The dissolution of Apple’s legacy design team
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
I worked with Jony after we were acquired. The original Siri linen background was his idea, the bubbles had to be perfect, the padding, the text size, the lists goes on. I inferred this as design obsession and did not find it offending, he was right 95% of the time.
When I left Apple, I emailed with Jony on a device I had designed and pitched internally in 2011 but was shelved. His response has stayed with me to this day, “not all ideas make the cut, even the best ones”.
He could have cut me down or ignored me, but he responded with honesty.
I think that void he left when he moved on was too big to be filled. Steve and Jony were always together, pretty much every day we would see them at lunch.
I'm not sure I understand. If the best ideas don't make the cut, which ones do? Or was Jony acknowledging a flaw in Apple's process?
The best idea might be too expensive for the market so you go with the next best one?
Whichever way you put it, it's either a flawed process or a weird turn of phrase by Ive.
Have you ever heard of "Good/Cheap/Fast — pick two"?
An unqualified "best" means it's the best. It was an unfortunate turn of phrase by Ive, a person known to make mistakes, as pointed out several times here on HN.
No not really, real life does not work that, you can be best in some aspect while not the best in other aspects but for some reason you dont seem to understand nuance, its probably your hatred for Ive that seems to be clouding your judgement.
> its probably your hatred for Ive that seems to be clouding your judgement
Wow. Hatred. I don't even know the guy, how can I hate him? I don't own a Mac, I just use one provided by my work. I don't own an iphone. I really don't pay much attention to Ive at all, just pointing out a flaw in his wording.
Hatred. Really. Is that how you normally debate?
Is that how you normally debate by making personal attacks? You have already made up your mind the Ive makes many mistakes.
> Maybe Ive should have been more careful about his wording -- which was my point, after all!
and my point was that there are nuances which for some reason you still dont understand because you have already made up your mind about Ive, so lets agree to disagree because you are not going to change your opinion.
> You have already made up your mind the Ive makes many mistakes.
I made my mind just like any person would: by looking at past behavior. This is not a sin, is how human judgment works.
> you still dont understand
Ok then. Good luck with your debate tactics.
I dont need luck when facts are on my side. Good luck understanding nuance in the future.
That's not a personal attack.
> you have already made up your mind that whatever he does is a mistake
Uh, no.
As I said, good luck with that.
As I said, Good luck understanding nuance in the future.
Good luck, and good bye.
Good luck to you too, you do need it.
You also seem obsessed with Ive.
What does it say about your obsession that you're continuing this thread?
What's funny is that you overstepped the line with the "personal attack" claim -- you know it, I know it -- but you're too stubborn to back down now, so you resort to... making personal attacks.
I still don't understand why you said goodbye if you had so much hatred inside you which you want to take out.
I see you enjoy insulting other people. One might even call it... hatred.
But yes, I do feel harassed by an online troll: you.
And also I'm a troll because I didn't take it in stride when you started saying I'm "insulting with my hatred" someone I don't know?
Did I get this right, is this what offended you so much?
I'm sorry I hurt you so much, you poor thing.
You are a troll because you said goodbye but when someone proved you wrong, you could not handle it because of your hatred.
You should feel sorry for yourself, you need to see someone to handle your hate which is festering inside you.
I missed the part where you "proved me wrong", I guess I need my glasses!
Tell me more about hatred, please.
Read my comments again with your glasses.
Could you please link to your comment where you "proved me wrong", for my own edification?
Did you get your glasses and read my previous comments again?
-Steve Jobs.
The products that launch end up being good enough in all areas but rarely/never the best in all areas.
It’s the sign of a healthy business IMHO
(As an aside, in my opinion -- and many others on HN, as I've read through the years -- Ive sometimes made the worst choice between two design decisions, so he definitely sometimes cut the best in favor of the less good).
(Also, judging by the reactions to my top-level comment, others agree with me!)
> 1. excelling all others
> 2. offering or producing the greatest advantage, utility, or satisfaction
Different models of products exist because "best" is subjective. The phone that is best for me is not best for you, but both are precisely, by definition, best for each of us. You seem to be thinking that the word "best" means some absolute global maximum, which is not the definition of the word. That maximum is made from weights in some huge vector space, with those weights being different depending on the perspective of each of us. There is no "correct" perspective that can allow this global maximum, that you seem to be searching for, to exist.
