Hopefully this signals the end of the designers tyranny at Apple.
While physical design has been of paramount importance in Apple's rise to the top, it has been more and more detrimental as Jony and his group wandered into worshipping at the altar of luxury and Platonic idealism.
When combined with /not/ ignoring other than luxury market segments and usability that was fine. But when Jony's star was completely ascendant everything else was sacrificed at that altar (see butterfly keyboard, single port MacBook, escape key-less touch bars, no 32 GB MacBook Pros since that would require non-power-sipping RAM.)
I could have lived with this if the design of the software hadn't also suffered in conjunction with the hardware. Jony was given responsibility for UX and it also started prioritizing abstract design principles over actual usability with extremely low contrast UI elements and other poor choices.
As we saw those points being walked back and Apple being responsive to the complaints, I've been wondering if Craig Federighi's star was rising and if Jony's was dimming, since I doubt he was a willing participant in the diminution of his artistic choices. Seeing the extreme effort he was putting into charity[0] and the spaceship campus, instead of his actual responsibilities, it all combined to me that he needed to either get re-focused by the CEO or get a new job.
I don't like that phrase, "tyranny of design". It implies design is just one side of a product. But design is everything. It is both form and function. A product that has great visual design is still a failure if the functional design is bad. A great designer is holistic and will be able to bring form and function into harmony..
While I don't have the inside scoop on how Jonathan Ive works, my impression is that he's good taste and excels at pushing the edge in materials and manufacturing processes -- he pioneered the aluminium unibody, for example -- and is probably a good leader. But he is not a great or original designer. Apple's recent history is littered with mistakes and poor design decisions, functional and aesthetic both, as well as a lot of unoriginal, boring visual design. There's obviously a lot of pressure at Apple, and they don't make anything easy for themselves, but that's not enough of an excuse to explain everything.
To me, the most audacious design decision in recent years was the iPhone X's removal of the home button in favour of a purely gesture-based UI combined with Face ID. That's great design that just worked.
The iPhone has one of the most slippery surfaces of almost all objects I own. It looks great in photos and ad videos but completely incompatible to the goal of safely holding it in the human hand. Things have became so bad with iPhone XS that I have never seen anyone using it without some ugly sleeve. If anyone has dared not using case/sleeve, they would experience heart wrenching drop out of hand within their first week of use.
Do you think this is good design? Why do you think this would happen at design-first company like Apple?
It's a bad design feature that is sadly common across premium smartphone brands - e.g. the Pixel 3 is also quite hard to grasp. One thing where I think lower-end phone design tends to be better, a function of their lower priority on aesthetics.
It's the fault of wireless charging. Premium phones used to have metal backs, but that is incompatible with wireless charging so we are cursed with glass for eternity now.
For most part, I haven’t had a case on my XS since launch. Love the feel. Have yet to drop it. I do put a case on it when I’m doing things like camping or taking photos at amusement parks.
> But design is everything. It is both form and function.
Steve Jobs would agree with you: "People think it's this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
So I think OP's term "tyranny of design" could be better phrased "tyranny of form" (as opposed to function).
A big part of the problem is that many designers seem to really want to be artists, not designers, and they tend to want to pull design in an artistic (i.e. form-centric) direction.
A casual glance at Dribbble makes this pretty clear.
The computer fits in my bag, even with my reading glasses. I can carry it a long time without my shoulder getting sore, which means I can use it all day on the go. Another poster mentioned that 32 gig of ram is impossible because the thin design needs lower power requirements. This actually tends to mean that you have more battery time (which is paradoxical, really).
I don't have a mac (or even want one), but I've benefitted from the trickle down effect where Toshiba seems to want to close ridiculously thin, long battery lasting macs.
Actually, the tyranny of design at Apple existed long before Jonny Ive. It began with Donald Norman who regularly discusses his Philip Starck juicer which "not meant to squeeze lemons, it is meant to start conversations."
I can't find the quote, but Donald Norman said something along the lines of "create something beautiful and people will say it's wonderful and easy to use".
This has always been the Apple way, and I don't see that changing. At Apple, form has always had priority over function.
That’s interesting. I always thought of Don Norman as having sensible, clear design principles. In the Design of Everyday Things [1], one of his main points was that devices should be always be clear about what they do, by presenting unambiguous affordances to the user. A row of light switches is no good; they should be organized so that they map to location in the room. A fridge with two knobs for temperature and volume of air should present a clear mental model to the user in its documentation, or better yet have a more direct interface to simply select the desired temperature for a given area. Doors that should be pulled should have handlebars; doors that should be pushed should have horizontal plates.
If there’s anyone whose design principles I’d want at Apple, it’d be the guy who espoused clarity and unambiguity. Him waxing poetic about a useless juicer seems very out of character, although he did indeed say that [2]. I’d be interested to hear more about his more current work for Apple.
It’s just not true. The early iOS had great fundamental usability.
The new voice recorder app is fundamentally worse than its predecessor in almost every way. IOS usability not a flat line. It started above industry standards, brought the whole industry up with it (Google would never have invested in Material Design without Apple’s competitiveness), and then seemingly when Scott Forstall left, took a real downturn.
I heard that employees started putting post-its on walls to help people walk around safely, which infuriated someone important, because they were all taken down and told not to do that any more.
Wouldn't surprise me if something like that is what sealed the deal, but the criticism of Apple's design decisions has been building for some time now.
(Apart from the price:) Nothing. It's a complete reversal from the trashcan. It's cheesy (!), loud, fun, it has personality, you can take it apart, mess with its insides, which are actually worth talking about. And people LOVE it - just as they'd probably love a decent Macbook which is maybe 0.2in thicker, but comes with an Esc key, a keyboard which won't die within a year, and enough ports to be usable.
I think he/she meant that the trash can model was very poorly received whereas the new one has generated a lot of excitement. If the new one was designed without Ive or against his wishes, it could have seriously called his value into question.
While physical design has been of paramount importance in Apple's rise to the top, it has been more and more detrimental as Jony and his group wandered into worshipping at the altar of luxury and Platonic idealism.
When combined with /not/ ignoring other than luxury market segments and usability that was fine. But when Jony's star was completely ascendant everything else was sacrificed at that altar (see butterfly keyboard, single port MacBook, escape key-less touch bars, no 32 GB MacBook Pros since that would require non-power-sipping RAM.)
I could have lived with this if the design of the software hadn't also suffered in conjunction with the hardware. Jony was given responsibility for UX and it also started prioritizing abstract design principles over actual usability with extremely low contrast UI elements and other poor choices.
As we saw those points being walked back and Apple being responsive to the complaints, I've been wondering if Craig Federighi's star was rising and if Jony's was dimming, since I doubt he was a willing participant in the diminution of his artistic choices. Seeing the extreme effort he was putting into charity[0] and the spaceship campus, instead of his actual responsibilities, it all combined to me that he needed to either get re-focused by the CEO or get a new job.
[0] https://www.dezeen.com/2018/11/16/jony-ive-diamond-ring-marc... https://petapixel.com/2013/11/24/one-kind-jony-ive-red-leica... https://www.businessinsider.com/jony-ive-bono-sothebys-chari... https://www.fastcompany.com/3019896/designed-by-friendship-j...