How much is due to Covid, and how much is due to Jony Ive's departure?
The designs seem to make a bit more sense now, I was always perplexed at Ive's 'thinness at the expense of everything else' mindset (butterfly switch keyboard, ugh)
The designs seem to make a bit more sense now, I was always perplexed at Ive's 'thinness at the expense of everything else' mindset (butterfly switch keyboard, ugh)
So Apple appears to have been asleep at the wheel with the Mac (which is perhaps why Ive's had so much leeway with clearly unpopular decisions like the keyboard, missing escape key, etc...) resulting in its worst years ever. The laptop keyboard is one example, but the iOS-ification of the Mac is another (i.e., moving towards the iOS security model), as is the stagnate Mac Pro.
Now things are back to normal, see the M1, the new Mac Pro, the new iMac, etc...
The M1 transition going so smoothly, and with such an emphasis on backwards compatibility (they ported OpenCL! they helped with Blender!) is my favorite example of this, contrasted with the complete &$@^*% you! treatment that developers got with things like notarization, new security features, and pretty much everything recent going all the way back to Mac App Store Sandboxing, which I'd personally consider the start of the dark years (and I'd also consider that the single worst decision in all of this, worse than the keyboard, that's the one that fundamentally broke the Mac ecosystem, maybe forever).
iOS-ification of macOS in particular is incredibly overblown, power users have been playing up a few security design changes and modernized APIs (e.g. kext > system extensions) as if they're huge negatives that will "ruin" macOS. I just don't think those issues matter.
If the Mac itself improving was part of the Q2 results, you wouldn't have seen the similar levels of iPad revenue spike. There has been no significant change to the iPad lineup that would convince someone to buy or not buy in the last couple of years.
That's why I think this is 100% Covid or whatever you call this current spike in demand.
Do we honestly think apple is going to reverse course on this? I highly doubt it. Open platforms are not their m.o. for many years. They've let the walled garden around macos have too many cracks and holes, and they're going to recapture those users that have taken advantage.
Apple is not deaf to their users, they know how important Homebrew is. Apple themselves gifted hardware to the Homebrew team:
"Particular thanks on Homebrew 3.0.0 go to MacStadium and Apple for providing us with a lot of Apple Silicon hardware and Cassidy from Apple for helping us in many ways with this migration. Enjoy using Homebrew!"
A very important percentage. E.g. Final Cut used to have a 60% market share. Now it's may be 25%?
There's most likely a dip among every other category of professional users.
We don't know because Apple doesn't report it, but I would surmise that Final Cut has had a consistently growing user base.
- Final Cut X was a major re-write that didn't support importing old project formats for something like two years and didn't support all required video formats for the same period
- Mac Pro was abandoned, twice. Once for years before the trashcan design. Once for years after the trashcan design.
I don’t really get the Jony Ive hate. The only particularly bad thing I can think of him being involved in was the butterfly keyboard, and the fact that the Apple Watch is the only real success among smart watches more than makes up for that.
Offer not valid if I do an hour of exercise during the day, or game heavily (I've been known to zone out on 2048 pretty hardcore), but for normal use, sure.
Apple Watch isn't trying to be anything other than a charge-daily device, it's honestly kind of incredible that something that small can be a full-fledged cell phone and still last a full day.
Never owned an Apple Watch so can’t compare but I really like my Garmin. It is a little large though so not everyone’s cup of tea. Smaller versions probably last a bit shorter.
It should be noted that Garmin's battery life drops to 36 hours (fenix 6) once GPS mode is on, which is comparable to the Apple Watch.
Long battery life is a lot less important in this category than you'd think. You throw your watch on your night stand every night and forget about it.
How do you wake up then? One of the biggest advantages of my pebble classic is that i can wear it to bed and have vibrate mode wake me up silently.
For exercise, i already have my phone on me, so it tracks everything for me and the pebble shows stats on the watchface.
I think we've lost something by not treating the "smart watches" as thin terminals.
It charges pretty quickly; quickly enough in my experience that even if I forget to charge it one day and I find it dead at an inconvenient time, I can usually throw it in a charger for long enough to get through the rest of the day without much inconvenience. I’ve had my series 5 for about 18 months and in that time, only once have I had it die on me when I was trying to use it.
If I ever go back to working in an office, my use pattern might change, but for the most part I think the inconvenience of charging daily is overstated.
Edit: It also will notify you 1 hour before your configured bedtime if it doesn’t have enough juice to get through the night. I thought this was silly when they announced it but in practice it is great.
As of right now I usually don't use an alarm to wake up. I just wake up. Or I use a standard audio alarm on the phone. But I guess that's kind of a cop-out answer?
