tundraboy

DAalseth said:

Two areas that IMO are solid signs that Apple's design philosophy has changed. The newer MacBooks with lots of different ports. Ive was the one who made the MacBook with just one, and other models with only one kind. The other place is the Mac Studio. Ive would never have put ports on the front. These are good changes in philosophy. Ive was so focussed on design that very often functionality took a back seat and the user, the customer, suffered.

Steve Jobs used to say "Design is not about how it looks but how it works." Or words to that effect.
Jony Ive started to drift away from this when Jobs passed away.

The opinion appears to be that Apple design has become less and less daring and innovative, with Ive's departure pointed to as a key inflection point.  

Throughout this discussion about the evolution in Apple's design philosophy, though, nobody mentions the relationship between design and the volume of product sold.

A boutique manufacturer can afford to address only that segment of the market that is willing to trade off function for form.*  (It doesn't work as well as it could but hey, it looks nice.  More importantly, it makes me look nice.)  Not that many people think that way so mass manufacturers have to pay more attention to function than to form because the majority of customers, or people in general, really, will not sacrifice too much function for form.

Like it or not, Apple is now a mass manufacturer.  The type of Apple customer who posts on this particular thread, who cares enough about form to take time to meticulously analyze and critique Apple's design evolution, is not the typical Apple customer anymore.  Those videos that have Ive waxing poetic about the finer design details of a new iPhone or Mac were not meant for the bulk of Apple's customers, they were for the people who watch keynotes and product intros. i.e. a very small segment of Apple's customers.

Does anyone remember Apple's main pitch that persuaded people to switch from PCs to Macs?  It's not "It looks like a work of art." It's "It just works."  Think about the "I'm a Mac. I'm a PC" campaign.  It was all about function!  The ads didn't even show an actual Mac, just an anthropomorphic portrayal of one.

Most people couldn't care less that a laptop is 1 cm thick rather than 1.2, or whether the iMac has a chin or not, or that an iPhone has rounded rather than sharp corners.  They do care very much about 1) what the device can do, 2) that it does it with minimum fuss, 3) that it's reliable, and 4) that they can get help if they run into a problem.  And Apple has addressed all 4 requirements better than any of their competitors.

*The extreme case of this is Frank Lloyd Wright.  Every single building he built leaks water or is structurally unsound, and thus requires expensive maintenance, repair, and updating.  An extreme case of focusing solely on form and completely disregarding function.

How to misuse data and statistics to generate more clicks.

There is no information whatsoever in the article that indicates whether intimidation occurred or not.  Any post claiming it happened or not merely reveals the poster's own ideology-driven prejudices.

Apple Maps is my default navigation app but sometimes when I search for a route by business name it sends me to a totally wrong address, the street name would be completely different and several blocks away from the correct address.  I wonder if this is a business playing dirty tricks on its competitor (the last time this happened I was trying to get to a used car seller, with apologies to ethical used car vendors) by using the crowd sourcing function to intentionally report the wrong address.  I don't know if Apple allows that at all.

(I also don't know how often Google Maps routes to the wrong address since I don't use it that often.)