You're making the assumption that he, a celebrated consumer product designer, was not aware of the subjective, multivariate, nature of "best", when used in the context of consumer product design. I don't think that's an appropriate assumption, for any professional designer.
I stand by my opinion: Ive was either careless about words, or pointing out a flaw in Apple's process.
Please, don't try to convince me I don't understand product design or what "best" means. At this point, this intellectual match trying to save Ive from his own words is not productive.
Let's agree to disagree.
No, why would I?
> From what you've said, I think we can agree that [...]
No, we cannot agree on nothing of the sort. Where did I say I'm a car design expert?
Please stop trying to make me say things I don't want to. I'm just pointing out Ive's misleading use of language. Since Ive is a design expert, I hold him to a higher standard, but he certainly didn't "make the cut"! Maybe he wasn't the "best" after all.
That said, in this case Ive seems to be arguing even in cases where the "best" can be identified and has a known meaning, it won't make the cut. By definition of "best", this means something "worse" will be chosen instead. Seems like a flawed process to me!
PS: if you ask me, I think Ive wasn't careful with his words, and instead he meant "even extremely good products sometimes don't make the cut, because they are competing with something even better here at Apple". But he said "best", an unfortunate word which made his statement... wrong. Someone so careful about design should also be careful about words, because words are also design.
But a company may not have the bandwidth to release in all three categories. So it may choose to focus on Product Category B, and the best implementation for B, and leave A and C (for now). Even though there are "best" implementations/ideas available for A and C.
Sometimes it is not possible for a company to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Never ever ever ever announce moves like this if there is still money on the table that can still be taken away from you.
No matter how awesome your company is, how great the team, product or how wonderful the atmosphere is. This guy thought he wrote a heartfelt goodbye to his beloved team and was instead brutally punished for it.
That made me lose a whole lot of respect for Ive.
You mean you lost respect for Alan Dye? Seems to have been the one who fired Imran Chaudhri.
> Shortly after the email, Dye fired Chaudhri.
> The email alarmed Ive and Dye. They feared that the message Chaudhri sent could be interpreted to mean that Apple’s best days had passed.
It’s clear from the article that both Ive and Dye were directly involved in the firing.
I’ve read many articles/interviews where Jony talks about being “hurt” by something. As in, he puts everything he has into these creations and certain things he takes very personally, as if someone is trying to stomp on a rose in his garden.
Chaudhri is known to have a big personality himself and went to start a company that has hired a lot from Apple (not exclusively but sometimes browsing LinkedIn it looks that way). So he sends an email while resting and vesting (and also planning his next big thing), and they decide to cut ties, as he’s now seen as a potential liability. It doesn’t need to be petty or vindictive, but a decision based on bad vibes they got. Chaudhri could have given his notice two months in advance and cruised and sent the email on his last day, but he didn’t.
It's really not. The part you quoted doesn't say that Ive was "directly involved" in the firing, it says he felt something about the message Chaudhri sent. The article states Dye was directly involved in the firing, and mentions nothing about if Ive was involved or not, so we should presume he wasn't. Otherwise the article would say so.
If it really was solely about himself it's a really poor metaphor. So the river is moving to a new mountain? And the river's lack of water has nothing to do with the current one? Or, the mountain (Apple) has plenty of water but somehow this river (employee) can't receive any of it?
The non-critical-of-Apple reading is convoluted and tortured, imo.
It seems obvious that he is talking about his personal joy running out. Because that’s what he said.
Maybe the lesson is that for employees who happen to believe that Apple's river had run dry, the message would be hard to interpret as personal to the author.
Or that the river running dry personally is potentially contagious.
In the letter he talks about his own soul, and the experience of deep work being like that of a river. So it’s pretty clear he’s talking about what’s on his interior spiritually. From a designer “I am barren and in a creative rut” pretty much means “I can’t come up with good stuff and I’m of no use to all of you here”.
However, regardless of what he actually said, he was on his way out from a tight-knit and emotionally connected team in which expressing your feelings and being sensitive is sort of expected, only the guys running that team were so paranoid that they decided to burn him and smear shit all over his beautiful farewell letter. That’s a dark thing to do to someone’s career/reputation etc.
