Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
onezero.medium.com
onezero.medium.com
A story recounted here last year [0]:
During the development of the first iPhone, Ive and his team became enamored with the look of an extruded aluminum prototype. Even though it was immediately apparent that the model's sharp edges made it physically painful to use as a phone, they persisted in trying to push the design and paper over its principal practical problems. It took Steve Jobs to finally step in, point out the obvious, and check Jony Ive's worst tendencies. [1]
Steve Jobs is gone, and nobody is left to fulfill his roles.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17056930
[1]: https://www.cultofmac.com/488008/jony-ive-book-excerpt-iphon...
The G3 cube was a good idea but was overpriced, as it was inferior to the regular G4 in every aspect other than size. It was priced to be a 2000’s-era executive desk ornament, a relatively tiny market segment. A few years later a substantially similar product was released to massive success—the Mac mini.
The puck mouse was stupid, but it wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be. It was eminently useable once you got used to it.
Jobs’ biggest design failure has always been his refusal to acknowledge the importance of cable strain relief.
Also the third generation iPod. Yeesh.
Not to mention media-centric phones without headphone jacks. Remember how services like Apple Music are supposed to be the company's future? Hey, let's make it HARDER for users to consume those services, by removing the audio output and battery life! COURAGE!
As for the headphone jack, if you think it was a stupid idea to remove it, you should save your vitriol for the "idiots" who copied Apple. Surely it's worse to take what you'd class as an obviously stupid idea and blindly copy it like a brain-dead zombie. At least what Apple did showed actual courage. And yes, I'm using that word entirely un-ironically. I personally think it was courage and they've been proven correct by the rest of the industry.
(Personally I'm glad they got rid of the headphone jack because it prompted me to get a pair of Bose QC35 headphones. Absolutely brilliant. Best headphones I've ever owned, and I've owned some high end ones. Meh. I'll leave the "good sound" at home thanks—when I'm out and about I care far more about blocking out the distractions than maximal audiophool wankery.)
Everything I read makes it seem like Jony Ive is full of himself. Jobs was the only one that could tell him that.
People who call him on that have a personal ego disproportional to their accomplishments.
Ive's (and others') asinine "flat" look tells you nothing. Buttons masquerade as plain text, and colored boxes next to each other are supposed to tell you which one (out of two) is active.
Apple's childish and ridiculous "skeuomorphism" wasn't just over the top and cheesy; it was just plain INCORRECT. They had controls designed to look like the paint on the felt surface of a blackjack table. WTF? You don't interact with the paint on a blackjack table in real life, so why the hell would I expect to do so in a program?
iTunes had a similarly defective UI: The "LCD" panel at the top (which was even depicted as having a sheen over it, to represent a glass cover) had controls in it you could click on. Again, WTF? You can't poke at the sealed LCD display on a tape deck, so... this is laughably stupid.
Yet year after year, very few decry the fallacy of reacting to plain old bad UI with even worse: the failure and design dereliction that is "flat" UI.
Getting both right at the same time was the big first for the iphone, not the bare concept of touchscreens as input devices.
The improvements to touch that made it magical was the super responsive typing and momentum scrolling and it’s all just one fingered.
The browser on the iPhone was actually good for the time. Touch actually worked, the display was responsive, they OSK was quite fast, and the lack of copy/paste was just dumb.
I ditched the iPAQ as soon as I held the iPhone and used it for five minutes.
This is just like the initial reaction to the iPod on Slashdot back in 2001. “less space than the Nomad. No wireless. Lame” and why computer geeks don’t get the general consumer.
And unlike many other design trends that are purely about aesthetics, skeuomorphism also had a practical aspect: people had to "learn" a whole new way of interaction with these devices and using familiar shapes and textures helped. The "Start" button in Windows is called like that because people literally needed to be told where to start with the "futuristic" GUI.
Those examples are not the really bad aspects of skeuomorphic -- which is about not taking advantage of the unique digital opportunities for UI controls, and instead e.g. copying a DVD hardware interface or some other physical mechanism verbatim.
At worst, they're tacky. You can do equally tacky things in non skeuomorphic UIs.
But even that is just taste. All kinds of imitation materials are still used all around UIs and design, and still considered beautiful (e.g. frosted glass -- there's actually no glass. UI lights with diffusion, there's no real material to diffuse their light. Etc.).
