Ive’s Legacy, the Post-Ive Apple
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“My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people.”
Bands are hard. People in bands are passionate, often drunk and/or on drugs, almost guaranteed to be egotistical, and fiercely competitive - not at all team players by default, more like literal 10X music rock stars. (It doesn't help if they are.)
There's almost never a supervising manager to keep it all together. (Producers are temporary, and band managers are more like salespeople and hired negotiators than corporate managers.)
It's interesting to wonder what would happen if you took difficult but talented musicians and somehow managed them into smooth cooperation. Maybe Jobs did indeed do the software and design talent equivalent - but even he would have struggled with getting to happen in the music business.
Top-down, command-and-control organizations that churn out product are different. Not all achieve the same success, but nearly every industry has figured out how to industrialize “creativity.”
In music, pop has had industrialization for sixty to seventy years. Instead of The Beatles, think of all the “bands” that were actually vocalists fronting for The Wrecking Crew or The Funk Brothers.
Think of producers and arrangers like Quincy Jones or Trevor Horn or Prince. They produced many acts, including their own, but they were essentially scaling themselves.
Bands of equals are hard. But industrializing music is an understood business.
> So Steve Jobs’ real talent was hiring good people. 'Cause he didn't invent most of that stuff but he sold it. He had ideas, and some of his ideas were the inventions and some of them got battered around and thrown away, you know, but he knew how to hire great people. And the people he hired, the reason they were great was they were great together. It was a very egoless environment in all honesty. People had their ideas, they would push 'em but they could be talked out of 'em. They could learn, we were all there, we were small enough. As you said, I was doing kernel work, language work, you know, whatever work needed to be done, we were all in it together. So it was a very positive environment. It was the closest work environment to my high school that I ever had. Tolerant, directed, but you know, and focused.
Also the ridiculous obsession with thinness of macs and iPhones probably at the cost of making them do something useful, if that is Mr Ive's doing, he has clearly outlived his usefulness.
Those iMacs though were pretty. Never used one but Ben is right about them being Ive's best work. Wish him a happy and most well deserved retirement.
Buttons looked like buttons, leather and denim accents made the phone feel like a luxury device even though it was just digital fabrication.
Even the notes application looked like a sketch pad with a special “handwriting” font. I was sad when it went but now I’m in full nostalgia mode.
I wonder why they decided to kill it. There must have been a good reason.
Because it is tacky and it didn't age well
I'd say the initial use of it was maybe in discoverability, but I suppose when smartphones became more popular that lost its main function.
I think it gets distracting sometimes and it is needlessly design heavy (think how much images you need to do that).
On top of that, I think there were other design considerations — how to make iOS' scale up to iPad more easily (remember when Siri was in a little box in the middle of the screen?) to the point where iPad apps can now be adapted with a checkbox to run on macOS. I think the groundwork started in iOS 7.
For those who don't know them, the "buttons" like "Cancel" "Next" here:
https://www.dummies.com/wp-content/uploads/293595.image1.jpg
Young users don't have such problems, but original iOS was easy to use for the older generations too. Steve Jobs cared about the easy discoverability. That is something that started as early as with Apple Lisa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4 also recently on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20247545
It was a big step back for my parents when iOS removed the buttons present in the older design and replaced them with the plain text.
I'd say this is a good example of (light) skeumorphism (which is mostly good and non-intrusive), I was mostly talking about stuff like the notes app https://www.dummies.com/consumer-electronics/tablets/ipad/ho...
https://www.authsmtp.com/images/setup/iOS11-smtp-server-setu...
They never know that they are supposed to click on these to proceed. With the button look it was obvious to them.
Because anyone can copy it. Skeuomorphic is basically a copy in itself, of real-life objects, so there is no design-patent possible.
IMO the glass highlights and reflections everywhere were beautiful.
The flat look is just meh in comparison. It does the job, but discoverability for buttons is poor, and it's just boring.
CPU certainly isn't an excuse today. Nor is "It's dated". IMO flat with gradients looked dated as soon as it appeared.
That's an odd one to focus on. Buttons only ever showed in the navigation bar at the top; one rarely, if ever, saw buttons other than to go back and to edit, and since the newer design, the focus has been on swipe gestures for navigation.
iOS 7 did go too far. I think people forget how much the design has improved since then, though.
> There must have been a good reason
All those designs looked hideous, hokey, and everybody hated them? That was made all too clear when those designs made the leap to OS X Lion.
Even back in the iOS 6 days, I thought iOS was beginning to look old and tired.