Getting that glimpse, I do wonder to what extent Ive and his buddies have other ugly deeds on their accounts. Perhaps Ive running that separate company of his is really only a way of gracefully pushing this kind of toxicity away from the house just in case.
It feels like they’re sneaking out under the cover of night, and it makes everyone I need to work with feel very fungible. Getting attached to any given person is a dangerous excercise, since one day they might suddenly be gone, and you wouldn’t know it.
People should put more faith in each other. Look for the positive instead of just the flaws and shortcomings.
The point of the story was that he was fired for what very well might have been a poor metaphor. I mean, even taking your point as a prior and assuming that the guy was clearly saying that Apple's design primacy was fading as he announced his retirement... why is that a termination-worthy act?
I mean, yeah, he was firing some mildly poetic shots at his employer. Who among us, as it were. That quote was a little bit of passive aggression. Firing him was an act of deliberate malice.
I think our society has gotten to much cynicism. Maybe we need more nativity, compassion and empathy.
Perhaps you are also reading things with a certain context - "poor", "convoluted", "tortured", "lack", "can't" - all negative words used in this comment. People often see things through lenses, - if management is negative, thin skinned, looking at a statement like that as anything but an indictment of the company would be wondrous.
As others pointed out, the context of the letter speaks very differently. Whether it is "Apples" river or the river of inspiration of the employee, is hardly worth arguing over, inspiration comes from without and is experienced by the employee, there is nothing innately inspiration about a company, ever, only about its employees...who make up said company.
I suppose you might want to argue that employees can inspire other employees - perhaps, but only to the limited degree which some employees have different experiences than others. As a senior employee, you are somewhat expected to be that source of inspiration, saying rivers dry up, e.g. yours, is not saying that Apple the company, can never be a place employees will experience inspiration, just that you aren't experiencing it anymore, and that's perfectly fine.
What's also perfectly fine is that management reacted this, way, which, ironically, foreshadows the absolutely lack-luster dumpster fire which was Apple in the past decade. It illustrates perhaps why there was not inspiration, because leadership failed to provide it.
But regardless of the interpretation, firing the dude was completely unacceptable.
It would seem thin skinned, skittish, cruel, deeply immoral and evil, leading me to lose a lot of trust, feeling as though creating a culture of fear is the goal. That behavior seems completely incomprehensible to me, especially since you need to have an extremely tortured reading of that e-mail to read it as an attack on Apple. It’s simply so extremely weird and wrong to do that. It also seems completely ineffective. What’s the intended effect here?
I’m not sure what the general vibe here’s on that, but it seems abhorrent to treat people that way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_SI_prefi...
I work as a user researcher and in general designers tend to be the very best, both at showing a real interest and investing themselves into the research and also at incorporating the results.
Designers tend to have a real interest in improving their designs and getting clarity on things they themselves may be uncertain about.
However, I’m not working in the context those people talked about there work in. (Also, UI design, not hardware design. So not very comparable.)
I feel it’s a mistake to conflate art with design. While related they are separate disciplines.
I had no idea the originator of the Bondi Blue iMac was Danny Coster. I'd always assumed it wss Ive.
Interesting he managed to take all of the credit for it.
It’s much easier to personify a monolith under a specific individual. Tesla is only Musk. Gas prices and inflation are only because of Biden. The list goes on.
Of course the world is more nuanced than that but the power of narrative combined with the romance of “leadership” and you end up playing a high-risk, high-reward game
You can have vindictive jerks in any job, but considering that design's fundamental purpose is to empathize with people and manifest that it some medium, vindictive people tend to filter themselves out.
I think you're absolutely right that in general artists are not like that. It's a few bad apples, and for the most part they don't ever have much opportunity to do damage because it takes an exceptionally weird company to enable them.
"Sadly, rivers dry out, and when they do, you look for a new one." broadcasts extreme negativity to the people who remain. It almost reads like a cautionary warning followed by advice.
One can write a heartfelt goodbye without ambiguity. Assuming the ambiguity was unintentional, the author was careless and paid the price. He could've gotten away with it in other places (large companies are generally too bureaucratic to fire someone who's already leaving) but obviously not in this case.
...which was immediately proven right by execs who fired him.
A team or an organisation that cannot look at itself critically and recognise its problems is unable to remedy them.