In the first years, Aqua UI was praised as "lickable" and extremely pretty, and iOS skeuomorphic UIs wowed the world (and and where copied far and wide by competitors) for 5-6 years before any complaints.
NeXTStep was Steve Jobs, not Ive who was at Apple at that point in time IIRC.
The iTunes Music Store not only helped sell the iPod, it was the reason they were able to stand up the App Store so fast. They already had the infrastructure and millions of credit cards on file.
The Apple Stores gave them a direct relationship with customers that meant they weren’t completely beholden to retailers and ttet didn’t have to compete for shelf space. Everyone at the Apple Store knew Apple products.
It was a 'fad', not a failure. It's also not even clear what Ive had to do with that, seeing as Software Design was under Forstall and it wasn't until the iOS 7 redesign that software design came under Ive's control.
_That_ design was arguably a failure though.
Alas the speakers that came with it have a custom USB wiring, so they can't be used on any other computer.
Otherwise it was an excellent machine - just a bit under powered. But really easy to upgrade - just lift it out of the enclosure via the click-out handle and the whole machine was available to upgrade RAM and install a wireless card (when that was a novel thing...). Design was nice, fits on a desktop and was mostly silent except for the HD.
Jobs' love of the Cube shape can probably be traced back to NeXT : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube
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I still remember I was struck hard when I could not teach my parents how to do double click on mouse, and when to use right click on windows in the early 90s. For years computing were merely a typing machine with a Screen in front of them. And serving the web as well as email has some sort of pain involves in the process. It was bearable for them, but it certainly wasn't fun.
I thought my parents were dump, but then later I realise majority of people not grown up in age of computing have similar problems. It wasn't until iPhone before everything was obvious. It was stupidly simple that you could leave it to them and they would discover how to use within minutes. Minutes, when you think back after years of using computer, from time to time they still ask when to use double click and when to use right click. Scrolling somehow become natural, something they fail to learn when using Scroll Wheels.
Skeuomorphism along with Touch Screen UI brings Computing to the rest of the world. And call me old fashion, I would much like a modern take of it than the current trend of Super Flat everything UI.
At some point the responsibility must fall on the design team and Jony Ives, because what is design if not the tasteful balance of factors resulting in a vision of experience, as opposed to the tunnel vision pursuit of maximizing on a metric?
Determining the essential functional qualities of a product, and balancing these with aesthetics. When you throw in the industrial factor as in industrial design you're also considering cost at scale.
Design is not a purely visual discipline.
As-in, is there really a full design team that are saying yes to Jony’s demands of an aluminium phone that is painful to hold to the point of requiring only the CEO to step in? Or does criticism from anyone below you not count any more?
We saw this with the release of the aluminum unibody MacBook. There was no product differentiation other than the FireWire port. There were probably a few products that were far enough down the pipeline that couldn't be killed when Jobs was back for a brief period of time.
And once you bought it for a significant sum, the sunk cost will force you to learn and adapt, even through suffering, and look for justifications to comfort yourself and kill any doubts.
To quote from memory, "Steve Jobs cared greatly about the experience of the user from the moment of walking into an Apple store and all the way until the free return period ends".
Jony and his team preferred the Extrudo look and gave it the most attention. They tried cases that were extruded along the X-axis, and some along the Y-axis. But problems surfaced immediately. Extrudo’s hard edges hurt the designers’ faces when they put it up to their ears. Jobs especially hated this. To make the hard edges softer, plastic end caps were added, which also helped with the radio antennas.
If you read further, you'll see that there were other factors leading to the abandonment of the "Extrudo" version as well.
Super shiny, glossy and smooth. And ridiculously slippery.
It can fall out of my grip when held with one hand. It can literally slide of a level surface (I have to be careful where I put it when charging). It’s amazing how many annoying things this decision to make it look shiny over functional has caused.
My “sharp” iPhone SE had none of these problems.
This idea that somehow Steve Jobs was the only thing between Jony Ive and disaster has to stop. All design is hit and miss. Internal forces in large, complex organisations are always at odds with each other. There are plenty of examples of post Jobs' designs which are entirely pragmatic or just market driven, instead of being examples of someone's decadent taste.
