An example of Apple doing parallax right is the new iMac page:
http://www.apple.com/imac-with-retina/
At least the top image effect is very well done IMO and does a very good job conveying the central premise of the new iMac: looottts of pixels.
Having said that I really dislike what happens lower on the page where the iMac image stays pinned on the left and the descriptions scroll normally on the right. It's totally jarring to me. It seems unnatural that some of the contents would move with the scrollbar (as expected) and other significant elements would not. It immediately pulls me away from the content and leaves me trying to analyze what in the world is going on.
We experience parallax in the real world every day and are completely wired up to find it normal and expected. But real parallax involves objects at different distances. When you force objects that are in the same plane to move as if they were in different planes, you get the "funhouse" effect.
I suspect that like many other cute effects somebody will eventually do some serious AB tests and figure out that this kind of thing reduces conversions.
The pinning is actually buggy: it pins the Mac to the wrong vertical offset when you scroll past the threshold the pin hits. At least on Chrome on my Macbook Air it does, anyway. Maybe it works correctly at other resolutions or browsers.
So not really "parallax right" if you're counting the whole page from top to bottom. I like the images a lot though, they're very nice.
I actually think this was terrible as well. I clicked the link on the release date because I was curious. I scrolled for a while, and I thought I was somehow just zooming out. It clunked along and took a while to get to any information. It felt poor. The animation was not fluid. Maybe it should have been a screen sized gif, that played over 4 seconds and then disappeared. Not sure, but it felt like I had no control over the page as a user. I couldn't scroll away.
That's not a great example either. I can't grab the scroll bar and go to the top or bottom of the page since they have their own custom scroll bar that doesn't work like it should. Also Page Up and Page Down don't work.
Having said that I really dislike what happens lower on the page where the iMac image stays pinned on the left and the descriptions scroll normally on the right. It's totally jarring to me. It seems unnatural that some of the contents would move with the scrollbar (as expected) and other significant elements would not. It immediately pulls me away from the content and leaves me trying to analyze what in the world is going on.
We experience parallax in the real world every day and are completely wired up to find it normal and expected. But real parallax involves objects at different distances. When you force objects that are in the same plane to move as if they were in different planes, you get the "funhouse" effect.
I suspect that like many other cute effects somebody will eventually do some serious AB tests and figure out that this kind of thing reduces conversions.