When people are afraid to speak about problems, those problems are more likely to remain. That's not a healthy culture.
Part of the problem is that everyone sees everything from their point of view, and not always from a holistic point of view.
Someone working on homepod sees the potential there and gets frustrated that its not equivalent to an iPhone or ipad. Someone else, in the siri division has his own list of priorities and demands (perhaps from the iPhone team).
Management isn't trying to fix every problem, or make everyone happy, they're trying to triage as best they can.
In my personal context we get all kinds of feedback from employees, but ultimately we have more ideas, and suggestions, than money. For some problems everyone has a proposed solution, half of which conflict with the other half. Sometimes suggestions fix some of a problem, but are short term, we may be holding out for a long term approach.
I guarantee that wherever you work you won't be happy with all decisions and directions - and I'm sure that includes people making those decisions and directions.
I've had people leave. Some on good terms, some on bad. Some are positive on the way out, but we stomp on negative. There's a place for negative feedback, and that's up the pipeline (where we always take it seriously) but whining to co-workers who have no authority to effect change, especially after resigning, is not a good look, and is not constructive.
If you're almost vested and planning on leaving very soon, that is not a terrible approach to take, even if the parties involved are not psychopaths.
We are only getting one side of the story after all.
Considering how awful the story is, I think it’s likely that there was more to the guy who got fired than the book let on. They were worried about an exodus so they treated a guy like shit? And why did he announce his departure before his benefits were locked in? The whole story is sus.
This happens when people trust their team and managers. Which is why I consider it the worst sort of betrayal to fire people over it.
I dunno... It sounds like they let him rest and vest for a few months as a courtesy even though he was already checked out.
And then, during that time, he sent an email to the entire team that implied (either intentionally or through carelessness) that Apple's river of ideas had run dry.
It seems pretty reasonable to ask him to leave immediately after doing that.
Maybe part misunderstanding, but it was a dumb thing for him to do.
That’s also taking this article at face value - I’d guess there’s probably more to it as there usually is.
I guess it's some clause of a vesting schedule that gets triggered when being fired and he already declared his resignation before his shares were vested, but they would've been after his last day?
I find it so weird that he already quit the job but the company could actually save money by firing him. Shouldn't something except fear of a bad reputation prevent this kind of move to do actual damage?
Btw, disciplinary firing of employees on leave is of course pretty rare but happens - also in those countries that make it difficult to fire salaried staff. People do stupid things, like steal, download thousands of documents, or write stupid emails.
It became these “did you hear the latest crazy thing they did in the US office?”
I am not saying this to dump on America but hopefully to get people to demand better. If this is how people want their work life that is fine, but I hope people realize it doesn’t have to be like this.
What is actually pretty bad corporate culture has been normalized IMHO.
That hasn’t been my experience at all.
I am not a lawyer, but I'd expect you'd need to be revealing company secrets, or have a public speaking position in the first place (e.g. you work for PR) and your declarations make you unfit for the job, or leave proofs that your goal was to damage the company, to be in a position as weak as in the US.
imagine otherwise how tough it would be to do political or ideological activism on your private time.
Can you do that in Europe and face no consequences?
> "He was fond of a line from the Persian poet Rumi, who said, “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” Playing off that line, Chaudhri wrote, “Sadly, rivers dry out, and when they do, you look for a new one."
No, an employer wouldn't be in a great position firing an employee about a reflexion on a poem, that was used to explain his motivation drying out. To be clear, the employer would face the consequences.
I can be openly critical to my boss, or leadership, or mess up in general and recover my good graces without constantly worrying that my job and life depend on it.
That said, we have to work with one another, so it’s in all our interests to keep a good relationship.
From the story, it looks like a benign email with an apropos quote.
But while that could’ve indeed been the email, maybe he was also going around saying Apple is done, come join me in my new gig, Ive is dumb, etc.
And team members then complained it hurt their morale.
So Dye and Ive put their door down.
I’m not saying this is what happened. But do we really know the full story?
But something also not frequently said: Apple had amazing designs (compared to the rest of the industry), for 2 decades before Ive started his thing. Heck, NeXT too.
Also, if I had to suffer yet another cookie-cutter Ive post-release video about a product, I'd kill myself...