TouchBar Macbook Pro
Trach Can Mac Pro
12"Macbook
>Steve Jobs is gone, and nobody is left to fulfill his roles.
I guess Jeff Williams will at least being saying No to certain things, in terms of reliability and cost. But Steves cares about the user experience more than anything else. Which is something I am not sure Jeff is any good at, but if the Apple Watch was something he has his hands on, than I have lots of faith in him.
It is nice to read I am not the only one complaining about the new Apple TV Siri Remote. I much prefer the old remote, it was so simple and intuitive.
I'd much rather look at a mac book pro than a thinkpad. Next to the minimalist design of the mac, a thinkpad looks like you ripped out part of a server and started carrying it around.
But, I'd rather type on a thinkpad than on a mac. The keys are better (if not as good as they once were), the surface is neither too cold nor too hot to rest my wrists on, and the edge of the laptop isn't sharp like the edge of a mac pro. Once you start using a thing, the visual details melt away and the functional details take over.
Huh? Windows CE and, later, Windows Mobile had quite a large number of apps for its era since the programming model was similar to desktop Windows (pre .NET) meaning that there was a ready-made base of developers for it. They weren't necessarily easy to find since the idea of an app store (and Apple/Google eating 30% of your revenue) didn't exist yet but they were there.
Blackberries were good at email, but otherwise they lost to Apple badly.
WiFi and the companion iPod Touch made me feel it wasn't as much a phone as a goddmaned computer with a phone app that mostly didn't suck.
The text input took a while but I still charge up and unlock my OG iPhone and am amazed at how well it fares (yes, iOS3).
* Multitasking was allowed
* Good maps app for navigating
* Rhapsody subscription service for all your music needs
* 3G support
* Built-in SIP client
The iPhone had none of this, but it had the superior UI. It took years for Apple to catch up to the technology of the klunky N95.
However, the Nokia N95 suffered from a small screen 2.6 inches relative to the iPhone’s 3.5 inch display. It mostly sucked for web browsing, which seemed less import because all phones sucked for web browsing.
What separated the iPhone was a useful touch screen enabling large screens, an acceptable web browser even if it lacked flash etc, and an unlimited bandwidth option. If anything it was really bandwidth that changed how people used their phone.
(I did not own an iPhone 1, only a 3G one, but I skipped on MMS as hard as I could)
- First phone emphasizing Wi-Fi
- Full web browser
- Integrated iPod
http://allthingsd.com/20070626/the-iphone-is-breakthrough-ha...
It also sported a screen comparable to a "retina" display.
Obviously, Apple did something (likely marketing, imho, and of course extreme ease of use) right to make the iPhone as popular as it is, but I would need to be convinced that it had something to do with functionality.
The version of IE was unusable for most of the web. But you don’t think “extreme ease of use” made the iPhone more functional?
The devices we use to deploy were $1000-$2000 (ruggedized devices) so they definitely weren’t cheap devices for the time.
IE eventually got pretty useless, but unlike iPhone you could always load alternative browsers, shells, and what not.
Sorry, I am still seeing that yes, iPhone is easier to use, as long as you don't need to do much, but functional? Not back then. And whether capacitive or resistive screen is better is a big question -- at least resistive is far more precise.
Ideally you shouldn‘t be putting any significant pressure on any surface with your forearms, palms, or wrists while actively typing. You want your hands “floating” with the fingertips resting very lightly on the key tops. But even if you must rest your hands or arms on something, please keep your wrists as straight as possible, and especially avoid wrist flexion or extension.
The surface of your laptop should be more-or-less parallel with the plane of your forearms, with the keyboard kept close to your torso so that your shoulders can remain relaxed with your upper arms hanging down at your sides. (This reduces the torque your arms put on your shoulder, allowing you to comfortably support your arms without any need for external props.)
If you have a tall desk and a low chair, and can’t change furniture, the way to work around the poor furniture design is to either (a) move the laptop to a low tray or directly onto your lap, or (b) prop the back side of the laptop up so that the base of the laptop is tilted toward you, with the keyboard parallel to your forearms. Keep the laptop (or whatever other keyboard) near the edge of the desk.
People should do whatever works for them and listen to their own bodies, but should be really careful with computer keyboards. I know many professional computer-users who did themselves serious harm with significant impact to their careers.
