Jony Ive: 8 hits and 8 misses from 20 years at Apple | Hacker News Reader

Jony Ive: 8 hits and 8 misses from 20 years at Apple

theguardian.com

55 pointskylesellas105 comments

The one thing I noticed missing that should have been included was the unibody MacBook design. That was a huge innovation that led to massive improvements in build quality industry-wide. If I recall correctly, he played a much larger role in that design than the iPod, which is largely credited to Tony Fadell (although Ive definitely had a large influence on later iterations).

Agreed. The Titanium G4 to the Unibody pretty much laid the foundation of what the next 20 years of good laptops would be.

Initially I would agree, and then it was all about thinnest, un-repairable, soldered laptops.

Doesn't this make it unrepairable though? (Honest question - I don't own a MacBook)

No, the decision to solder components to the logic board probably comes from making it thinner, not from the unibody design.

The 2011 MBP was unibody and it was a lot more repairable but also thicker.

No, the Unibody chassis have been in use since the 2008 MacBook Pro and they have been perfectly repairable, until 2012 and later 2016 where Apple started soldering previously replaceable components to the logic board.

They did make it a royal pain in the ass to work on the keyboard or trackpad though, but anyone who works on MacBooks daily can gut one in minutes.

MacBook Unibody from 2009 was very serviceable[1]. You only need to remove 10 screws, no glued parts, no soldered RAM or storage.

[1]: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Unibody+...

Current model designs, yes; but the series from roughly 2009-2015 (and the 2011/2012 models specifically [0]) are some of the most repairable and hackable models they've made: pull the bottom panel off the Unibody frame, and all the parts are laid out. Swap RAM, replace the optical drive with a 2nd hard drive, replace the battery, fans, whatever.

Whether the "sealed-airtight-with-glue" patterns of modern Unibody designs are truly necessary (or desirable) to achieve design goals of thinness and weight is hotly contested. :)

[0] https://www.ifixit.com/Device/MacBook_Pro_15%22_Unibody_Late...

Having owned both a 12" G4 powerbook and a 2008 MBP (unibody), the unibody was far far easier to get inside of and replace most parts.

I think when designed considerately, unibody type construction can make disassembly significantly easier.

I think what bothers me about all these Jony Ive articles is that they rarely differentiate between Ive the designer, Ive the art director, and Ive the product manager. Similarly, they fail to differentiate between whether something was good or bad based on its aesthetics, functionality, or market reception. In these articles, Ive is just functioning as a stand-in for Apple, as Jobs did before him. It betrays a lack of understanding of how companies (and design) actually work on the part of pundits and journalists.

I was going to say the same. They call out a few products that I doubt were misses because of Jony Ive. He may have been involved with them but to say that they were misses because of the work he did on them is a little...misleading.

Can't really agree with the Magic Mouse 2 being a "miss". I understand the controversy with the charging port being under the mouse, but it's done on purpose: Apple wants to prevent users from leaving the mouse connected with a USB cable all the time. Maybe there was a better solution to this issue, but the truth is that it's not actually an issue and not a blunder either. I've had this mouse for years and simply recharge it every few months overnight.

Scrolling without a wheel took a bit of learning, but in the end, being able to seamlessly move vertically and horizontally with a single finger is highly useful in design or music software. I haven't seen a mouse that could handle it as well as the Magic Mouse.

I was wondering if that was the decision. it is well known that apple products should not constantly stayed plugged in and I think putting the charging cable in this location allowed for the battery on the mouse to stay consistent over time.

If it'd been on the edge I'd have probably used it plugged in all the time, because I've been trained by years and years of shitty battery-powered peripherals to plug them in any time I possibly can. Turns out it's totally fine and the battery lasts ~forever, and since I couldn't plug it in I didn't stress about it.

> it is well known that apple products should not constantly stayed plugged in

I've never heard this before. What's the explanation? Is it related to battery health? Why does it only apply to Apple products?

> I understand the controversy with the charging port being under the mouse, but it's done on purpose: Apple wants to prevent users from leaving the mouse connected with a USB cable all the time.

