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Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

> Ive is, to state the obvious, preternaturally talented. But in the post-Jobs era, with all of Apple design, hardware and software, under his control, we’ve seen the software design decline and the hardware go wonky.

These two sentences don't make sense when read together. If Apple design -- hardware and software -- declined during Ive's rein that, to me, is evidence that Ive is not preternaturally talented. The moment iOS 7 was unveiled at WWDC I knew Emperor Ive is wearing no clothes. The number of basic design mistakes iOS 7 was astounding.

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I gotta eyeroll pretty hard when some internet expert points out the basic design mistakes in something.

None of those things were mistakes, they were choices made as a result of tradeoffs that people agonized over.

I think it makes perfect sense to me, Ive seems like he's got a big personality and a laser focus on a set of things he has a deep deep understanding of. Without Jobs maybe there was nobody to challenge Ive and thus the balance was pulled too far toward his vision and the greater picture has suffered.

Let's consider Jony's performance on software design first. This is what some prominent people have said about iOS 7: The Verge wrote in their review: "iOS 7 isn't harder to use, just less obvious. That's a momentous change: iOS used to be so obvious." In iOS 7 basic usability features such as making buttons look like buttons are now stuffed under Accessibility options. About this, Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment wrote: "If iOS 8 can’t remove any of these options, it's a design failure." (And iOS 8 didn't.) Michael Heilemann, Interface Director at Squarespace wrote, "when I look at [iOS 7 beta] I see anti-patterns and basic mistakes that should have been caught on the whiteboard before anyone even began thinking about coding it." And famed blogger John Gruber said this about iOS 7: "my guess is that [Steve Jobs] would not have supported this direction."

And what about Jony's other responsibility, industrial design? The iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and other Apple products are all amazingly well designed and breathtakingly beautiful. But these products weren't designed by Jony Ive all by himself. He designed them under Steve Jobs's guidance and direction. Steve was the tastemaker. Apple's post-Steve products are nowhere near as well-designed.

Consider iPhone 5c, for example. The colors are horrid, and when you add those Crocs-like cases it looks more like a Fisher-Price toy than like a device an executive would want to be seen holding. Then they released some ads for the 5c, and I kid you not, one of the ads had sounds of bleating farm animals. (It was titled "Every color has a story", published on tumblr.) That the 5c didn't do well in the market shouldn't surprise anyone.

> Consider iPhone 5c, for example. The colors are horrid, and when you add those Crocs-like cases it looks more like a Fisher-Price toy than like a device an executive would want to be seen holding.

But it wasn't for executives. It was supposed to be a downmarket phone. You may think the colors were horrid, but I think they added much needed character to the iPhone line, much like the XRs.

Yeah i often look at my iphone SE and think it really needs some character.

>Consider iPhone 5c, for example. The colors are horrid, and when you add those Crocs-like cases it looks more like a Fisher-Price toy than like a device an executive would want to be seen holding.

Except Apple has previously found wild success in selling brightly colored devices down market, see the original iPod Mini for example. A selection of colors both appeals to the sort of person they are targeting with the lower end device (teens/young adults) while also preserving the marketshare of their higher end device by turning off the kind of older, more reserved buyer who might otherwise buy the less expensive option. There's also the entire Apple lineup in the early "Second Coming of Jobs" era with the iMac and, to a lesser extent, the Power Mac G3.

The 5C was a 32-bit phone released at the same time they started moving to 64-bit. That’s a device with a built-in “use by” date.

Design-wise, I really wanted one. Technology-wise, I couldn’t justify it.

> This is what some prominent people have said about iOS 7

Prominent finance people criticize other finance people for their decisions all of the time (Buffet et al). I think I could name a hundred other professions where this is also true (I use finance as a good analog). Just because <insert prominent professional> makes a criticism doesn't make it suddenly true.

I personally hated iOS7. Guess what, it clearly didn't stop people from buying more iPhones[0]. At the end of the day, Arment, Heliemann, and Gruber can all take a seat while iOS single-handedly rakes in billions for Apple. This is how business works.

[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/276306/global-apple-ipho...

Are you arguing something can’t be poorly designed if it makes a lot of money?

The problem in arguing about design is that many things may be subjective (I do not believe all of it is subjective) whereas profit at least gives an unarguable metric.

That's kind of naive no? Everybody in this town buys Comcast, but that's not because it's a great product.

the original meaning of naive is natural, I suppose that monopolies are unnatural and as such fall outside the normal argumentation about business quality.