Ive was great, but he was way too much of an artist to understand that computers are mostly tools. Ive was more interested in folding katanas and the process of creation than the mundane design of a productivity tool.
As an example, I remember being utterly bemused by the relentless port-pruning on the Macbook Pro. It just didn't make sense to me to remove ports on a machine designed primarily for productivity. But Ive didn't like ports, because katanas don't have ports. So the MBP didn't have ports.
The PowerBook/MacBook Pro designs up through 2016, the MacBook Air from 2010 onwards, the Power Macs G3-G5/Macs Pro through 2013 and the 2019 Mac Pro, the iBook/MacBook line through 2011, and the entirety of the iMac’s history all reflect a recognition that computers are fundamentally tools. They just held the conceit that tools can also be beautiful.
But yes, sometime between Job’s death and 2017, the wheels just completely fell off when they introduced new Mac designs, and they spent the better part of the last 5 years putting them back on after Ive was promoted into the sky and left the company.
Evidence suggests to me that Apple's record on utility is mixed.
I suspect Ive was fired because he created the craziness of 2012-2017 post Jobs era.
Trashcan, no ports, touch bar, mouse charging etc etc.
These days I have moderate confidence Apple will fix its issues. Eventually.
Of course, we didn't see the effects until now because a trillion dollar ship takes a while to turn around.
Hardware involves making things, the turnaround time is nonzero.
But they just released a revision of the 13” MacBook Pro with the touchbar. And while I know they have a hard time course-correcting bad design choices on their biggest product lines, there’s no excuse for not having revised the Magic Mouse 2 by this point.
Also while this discussion has been mostly focused on hardware, let’s not forget that Apple is selling 6K displays while displaying all the signs and symptoms of an organization absolutely allergic to on-screen chrome in every release of Mac OS X for the past few years as well as the next major revision they just announced.
I’ll put a lot at Ive’s feet, but only for the time he was actually there and in charge of design.
Chrome is all the stuff that’s not the content area in a GUI. So the user-agent you’re reading this in has a content area loading the page this thread is on (most likely a web browser but maybe you’re using an HN-specific app), and then a toolbar where the location bar lives, maybe a favorites bar and the window controls like close and minimize unless you’re on a phone. Basically chrome is all the overhead GUI like menus, toolbars, sidebars, pop-overs and controls around the stuff you’re focused in on.
I really like that the almost the whole surface is active and have gestures.
I agree that for video games not having dedicated buttons is not ok. I dont play those so for me this is the perfect mouse.
Being using them from the first generation I think 2010-2011 and it is hard for me to go back to normal mouse.
The Magic and Mighty mice support horizontal scrolling in spite of being one button mice and not because they are one button mice. Apple laptops kept with the whole one button thing even into 2000s where it was pretty painful as there was no scroll mechanism at all, no right click mechanism at all besides a key combo.
I didn't realize how much people hate dongles.
But dongles would still suck so probably the answer is “technically yes, but not in a meaningful way”.
The other adapters like the VGA one they make also don't support more than 60W PD passthrough and they don't really make this clear on the store page or packaging either.
https://images.app.goo.gl/n3TFrbnZ8JbjzVyp9
It expands to support a standard Ethernet jack
Having said that, most of our spaces now have a box that lets you share via Teams meeting, which generally works fine too.
No cables is the holy grail!
All our monitors on desks have a USB-C cable so that’s nice and easy to get connected with these days.
What I'd hate is the fact that I'd have to unplug everything and take this dock with me if I wanted to connect in the conference room.
Every time I had to connect or disconnect 6 cables, now I have to connect only one.
So, the magic dongle that delivers the USB-C dream is ultra expensive and rare and only worth finding if you have 6000 employees to provide.
It’s nice to only have to unplug one thing to be able to take my laptop somewhere, and I like the 2 port design more than I thought I would.
Be warned that they aren't cheap. Most of the good ones cost $300 - $400; I'd recommend looking at options from Caldigit and Anker.
Dye and his team continue to make beautiful hardware but fuck me hiding every function of a program behind a hover state or overflow menu absolutely kills usability. Productivity is being sacrificed for some weird notion of “cleanliness”. We’re all running displays with millions of pixels, we can afford buttons for stuff.
The hardware is getting better. The software is getting worse.
They're hiding usability.