The vibration alarm was nice, not a must-have considering I had to wear something around my wrist when I slept: not as comfortable as not doing that.
I disagree with you about the concept of smartwatches that should be "thin terminals." The things I don't miss about my Pebble classic involve how basic it was.
I can totally understand someone wanting much more of a basic device with time, fitness tracking, basic notifications, long battery life, and that's about it. However, I think that in the scope of what is marketable to the general public, it's a more of a niche.
I think that most people:
1. Don't actually want to sleep with any jewelry (watches) on.
2. Aren't deep into fitness tracking beyond the basics, i.e. they wouldn't sleep with jewelry on just to get sleep tracking. For most people fitness tracking means a few graphs and figures that make them feel good about themselves for getting on a treadmill for 20 minutes.
3. Choose their watch based on the fact that it's a piece of jewelry. In my mind, Apple gained a lot of early traction (and high-margin revenue) by focusing on the fashion part of it with the way the bands are easily changeable.
Pebble wouldn't have folded if they had considered how high-margin the jewelry business usually is. The original Pebble should have been designed with replaceable bands like the Apple Watch. They shouldn't have said "oh hey these are standard sized bands, just buy your own!" They just surrendered revenue right out the gate!
4. Want something that's more of a general purpose extension of their smartphone.
In the long term, I don't see a huge amount of reason why smartwatches can't entirely replace the smartphone, at least for the people who aren't interested in content consumption, or to give people flexibility to leave their phone at home for evenings out or other situations.
Apple Watch does do sleep tracking. I've heard reports from people of success with just charging the Apple Watch while they're in the shower or getting ready every day. If you take something like 30 minutes to get ready you'll never need to charge the watch at night.
> I disagree with you about the concept of smartwatches that should be "thin terminals." The things I don't miss about my Pebble classic involve how basic it was.
Let me restate this. Unless the watch is a phone replacement (including just part of the time), I think it is a waste making them more expensive and more power hungry. I can agree that the use-case of not carrying my phone around would make the "fat" smartwatch reasonable (or if it tied to a 3d headset or something for better consumption - stream netflix on wifi).
> The things I don't miss about my Pebble classic involve how basic it was.
I think the Pebble classic is not a good example of what a modern low power smart watch could do -- something that could offload everything to the phone and acts just like a display and input device.
For a thin-watch, I love that even my ancient pebble classic can answer phone calls (with BT earbuds in), display text messages, and control music playing (volume/skip/pause). I get so many spam calls now, i can instantly check on my wrist if it is someone i know and silence it otherwise.
They just reached a useful minimum, I don't think it has anything to do with Ive.
IMO the guy got bored and focused on building the museum-like HQ building and took eyes off the ball of actual products, while maintaining total control. Even for an elite, top of his field individual, you need to focus to win.
In terms of laptops, HP built some very nice high end business laptops that were more like evolutions of the 2014 MacBook Pro than the garbage Apple pumped out and wasted many millions of dollars on for warranty claims.
[0] from the OED: a) To make drawings for the construction or creation of (something, as a building, object, garment, etc.) according to certain aesthetic criteria; (b) to make plans for the production of (a device, product, etc.) according to structural or functional criteria (sometimes without the implication of aesthetic requirements); (c) (in extended use) to conceive, devise, plan (something immaterial, as a scheme, system, programme, etc.).
When function follows form to the point where you ship say a laptop with an unserviceable keyboard that is rendered inoperable by a speck of dust, or make a smartphone surface friction similar to a stick of butter, you got a problem.
- for the first x years of apple, everything was legitimately thick
- so each generation Ive wanted to make things thinner
- it entered the culture (of the design division perhaps) that you had to make each generation thinner than the last to please Ive
- Then when things got to a comfortable thickness for users, people kept making each generation thinner to please Ive
- Ive never told them to stop making things thinner so they didn't stop.
- snowball effect and we got those horrible products
- he had to leave to stop the cycle
In general I think this is less of an issue today, since usb-C is both generally great and very small, so you can just use it. But, if thinness came at the sacrifice of common connectors like USB-A (or like HDMI), the opportunity cost of standard connectors might be lost.
I'm ignoring that like many of apple's ports are just better than USB-A to focus only on the waste argument here though.
Apple's software support for all their devices lasts much longer than the competition, and their hardware tends to last many years out of warranty. Not always of course, but this is a numbers game, and there is a robust secondary market in everything Apple makes.
Objectively, a laptop, phone, or tablet, will have a longer service life if manufactured by Apple, than anyone else, with the possible exception of ThinkPads.