If something hurts even a little bit, please don’t try to work through the pain.
In none of these cases should your forearms be digging into the edge of the laptop. If they are something else is wrong about the position.
I occasionally type sitting on a couch, lying on my back on a bed, sitting at crappy furniture at a coffeeshop, sitting on the floor, with one hand on a tall table while tending to toddlers, etc.
In any of those contexts, it is possible to find a way of typing with straight wrists.
This really has nothing to do with the computer case design; the previous poster should adjust his or her posture irrespective of laptop choice. RSI is no joke.
If you come up with a body shape and context and I guarantee you we can come up with a more comfortable way to position the laptop than anything requiring wrists bent downward.
This is not about the design of the Macbook: the same goes for any other laptop, however smooth and soft its front edge might be.
You also shouldn’t drive your car into other cars. But we still put seatbelts and bumpers on for those who do.
I said people who are digging their forearms into their laptop edges are probably bending their wrists down in a way that puts strain on the tendons used for typing (not to mention putting direct pressure on the tendon sheaths for the finger flexors), so they should be careful about RSI.
The thing is, laptops aren't satellites. I've never understood the obsession with saving even a pound of weight for a laptop. (OK, maybe if you're one of those people who flies a million miles a year.)
It's a tool, not an objet d'art or a satellite. The Thinkpad was the best expression of this idea. I've never liked using a Mac more than a Thinkpad. Maybe I'm strange that way, or maybe I'm just that much further skewed toward utility that it makes all the difference for me.
the only time when weight is not a consideration is when getting a machine that i don't intend to move but just keep at home/work. but even then, i get annoyed when i occasionally have to carry around, or decide to change the purpose of the device.
My MacBook Air at home is 3 years old, but it's thin and light. I take it with me when I travel, and the battery will last through a whole trans-atlantic flight. I don't actually care about the visual design, but the 2016 MacBook Air's keyboard feels very comfortable to type on, and the battery life is awesome.
Unfortunately, when this MacBook Air dies, it will probably get replaced by a PC. I don't really want to shell an insane amount of money on a new Mac, especially in an era where you can't get one without a touchbar, and I won't get the convenience of a non-USB-C port.
This has everything to do with the unresolved problems of Linux power management. I use Ubuntu on Thinkpads too, and battery life is decent after a bit of configuration. Windows meanwhile gives all day battery life on Thinkpads.
I think the problem is that most distributions ship with no Powertop or udev rules, plus lots of unnecessary services and devices on by default.
One really nice thing Apple does is optimizing Safari for battery life. My comparison was Firefox on macOS vs Linux. With Safari, I'd get 20-30 min more.
I bet Firefox and other programs would benefit from some black-box GCC/LVM flag optimization to improve battery usage.
GPUs could consume a lot of power. > built-in Nvidia GPU (which
> I use for machine learning)
Currently I have 11 hours remaining, on 78% battery charge with a fairly dim screen (I use a setting to prevent the battery charging fully to extend its lifetime). Powertop shows a draw of 4.1W. Strangely the computer seems to run hotter in Windows and the battery lifetime is a bit shorter.
I'm using Ubuntu 18.04, running KDE. The laptop (Carbon X1 6th Gen) has a very nice keyboard, red trackpoint, 1TB NVMe SSD, 16GB RAM, i7-8550U CPU and a 2560x1440 display. It also has USB-C plus a couple of USB-A and HDMI sockets.
if only i could find a more lightweight version the same size as the x230, then i'd probably stop using the mac.
Personally that's the aesthetic I want in a laptop.
I'll accept minimalism, though. Or anything that's not too flashy and doesn't scream GAMER.
There's no such thing as a non-functional design! If it's non-functional, than it's either a piece of art or a piece of crap.
Their goal was a computer heavily focused on multithreaded and OpenCL loads, as most vendors were still preaching to developers that the single threaded performance increase ramp was dead, and workload would have to scale out instead.
At the same time, it is quite easy to point to the Mac Pros before and after it and say that they have a lot of wasted power and space. The new Mac Pro design has a 1400W power supply and is mostly empty space to accommodate the "fully loaded" expansion options that most buyers quite frankly will not purchase.
