iPhone 6: An edgy concept
behance.net
behance.net
Designers do this stuff because they have ideas about how devices and interfaces can change and they explore those ideas. It doesn't seem to me that Johnny is making claims about inside information. He's using his visual talents to create mockups of what might be possible in the future.
The medium is different, but the process isn't any different than sci-fi writers setting stories in the future or me making UI wireframes for an application. It's just ways of exploring what could be done.
The last point is to realize that this is most likely just personal portfolio work. Some of us have github profiles and others have PSD's. Just think about the exposure Johnny is getting out of this and how it might get him more work in the future. That's the best reason for him to make this.
He is a fucking graphic designer and that’s exactly how you should judge this.
It's like you hand me an album of somebody scratching at a violin for 80 minutes and tell me that the point was the album art, he's "not a musician" and "not advertising himself as one", gosh.
Excuse us silly engineers that got distracted by the actual content of the damn link. Guess we didn't see the trees for the forest.
If the point is to have a portfolio piece as a visual designer, Make a brochure for something that already exists, or that is unique and doesn't exist. This is an uncanny valley of being unimaginative yet impossible and that distracts me (and many readers here) from everything else.
This fucking thing is some stupid fun. Nothing more. I’m not sure what this cynicism burning with the power of a million suns shit is all about. Why do people behave this way?
None of the assets look original, and there doesn't actually seem to be any graphic design involved. The entire thing looks to be a showcase of non-existent industrial design skills.
Hows that for judging it based on graphic design?
But to be honest, what really annoyed me was a designer who proposes a Retina2 type screen yet in his showcase work here, uses low resolution fonts. It's just hard to give any serious thought to a designer who overlooks one of the most critical -- yet trivially easy to do right -- aspects of a prototype design.
I agree with this wholeheartedly.
My secondary negative reaction to this, though, is that I think there's a certain conceit in putting this design together and calling it the "iPhone 6". Whatever merits these drawings might have, they could be showcased just as well by making up an arbitrary new name for it and calling it an evolution in smartphone design in general — rather than hijack Apple's branding just to draw attention.
Yes, god forbit he also being somewhat pragmatic...
There is this notion of the 'uncanny valley' where a rendering/expression of a human gets too close to the real thing. There is a similar space in design where dissonance between what is possible and what is shown jars the senses.
Escher used this to great effect, creating scenes that you eyes initially perceived as 'normal' but began to sense a 'wrongness' or 'otherness' which as you looked more closely became apparent.
This would have worked better as an exercise if he had done an advertising type pitch for a tri-corder or what ever the Stargate equivalent is. But by using the next generation of a product that is already out there and known for its design, and adding in features which are currently science fiction (and physically impossible [1]) the designer causes the brain to go "urrrk?" and the whole thing collapses.
[1] For example, iPhones use a touch screen based on capacitance. Graphene is a conductor. A transparent graphene cover would shield the phone from being able to see any change in electric field (it would, at best, be diffuse across the conductor) and render the touch screen inoperable. Try this fun experiment, put a piece of paper over an iPad and watch your gestures go right "thru" it, put a piece of foil over your ipad, and note how you can do anything.
Graphene isn't the best choice, but the point was to illustrate a currently unseen level of tensile strength, not as a blueprint for manufacture. Wouldn't that be a fun device to have?
We tend to ignore humor on HN, but this is one person's imagination at work, and I applaud that.
Per my point about a tri-corder (a clearly fictional device) had he made his project "more clearly fictional" it would have avoided that uncanny valley. Basing it on the iPhone was not a good choice for me. A friend of mine was doing the computer graphics thing and initially all of his "models" were real actresses (he used stills from films to figure out the models) and it was hurting his portfolio because the 'goodness' of his modelling skills was being subverted by the 'wrongness' of the model (people recognized the actress and then saw things "wrong" in the models of them). I suspect that is the case here is well.
Anyway, dude has some skills.
The screen however is very reminiscent of Atmel's XSense touch sensor, which I'm keen to play with[1].
The wolf in sheeps clothes special pleading I'll leave alone.
Is he an electrical engineer who can say for certain that the retina display can actually be manufactured in this edgy way?
No, he's just a guy with Adobe Illustrator.
So... why should I care what he thinks?
I'm not sure why you thought that I didn't understand that Retina is a marketing term, or why it's relevant to the point I was making.
