As I said, the colours were more subdued and the overall design concept was much more mellow. All that ‘fake wood’ looked splendid on Retina displays. And then it was as if someone’d taken a cosy, fireplace-lit little room, and turned it into a futuristic hospital ward. That’s not to say I’m opposed to the latter - just wouldn’t want to live in one.
Also, I’m not quite in favour of all those gaudy iPhone finishes they offer nowadays. With Apple, less is more, as it was exactly this notion that lent the company its luxurious, enigmatic aura in the noughties, the phenomenon upon which the ever-growing line-up has taken a toll despite the fact that most iPhones are now selling at absolutely formidable prices
Oddly enough, I’m rather glad Jony’s left Apple. While I fully recognise his enormous contribution to Apple’s success, this new flat, colourful design language of his, which the industry was very quick to copy, still doesn’t quite sit well with me. I experience some kind of sensory overload while lacking the emotional connexion I had back in the day when the colours were subdued and the designs, sophisticated…
Because that skeuomorphism with fake wood and leather as well as other more pointless attempts to mimic real world items completely out of scale on a glass display wasn't sensory overload?
If this means that new design leads at Apple give a little more emphasis to function over form, I'm all for it. If Apple doesn't return to a machine in which the end-users can replace/upgrade memory, storage and battery, my current late-2016 MacBook Pro will be my last Mac. It needs a new battery and Apple has quoted $450 for that service. Although my keyboards have been okay, my daughter recently bought two Macs that have to go back to Apple for keyboard replacement. And in addition, I think their OS QA has really gotten far worse in recent years. Every update seems to bring more issues, especially to older applications that had always worked fine. Sometimes I have to wonder what all these hires at Apple are actually doing. My personal feeling, observing from a distance, is that Apple has perhaps gotten too large to effectively manage. I can remember when Apple used to test every single phrase that would be displayed to a user to make sure it conveyed the correct meaning. Today their language is as bad as Microsoft's and sounds like it was written by programmers.
I always thought it was a bit insane that the phones got thinner and thinner and Ive would make videos showing how great the back looked and yet, you really had to keep it in a case, because if you dropped it without a case, chances are the phone was destroyed. So if you had to keep it in a case anyway, what was the point of making it so thin and having reduced battery life because of the limitations on battery size?
I always thought Ive seemed like he cared how a machine looked, but didn't seem to care too much how it operated.
To all of those who are cheering and seeing the departure of Ive as an occasion to expect thicker products from Apple:
No, you won't get from Apple that monster laptop of three inch thick, with 16 fans, 8 hard disk bays,1080p display, 16 slots of desktop RAM.
The thinness of Mac products is simple physics: give it more room, it will hold more heat.
A laptop is not a flattened desktop tower, unlike a desktop PC, the fans in a laptop cool down only the CPU and the GPU, not the whole case. The rest of the laptop must cool down itself. For faster heat dissipation, the overall volume must be kept as small as possible,
This is the reason Intel struggles so much to push the Ultrabook concept.
IVE was wonderful but, . . At times the pursuit of the ultimate edge was ill advised like the pursuit of thinnest, especially in the iMac line was silly. A little bit of function over form would have done both Jobs and Ive some good.
No way, thin means lighter. My new iMac is significantly lighter than my old one, like by 10 or 20 pounds. This has real world benefit, from transport to how well it sits on an arm mount.
I never cared for Ives vision of maximum thinness of design when it came to sacrificing performance. My current iPod Touch’s battery life is laughable and must always be plugged into a power source or I’ll get the low battery warning. Same with the MacBook Pro, it’s too thin to include the SD card reader anymore.
How used up is your battery? They aren’t supposed to last forever.
I have never ever used a SD card since my cameras use CF. Should your laptop include a CF reader?
He had some good stuff and bad stuff. Just like most people. He also got lucky with some timing and probably unlucky with other timing.
Personally, I think he was moving too far from function and letting obvious errors go uncorrected.