As Thunderbolt is basically an externalized PCIe interface, there is certainly a case to be made that extensibility is better served as a separate unit. This allowed the design of the core system to forgo modularity, and have an extremely compact design. This also allowed them to have a reduced parts cost.
But the reality was: - Component thermals did not stay balanced, with GPUs using far more power and giving off far more heat on the high end. This meant that there was a shortage of pro-level parts usable without redoing the core design. - As Apple didn't upgrade the core design, it wound up having dated thunderbolt support. - There is certainly an argument to be made that extensibility within the case is a cleaner, more manageable design for the end user - Intel's licensing for Thunderbolt has been guarded, and thus the market has been sub-par. For example, eGPU took ages to become available. Another example - Intel forbid RAID assemblies to be sold without disks.
In the end, I personally see what they were trying to go for, but in a lot of ways the way they thought technology and needs would evolve were missed by the 2013 pro. I don't see an issue with the design based on where they thought things were going - the issue IMHO is that it took them six years to react with a new product.
(FWIW, I was planning to buy the second rev of the trashcan pro - which I slowly realized would never happen)
The new Mac Pro's modular feature ties you completely to Apple for GPU improvements, I did not verify if it also ties you to them for CPU upgrades. Simply put, they designed a system by which you are stuck with them that added cost but no value.
I am hoping that with Ive gone that we leave the pretentious era of Apple behind, the era that resulted in the trashcan, designer bands for a watch let alone a gold 10k watch, and even to the point of their new headquarters.
It has one major issue in that it's symmetrical and you sometimes pick it up the wrong way.
But other than that I love it. The touchpad is great with the Apple TV, especially once you figure out that you can single-tap the edges like a D-Pad for precision.
It lays flat, so you can tap the play/pause button on your coffee table rather than picking up the remote.
There are just enough buttons for the Apple TV functions, all of which are big and easy to press and work with a satisfying click. No mushy rubber.
I wouldn't want a game controller designed with the same sensibilities. That's something you're holding for hours at a time and needs to be designed for your hand.
But I don't need a "comfortable" cable remote. I'll take the nice objet d'art.
A bit of rubber on the lower half so could feel up from down would be my only change.
I use an HD HomeRun and the app Channels to watch local antenna TV via the Apple TV, so no need for channel buttons.
I do wish that the Apple TV volume buttons worked without HDMI-CEC so I could use those to control the volume when playing games. That and the occasional need for the Input button are the only reasons I keep the TV remote handy.
When you’re using it, it’s fine. No complaints. But any time you’re not using it, it feels like a ticking time bomb waiting to mess up your show.
I'm one of those people who likes to select the text they're reading - or at least the first line or so of the paragraph I'm in. It helps me not lose track of where I am.
However, that means I'm often continuously selecting/double-clicking lines of text in an article. Unfortunately, some websites now show a popover menu next to text you select, e.g. to tweet that line of text. That popover menu often obscures the text I'm reading.
That's something that would go completely unnoticed when the design is tested on people that simply scroll down while they're reading.
I don't understand what problem the developers were trying to solve with that feature/bug.
And I disagree that they're "completely" undiscoverable... if you rest your thumb on the remote, skip forward/back glyphs appear on-screen and indicate the functionality if you were to click.
The way I did fix it is that I put some ugly tape on the bottom of the remote.
Pretty sure Steve or Jony would hate to see what I ave did to their beautiful remote :-), But at least now I know how I am holding it with looking at it.
I used to have a Logitech G700 mouse for my old Windows machine and it had this ability to unlock the scroll wheel for smooth / fast scrolling but it was a disaster due to Windows' shoddy support of it. More often than not it just overloaded the window with scroll events and it bingbonged from the speakers for a while until the scroll events stopped. Glad to see that at least that's getting addressed.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Ma...
Currently using one as I type, the stray / static finger rejection is near perfect and I can easily scroll with my index finger with my middle finger and edge of my palm resting on the surface.
I blame jobs for this.
He basically tried to force an opposing idea for its sake on something that would be an FU to MS.
But the physical design of these mice with the recharge port on the bottom was an utter retard.
https://zurb.com/blog/steve-jobs-and-xerox-the-truth-about-i...
Are you claiming to have just bought a new Mac with a Mighty Mouse?
The "just" in the first sentence could be misinterpreted, but that's not the part you quoted...