Sure, if you want more RAM or what have you, you have to buy a new computer and sell the old one. That's expensive, but all that matters with respect to the environment is total service life of a given machine, and again, as an objective matter, Apple is peerless there.
It's tempting to compare this record against imaginary competition which doesn't exist, but I don't see the point.
An apple device with upgradeable parts would be even better for the environment. Apple's software support has no effect on the environmental impact of non upgradeable computers compared to upgradeable computers.
That's true for mobile products.
On desktop no one beats Microsoft's support time spans. Apple cares significantly less for desktop longevity.
> - he had to leave to stop the cycle
Or, you know, correct people on their misinterpretation of his desires, if indeed there was any.
I'm trying real hard to not see this comment as some sort of Apple logic distortion field showing itself in an overt manner, but not having much luck.
The 12” MacBook was the poster child for the search for ultimate thinness. As was the disastrous butterfly keyboard (it was suggested this only shaved off 0.5mm).
Look at the iPad Pro refresh just announced. It’s actually slightly thicker because that’s needed for a better display. This would never have happened with Ive at the helm of design.
This is verifiable nonsense, given the iPhone increased in thickness between generations several times with Ive at the helm.
I can't find the link, but I heard when they launched the new Mac Pro, Ives tried to show Tim Cook what it looked like, but Tim responded with "I get it... its a computer", and didn't see the design until the public launch event.
Right-clicking became so ubiquitous and even consistent on Windows. You needed the same behaviour on Macs but had no second mouse button so got that by using modifier keys. Some apps it was Option, others control and so on.
The problem was that those modified clicks had no discoverability and less consistency than right-clicking. Windows users on the other hand learned that nothing bad could happen with a right click.
Force Touch as a similar kind of UX fail with no discoverability. There was (and is) no consistency with what a Force Touch means or should mean or even if it's an option at all.
But yes, Force Touch did make the iPhone thicker and heavier.
The thinness and smallness of the computer was genuinely a very nice thing about it. You could hold it open in one hand easily, fit into any bag, didn't add any weight. Computers don't have all that much differentiating them anyway, so these things are actually a very good goal to shoot for. I'm guessing that they will probably end up bringing the form factor back with the M1 at some point.
So dust kills a keyboard that is an expensive replacement and was such a fail Apple had to replace who knows how many keyboards for free. Epic fail. That's kind of my point.
> Biggest downside is that it got very hot during video calls
Exactly. It was too underpowered. Compare that to the Macbook Air (2010 onwards, not the earlier 2008 model). This was such an awesome machine. Relatively cheap and a good compromise of power and portability. It was actually amazing how good this machine was. For years no Windows hardware could compete with that price and set of features.
But it languished for years when all it needed was more memory and a retina display and instead we got the one-port 12" Macbook abomination. All for the holy grail of thinness.
Design is the art of compromise. The 12" Macbook shows you exactly what happens when you don't compromise.
> I'm guessing that they will probably end up bringing the form factor back with the M1 at some point.
While waiting for a Macbook Air refresh my heart sank as soon as they announced the 12" Macbook. Why? Because I knew there was no room for the (then) 11" and 13" Airs with a 12" SKU. And I was right. That mistake was corrected so I don't see the 12" model coming back anytime soon with the 13" Air here and on M1.
if anything, I think that niche has been filled with the iPad (poorly). I mean there's lots of things I like my iPad for but it's no laptop replacement.
The thinness trade offs with the butterfly keyboard and USB C actually make sense for an ultraportable (as opposed to a desktop replacement like the pro).
> I had some issues with dust in the keyboard I use a keyboard cover to get around this.
> Biggest downside is that it got very hot during video calls, which wasn't as big of an issue in 2016 as it is now. Agreed, it's not great for video, esp. since the camera also kind of sucks.
I'd totally buy an updated version.
It's crazy to think about, Intel 10nm was supposed to be available for the entire butterfly/touchbar era.
And yet now we have the new iMac, the "thinnest iMac ever" at just 11.5mm. So it seems like Ive wasn't the only one at Apple obsessed with being thin.
Really moving into the lifestyle product market.
Sure, but it was removed from the main device.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. The iMac gets an Ethernet port, and there’s one fewer cable to run up to the machine. That seems like a win all around.
Honestly I think that’s an inspired bit of design. It solves for Apple’s desire to keep clean lines, and, in many offices I’ve been in, the Ethernet is wired in close to the power, so it’s very functional. Win-win.