Just one example. The 11" Air should never have been allowed to go public with light grey text on a basically grey colour scheme. An absolute nightmare out of the box. Something as plainly obvious as that should never have got out of the gate. He should have been on top of those things even if the original decisions weren't his. As a designer in an influential position, he had the duty to catch such huge in-your-face problems
New blood, new ideas and new solutions are needed, so seeing him go wasn't a big issue.
Oh, sure, Ive was about as good as most people, and got lucky. Cool story bro.
Steve Jobs over-rated Ive and made him unassailable within Apple. The consequences of that have hit Apple - the disastrous 'Trash Can' Mac Pro, the iMacs and MacBooks which became essentially 'disposable' and all in the name of aesthetics. His reach went too far and unchallenged. His influence will live on but hopefully in a more measured dose.
The trash can MP was a dead end as they realized parallel GPU processing wasn’t going to be a thing.
There is absolutely nothing “disposable” about Macs. You’re confused, as you seem to think not having DIY upgradable parts means disposable, which it doesn’t.
Steve Jobs and Jony Ive shared the same design instincts and vision. As Apple moves away from Ives, it is also moving away from Job's. It will happen slowly, but it will happen. Sad to see.
Yes and no. Jobs and Ives were a balance, a Yin and Yang as it were . Once Jobs was gone, I think the tension that made Ives designs so great went with him. I don’t think Ives has done as good quality work since Jobs departure. Just as a kite needs a string to fly high, Ives needed Jobs to stabilize him and keep him from plunging off into rabbit holes.
Sure, no quality work out of Apple in 8 years. No quality phones, Macs, accessories...nope it all stopped. Riiight.
I never cared for Ives vision of maximum thinness of design when it came to sacrificing performance. My current iPod Touch’s battery life is laughable and must always be plugged into a power source or I’ll get the low battery warning. Same with the MacBook Pro, it’s too thin to include the SD card reader anymore.
Is there an AppleWhine.com site somewhere that holds four or five templates forms for quick and easy forum posting?
I'd like to do a keyword search for "thinness" and "dongle" and "if Steve were alive" and then get a handy-dandy formatted post that I can use to pollute forums with the same rehashed dross.
“It looks as if Apple no longer sees his vision quite as crucial as it was.”
Uh... seemed like from all accounts this was a largely amicable transition, and had he kept interest, he could’ve stayed indefinitely as CDO. What a weird lede.
"However, it's hard not to see Design as being something less important now in Apple. It's hard to see it as something even approaching as crucial as it used to be."
Yeah, no. Design is as important at Apple as it was a decade ago, especially as they push further into new realms like wearables and non-traditional interfaces. The whole “hardware isn’t important because of services” thing isn’t actually a thing.
Yes. He left because he wanted to expand his work into other areas, and his long term contract will assure his influence at Apple will extend for some time. Though, not being part of the company, his authority will be much less. He can’t enforce a policy, for example.
Buy an Apple product, couple years later it quits working. No worries mate, just toss it in the bin and buy a new one. Who cares about the design if it fails so quickly?
Buy an Apple product, couple years later it quits working. No worries mate, just toss it in the bin and buy a new one. Who cares about the design if it fails so quickly?
My ten-year-old iMac wants to know what you are talking about.
He had some good stuff and bad stuff. Just like most people. He also got lucky with some timing and probably unlucky with other timing.
Personally, I think he was moving too far from function and letting obvious errors go uncorrected.
Just one example. The 11" Air should never have been allowed to go public with light grey text on a basically grey colour scheme. An absolute nightmare out of the box. Something as plainly obvious as that should never have got out of the gate. He should have been on top of those things even if the original decisions weren't his. As a designer in an influential position, he had the duty to catch such huge in-your-face problems
New blood, new ideas and new solutions are needed, so seeing him go wasn't a big issue.
Oh, sure, Ive was about as good as most people, and got lucky. Cool story bro.