Furthermore I also thought I put in enough qualifiers in my statement that I did not have to defend it as being my overarching philosophy regarding every situation it might possibly be applied to. After I wrote the preceding sentence I proceeded to write another 3 paragraphs until I realized that I was actually writing a bad version of an essay on aesthetics and requirements for being able to speak with critical insight, so I erased those paragraphs and here we are.

It makes perfect sense! That's why Transformers is a better movie than the Godfather...

> None of those things were mistakes, they were choices made as a result of tradeoffs that people agonized over.

You can put a lot of thought into something and still make a mistake.

Absolutely, but the tone of the OP was not one that I felt reflected that viewpoint.

I got the sense there was a conflation of "didn't do things the way I wanted" and "poor design choices".

> None of those things were mistakes, they were choices made as a result of tradeoffs that people agonized over.

Every design choice is a tradeoff and industrial design is about making the right tradeoffs. He did not make the right tradeoffs. He regularly sacrificed functionality for the looks, and preferred form over function. While I do respect many of the things he did, I am glad his time at Apple is coming to an end.

Exactly. Which is why Apple went out of business.

>I gotta eyeroll pretty hard when some internet expert points out the basic design mistakes in something. None of those things were mistakes, they were choices made as a result of tradeoffs that people agonized over.

This is something I have had a hard time with over the years... I even emailed Jony in hte past abt some of the design "choices" that were made that REALLY irkd and cost me and MILLIONS of users too much money.

The overall body design of the iphone has been "sleek and slick" -- meaning that it was WAY too easy to drop and break.

The physical phone should have been more heartily designed from day one - and allowed for a lanyard attachement bracket on all models.

Screw the people who claim things like: OH that was a design decision to keep the 'vision' blah blah blah -- esp. and including specifically Ive.

The reason is that 'aesthetic design decision' cost consumers billions over the years.

I have a 6S+ -- my ~27th iphone

The argument is "why dont you go get a case!"

Why should such a 'perfect' design, so perfect where it doesnt want a lanyard or other safety features interrupting its elegance, require a case?

So, Fuck Ive worship.

I like the phone, I've had every iteration up to the 6S+ (which is my favorite, and I have had many of them. but I am not going to praise the shortcomings of the device and hero-worship the guy.

Sometimes a design is bad and people make the wrong tradeoffs. Look no further than the Magic Mouse 2, which requires placing it in an awkward upside-down position and that you completely stop using it in order to charge.

The original Magic Trackpad should've had a port for wired connections. That would've allowed you to avoid having to constantly change batteries, as well as avoid the flaming garbage can that is bluetooth. At least they listened and fixed these issues with Magic Trackpad 2.

iOS had a ton of mistakes, not just trade offs. I understand that yeah, I didn’t figure them out myself, but just looking at the Nielsen Norman usability studies you could see there was a lot to be improved on (and they did, to their credit)

I actually really agree with this — I didn’t hate the way ios7 looked, but I really did dislike how much it slowed me down in terms of figuring out how to read and use the interfaces that conformed to the new design style.

At a fundamental level Ios7 relied on color instead of texture for visual segmentation — and I’m not sure about others but the texture processing hardware in my brain is about a million times more reliable at performing segmentation tasks than any subtle abstract color blend detection engine in my brain will ever be ...

I hope that whatever new design mentality arises after this change is able to better improve the efficiency with which im able to use my devices - and that the devices are once again striving to meet me as an actual human rather than chasing some local optimum that might exist by imagining some 1 or 2D abstract idea of a human ...

Talent without vision. Jobs was focused on both esthetics and function. Ive was entirely esthetic driven and it shows in the lack of function.

This 1000x.

The battery had to be reduced in thickness, so it had to get wider and/or taller, and now we have iPad minis as phones.

-edit

...and Jobs was not keen on the iPad minis.

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. 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.

— Steve Jobs

Maybe Ive is an exceptionally talented designer but a poor senior executive. Steve kept Ive in check in a way Cook didn't appear to have done. Maybe its equally a failing of Cook.

And I say this as someone who is terribly excited Ive is leaving and hoping for more funcional products.

Considering all that I’ve had done, it might be hard to tamper him down. He might (wild speculation incoming) have thought of himself as equal to Steve and maybe he didn’t take it well to keep reporting to someone else. I mean he still speaks of Steve with a slightly absurd level of reverence.

Ive was equal to Steve. That was part of the agreement they came to, and why he was given the CDO title.

In his shoes and with his talent and ability to leave, I also would not have agreed to be in charge of all design only to have Steve Jobs keep veto power over me.

McCartney never reached the heights he reached in the Beatles in his solo work, but he was probably one of the most talented musicians in history.

You can can be an absolute genius as a collaborator but stumble a bit when working without someone around who can tell you ‘no’. There are a lot of brilliant writers who absolutely need a good editor.

