Pretty is good. Ugly is bad. It has always, and will always be this way.
If you don't make beautiful products, its probably because you can't.
If you don't make beautiful products, its probably because you can't.
All due respect to Matt Maroon, as always, but it's SUCH a snotty thing to dismiss a line of products because they're pretty. It's not only backwards thinking, it's snotty, too.
Edit: Too soon?
I haven't seen a single Apple product that I think is crap, not in a decade. I think that a lot of them could be BETTER, but Apple absolutely cares about making the best product that they can, and they've shown it time and time again. Also, for the record, I LIKED the original iMac. I like the new ones better, but I think that iMac was great when it first came out. So unless you've got a quantitative argument against Apple, close it: I don't care to hear insults against a company that I like without any sort of backing-up.
I will admit, though, that Apple tends to go overboard with its cheesy marketing tricks and ploys many times. They should let the products speak more. In most cases, they just do.
As for the "I'm a Mac" ads, they are not that bad at all.
Disclosure: I own an iPhone and am madly in love with it. I also own a new iMac, and love its looks and would like to make OS X work for me, but have not been very successful at that. Perhaps because I am just used to Linux.
The operating system is absolutely the most advanced. The fact that it gives you so much power without any tinkering is stunning. Corner-window commands, the vast keyboard commands, and the incredible efficiency of Spotlight are my favorite quick things to point out.
It will very be interesting to see how this changes once Verizon opens up their networks to all products that prove their compatibility. Hopefully it will be much better then the locked down equipment they currently sell.
The only network I get home reception from won't even include flashes on the vast majority of their camera phones.
With all the demand for iPhones, the only reason to this closedness is maximizing profit at the expense of end-user flexibility.
Usually Apple isn't against making tons of money, so I think it makes sense that there's a logical reason behind their actions.
The truth is that Apple feels it can make much more money from exclusive contracts with the carriers than it can selling the phones directly to consumers.
And yet Microsoft produces a more open mobile platform. If you believe AT&T is dictating the abusive iPhone terms, I'd recommend you lay off of the Jobs Kool-Aid for a while. It's effecting your perception.
Unfortunately, trading Gates for Jobs is like trading Mussolini for Hitler.
DRM sucks, but the iPod has proven that the presence of DRM doesn't mean a product is crap.
If that wasn't crap, I don't know what was. Even the much improved version is still a misfire, but probably not crap.
And as much as the performance of the MBA is derided on here.. It's probably better performing than my thinkpad (Due to being much newer). Has what you do in the last 2 years or so really changed that much needing extra performance (On your laptop?!)
I must have been born without the desire to dictate to people why they should want things.
Even when I see people using things I dislike (anybody heard of Twilight? That book is the scourge of intelligent life), I find fault not in the person who likes it but in the people that chose to make that product available (in that book's case, the publishing company). People can like whatever they want, and while that might change my opinion of the person, I don't blame the product for it.
I've found the most effective way to deal with it is to aim for a very simple base design, and add design elements iteratively rather than attempting to build a complex design and forcing it into place. A few highly polished and professional graphics make a site seem polished, and are easier to get working across multiple browsers.
The Lenovo has a better design aesthetic for getting people to pay $2,500+ for an ultra portable laptop.
Pretty is often good. Ugly is even more often bad. It has often been that way, and it will often be that way.
"If you don't make beautiful products, its probably because you can't."
Or because your product is wooden pencils, or bulldozers, or parachutes, or test tubes, or transistors, or pillows, or ammunition. Various things resist beauty enough that all you get is the elegance of something that's efficient and reliable, which is not the usual meaning of beauty.
(Yes, I remember our host's SR-71 example. And good sailboats look nice too. But efficient submarines and high speed rockets aren't particularly pretty. Once simple design constraints become too extreme --- streamlining in this case --- it can become hard to satisfy the constraints in an interesting way.)
Various other things like books are borderline cases. A well-done book may have more appealing aesthetic touches than a well-done wooden pencil. But not so many more, because mostly its presentation should keep out of the way of the words. A particularly beautiful fire alarm or fire extinguisher is not necessarily a good idea, either.
Notice I said that pretty is good, but not the only good.
Myspace and Craigslist 'can't' make beautiful products, Myspace because that would detract from user personalization, and Craigslist because they never hired the design muscle because it works well enough.
MySpace is popular with the same personalizing crowd that would put stickers on their MacBooks.
The original walkman was ugly as sin, but it was cheap and reliable. Had it been beautiful, it would have been even better, but it couldn't, without costing more.
Sure. But the word you're looking for is functional, not ugly. The ugliness is just a side effect.
Craigslist was criticized for being too plain from the moment it was built. But it's buried a lot of better-Photoshopped competitors.
Dove is using this idea in their "Campaign for Natural Beauty" (http://www.dove.us/#/cfrb/) . The models aren't ugly, but they also aren't the usual perfect-looking models.
When I was in grade school, I remember there were anti-smoking and tobacco posters on the wall of severely aged, sick looking people along with some text about how "chewing cost me my mandible". Those were examples of actual human ugliness, and they worked.
So that's all to say, ugly could be part of your message. Which isn't really a novel idea.
What's more interesting, in my opinion, is when something seems bad from a usability standpoint and still succeeds. plentyoffish.com fits under this category.
Facebook has made serious inroads largely due to better design (in terms of aesthetics and usability) than myspace.
Plentyoffish, craigslist, and Wikipedia are ugly ass sites that seem pretty much unassailable though.