1. Lot of use cases for SD cards besides cameras. Audio recorders, notably.
2. A fair number of high-end cameras are no longer using SD cards, or at least, not exclusively; lot of CFexpress for the big boy cameras out there now. (I mean, they used to use CompactFlash cards, but it’s not like they’re gonna jam a CF card reader in there.)
some have also mentioned potential synergy with future MacBooks, which might also adopt this port on the power brick. that could bring a magnetic connector back to laptops _and_ ethernet without a $30 dongle
But they did choose to make the new iMacs thin rather than small, they could have tucked the computer part behind the display and done away with the chin, but they didn't.
But I don't think it's entirely fair to just call that failed experiment the pursuit of thinness at all costs. Scissors are a bit mushy, you can move your fingers around on a keypad and feel them wobble. The sound is kind of dull, the action lacks a clean tactile break.
The butterfly keyboard felt great, to me at least. Crisp, clicky action, rock-solid pads: to my taste, the tactile experience is superior. If they had found a way to make them absolutely reliable, I'd have called it a win. Although the square arrow keys and lack of a physical escape key were ergonomic disasters, that's orthogonal to keyboard action, they could have fixed both of those things while sticking with the butterfly switches.
These are ultimately aesthetic considerations. Someone else certainly prefers the sound and feel of the scissor switches, I respect that, I just disagree is all.
So I don't think shaving a half millimeter was the be-all and end-all of the decision to iterate on the ultimately unworkable butterfly keyboard design. I imagine Jony Ive thought it was a nicer keyboard and just spent more time trying to make it work than was really justified, especially since it proved to be impossible.
Was it the best on the market? Well, no, obviously not, one of the worst considering the reliability.
Is Apple's current scissor keyboard the best on the market? No, it was clearly shoehorned back in from older designs with minimal changes.
I would have loved the butterfly keyboard to have just a hair longer travel...and there was something about the key shape/spacing/size that made me slightly less accurate finding the correct keys.
It really was "almost there" but they had to throw it out because it was a PR disaster.
I will add that I have no real idea about Ive's design leanings. I guess it is possible to conclude that either he wasn't the driving force behind "extreme thinness" or he managed to convert people inside of Apple to this way of thinking and they still remain influential.
Obviously dramatic over simplification but it doesn’t seem to be the usual kind of thin for the sake of thin design - this iMac seems objectively better than its predecessors and its thickness (or lack thereof) doesn’t seem like a problem or unnecessary constraint.
Again, they don’t have to solve the mobile/tablet issues on this product, it’s never going to be a portable device.
They made a trade-off to make it look uglier/bulkier/worse from the front when actually using the machine, just so that if you happen to glimpse it from the side it's a little thinner. There's not even the argument of portability to support the pursuit of thinness here as with most of their other devices. So I would argue the opposite, this new iMac is just about the pinnacle of thinness for the sake of thin design.
(You could of course argue that it's not ugly, that's totally subjective, but they clearly went out of their way to make it as thin as possible).
They will always be two different use cases, desktop/mobile.
Apple is clearly selling to the masses here.
Most people don't know or care who Jony Ive is, and the MacBook Pros and iPads don't look meaningfully different in any way.
I'm shocked anyone thinks Ive's departure is relevant at this scale.
You need some balance. The key is to produce the best looking product without compromising functionality or usability.
Not sure how that has anything to do with the parent's argument.
It wasn't usable for the majority of the market. Even in the infamous mea culpa Apple made about it, they admitted they designed themselves into a corner. It was designed so poorly, they had to take years to undo it after admitting it needed to be done.
GP was complaining about the common and incorrect trope that design is limited to aesthetics.
In theory.
In practice, designers design for two things: market demand, and personal predilection.
To be fair, Apple acknowledged the problem and provides free out-of-warranty repair/replacement for keyboard issues on the affected models. But it took them years to come out with a better keyboard.
Yes, Ive was a bit of a farce. Under Jobs he flourished. Without guidance from Jobs he proved to be comically bad. It will take years for Apple to recover from the damage he did. For example, copying Flat-UI from Windows Phone. Apple hasn't recovered yet.
I mean, he did basically design the Apple Watch which has been an absolute runaway success, the most successful new entire product category since the iPhone.
So not exactly sure how that's comically bad.
I don't think that any of this is due to the design either.
Finding product-market fit for health is a separate issue -- that's not the design department's job.
Ive's job was to design a brand-new smartwatch from scratch and he and his team knocked it out of the park.
I noticed in the early 2000s, and it has held true ever since: don't bother getting the first three iterations of a new Apple product unless you're well and truly enthusiastic about it. They always iterate, it always gets better, and the fourth go around is generally when I'll be happy with it.