Here's a better solution: good old rechargeable AA batteries. Keep a spare set sitting in a charger, and you'll never need to wait for your device to recharge.

If you're concerned about users falling back on disposables, bundle two sets of rechargeable AA's and a charger. Apple used to sell branded versions of these items.

I hate built-in rechargeable batteries for peripherals like mice, keyboards, and game controllers.

Any even better solution, use a wired mouse and keyboard. Why do I need to deal with batteries for something that doesn't move more than a few inches from its destination? We've banned wireless peripherabls in our organization, because they cause more issues then they are worth. "My mouse is jumping all over the screen", "my mouse no longer works", "my keyboard is typing things I'm not typing!". 9/10 it's low battery, the other 1/10 is someone has paired accidentally with your machine.

I don't like wired mice for the same reason I wouldn't want to use a wired Wii Remote. I use my mouse by physically moving it around my desk, and I find the tug of a physical cable to be distracting.

I can't say I've ever had tracking issues with the Magic Mouse either. I certainly don't have any with the wireless Logitech G305 I use now, which was designed for gaming and feels particularly precise and responsive.

If we were talking about keyboards, I'd be more sympathetic to your viewpoint. Although even then, I like the clean look of my wireless keyboard, even if it means I have to swap batteries once every couple months.

As an engineer who works with smaller parts, my desk and work areas have a constant influx of parts and pieces- and the keyboard and mouse I use take up a lot of space- like two square feet- and being able to move them, rest them on top of stuff, and use the mouse on my leg as necessary is really useful, and I really don't want to go back to wired peripherals.

Similarly, I really like Thunderbolt docks and the like because it helps me cut down on the semi-permanent wire clutter on my desk.

I personally love my apple mouse, they did a great job with it

How about a Qi certified mouse and mouse pad?

What's the point of AA and AAA when lipo already has months of battery life, better weight and weight distribution and don't have to deal with finding/charging batteries, battery recycling all the time, gunk from unequal cell discharge etc. It's so much easier to just plug on a USB cable for all of 2 minutes.

2-3 years later when your proprietary LiPo dies, you'll pat your younger self on the back for choosing a standardised battery. You will repeat this over and over again for every time you choose a standardised power source over a proprietary one.

These batteries last months, at the standard 500 cycle's that's about a decade's worth of regular use.

2 minutes is 2 minutes too long. I don’t want to sit and wait while my mouse recharges.

(Yes, swapping batteries tajes some amount of time, but so does finding and plugging in a cable, so that’s a wash as far as I’m concerned.)

The problem with belly-up charging is that it's ridiculous quite literally. Maybe usable, but ridiculous, that is all.

I think a docking/charging station for the mouse would be more elegant and nice to have, though more expensive too of course.

Even a docking station would suffer from the same problem because people would just put the mouse onto the dock every time they were done using it. Also, I don't think contact charging is as fast as cable charging. The point is to only charge it when you absolutely need to.

> people would just put the mouse onto the dock every time they were done using it

That's still so much better than using with the cable attached (if it was possible), or the belly-up charging.

... but why does that matter?

Part of the reason the Magic Mouse was a miss in my mind was that the Magic Trackpad was so much better. For how awkward the magic mouse was at first, the magic trackpad felt natural at first touch.

I remember getting one at work, this was the only time I liked a product at work so much that I immediately picked one up before coming home.

There’s also a ton of general mice that work great.

I love my Magic Trackpad up until it starting killing my wrists. A Magic Mouse let me be pain-free again.

Ergonomically it is a disaster. I can’t think of a single product that embodies design over function more than this mouse.

All of Apples mouse designs have been absolute train wreaks since the horrible “puck” mouse on the original iMac.

The Mighty Mouse wasn't so bad. The ball would get dirty and need to be cleaned occasionally, but you could kind of clean it without taking it apart (flip it upside down and rub it on paper), but you could also take the mouse apart to clean it more thoroughly.