Yes it is clean and minimalist, and some devices like the iPhone 4 were truly innovative, bold and impressive designs.
But overall, this is mostly bland, generic, boring.
In the same minimalist style, I prefer the work of Dieter Rams.
Some Sony products have really good design, including devices that were released a few years before the iPhone, but that were unfortunately built around a weak and already dying software stack (PalmOS). The Sony Clié are, in my opinion, less boring and better designed than most Apple products.
IBM comes also to mind, the ThinkPad was a stylish and sturdy computer.
There is a world outside of Apple headquarter, and I feel that they reached a dead-end, design wise.
Everything IBM does is so hilariously ugly in the least imaginative, boring, industrial way that they’ve gone through “boxy” into some other universe where it’s almost — but not quite — good style.
For crying out loud, everything they make is black.
There are famous Apple ads deriding the bland corporate look of IBM!
Unlike Apple who put the high power display powerline immediately next to the CPU one. One drop, and the CPU is gone. (IIRC from Rossman's repair videos).
Yeah, both in their electric and Selectric lineup.
In my opinion, there should be enough space for multiple design schools and trends.
https://archive.curbed.com/2016/8/31/12700054/richard-sapper...
Design is funny: what was new and amazing eventually becomes old and dated, and then sometimes, later still, beloved.
Their mainframes and HPC clusters have a sort of "intentional brutalism", almost skewing into a "dystopian, corpocratic sci-fi evil-idol the protagonist blows up at the end of the movie" look, that's actually kind of appealing/fitting for what those clusters are/do. It's the "Hugo Boss SS uniform" of computing.
https://static.righto.com/images/1401-boot/1401.jpg
I don't know about you but this is beautiful.
They're slowly going from Ive's minimalist artistic designs back to useful computing devices and user interfaces.
Mac suffered a lot under Jobsless Ive (Cook doesn't care about product one way or the other), surviving the butterfly / touchbar winter because customers were able to keep their old Retina laptops, customers groaned and beared with lemon laptops for a few years, and desktop declined in overall relevance (except gaming where Apple never had a presence anyway), and started to recover in the post-butterfly/post-touchbar/M1 era.
There does seem to be more collaboration and sensible compromises from all internal stakeholders than at any time at Apple, at least that is how it feels as an end user. Apple products of the last few years have less head scratching omissions and/or design/engineering decision.
The MacBook Pro from 2016 to 2021 is the embodiment of that weirdness.
I’m not arguing that Ive is a great designer. Ok just saying that the iMac hockey puck mouse doesn’t invalidate that claim.
> nonrecurring engineering costs led Apple’s business division to suspend the iPad [redesign]
That doesn’t sound like Ive had unconstrained power?
I’m not an Apple Watch fan myself (still clutching my Pebble for dear life), but I can understand why the uber-expensive Apple Watches would appeal to a certain audience.
I never could understand why Apple (or anyone else) this would be a possibility. Luxury watches are almost synonymous with heirloom; there is no way anyone will be wearing a functional Gold Apple watch in 2085 with the anecdote "This was my dad's watch" - it would be hopelessly outdated, and likely non-functional by then. This is not the case with other luxury watches. This has little to do with branding, but everything to do with expected longevity and utility.
Passing down a watch or car is an incidental thing and the watches real old money passes down are not the ones like Patek Phillipe who find it necessary to run ads suggesting otherwise to the middle class readers of The Economist.
But a lot of people wear luxury watches simply to show off how much disposable income they have. To these people, having a watch that is recognizably expensive is the only requirement.
This is somewhat true throughout all of apple's products. Release a new Mac or iPhone, you'll notice a lot of people (especially musicians) buying them for no utilitarian reason other than because it's new and because it'll be theirs - and it's expensive. Apple's marketing and reputation is so brilliant it's ingrained almost like a religion (Certainly socially what religion was to a ye olde' peasant)
Is this a subtle attack on USB-C?
This failure resulted in a support program that covered the entire output of the Apple MacBook Pro product line for half a decade.
Nothing subtle about that at all.
It could also be a widespread cultural issue where Apple is unable to admit fault. Sure, Apple removed the butterfly after he left, but they're still quite stubborn about not putting USB-C on iPhones, for example.
