Apple loses one of the last remaining designers from Jony Ive era
bloomberg.com
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Nearly every Apple product has become objectively better since his departure. The complaints actually got addressed. Customers are being treated as valid sources of input to the product. Hard to see an issue here.
So most of the complaints you're alluding to e.g. ports, touch bar etc had little to do with the design team.
It's largely been the rise of people like John Ternus that have improved their hardware.
Either way, since his seeming marginalization and departure from Apple, the design of their devices haven't suffered aesthetically and they've gained significant function.
Ive doesn't decide on the thermal characteristics of their products nor does he decide what features go into them. And it's ridiculous to think that he in some way forced Apple to build their own silicon.
And as someone who was at Apple during his reign he was an important voice but just one of many.
Years before we got Apple Silicon macs (which I think are the best laptops I've ever owned, literally no compromise I am aware of), I was reading about JS benchmarks where Safari on an iPhone was on par or faster than Safari on Intel. I remember being shocked seeing that – so even though Apple bought Palo Alto Semiconductor 10+ years ago and created their chips for iOS devices, they've had to have wanted to migrate ever since they saw these huge gains, Jony Ive or not.
It's another Johny (Srouji) that's the head of the semiconductor division that's producing stellar chips.
Apple was (and still is) a very design orientated company and the design group is very much in charge.
Maybe you personally do, but I doubt the average HN does. And neither do I.
I doubt that person had the internal clout to challenge any of the braindead design decisions from the later part of Ive's tenure.
This is a subjective matter actually. The MacBook Pros got thicker, and Apple have no desire to address this. The iPhone camera modules sticks out more each generation to the point that a case is a must.
I do wish there are some Ive left in Apple so there are at least some care for the form rather than just functionality.
I just upgraded from a 6S+ to a 15Pro, and the cameras are taking some getting used to. i am impressed by the battery life, so i've been thinking a new case instead of a battery pack would be some form of an external SSD to capture the ProRes in a nice tight form factor that still fits all of the gimbals and other attachments. but, yeah, the protruding camera mount is well past ridiculous
The obsession with thinness above all else is a great example of Apple's style-over-substance failures.
It's good for a laptop to be reasonably light and portable. Having one line that focuses on reducing size/weight and another that focuses on power, as Apple does, also makes sense. But if the power-focused branch is 15mm instead of 13, that is deeply not a problem.
I haven't used a case on my iPhone for years. No issue at all. (Except that one time when I accidentally flung my phone into a concrete floor.)
Yes, because in the real world bigger batteries store more energy, keyboard with more depth and travel are easier to type into (up to a point), and thicker objects bend less. Computers that are too light are actually harder to use
> and Apple have no desire to address this
GOOD. Sounds like the professionals are actually having a say
The iPhone 6 had a case with the consistency of warm butter, and the phone 4 and 7 had glass cases. The current Pros are pretty durable.
The Macbook Pro had a completely defective, unrepairable keyboard, full stop. My company retired 40% of them early as a result.
I don't know enough about the Apple process to truly judge. But it does seem to correlate that post-Jobs, the design aesthetic had a negative impact on the product with little benefit. Ive's departure correlated with more pragmatic products.
I suppose this would be a concern for me if that was an attribute I actually think of when shopping for a laptop but it isn't. Getting back the good keyboard, MagSafe, HDMI and to a lesser extend an SD card slot was absolutely worth the trade of a thicker machine. These are tools, not art pieces. I wish Apple would take it even further and give us back the ability to replace memory and storage, but that will probably never happen.
That's not a bad thing. I used to mock Apple's design for monomanically prioritizing thinness over almost everything else (e.g. we dropped this useful port to make your computer 0.2mm thinner, enjoy your dongle). That sounds like the natural and healthy reaction to relaxation of monomania.
(“Well they should just build the case in then” eh, the customizability and the way the case can ablate damage and be replaced is pretty good UX)
If a phone requires a case in order to be functional, that's a badly designed phone that I won't purchase. I wouldn't purchase that particular phone anyway, though, since it sounds like a lot of emphasis was put on the camera, and a camera is something I don't value in a phone at all.
I feel like this is subjective only if you want to sit around a cafe showing off your laptop, or make "day-in-the-life" videos for TikTok where you just show yourself eating at one of the FAANG cafes.
If you actually want to get work done, I don't think it's subjective at all. The butterfly keyboard is probably the best example of this bizarre obsession with design anorexia. Look, your laptop is .1 mm thinner. Except now you have basically no feedback when you type. Oh, and certain keys will randomly break every couple months if you get a tiny speck of dust on them.
It hasn't gone unnoticed that one of the biggest collective "Yes!!"es I heard from developers was a few years ago when Apple simply undid Ive's most recent design follies.