The ball in my Mighty Mouse died after 6 months of use. I tried cleaning the ball but it didn't fix it. Opening the mouse broke it because it wasn't really designed to be opened. Terrible experience for a pretty expensive mouse.

I have a 10 year old Logitech mouse that still works perfectly fine.

Having switched to PC recently one of the few things I miss is the amazing magic mouse / mac drivers combo.

The Magic Mouse 2 is junk but not because of the location of the charge port or the touch scroll. It's because it got the fundamentals of good mice so bad—an unergonomic shape and abysmally high foot friction. There are obviously going to be people who love it, but for me it's embarrassingly bad compared to options made by Razer and others.

Yet their trackpad is the best in the entire industry. I've switched to the Magic Trackpad on my desktop and it's brilliant. The impetus to change was concern for some occasional RSI-like pain in my left-click finger, but now that I've been using it for a couple of years, I don't miss the traditional mouse at all.

I used to use the original Magic Mouse at work, which used AA batteries instead of a stupid lighting port to recharge.

I came to appreciate the Magic Mouse quite a bit. I found it perfectly comfortable, and having what is effectively a super long scroll wheel is great. I also appreciated the easy horizontal scrolling, and the ability to switch spaces with swipe gestures.

I switched only because I discovered how nice the tracking quality of gaming mice is.

Same here. I still don't have a good solution to horizontal scrolling (shift doesn't work in Excel).

The Macbook trackpad has by far the best horizontal scrolling of any pointing device. I could not live without it. (If anyone knows a better solution please tell me. I'm always looking for new options.)

It's great for spreadsheets. I even use the Macbook trackpad for 3D CAD. I used to use a spaceball and mouse, but the trackpad plus modifier keys is more convenient because it keeps the hands to the keyboard.

In the event that you'd prefer a mouse for standard pointing, I do think the Magic Mouse is equally good at horizontal scrolling. One could quibble that the Magic Mouse offers less room on the surface for horizontal movement, but in practice I don't think this makes much difference.

Best of both worlds—

I know many people that use a mouse and Magic Trackpad and fluidly switch between them depending on the task. I did exactly that for about a year—before eventually ditching the mouse altogether.

I developed terrible tendinitis in my fingers using the Magic Mouse within a few weeks of purchasing one, I've never had a peripheral cause me so much pain in my career.

Are you still experiencing pain? I had terrible tendonitis from playing too much chess using crappy trackpads in college lol. Took using https://www.amazon.com/Evoluent-VM4R-VerticalMouse-Ergonomic... this for a few years to fix my hands. Now I'm fine using the macbook trackpad all day.

I had that happen with the original Microsoft Ergonomic Mouse. The Magic Mouse has been fine. In fact it's my favourite mouse design ever, and I absolutely love the touch surface.

The bottom charging is kludgey, and there was probably a more elegant solution. But you only need to charge the mouse once ever couple of months, so it's not a huge problem.

However, I would guess my hands are not the same size as your hands. You don't have to be a design genius to understand there's a ton of variation in hand size, and one-size-fits-all products don't.

A genius product would be a resizable mouse with an auto-resizing guide to help you pick the right size and curve for your hand size and grip style.

> Apple wants to prevent users from leaving the mouse connected with a USB cable all the time.

Why should that be a problem?

Because how dare the end-user do anything Apple does not approve of?

My guess is to prevent images of it out in the wild looking like a non-magical normal mouse with wires

Because that will wreck the battery capacity.

Li-Ion batteries aren’t designed for that use-case.

Also the Magic Mouse has fast charging. You’ll get a full day of battery in 2min.

With a full charge, you’ll get 2+ months of usage.

Do the math. You’ll most likely charge this thing less than 20 times in it’s entire life.

That’s why the battery port design is both really smart and elegant. Unfortunately people don’t take the time to understand the purpose of design choices and jump to the easiest meme that reinforces their beliefs.

Is it not possible to disable battery usage completely using circuitry if connected by wire? Draw and use all power from the cable? What impact could that possibly have on the battery? I imagine it'd be similar to keeping a mouse unused.