The annoying thing was the lack of everything else except usb-c. Especially in 2017 when it was uncommon and for devices featuring only 2 ports. „Dongle life“ was a serious step backwards.
With the speed of the M-series processors, and the fact that I can get one with ports and without an idiotic touchbar, I've started considering an Apple laptop for the first time in years.
I'm sure it's just a matter of time before the pendulum swings back again, alas.
We got a decade or more to enjoy this time of “doing things right”
Up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Pro) or up to three external displays with up to 6K resolution and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Max)
To clarify the M1 Macs, not Pro, Max, or Ultra can only support one external display. This also seems to be the case with the non-Pro/Max/Ultra M2 macs.
The parent comment: “Maybe by next decade, all the MacBook "pro" models will support more than one external display.”
The 13” M1/M2 MBP is the only one that doesn’t support more than one external display.
I already have a half-dozen Apple devices that I use every day. I don't really need more of them.
I steadfastly refused to use a smartphone and a tablet when the products came out but ended up making them an integral part of my daily life. Apple has made products that have fundamentally altered our idea of a computer a few times, our idea of a phone once, and our idea of a music player once, and a consumer information consumption device (tablet). I'm talking about that level of innovation here. A laptop without ports and that is x mm thick is not a 'new' consumer product from this perspective.
As an outsider, I have no idea whether this is the case. But I could imaging that if they had stayed on a more evolutionary design path, their current laptops might not be quite so amazing.
It would have been great if:
- They kept the butterfly but completely solved the failure problem.
- Supported Touch Bar with actual haptic feedback that could really be used "professionally" as in a Pro device. It could at best become a gimmick, but if played right, had great potential.
- Had a simplified thin chassis with less ports. I really don't wanna pay for an HDMI port, SD reader, and a headphone jack that I'll never use in my entire life. I still believe after all the years, unification of everything to a single port (USB-C) was right. The industry should have forward to, say, support HDMI over USB-C on ubiqutiously, and really should have adopted a single card type: now we practically have 3: SD, microSD, and CF. My camera has a CF card, my drone has a microSD, and ironically regular SD is the only one that don't use so I still carry a dongle anyway (microSD adapter in this sense can be considered a passive dongle). Instead of the headphone jack it could stream raw audio over USB-C and offload DAC to the connected device. I also get that without a single standard, Apple also couldn't make everyone happy at the same time, but if there was a single standard port, or even a wireless standard that provided Gigabit speeds in around less than a meter, that would have been a great device with much less ports.
Of course, this is not reality, and I of course also get why Apple added all those back, and I love my M1 MacBook Pro regardless. I just wanted to share a vision.
Is Ive's trademark.
That was the first thing I missed, along with the custom controls for DND/Focus which was one tap away on Touch Bar.
Though it was a lot of hit or miss to use Touch Bar while looking at the screen, as there wasn't a physical feedback of pressing, and no indication of button bounds by touching.
The first thing I did when I got on M1 without Touch Bar was to open up Karabiner and map right Cmd and right Option keys to navigating back and forward in Vscode. After getting used to it in a few days, it was much smoother than using the Touch Bar as I was using a physical key.
I know you can hit F5 for suggestions but it isn’t the same.
You don't want to pay for $20 worth of components? Like what another comment stated, you're getting components that have been tested by Apple and will have documented specifications.
I've seen ego- and power-tripping at all levels, even in situations where the people playing these games had nothing to gain or lose from torpedoing the other.
Imran Chaudhri would have been best served by keeping all written communications strictly minimal and work related. Something along the lines of "I'm leaving in a months' time for other opportunities. It was a pleasure working here, thank you for your support, wishing you all the best." Nothing would have been misinterpreted.
Keep any and all sentiments out of work related communication.
I mean...yeah? iPod, iPhone and iPad are Apple's whole 21st century legacy. And most recently, arguably Apple Watch and EarPods.
They all have the same thing in common - they're wearables that you see on the person on the street.
Apple is a trillion dollar company (and not a skeleton in a graveyard of companies crushed by Microsoft in the 1990's that it almost was) because of iPhone and iPad.
Every other Apple product is a "hobby" by comparison, and that includes iMacs, and Macbook Pros.
You have to have your eyes open about the product you work on, and where it sits in the company hierarchy. Not everything is a core product, but that doesn't mean it's not important.