An interesting intellectual exercise and a beautiful design, but that only applies if you think it could be real, or else it's the hardware equivalent of a Minority Report interface. I just don't see this in my hand within the next 20 years. That makes it easy to be pessimistic.
In reference to the top comment, that's why good Sci Fi tends to focus on how the technology affects the future society and interpersonal relationships, not simply marvelling at the technology itself. Calling this the "iPhone 6" mockup and not simply a future phone or even iPhone puts a certain expectation on it, as does the mention of specs that would only be impressive for a year or two.
You can't have it both ways. Either it's an entirely theoretical mockup that can't be criticized and it's simply design work or I'm supposed to imagine it as the iPhone that's on the market two years from now with the specs listed on that page.
The perfect ui would be a device that you wear in a small ring that reads your mind to find out exactly what you want, and using superhuman ai, strategizes the perfect way to get it for you.
There. I did it.
Oh, you're going to make the screen out of graphene? My mockups are exactly the same as yours, but instead of aluminum my case is made of diamond. I've solved the chipping problem!
To be clear, I think that these are really attractive visual mockups with some interesting concepts, but I have seen literally every one of them before elsewhere.
Steve Jobs is quoted in the 80's as saying that they aspire to make a computer that is essentially today's macbook or ipad.[1] It most certainly was impossible at the time.
I sure like mine though.
You know what you get when you limit yourself to the constraints of right now? The IBM PC Jr.
[1] "Apple's strategy is really simple. What we want to do is we want to put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you and learn how to use in 20 minutes. That's what we want to do and we want to do it this decade." http://lifelibertytech.com/2012/10/02/the-lost-steve-jobs-sp...
But there's no real imagination here either. It's just a thinner, lighter iPhone, made thinner and lighter using materials that don't exist. Genius!
As an aside, this is how Jony Ive works: http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/01....
The point of imagination is that it is not limited by constraints.
Apple have patented gesture recognition detected by the cameras for, e.g. page scrolling.
What does this "unlimited imagination" future iPhone have for an input improvement? Nokia feature-phone soft-buttons from 2002.
Make it the size of a book. Make it battery-powered. Make the UI good (they failed on that one, but moving on)...
OP's link is just "Take an iphone and remove the edges and make it lighter by using a material that doesn't exist."
That's not innovation. It's actually incredibly formulaic, and completely different from the Steve Jobs quote you gave.
I see comments like, "Carbon fiber alone is perfectly rigid and doesn't bend." and can only shake my head about how stupid this statement is. This particular mockup is one of the worst I have ever seen for being unrealistic. Feel free to create industrial design concepts, but at the very least don't comment on features that are unrealistic.
Anyone telling engineers to build it or get fired will soon be or is already talking to an empty room, or somehow have engineers hostage
You can't push the boundary of what's possible without already understanding the physics and engineering of the existing boundary. Otherwise you're just another kid with a pretend jetpack made out of 2 liter soda bottles. It's fun, and perhaps praiseworthy for a kid... but as an adult you look a bit silly claiming the design is something real.
You're assuming it'd either be too weak or too strong. They would calibrate it until it was "just right", as they do (or try to do) with pretty much all of their ergonomics decisions.
[0] Anecdotally, I own both a MagSafe 2 device and an iPhone 5.
OK, in travels some countries probably still try to read the creditcard magstripe, that may be a problem for a part of population. Otherwise it's just like worrying about the macbook demagnetizing your floppy disks..
My university ID uses a magnetic strip and RFID. However the university disabled RFID usage on all of the printers, doors, etc. on day zero after people found out you could easily spoof them.
Granted, at least my important cards use chips/NFC now.
Saying that this could "never work" is silly.
The objection that actually does make sense is to point out that Lightning is a) reversible and b) has 8 separate data contacts on each side. It's not just a power connector. Can't really duplicate this with MagSafe or anything similar.
With a Magsafe-like cable, it'll disconnect after the tugging happens, and if the pull from the tug is strong enough, it'll cause it to potentially go a greater distance, since there's no cable connected.
Make it an electromagnet powered by the USB host/power supply, and use the iPhone accelerometer (or more than one) to detect being yanked by the attached cord and disable the magnet to disconnect easily.
(or do what everyone else is and have an inductive charging matt with no connector).
http://www.webosnation.com/hands-on-hp-veer-s-ridiculous-hea...
One question: why not a 1920x1080 screen? The Galaxy S4 already has that resolution.