>Also the Magic Mouse has fast charging. You’ll get a full day of battery in 2min.

> With a full charge, you’ll get 2 months of usage.

> Do the math. You’ll most likely charge this thing less than 20 times in it’s entire life.

These things don't make sense as a whole.

Why put a fast charger in (to get your day's worth of charging) if your use case is "charge it to full, get 2 months", so you "likely charge this thing less than 20 times in its life"?

Most likely, you'll go to one extreme or the other, and I think the "less than 20 in its life" is entirely optimistic, and based on a use case that the design doesn't represent.

A full charge to 100% takes longer.

Fast charging is more intensive on the battery - you don't want it to be running on fast charge the whole time.

It's for scenarios where you might forget to charge or it's been sitting unused for a while but you still want to get to work quickly. It minimizes failure scenarios.

It's meant to be a wireless mouse. Emphasis on wireless.

You are assuming that when plugged the mouse would run from the battery, which quite frankly would be a terrible decision.

The mouse is designed to never need wires except for charging. The solution is to minimize charge time, not add more features to let you use it in a wired fashion; that's regressive.

It actually works really well. I still don't like the mouse because my hands are big and the ergonomics are absolutely terrible for me, but the charging design is well considered.

I've never understood why companies force the battery to charge the whole time it's plugged in for things that charge quickly and discharge slowly.

If a full charge lasts 2 months, then why keep it topped up while plugged in? Just charge it to 85%, then let it discharge to 50%, then charge it again. The circuit to do this can't be that hard to design.

So my understanding is that all Li-Ion batteries come with circuitry that explicitly keeps track of the battery condition and minimizes charging when unnecessary, even if it's plugged in. I don't think it's just "juice goes in until it's full"

Can anyone more knowledgeable confirm?

Usually that just means it lets the charge level drop to ~98% or something before topping it off again which I'm sure they do but having doing anything with a lipo slowly kills it to some degree including simply being near high and low states of charge so it's no silver bullet.

What they would need to do is detect when the port has been has been connected regularly for days and let the charge level drop to some announcement proportionate to the frequency and duration.

Ignorant comment. Very easy to design a) a dual power circuit and b) charging hysteresis to not mame the battery.

There simply is no good reason for the port placement.

> Apple wants to prevent users from leaving the mouse connected with a USB cable all the time.

This happens a lot with Apple. Good, bad or otherwise, they constantly solve customer issues when the customer isn't really having an issue.

I love the Magic Mouse. What’s amazing is how long the batteries in Apple’s wireless mouse and keyboard peripherals last on a single charge.

I work remote and visit my office ~ twice per month. Nearly every time I show up to my desk, the mouse is dead, and I have to work without a mouse while it charges. IMO the Razer mouse I use at home is better in every respect.

Apple demonstrated that this was an incomplete design effort by releasing the rechargable track pad that can be left plugged in.

"Hits" and "misses" should be thought of differently. Hits sell zillions and make people happy. Misses like the Apple Hi-Fi sell poorly because nobody wants them. So in the aggregate, there's far more good done when you have a hit, than bad done when you have a miss[0].

[0] Huge disclaimer: The category "miss" is higher dimensioned than "hit." Misses like the butterfly keyboard are different than the Hi-Fi, because it's a given that millions of people are going to buy a Mac laptop, and they suffer because they're forced to cope with an unreliable keyboard. By contrast, almost nobody is forced to use an Apple Hi-Fi.

It’s like Babe Ruth in baseball. You live with the strikeouts because the home runs are so great.

Also: I've noticed anecdotally that a lot of people, myself included, make decisions to reduce their misses, where it's usually better to maximize your hits.

You might be referring to loss aversion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

I still use my Hi-Fi, admittedly with an Amazon Alexa as source, but it still sounds great.

The last paragraph for Magic Mouse 2 seems a bit forced. This mouse has not garnered the same level of controversy as the other products in this article.