I think the extensive use of textures and animations (like Passbook's card shredder when deleting a pass) also limited to what extent iOS could be made to dynamically scale up between iPhone and iPad. I'm fairly certain that iOS 7 is when the foundations for this started, with a cleaner design that could more easily adapt to larger devices and different orientations.
I feel like I'm making it up when I say Autolayout started with the new design, but I'm sure the new design was initially made with Autolayout in mind. It wasn't long after the new design that the first iPhone with a different-sized screen came out. Since developers started adopting Autolayout and the new sizing system (well, newer than springs and struts from before) that iPad software can now easily adjust for four display sizes and adapt to macOS in Catalina.
This would certainly explain Apple’s apparent lack of direction in recent years. Between this, their recent refocusing on “services”, and the clusterfuck of ports, dongles, and redesigns on new products, I am fearful for the future of Apple hardware.
But does anyone in the engineering groups yet get to pushback enough against bufferfly keyboards before they go to market or will function[ality] still follow after form?
Whether the same thing will at some point happen to Apple we do not know (although I'll wager we're nearing Apple's peak), but it will likely take a monumental change in the way that the technology world works for such a transformation to happen.
They just tend to choose not to these days to make our user experience slightly worse and extract more money for dongles or force us to buy more of their special hardware.
Which seems sensible, even under a benevolent dictator: if the COO says the logistics are impossible, well, you'd better go back to the drawing board, even if the design is perfect.
We'll see if there's a move to more repairability now that he's moving on.
I suspect there won't be, but I'd love to be proved wrong.
That is not at all a recent thing.
Example: the first iMac mouse in 1998 was round. A casual observer might not realize how misguided this is until they try to use one for 5 seconds and can't keep it in the correct orientation.
Another example: dreadful charger cables that predictably break. It's been this way for at least a decade now.[2]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_USB_Mouse
[2] - https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Apple-chargers-always-break/ans...
Ben of Then would easily spend an hour meticulously crafting around the topic whilst carefully rationing his listeners' attention. Once listeners are thoroughly primed, Thompson would then proceed with a sudden, massive contextual leap shifting the laid groundwork (vertically) into potential energy, lifting us along.
Ben of today, writes mechanistically, with two main pillars: 1)catering to his technocratic subscriber-base 2)asserting himself as an expert historian of the industry.
Technocrats demand affirmation of their worldview (that is what they do), so static narratives provide an important anchor. The preeminent historian supports this rigidity as his main competitive advantage (over lesser historians) is his cultivated cache of (niche) interlinks.
In our (violently) changing world we need thermonuclear Ben not the historian Ben.
Also, if you make a design slimmer and slimmer, you're bound to end up with something flat and uninteresting.
I also don't like the sharpness of the aluminum at the edges. The plastic designs were much more friendly, imho.
That's the ideal: a computer that gets out of the way. They've been wanting that since long before Steve died, too.
Hence the iPad, literally just a screen. Or last year's iPad Pro, where they took the bezel away and there's even less screen, same for the MacBooks. The iMac must be the poster child: literally just a screen.
The less device you see, and the more content (ergo screen), the better.
> The plastic designs were much more friendly, imho
But plastic also chips and breaks. Of all the plastic MacBooks I had, none of them finished life without a few chips of plastic missing. The plastic also didn't vent the computers' heat very well.
I agree that the sharp edges aren't fantastic but, strictly speaking, you're supposed to keep your wrists raised above the keyboard to avoid developing RSI so the edges shouldn't come into it anyway.
I miss the PowerBook G4 design. That was aluminium but had round edges. That design but with modern thinness, that would be nice to have back.
Yeah, but what's Ive's role here? Isn't the miniaturization more due to electrical engineering efforts (placement/routing/PCB design), than to visual design efforts (making it look thinner than it actually is)?
> But plastic also chips and breaks.
Yes, and I think it gives a device more identity and character :)
> The plastic also didn't vent the computers' heat very well.
True! But Apple is known for their obsession of "form over function", so this is a curious aspect that goes against their principle.
> the edges shouldn't come into it anyway
Yes, that's a good point. But you can't always prevent that e.g. when traveling, or lying down, which is what laptops are made for.
Anyway, I just wanted to share my view because I don't understand what all the fuss is about. I liked Apple in the days of the Apple ][, but I absolutely despise their walled garden, and their assimilation of the supply chain. Design is absolutely secondary to all that.
I mean, I plug mine in once in a blue moon ... and always when I leave the office for the night ... and it's fully charged for many weeks thereafter.
You might have more of a point if the battery only lasted a few hours ...