Plus, you can always get a MacBook Air (which now have relatively great power and performance) if you're a fellow design anorexic.
IMHO, that's a key point. If there aren't clear form factor differentiations between the Air and MBP, Apple is making the wrong tradeoffs with the MBP.
But the previous computers were such dogs (over-heating-prone, loud, unreliable keyboards) that I think 99.9% of people think the current gen was a huge improvement.
And the Air's are so powerful, I use one for my entire daily life (incl. work).
The iPhone camera modules sticks out more each generation to the point that a case is a must.
Doesn't matter to me if the phone is 0.2mm thin if I must slap a case on it to bring it to the same thickness as its largest protrusion.
Moreover, this isn't just an aesthetics issue anymore. The camera modules interfere with wireless car charging mats in some car models, either by slowing charging to a crawl due to the distance it creates with the charging coil, or making it extremely finicky.
I have a 15 pro max, and still wish they did something to keep the camera bumps under control. I could always use more battery, and do not find the bulging camera modules aesthetically pleasing on top of the issues they create.
I don't like that the iPhone without a case is not stable on a table when you tap the touchscreen. Seems like the kind of huge oversight that Apple wouldn't make.
It's both a helper for using the phone with one hand and a "stand" of sorts to keep the phone stable when it's face up on a desk.
I do agree the protrusion is pretty ridiculous. I don't mind as much that mu current 15 Pro has a thicker one than my previous X. They're both more or less equally bad IMO.
Thank goodness.
I think you're assuming that missed sales for the Mini means there's no market for small phones.
I would take a different assumption: the 12 Mini (I owned one btw) was as large as an iPhone 6 which for many was the point where phones had gotten to be too large.
If your answer to: "Small phone" is to go back to the first unacceptable phone size for many people, maybe they don't really think of it as "small phone". Why buy it?
There was some minor issues with the phone too, laughable battery life for example and the fact that the 5-sized SE was still generally available and receiving support until even after the 13 mini was discontinued.
People discuss the "SE" moniker as if it's an answer to small phones when ironically the first SE was the only actually small phone and everything since then just gets larger and larger.
I bought a mini because I intentionally wanted to support Apples small phone endeavour. It was too big and going from a 12 Mini to a 15 pro doesn't feel like such a leap anymore because I can use neither of these phones one-handed anyway.
I want a small phone. I went from a X to a 15 Pro.
Some time in between those 2 phones I considered a Mini. That is, until I actually held one in my hands and tried to use it.
It was too big. The Mini was the worst of both worlds: small screen and still unusable with a single hand. There was just no point in getting one.
I never was a fan of Ive's obsession with making the Mac so thin; I don't need to shave with it, and getting rid of actual function things (replaceable parts, ports, etc.) to do it just irritated me greatly. I don't use Macs as a fashion accessory.
I really hope Ive sings up for building the OpenAI-phone, and eventually is bringing sexy back.
People leave the keebs/trackpads connected where I work and it's not uncommon to have them balloon up because of the spicy pillow.
Though; it's obviously more about aesthetic than anything else... I would argue that the (genuinely ergonomically terrible mouse) does not need to have a charging port on the top due simply to the fact that you can get 30minutes of usable charge from less than 5s of charging time.
If you really can't leave your mouse for 5s (from dead, despite plenty of warning) to use it for the next 30 minutes then likely you have larger issues in your life.
And yet they don't care about people leaving their Magic Keyboards or Magic Trackpads plugged in, so I don't really buy it.
> If you really can't leave your mouse for 5s (from dead, despite plenty of warning) to use it for the next 30 minutes then likely you have larger issues in your life.
What a remarkably bad-faith attack line. I have two of these mice, both a few years old now. Aside from battery degradation they work fine but the battery degradation has also done away with the "plenty of warning" that the battery is low. One of them notifies me just before it dies, the other one often doesn't notify me at all.
They also don't gain enough useful charge within a few seconds anymore either. I've been caught out with this right in the middle of doing something a few times and it would have been a complete non-issue if I could have just plugged the mouse in and kept working.
Sure, I could replace the mice, but that doesn't stop it from being any less disappointing, nor does it stop it from being a silly design choice.
I suppose it technically can, but this assertion makes me ask: why haven't we seen this actually happen? I mean yes, we got consistency -- but at a pretty serious cost in terms of usability.
These findings also confirm that flat or flat-ish designs can work better in certain conditions than others. As we saw in this experiment, the potential negative consequences of weak signifiers are diminished when the site has a low information density, traditional or consistent layout, and places important interactive elements where they stand out from surrounding elements.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-ui-less-attention-caus...
And this is what has happened. All over the modern web and applications there is a low information density which means I need to carry more context around as I browse through things.
The article goes into it more in depth but flat design is bad in almost all regards apart from one: anybody can be a designer now.. the barriers to entry are that much lowered.