Jobs had plenty of design failures on his conscience, like the G3 cube, the skeuomorphism fad, and the hockey puck mouse. We should not pretend the guy had irreplaceable design sense.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.