I've personally found it more enjoyable and ergonomic than my Logitech M705 and Microsoft Sculpt. It's not inherently more ergonomic but the additional functionality enabled by multitouch means I don't have to move the mouse as much (on macOS at lease), which vastly improves usability.

The charging port is not in the most functional location, but it's a worthwhile tradeoff IMHO. If we assume Apple doesn't want to change the shape of the mouse, the only alternative location is on the side of the mouse, which makes the mouse asymmetrical and would probably give Jony Ive a fit.

Actually it is so bad and non ergonomic that there is a video from a keynote where Craig Federighi is struggling to use it.

The G4 Cube had issues but I honestly liked it as an experimental design from a well-known computer brand. It was a breath of fresh air among the monotonous beige or gray towers of the time. And it wasn't the only G4 computer you could get, as you could've bought the tower (which I ended up doing at the time).

For me, the biggest miss is the touch bar and butterfly keyboards. Those single-handily prevented me from upgrading from my 2012 Retina MBP.

The G4 Cube was a good idea but was overpriced. Yes it was smaller and prettier than the G4 tower, but it was also far less expandable. It was priced to be a 2000’s-era executive desk ornament, and I suspect they simply misjudged the market for the Cube.

But the idea was solid and a few years later a substantially similar product was released to massive success—the Mac mini.

You could upgrade to a 2015 -- those have no touchbar and the old keyboard.

I feel the need to say this every time the 'puck mouse' comes up: I loved mine. If you use your fingers to move a mouse, rather than your hand (like I do) then it was totally fine (and I found I could move it very exactly for fine control when using a design package). I never got it the wrong way around, never had any other problems people complain about and I loved the weight of it and used to chuck it around my desktop with real accuracy.

My only conclusion is that y'all must be a bunch of clumsy fools. :D

I feel the same way. I loved that mouse, I was sad the day mine finally gave out.

Oh buddy...

https://www.ebay.com/b/Apple-Puck-Mouse/23160/bn_7023277587

It is almost universally hated. Your conclusion is wrong.

> If you use your fingers to move a mouse, rather than your hand

This is called the "fingertip grip".

See this for more mouse grips: http://blog.logicalincrements.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02...

I really like 3D touch for moving the cursor in text input fields.

Yeah, that has to be my favorite use-case for the force-touch on iOS. The way text selection works on iOS has never felt that smooth, but force touch takes away some of the worst pain.

Shame it’s got zero discoverability. Most people I know are surprised when I show them that. It also has quite a steep learning curve for some. Plus, some of the more advanced useful stuff is pretty hard to use - for example, did you know you can switch to text selection by “pulsing” your finger twice while pressing the keyboard?

Yes, the pulse selection is the most useful part of the implementation, and makes me not want to upgrade to iOS 13 on my iPhone X based on feature degradation alone. I use 3D Touch all the time and have for years now. I don’t understand the “zero discoverability” claim. It is natural to try and push harder on the screen, and it’s extremely fast. Ive often thought they should leverage the Taptic Engine to offer (at least in accessibility settings) an option for haptic feedback for all deep touches system wide, with like a double knock telling you that nothing happened. And honestly, peeking/popping links is the single greatest innovation in mobile web UX in a decade, deprivation of the tech stack is a travesty for a premium gadget brand like Apple.

Yeah 3D / force touch is a "miss" that I strongly feel should have been a "hit," as it's a pretty innovative idea - mostly from the hardware side - but was either difficult to discovery for users and/or apps didn't have good examples.

Most baffling for me is the fact I use mac counterpart to this - force touch - every single day even though most apps don't support it; VS code for example would profit immensely from using it to peek definition, but alas, electron does not support it at all.

In iOS 13 you can just drag the cursor around with no special technique or gesture. It also effectively removes the peek and pop paradigm and replaces it with context menus which work on all devices. It seems pretty clear that they’re setting up to remove 3D Touch.

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

There is an obvious power law visible here.

His big wins are orders of magnitude larger than his misses.