I even mange to play StarCraft using the magic mouse.
Somehow millions are using Magic mice without getting injured. Obviously, one device isn't going to work for everyone... and fortunately no one is try to make that happen.
Edit: I'm not trying to question you, I'm wondering if I used wrong somehow.
The hockey puck is mentioned in the article which is probably the worst mouse Apple has made.
Then came the Apple Pro Mouse (the transparent one) which didn't have a scroll wheel and IIRC didn't have a right click either. In the early 00s those features were super common. I remember having a Microsoft's Intellimouse with a scroll wheel in the late 90s.
Then came the Mighty Mouse. Apple added the scroll ball and right click but the scroll ball was prone to failure. Mine died after 6 months of use because the ball got a bit of dirt. Unfortunately it wasn't possible to open the mouse to clean the ball without breaking it.
Then came the Magic Mouse 1. Apple added the touch functionality but the mouse was pretty heavy including the weight of the batteries and IMO the noise of the click was quite annoying. Apple worked on the weight problem with v2 by adding their own battery, but they added the charging port at the bottom of the mouse (facepalm). Not sure if the noise of the click was solved, I didn't personally try v2.
I thought this was incredibly stupid until I actually used one. The battery lasts so long and charges so fast that it's not a problem, to the point that I wouldn't pay so much as a dollar to "fix" it by moving the port to the edge.
If it had an edge plug I'd probably have started off using it plugged in all the time, though, just because I'm so used to battery powered peripherals being so shitty that not plugging them in when there's an opportunity is a bad move. Kinda like how it took a period of adjustment when I started using Macbooks to get used to my laptop being usable long enough on battery power that I didn't need to constantly be looking for power outlets, or carting my power supply everywhere I went.
No integrated keyboard in my iMac... :)
Reminds me of the 1968 VW Camper Bus. (My dad had one.) You can always tell the 68's because the gas filler was located on the right rear quarter panel. When you were filling up, and opened the sliding door, it would shear off the gas pump.
In '69 they moved it to the other side.
My dad's low tech solution was to yell at me to not open the door when he was pumping gas.
Back when I switched from Windows to Mac in 2006, I found this perhaps the most disruptive aspect; everything else was pretty standard GUI stuff, but the mouse behaviour was a nightmare. Windows had a different acceleration curve that felt super snappy (at the cost of a loss of precision), whereas on the Mac it was sluggish; it was a chore to get the mouse pointer to move anywhere.
For years I ran various apps that would fix the acceleration, including a tool from SteelSeries. I wasn't alone in being frustrated — forums were full of discussions about this. I'm not sure what happened or when, but I haven't needed that app in a long time. Apple must have changed the acceleration curve — I don't see any other explanation. Perhaps it came with the attempts at unifying the trackpad with iOS gestures, which require a 1:1 correspondence of your movement with what happens on the screen.
AFAIK you can change the cursor speed (called "tracking speed") but not the acceleration curve.
Never had that issue with the trackpad though, only with mice.
Not sure when Apple change those, or if I just got used to the Mac curves over the years.
It's obviously well made but it just feels pretentious compared to a phone or remote than you can actually type with.
Wouldn't that be a reasonably large remote?
It doesn't even need letter/number buttons, just some proper tactile feedback rather than this smooth hello-my-owner-has-more-money-than-sense rotating action thing i.e. the scroll wheel on an iPod classic from the mid 2000s was miles better.
Note: I've actually perfected a flick-of-the-wrist so that I can reorient the remote quickly when I pick it up wrong.
One big project that comes to mind is The Getty Museum in Los Angeles -at a billion dollar cost. The architecture is beautiful but it lacks function. Getting around the museum as a visitor is like entering a mase. I'm sure you could not convince the architect that he should have changed it. I don't have the know how to know if it could have been designed with an emphasis towards function. But I do know that it's beautiful so in my mind, the architect was a genius.
Ives should get the same consideration.
Designers should tend to put emphasis on beauty, otherwise they would just be called engineers. I'm not a designer either, but I think the secret sauce is convincing users (of hardware, software, no matter) that form followed function. Ive is most certainly a designer so the changes he made, e.g. removing ports, were driven by aesthetic rather than function. Without the checks and balances named Steve Jobs these were allowed to ship, and is a reason why Apple is getting a bad rap.