If the manufacturer does not opt for the top of the line GPU, games suffer too, since by doubling the resolution, you need to quadruple the pixels rendered. Apple made this mistake with the iPad 3 and iPhone 4, both which performed worse than their predecessors.
This PPI race reminds me of the megapixel race in cameras. Where dumb consumers think a "higher spec" is better when it actually gives them a fuzzier screen (pentile OLED over non-pentile, not in LCD), worse battery life, and worse performance in games.
And it looks gorgeous on a black iPhone (mockup) because it's not as light.
where the screen comes round the edge of the surface. Pretty, and a lot more likely to be in production this decade.
Pedantry aside, I think the mockups look great.
I don't see why; for the edges, I think it'd look fine to just stretch the border-edge pixel out to infinity. All taps/gestures on the "sides" could be reported as occurring at the edge pixels. You'd need to modify your view-controller logic (to do something with all these edge-taps), but not your view.
In Android you have to use 4 different density versions of your images to support the majority. And in BB10 you think about to differnt formats which have different artistic rules to them (you can't use the rule of thirds in a square, it doesn't work well).
So you should better expect screen size/density/aspect ratio differences in future or you will probably regret it.
To me, it's kind of like how the first people on Youtube now have millions of views, but good luck starting a new YT account today...
Where possible I've moved my artwork flow from using PNGs for everything to translating PSD files into stretchable image slices and custom UIViews crafted in IB/Objective C via Core Image & Core Graphics. It's more time consuming at first but pays off in the end.
And moisture is the essence of wetness.
Quotes aside, I've imagined this kind of edgeless design to be where things are headed, and it certainly looks beautiful.
That's doable in the next 1-2 years, this design isn't.
But these materials are hard as hell to make. Carbon and aluminum do not get along for a variety of reasons, and aluminum/carbon composites remain a pie-in-the-sky concept. One of the ways they make Al/C composites now is through a process called squeeze casting, whereby they just force molten aluminum (>660C) to infiltrate a fiber preform at super high pressures. And even then IIRC their properties usually fall well short of theoretical. These are not things nature wants us to put together (at least not yet).
And high pressure is not a deal breaker -- it's just the best way to make some things right now. But even after you've forced carbon and aluminum together, you have a variety of other issues then to deal with: large potential for galvanic corrosion and huge difference in coefficient of thermal expansion are two of the primary ones. The fact that they have horrible wetting behavior is another one, and is the reason they have to do squeeze casting in the first place, but likely also negatively affects the quality of the interface formed between the carbon and the aluminum (thus leading to poor properties even after you've spent all the effort of making it)
also, aluminum and titanium are already really strong and light. the author wanted to include carbon fiber because "it's perfectly rigid and doesn't bend" and that "scratches are a thing of the past". i appreciate that he wants a bit of far-out flourish for his new design, but both of those statements are way off the mark technically, and would be poor and wrong reasons to pursue difficult to make metal-matrix composites.
and let's not even get started on the graphene...
2) Not going to happen
Arguably the biggest hardware leap so far was the 3gs -> 4, and that was limited to an aesthetic re-envisioning, a camera improvement, screen resolution upgrade, and processor bump.
This design showcases improvements that Apple would likely spread out over 3 generations: everything listed for their biggest leap above, plus new input mechanisms, new connector, significantly less heft, and waterproofing (!!).
Don't get me wrong -- I'd buy this in an instant, but it looks more like iPhone 8, than 6.
[1] Apple store is currently down, this is a link to an image.
And the quote about graphene was distracting to me because I know for certain that Apple would not have a layer of graphene that would be as thick as Saran Wrap. That's crazy talk- too expensive. I know he wasn't saying it would be that thick, but that was the first thing that came to mind: "no way they would do that".
This guy just made mockups of a future iteration he imagined, of a product he probably uses and likes. Something designers have published to the interwebs for years. It can be fun and a nice way to improve on your skills.
It don't get what justifies the hate some people here show up with. If you don't like it, just skip it and enjoy something else.
Which incidentally fits in with the latest rumours on 4.7" display. Um....
Thanks, Johnny. This stuff is fun to think about.
I like pure technology design concept without regarding to economical consideration.
This design is just plain form design plus some wanna-be technical terms.
Not fishy at all. Quite plausible. If anything, it's reasonably likely that there will be MORE of an improvement than the concept predicts, in this case.
This is a VERY old idea in the computing world.