technical details and release iPhone/Pad/Pod *insert number here*. If we're talking innovation, LEGO is the Nintendo of the toy industry.

 

Expecting major innovation for every single iteration of the iPhone is unrealistic. The iPhone is such an ubiquitous product in Apple's lineup that new versions of it are like new versions of OS X. Not many people complain much about OS X not being innovative enough whenever a new version is released for the same reason just about everyone complained about Metro UI in Windows 8. It's not a good business move to fundamentally and suddenly change a core product, let alone fundamentally changing a core product each year. People don't adapt to major change well enough for that to be feasible. OS X has a formula that has seen success for years upon years, and the iPhone is no different at this point. They both receive updates that are focused on polishing the user experience and incrementally raising the overall performance each year. 

 

Apple is not the innovative company that they were 20 years ago, but most of the arguments made about their total lack of innovation these days really can't be backed up very well. No, they aren't as innovative as they used to be, and no, I don't use their devices very often, but releasing slightly changed iPhones every year isn't ALL they do. Come up with a better argument as to why Apple sucks, please. 

 

LEGO strikes me as a healthy combination of the old Apple and the new Apple. Their level of innovation reminds me of the old Apple, and their overall proficiency, success, and rate of growth over the past ten years reminds me of the titan Apple is today. 

[masterchirox580]

 

Yeah but lego aren't quite the liers apple are.

So when is the last time Apple has blatantly lied about anything in a way that made them stood out from any other tech company? 

 A documentary recently aired on BBC one showed they were lying about worker treatment and that that they were vastly overpricing the iphone. 

[Takuta-Nui]

 

 

a profit-generating, design-driven miracle built around premium, intuitive, highly covetable hardware that fans can’t get enough of.

Value judgements aside, this line is fairly indisputable for either LEGO or Apple. Clearly the situations, processes, and ways of thinking are very different, but LEGO has done very well for itself.

 

The bit about day to day management being turned over to someone who lived in Paris and seemingly didn't integrate with the actual company definitely raised my eyebrow. Bad decisions happen. It's wonderful to read the comments from the different employees interviewed. It looks like the company has really reclaimed its culture and has a bright future.

 

I've read about their brick library, but didn't know that they could almost instantly fabricate a new part to test it out. That's the era we live in!

[fishers64]

 

What's wrong with Apple? Other than they suck at word processing compared to Microsoft and can't be bothered to design a keyboard with a Ctrl key and a Backspace?

I'm not sure what you are talking about with the keyboard 

Look at the Windows keyboard that you're probably using right now. Two keys above Enter is a Backspace key, which allows you to delete the character before the cursor (i.e. what you just typed). On a Mac keyboard, that would be called Delete. The problem is, delete is commonly used to a key that deletes characters in front of the cursor, instead of behind. So your Mac has two Delete keys, and mixing them up is fun. Not. 

 

The second thing is to look at the lower left hand corner, where you'll see Ctrl, Windows Logo, and Alt. On a Mac, that's Control, Option, and Command. You need to press the Command key to do most of the Ctrl + options that a Windows PC would normally allow, and it's two keys in and with the wrong name. I can't count the number of times that I've hit the "Control" key and expected it to behave like the Ctrl key. 

 

Let's say, just for the purposes of analog, Hasbro/Mattel is Windows. If Lego were Apple in this analog, they would be producing products that are more confusing, harder to operate, and inefficient. You can argue that Lego requires more effort to play with with the building and stuff, but it's still effective for what it needs to be. 

 

Apple, not so much. 

[Gatanui]

 

 

Yeah but lego aren't quite the liers apple are.

So when is the last time Apple has blatantly lied about anything in a way that made them stood out from any other tech company?

 

 A documentary recently aired on BBC one showed they were lying about worker treatment and that that they were vastly overpricing the iphone.

 

Apple employs other companies to produce the devices they designed. I can't recall Apple explicitly lying about working conditions are their manufacturing partners besides restating the reassurances of those third parties regarding the treatment of their work forces. What they did do, apparently, is that they promised they'd take better care of worker conditions after the, at that point, latest reveals of bad working conditions and the documentary shows that Apple has failed to deliver on that promise. Of course I'm not trying to excuse deplorable working conditions but most major tech companies contract Foxconn or other factories for their products, so the problem isn't exclusive to Apple. Then again, not having actually watched the documentary, I can't judge the issue as well as I probably should. It is true that the iPhone has a very big profit margin but there is nothing wrong with that per se as long as people have a choice, which they have. As long as people are willing to pay the price Apple is in their right to demand high prices. If anyone doesn't agree with the prices Apple asks for their products, they are free to buy hardware from Samsung, HTC, Sony, LG, Microsoft or whoever else.

 

Before anyone makes any assumptions, I don't use any Apple products but frankly, all major tech companies have done something that sucked at one point or another. And of course, criticizing tech companies for the wrong things they do is perfectly alright. But what I see all the time is that people who use and enjoy the products from a certain company (some people may refer to them as "fanboys") tend to unilaterally hate against competing tech giants and spread rumors and fallacies about them. I'm not accusing you of doing that but frankly the attitude I've just described and that I see all the time is quite annoying. It's hard to have a neutral and fair discussion that way.