Apple's cables have for generations now been fraying and cracking all because someone decided that strain relief was an unsightly and unnecessary thing.
It could be forgiven if it was on one era of products, and learned their lesson when people started getting electrical shocks, devices started dying, and things being set on fire - but no, they persist.
Even today they've only made the most minor of attempts at introducing strain relief.
The part circled in red is the strain relief, separate from the cable itself, and from the connector.
Image taken from http://www.blogquail.com/strain-relief/
Others have already helpfully provided pictures of the common stuff.
It's used where you have a flexible material in contact with a rigid material. Most commonly on electronics it's on cables - between connectors and either connectors (when removable) or into the case/device (when fixed).
The strain relief prevents all the stress (from bending, induced by movement or just gravity) being placed on one location and spreads it out.
Once you know what strain relief is, and you look around at all the cables/hoses/etc in your life - you start seeing them everywhere.
Headphones, Keyboards, Network cables, power cables, USB cables. Just sitting at my desk I can see a dozen or more of them.
As they make a fuck-ton on resale of these accessories. (planned obsolescence)
Strain relief is, or can be, somewhat ugly. More angles, thicker cables, varying widths - it all adds up to muddying the lines of their product.
Compared to how much they make on device sales - selling a few more adapters is peanuts. How many people do you know that have downright dangerous cables which they persist in using? I'm sure I know dozens.
But despite the obvious advantages, the next generation went back to the old design, but a little bit smaller, and back to all the old issues. I probably spent a few hundred dollars on replacement 3rd gen chargers alone, while the 2nd gen charger which came with my laptop is still in perfect working order in a box in my closet.
The cynical of me honestly wonders if they didn't see a decrease in peripheral revenue after the first iteration, and reverted to the old design only because of that.
1. https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/4974/as-images.apple...
That's the redesigned magsafe2 cable with longer and slightly more flexible strain relief.
The original magsafe power adapters had almost nothing, and it was a much harder plastic.
While material choice and thinness may be an issue, it's exacerbated by the strain relief being insufficient.
If there was a requirement for manufacturers-at-scale to display visual overviews of potential defects over time due to normal use - and with the same prominence as the marketing material:
* a laptop with stressed / broken cables
* a defective keyboard
* inputs in iPhones that appear to fail due to microscopic dust / debris accumulation
then you'd have a forcing function which addresses the information asymmetry in consumer transactions and perhaps you'd quickly see a lot more attention directed at these kind of product defects.
Of course this kind of thought-bubble regulation might be totally unworkable: how do you determine thresholds of wear and tear considering 'correct use' as considered by manufacturer vs 'real-world' use by user base. But then again doesn't good design consider the practical over the theoretical reality wrt product usage?
I've seen a bunch of anti-Ive comments and articles here recently. Is everyone just picking out all failures and attributing them to him and design successes to Jobs? Is that really representative and based in truth? The article reads as conjecture which makes me wonder about the authors motivation.
During that period, Apple went from being a somewhat niche player for digital artists and enthusiasts to being one of most valuable brands on the planet. They went from having to work very hard to convince consumers that they were worth taking a risk on, to being a coveted status symbol which some customers would pay virtually anything for. I don't think it's surprising that during this period they would push their product line toward higher-margin, less utilitarian products you might want to replace more often for their various flaws.
I also don't think it's surprising that we're seeing Apple signaling a shift towards their old, pro-consumer ways now that the smartphone market is weakening.
Yes it's compelling to think about things in terms of the interplay of a few individuals, and the hubris of a rouge designer, but in general understanding the behavior of corporations through the lens of incentive structures is much more accurate.
I point out in the article that Ive (plus Jobs) undoubtedly saved Apple. Without Ive, and the inspirational design of the first iMac, Apple would now be a footnote in history. The Apple Watch is a good design. The "sunflower" iMac was a good design. The unibody MacBook Pro is a good design. The 2001 Titanium laptop was a fantastic design. The iPhone 5 was a delightful design. There's a long, long list of good products. There's also a list of less good products, and I cited some of them.
I use and enjoy Apple products every day. But nothing and nobody should be above careful critique. My motivation was to point out that Ive leaving isn't necessarily a disaster, because he didn't always get it right, and to cite some examples to back that up.