This is a tangent, but both Lennon and Harrison made some pretty good stuff. 40 years later I can listen to their solo albums all day long. Never got into McCartney stuff the same way.

See: Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time.

> If Apple design -- hardware and software -- declined during Ive's rein that, to me, is evidence that Ive is not preternaturally talented.

Sometimes it takes working with specific types of people to bring out someone's talent in the best way. I think Steve Jobs did that for Jony Ive in a unique way - it brought out the best in his work.

Steve thought of it as The Beatles model - the team should bring out the best in everyone around them. Look at how many people pushed back on him and made great things happen - the iTunes on Windows. The App Store on iOS. Etc etc

Those sentences are entirely compatible. He could even be the most talented designer in history and still reside over disappointing results at the same time. There are many explanations for how this happens. It could be as simple as being burned out or being spread too thin. And significantly, we don't know what kind of internal constraints and forces were in play, which have massive implications on outcomes.

iOS 7 was so much better than 6 it's not even funny. I'm so happy the skeuomorphic look was finally killed.

Can’t agree more iOS 7 design goal was to get rid of skeuomorphism.

This goal was so overachieved than young readers probably will have to google the term.

And now computer UIs are ugly as sin and impossible to find the interactive elements. Meanwhile in the physical world skeuomorphism is huge with Chinese factories pumping out all manner of products that just barely match the appearance of real objects made of quality materials, woods, and fabrics, when viewed in a store or just a photo in an online store.

It had to die for more practical reasons - a pixel perfect interface is impossible to maintain with difference screen sizes. At the time there was only the 3.5 inch iPhone and the iPad.

Apple knew that various size iPhones were in the pipe.

Except it didn't have to be pixel perfect. Mac OS X was skeuomorphic and beautiful, yet it worked on various size displays, you could even resize a window, in real time, imagine that!

If you're going strictly based on going from skeuomorphic to flat, everyone is talking about the less intuitive and obvious UX design, not the aesthetic design of the UI.

In other words, the function, not the form.

Preternaturally talented professional athletes have terrible seasons, even multi-year slumps. It's downright silly to point to some piece of output that is a "mistake" (never mind the fact that this claim is itself highly subjective) and use that to conclude that, regardless of the rest of the person's output, they're not preternaturally talented.

> If Apple design -- hardware and software -- declined during Ive's rein that, to me, is evidence that Ive is not preternaturally talented.

It's possible to be preternaturally talented and still either (a) make mistakes, especially balancing priorities (say, thinness vs utility) (b) get into situations that are beyond the range where talent is a guarantee of success.

Mind catching me up on what was wrong with iOS7?

Disclaimer: I'm not a designer at all, and I have no design sense whatsoever. HN looks like something I'd design, except there would be no splash of color at the top.

For me, the most striking change in iOS 7 was that the icons lost all of their character. I put together some before and after examples:

https://i.imgur.com/hg8s50I.png

The design was... sterilized. I specifically remember that when I updated my iPad and saw the new Safari icon, I said, out loud, "what the fuck is that?"

Again, I don't know anything about usability or- well, I don't even know enough to have the vocabulary to describe what I don't know about design. But I thought the new icons were really dumb.

You're right. The new icons were bad and they're still bad. The Photos and Game Center icons in particular don't communicate anything or make use of any visual metaphors at all. It's like something you'd expect from a second year art major.

More to the point. Why did they need to be changed? What was so wrong with the way they were that a hundred million users needed to re-learn a user interface?

The badness of the Photos icons is especially bad when it's used without a label, like in the text message composer.

The number one issue that's slowly getting fixed is not knowing which text is clickable or just a label. Then there were slow animations, arguably bad icons and inconsistent font usage. That's what I remember at least, I hope my memory's not failing me.

Some of the very early icons were so garish I remember being astonished by them.

The main thing was the horrific unreadable Helvetica Neue Ultralight system font.

The most amazing writing on this topic (i.e., how Apple ruined iOS) is by Michael Heilemann, Interface Director at Squarespace. Unfortunately he took down his blog. You can catch pieces of it on web archive though: https://web.archive.org/web/20130724000346/http://binarybons...

While there are good criticisms against iOS 7, it is a bit unfair to quote a criticism timed approximately against beta 1.

Objectively, "bland", "confusing". Subjective, "ugly" comes to mind.

I’ve been saying this since iOS 7 was released! iOS 7 was littered with dozens of major design bugs that have slowly been fixed with every new release. People forgot how bad iOS 7 was because people either were so happy to be rid of iOS 6 or comfortable with iOS 12.

They aren’t mistakes, just designs for constraints we aren’t aware of yet.

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