One which I thought was too cool to pass up was AirPods, and yeah the first generation were really special and I'm glad I got them. The wireless case in the second generation was a nice bump, and the AirPods Pro (gen 3) are a clear improvement in every way. I did get a pair from the bad batch which started having problems with noice cancellation, but the replacement process was pretty smooth: so I conclude that if I wasn't in a hurry, the next generation, the fourth, would be "insanely great" and the right time to buy.
Not sure about that.
I was impressed by how Apple-y the Apple Watch was, especially before the first software update. I am convinced this is due to Steve Jobs' influence [1]. As soon as the first software update was released I noticed a marked decline, much like the decline we saw in iOS 7.
[1] https://www.cultofmac.com/427636/steve-jobs-may-have-influen...
If you notice people complaining about something in numbers, there's a reason for it.
There were people who held out for years because MacBook Pro designs were anti-consumer and people held out for compromise. I know I did. Everyone I know did. It wasn't some niche. There's an entire professional class that relies on good tooling.
The idea that Ive has somehow fundamentally damaged Apple's business in a way that they've yet to recover from when they've just had an almost $90bn quarter is .... just wrong.
(And anyway they've fixed the keyboard and Mac sales are up hugely).
MacBook Pro keyboard.
It didn’t work out that way. High performance Thunderbolt peripherals like eGPUs were slow to develop, for reasons outside of Apple’s control. They thought you’d soon be able to buy the latest GPUs in external enclosures as well as internal cards, the way you can hard drives. Didn’t happen.
It’s a good example of a big bet from Apple that didn’t move the whole computer industry. Eventually Apple threw in the towel and went back to the traditional big box case for a pro machine.
Option is Alt. Used to modify some keyboard shortcuts like the above, sometimes on its own, and often used to type in alternate characters than standard on your keyboard (Option+e e gives you an accented e).
Control is honestly something I use often outside the terminal on macOS. I think Control+<left/right arrow key> gets you linear navigation with multiple full screen windows or multiple desktops. It probably does more, I don't know.
Windows and Linux (desktop and server) user for ~15 years before getting my first Mac (at work) around 2011 (DOS user even earlier). Other keyboard+OS combos are so frustrating now. Not in the "this is unfamiliar" way macOS was initially, but in a "I know this and the Apple way now, and this is worse, why the hell do you keep doing this, and not either just copy Apple or come up with something even better?" way.
Point is: you'll get used to it, and probably like it. But you might permanently be slightly irritated when using anything else, afterward.
(Try Spectacle, or something similar, if you want somewhat better window layout management from the keyboard. It's in Homebrew. It's pretty much the only OS-behavior-modifying thing I install on Mac—my other tweaks are just in the settings GUI, mostly just making CAPS lock an extra ctrl. The default spectacle shortcuts are a bit wild, but 95% of what I use is just split-half-screen left, split-half-screen right, and fullscreen, and it'd be worth using if you never used any others)
In fact, I just checked out of curiosity, and I move 2 fingers very slightly to cmd+c, while doing (standard) ctrl+c I move every joint up my arm, including my shoulder, and all my fingers (as I reposition my whole hand, so the fingers all flex, flattening so my pinky can hit the ctrl)
Again, caps-as-control makes it much better, but I can still feel more strain than the very natural almost-pinching motion of cmd+c. I don't know how much of this was intentional when the Apple keyboard was designed and shortcuts chosen, but it's a real effect regardless.
Huh? If anything, everybody and their dog were yelling at Apple against the non-flat "skeuomorphic" UI at the time they made the switch.
And while the first version was undercooked, the current (and 2-3 years) iteration of the flat UI is just fine...
It turns out everyone did want to do that, and in fact iPhones weren't big enough, so the flat UI was designed to take the same device and make it look bigger and brighter.
Huh?
So maybe you could enlighten us without being, you know, a jerk about it.
As the grantparent said, noone at Apple ever claimed so.
The device was small anyway in actual life (no need to "make it look small"), skeuomorphic vs flat has nothing to do with making a device appear smaller or bigger, iPad and even OS X also used skeuomorphism (so it wasn't a size concern), and Ive never said anything to that effect. The whole idea doesn't even make sense.
As for what Ive actually said, citing real-life metaphors and familiarity as the reasons (for the skeuomorphic design):
“When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn’t need physical buttons, they understood the benefits,” says Ive. “So there was an incredible liberty in not having to reference the physical world so literally. We were trying to create an environment that was less specific. It got design out of the way.”
And Scott Forstall said the same:
"If you look at the designs we did at Apple, we talked about photo illustrative designs, metaphorical designs. And those were infused into the design sense of Apple by Steve Jobs since the original Mac if not earlier. The original Mac had a desktop and folders that looked very much like the desktop on which that Mac sat. And so we used these design philosophies".