 

 

 

What's wrong with Apple? Other than they suck at word processing compared to Microsoft and can't be bothered to design a keyboard with a Ctrl key and a Backspace?

I'm not sure what you are talking about with the keyboard

 

Look at the Windows keyboard that you're probably using right now. Two keys above Enter is a Backspace key, which allows you to delete the character before the cursor (i.e. what you just typed). On a Mac keyboard, that would be called Delete. The problem is, delete is commonly used to a key that deletes characters in front of the cursor, instead of behind. So your Mac has two Delete keys, and mixing them up is fun. Not.

 

The second thing is to look at the lower left hand corner, where you'll see Ctrl, Windows Logo, and Alt. On a Mac, that's Control, Option, and Command. You need to press the Command key to do most of the Ctrl + options that a Windows PC would normally allow, and it's two keys in and with the wrong name. I can't count the number of times that I've hit the "Control" key and expected it to behave like the Ctrl key.

 

Let's say, just for the purposes of analog, Hasbro/Mattel is Windows. If Lego were Apple in this analog, they would be producing products that are more confusing, harder to operate, and inefficient. You can argue that Lego requires more effort to play with with the building and stuff, but it's still effective for what it needs to be.

 

Apple, not so much.

 

My keyboard here has both a backspace and a delete key, as most Windows keyboards actually do (and I use both of them with no problem). Contrast that with the MacBook Air from my father that I'm holding here which only has a backspace key, as most if not all MacBooks and Mac keyboards actually do. Honestly I still don't know what you're talking about.

 

There is no "wrong name", Apple just chose to move some functions of the CTRL key under Windows to the CMD key for reasons I don't know. CTRL and CMD are still two different keys and not two keys with the wrong name or something. It's just different than on Windows but there is nothing wrong with that.

 

I don't want to argue about this but "more confusing" and "harder to operate" aren't things I've ever heard being said for Apple products. If anything that's something I hear about Windows and having used both Windows and OS X, I agree Windows probably requires more learning to master it than OS X - though from my experience Windows is also more powerful. Not universally, but at many things.

Edited January 12, 2015 by Gatanui

[Aanchir]

The second thing is to look at the lower left hand corner, where you'll see Ctrl, Windows Logo, and Alt. On a Mac, that's Control, Option, and Command. You need to press the Command key to do most of the Ctrl + options that a Windows PC would normally allow, and it's two keys in and with the wrong name. I can't count the number of times that I've hit the "Control" key and expected it to behave like the Ctrl key.

My MacBook Pro which I'm typing on right now has a "Control" key, right to the left of the "option" and "command" keys. And its "delete" key functions the same as a Windows machine's "Backspace" key. Despite being different than what I grew up with, operating this computer is easier and more worry-free than any other computer I've ever owned.

 

The idea that Apple products are inherently confusing because they're different than what you're used to is silly, because for somebody who grew up with Apple products, it would be entirely the other way around — using a Mac would be second nature, while using a Windows PC would be a confusing hassle. Neither way of naming the keys is inherently "right" or "wrong", they're just different, and switching from one to the other is going to be a bit of a challenge for anybody.

 

Of course, the difference with LEGO is that as a toy it's designed to be immediately fun and enjoyable even for younger children, and as such it is usually easier to learn than ANY type of computer. A person who grew up building Erector sets, K'nex, or Tinkertoys could probably figure out how to build with LEGO very quickly, even though there would certainly be creative challenges and moments of frustration as they realize the ways of thinking they've grown accustomed to do not apply in the same way to the LEGO building process as they did to those other toy brands.

 

Anyway, I think this article is pretty much on-point. It also offers a lot of great insights into how LEGO does business, and how Future Lab comes up with the more experimental sorts of products we've been seeing lately that seek to translate classic LEGO building into new kinds of experiences.

Edited January 12, 2015 by Aanchir

[Lyichir]

the difference is that Lego won't break into your home and put the new U2 album into your record collection.

OR WILL THEY? I probably have all the parts I'd need to build my own copy of the new U2 album, surreptitiously inserted into the sets I've been buying for years. So maybe the difference between Lego and Apple is just that Lego is sneakier.

Edited January 12, 2015 by Lyichir

[Moku]

Wow, an article about LEGO turns to Apple.  Jeez.

 

I'm no big fan of Apple, to be honest, and comparing LEGO with them is basically saying that LEGO hasn't innovated that much in the last few years, which I feel is not the case.  That said, Apple's influence over the media is quite far-reaching, and I understand how this article links the two.  And yes, LEGO's comeback to success is much like Apple's comeback from the mid-90s to today, so I can see how the two are similar.  Plus, depending on the time frame we're talking here, Apple pretty much invented the modern smartphone with the iPhone, so it's safe to say that Apple innovated there.  Granted, LEGO's recent innovations will probably never get on that level of legacy, but LEGO's innovations are still good innovations for toy company standards.

 

All that said about Apple, I still love Android, though that's just me, not on-topic here or anything.

Edited January 17, 2015 by Moku