Another glaring example was putting the SD slot on the back of the iMac.
For someone that liked to tell us how much effort went into some easily overlooked detail, he didn't give much thought to plunking the iMac SD card slot in the absolute worst position for it.
And lets not forget how long it took Apple to get front facing USB ports.
Timing is a crucial element of many things. In design it is sometimes vital, especially if your design depends on technologies that don't exist now or aren't mature enough or if your target market is not currently receptive to it.
A keyboard without traditional mechanical keys for a MacBook would be a good example. It is also possible that the market could eventually reject the glued together/unrepairable for a reasonable price design. The current design for MBP is from late 2016 and when I criticised the glued in battery which required changing the top case and keyboard to swap it out, I was told by many here the battery would out live the life of the machine. Well, we are now at the statistical starting point of what I consider a period of possible replacement cycles of batteries on those late 2016 machines and they are out of warranty and seeing AppleCare contracts expire. Let's see if people remain happy with the design when they realise the cost of changing a battery.
There is even a person in this thread who is already unhappy with the $450 quoted for the replacement.
Comments
I always thought it was a bit insane that the phones got thinner and thinner and Ive would make videos showing how great the back looked and yet, you really had to keep it in a case, because if you dropped it without a case, chances are the phone was destroyed. So if you had to keep it in a case anyway, what was the point of making it so thin and having reduced battery life because of the limitations on battery size?
I always thought Ive seemed like he cared how a machine looked, but didn't seem to care too much how it operated.
It resulted in the butterfly keyboard and bad Mac portables for 3 years.
Also, I was told by Apple Engineers that an extra millimeter on the iPhone would give another 3/4 day battery life.
Not a good trade off.
Also, I'm surprised that the news of his increasing use of cocaine led to a lot of missed design meetings has never been reported.
No, you won't get from Apple that monster laptop of three inch thick, with 16 fans, 8 hard disk bays,1080p display, 16 slots of desktop RAM.
The thinness of Mac products is simple physics: give it more room, it will hold more heat.
A laptop is not a flattened desktop tower, unlike a desktop PC, the fans in a laptop cool down only the CPU and the GPU, not the whole case. The rest of the laptop must cool down itself. For faster heat dissipation, the overall volume must be kept as small as possible,
This is the reason Intel struggles so much to push the Ultrabook concept.
I have never ever used a SD card since my cameras use CF. Should your laptop include a CF reader?
Oh, sure, Ive was about as good as most people, and got lucky. Cool story bro.
The trash can MP was a dead end as they realized parallel GPU processing wasn’t going to be a thing.
There is absolutely nothing “disposable” about Macs. You’re confused, as you seem to think not having DIY upgradable parts means disposable, which it doesn’t.
Since Ive has been in charge until very recently then you surely must credit that to him as well.
IVE not IVES
So many people can’t spell a three letter name correctly. It’s crazy.
Mac not MAC!
Mac is not an acronym for anything.My ten-year-old iMac wants to know what you are talking about.
For someone that liked to tell us how much effort went into some easily overlooked detail, he didn't give much thought to plunking the iMac SD card slot in the absolute worst position for it.
And lets not forget how long it took Apple to get front facing USB ports.
Timing is a crucial element of many things. In design it is sometimes vital, especially if your design depends on technologies that don't exist now or aren't mature enough or if your target market is not currently receptive to it.
A keyboard without traditional mechanical keys for a MacBook would be a good example. It is also possible that the market could eventually reject the glued together/unrepairable for a reasonable price design. The current design for MBP is from late 2016 and when I criticised the glued in battery which required changing the top case and keyboard to swap it out, I was told by many here the battery would out live the life of the machine. Well, we are now at the statistical starting point of what I consider a period of possible replacement cycles of batteries on those late 2016 machines and they are out of warranty and seeing AppleCare contracts expire. Let's see if people remain happy with the design when they realise the cost of changing a battery.
There is even a person in this thread who is already unhappy with the $450 quoted for the replacement.