Didn't the aluminum solid body originate with Mac? Thats been a huge cross product design decision that I personally love.

if those are his misses then I'd say he did a fantastic job. half of those I'd say weren't even misses. Loved the G4 cube, the hockey puck mouse, 3D Touch, and my Magic Mouse 2. But nothing gives me more anxiety than my AirPods, they always feel like they are falling out and occasionally do.

Sounds like the AirPods just aren't made for your ears unfortunately. They've never fallen out of mine, even on runs.

Apple should build a system to scan the three-dimensional shape of its customers ears using the iPhone Face ID sensor. They could collate that data and feed it into a machine learning algorithm that could come up with two or three alternative AirPod shapes that would suit the widest array of ears.

(Then use the same "Ear ID" feature on your iPhone to tell you which model best suits your ears.)

The biggest miss that I remember that isn't on this list is the iPhone 4 antenna that wrapped around the device. If the user's hand got between the two sides, it would lose connectivity. Then Apple started selling those "bumpers" to keep the antenna working.

They didn't start selling them to the troubled iPhone users. They gave them away until the end of September that year:

https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/how-to-get-your-fr...

Also worth noting that they demonstrated every other phone at the time could be held in all kinds of similarly ordinary ways that led to the same or worse attenuation. But the iPhone 4 had that conspicuous pair of thin black lines on the metal frame that people could see and touch to trigger the attenuation.

iPhone 4 owner here. That was never an actual issue in daily use. You really had to force it at exactly the right spot to produce this problem. Also other phones from that time had the same issue when they were squeezed like that. So yes I got that free bumper, but never used it anyway.

Antennagate was 90% myth. Bridging the two steel pieces with normal skin contact wasn't a significant factor in signal degradation. If it was, the problem would have persisted with the iPhone 4S, but it didn't. In fact the 4S was notable for having exceptionally good reception despite using the same exposed steel band arrangement—albeit with two cellular antenna segments instead of one.

(Major Australian telco Telstra assigned the iPhone 4S their "blue tick" mark for phones suitable for regional/rural Australian customers. This rating was only given small number of phones.)

> [The MacBook Air] drew audible gasps from the crowd, instantly redefining how thin, light and portable a laptop could be.

I was quite surprised at the time: the MacBook crowd seemed almost entirely disjoint from the ThinkPad crowd. The X61 predated the Air by months, was considerably faster, and only weighed 0.11 lbs more. The X220 was released just slightly after the Air IIRC, was even more powerful, and was lighter than the Air.

Admittedly, both ThinkPads were a good deal thicker and we’re nowhere near as shiny. But they totally rocked the ports, and they had enough ventilation to run at full speed continuously.

Back then Lenovo made a really good parody of the original MacBook Air ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHXgIH9eaHg), showing the advantages of their ThinkPad X300: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hnOCUkbix0

Missing miss: every single power adapter since the clamshell yoyo.

(Of course it's not clear in any of these cases how to apportion blame for Apple's form-over-function designs between Jobs and Ive.)

surprised they omitted the shittiest thing ever made: TouchBar

At least they hit the Butterfly keyboard, which I'd argue is worse.

I know some people hate on the ‘Dustbin’ Mac Pro but I really liked mine, it was more powerful and 1/5th the size of those big Dell T7500 towers.

They were also super-quiet, given their size and power requirements.

I can't believe they still haven't fixed that charging port on the mouse. It has to be the single most hated Apple design choice ever...

Finally used one. It was totally fine. And kept me from using it plugged in 100% of the time, which is what I'd have probably done otherwise. Not like the touchbar which I have to all-but disable to make a Macbook Pro usable at all.

It's totally fine until you show up in front of your computer one day and find that you can't use it because the mouse has run out of battery.

Yeah, then you're out of luck for a few minutes, if you somehow manage to let that happen.

The one time I showed up to work to find that my mouse was dead, I plugged it in, got a cup of coffee, and by the time I was back at my desk it was charged enough to be used for the rest of the day.

I'm starting to get the feeling that some people will never be satisfied, and that complaints will always be made.

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