(edited to replace attempt at blockquote HTML with "".)
(IMO, it's not bad design; you're not supposed to be using it plugged-in 24/7, you're supposed it to plug it in for occasions when you aren't using the mouse anyways)
EDIT: it was mentioned, I missed it
That's why it's an apparent mistake. It's only an obvious mistake if there's an obviously—and really, not just apparently—better solution.
I had a reasonably cheap wireless mouse back in the early 2000s which could take rechargable lithium batteries and charge them with a wire that also allowed me to use the mouse at the same time.
I'm no power user, that device lasted me years and the reason it's still not used all the time is the cable frayed and died after 10 years.
"There was yet another mouse, with a bizarre charge-my-belly design. Everyone else would have put a Lightning port on the front or back, or even had a recessed horizontal port beneath so you could keep using the thing while it charged."
I've come to dislike the copycat trends that Apple's stringent design ethos has unleashed. Sure, it's occasionally been brilliant but the article does a good job outlining the significant errors - and other posters here fill in the blanks.
I'm glad the end of the Ives era seems to be sparking some healthy reassessment and introspection in the industry.
I think the author underestimates large scale production pipelines, where you may be many years out (due to things like design, test, assembly creation, assembly optimization, backchannel buildup, etc). Most products are several years in development before they are released.
The decision to change was quite natural. The kids like the Surface and how it was a touch screen, but could also be used as a laptop that they could do school work on.
Moving to Windows was easy for me once WSL was introduced. I no longer needed OSX to do development as I am now able to do everything I was doing on my MBP on my MSI in WSL.
I still can't believe that Apple has yet to come out with a laptop with a touch screen that isn't an iPad. The touchbar is very clever, but I never use it.
The last couple of straws for me for moving off of Apple at 10+ years was the MBP. Touch Bar, shitty keyboard, and no proper USB ports....I hate having to keep dongles at the ready.
For me, at least, the magic that was Apple died when Steve died. Now they just push out product and services and nothing that can be considered "magic" or unique.
Same feeling towards the original versions of MacOSX with the “lickable” candy color theme.
You have to kind of look at and consider them in the context of their time.
I do kind of miss fun colored devices. We're in a new era of beige with all this brushed aluminum and glass. I really would love some funky colored electronics again.
My guess is that all of this is a lot more complicated than the author thinks and the road to simplicity is a very difficult one that has changed our technical devices for the better (overall). We’d still have plastic phones with “ergonomic” slide out keyboards if it was up to the author.
They might fail at it, but it feels like they put a stake in the sand, and then run to get there. Sometimes they trip up and don't get there (Magic Mouse 2, "you're holding it wrong"), and sometimes they do (MBPr, Watch, several iterations of iPhone).
I don't have the disposable income to fund said tenacity at the bleeding edge (in case they do trip), but my iPad Mini v2 and MBPr are both examples of a product they doubled-down on and got right from both ends.
The problem is that in order to produce the beautiful silhouette, they put the charging port on the bottom. I never seem to remember to charge the thing, so it’s always needing to be plugged-in. And then you can’t use.
What I find bonkers about this is that mice were wired for the majority of their existence, so it’s not like this was a hard one to figure out. They just chose to go with what looked nice.
It is pretty, though.
After long distain, I finally adapted to the Magic Mouse:
Movable trackpad.
I now nudge it around a bit and then take my hand off to do the gestures on the top surface. Previously, I tried to continue holding it while doing gestures, and it's way too small for my hands.
I still prefer the trackpad, but now the Magic Mouse feels usable.
I bet at most companies though, there isn't an ideal balance of power between teams, or between the different divisions of a company. I don't think that balance happens naturally. It might even become harder to maintain that balance, as a company becomes more successful.
Supposedly Microsoft during the Ballmer years was known for political conflict between the Office and Windows divisions. Sometimes what would be good for one (putting Office on as many platforms as possible) might be bad for the other one (the Windows people might want Office on as few platforms as possible). Conflicts like that are inevitable, but resolving them can be a crap shoot. If there's a lack of executive leadership, or a political power imbalance between the groups, the wrong group can win sometimes.
but remember that a picture is usually your first impression. their goal is to sell.
Why, why, why do people create content and give it to Medium to wall it off?