> After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul
Having worked for Apple during the Steve days, I'm not sure there was a soul to be lost.
I think this sums up pretty much everything that is wrong with Modern Apple. And as someone who used to scrutinise everything Apple, from their quarterly report to Supply Chains. This is sadly the case. You only need to look at Apple Retail to see how it went from a Marketing, Services and User experiences goal to some financial checkbox.
I would imagine Steve would have authorise the few billions just to build a better iPad.
It is also clear Johny have a some sort of burnout at Apple, Software UX should never have been under his decision making. After the departure of Forstall, Jony went all in and teared everything apart in iOS7 within a year. Spend most of this time on Apple Retail redesign and Apple Park. And clearly trying to make the ultimate product he long dreamed off, the Macbook and MacBook Pro Touch Bar before the tech was ready. And somehow had an Apple Design Book by the end of 2016, which I thought was basically a tribute dedicated to Johny.
It's kind of like when most websites started to switch to responsive designs where image heavy layouts and other fun animations kinda dropped off. It was just too costly to make things work well.
Yep, things got harder with AutoRotate on the iPad.
It took a while to get used to SwiftUI. But the pay off is immediate when switching from Portrait to Landscape mode. Now, everything flows perfectly.
Imagine designing for every single kind of device: be it watch, phone, pad, desktop, and TV. It kinda forces you to think differently.
ok, yeah. Was thinking of the original Notepad, where the frayed yellow tear-off sheet border drove me nuts! Anything tied to the "desktop metaphor" - bits are not atoms
While iOS was still skeuomorphic - first app I had that was flat was made by Microsoft. (Photosynth app)
I think what pushed people away from the skeuomorphic stuff is that it feels like the aesthetics can become to feel dated quicker? But I don't think that necessarily needs to be the case.
Like skeuomorphic design in itself isn't 'dated', but the aesthetics chosen can be.
Another thing worth observing is that Apple exists as part of essentially the fashion industry which is design. And I don't necessarily wholly blame Apple for all the thin, grey, minimalist design that we see everywhere these days.
I mean that's kinda what I was saying in that the aesthetics are dated, but I think the aesthetics chosen are distinct from the concept of 'skeuomorphism', the aesthetics of a particular implementation can be dated, but the idea of skeuomorphic design might not be.
If they had a geriatric mode that concentrated on functional UI over form, I would probably use it myself. Here are the most obvious issues (some are Safari specific):
* Lack of scroll indicators. If you don’t know you have to scroll, then you are screwed. It doesn’t have to be scrollbars, but there must be some visible indication and/or control so that the need for scrolling up or down in particular is obvious and discoverable.
* iPad multiple windows. The usability of this is completely broken. I would also love to disable it for myself, because I don’t use multi-tasking and the UI only ever frustrates me. Horrific UX.
* Keyboard focus indication. Watching your mum type into a field, scroll, and not realise the keyboard focus is not where she expects is hella frustrating. Should a field outside the viewport even retain keyboard focus?
* <input type=number> completely broken. I have watched my mother type in a number using a comma (because other numbers on the page were displayed with commas) and the UI silently fails. Same with $. I’ve experienced this as a developer - it is just sooooo broken because the field accepts invalid characters but input.value == "" which is fucked.
* auto-hiding the tab bar in Safari. Mum opens a hundred tabs. And doesn’t know about the rest of the Safari toolbar. Just leave the chrome visible please.
* Hard to Undo. I remember how fucking magical undo was, and still is. Undo is not accessible (although admittedly far far worse on Android). Implicit save is fantastic for most things, but frightening for some settings. System confirmation modals as a workaround are seriously fucking nasty.
* The top-right swipe system menu is difficult to learn. Especially for system modal changes (rotation lock, wifi, bluetooth).
There are so many complicated things on the iPad that I need to teach my mother, just like Windows of yore. Some of those issues can easily be fixed, if the UI were to be more obvious and less “pretty”.
Maybe they could call it “beginners” mode. Like the opposite of a “pro” model or something.
While I am being a whinging Englishman, they could fix some bugs too. 4 major iPadOS versions, and I still run into the same fucking bugs every day. I mean, the hardware is great, but why do the same bugs persist forever? Obvious bugs, with many appearing to be very shallow. Maybe hire some devs to fix bugs as their only job?