When Stephen Fry Met Jony Ive
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
> Apple has recently developed a standard British power plug whose prongs fold elegantly back flush into their body. Easily stowed, no agony if accidentally trod on. A separate and wholly different solution to that offered by the Mu Plug which solves the problem in another way.
> “It took ages to solve,” Ive says wistfully. And that is the point. No one else cares as much. Of course it took ages, because anything worth doing does. People who take pains to the extent he and his team do are very very rare.
This sort of design has been present in countless cheap, $3 international power adapters. Ive's ego and insistence on exalting his own genius at the expense of others' is maddening, and to call something so simple an "innovation" illustrates how little is necessary for something to be deemed a work of ingenuity.
Like Marc Newson, much of his work is design for the sake of design, with little regard for functional implications. To have a company's philosophy be singularly focussed on aesthetics and minimalism alone is not a bad thing. But as Larry Wall prophetically said several years ago, "Apple is the arbiter of good taste. But when good taste becomes mandatory, it's no longer good taste, just manners."
I feel similarly about Apple's design philosophy. Their level of influence doesn't inspire opposing philosophies from their competitors, it inspires imitation-- since imitation is a basic, natural, fundamental reaction to something successful. The problem is that it alienates those who have other requirements that differ vastly from those of Apple's, and who would be better served with a little less aesthetic sense, and more functionality or durability at the expense of (largely arbitrary) things such as thickness, gloss, polish, and shine.
There is a reason you only see ThinkPads on ISS rather than MacBooks. Similar design goals -- minimalism, starkness, and abstraction -- but with vastly different approaches.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding. The minimalist aesthetic is underpinned by the principle that form follows function, and is absolutely opposed to ornament or visual additions. Aesthetic === functional in this worldview; it's not a separate thing which gets added in. (This is precisely why Ives and others eschewed skeumorphism.)
Take the iPod shuffle:
- Gen 1 was minimal, usable, and a portable USB drive,
- Gen 2 was minimal and usable, but lost its portable USB drive functionality (required a cable to also be carried around), but
- Gen 3 was smaller for no reason, moved the controls to an earbud cable which was impossible to use while running, and cost extra to buy an adapter if you didn't want to use their shitty earbuds, and then
- Gen 4 returned to the 2nd Gen design, because Gen 3 was very clearly flawed.
Seriously, explain the 3rd Gen iPod Shuffle.
I can cite many examples where they've dumped functionality for aesthetics, like non-removable batteries, fully-sealed computers (latest Mac mini), etc, but this is the clearest mistake they've made where they had to actually reverse course because of their favoritism for aesthetics over functionality.
More generally, Apple have taken what many might think of as an industrial design approach and applied it to consumer design in a more rigorous way than others. So a lot of thought about coatings and materials used for screens and bodies, packaging (part of the consumer experience), and so on.
To construct a plausible scenario around your point off the top of my head, reduced size is clearly a key functional feature of a portable device, and while I'm not defending 3rd gen shuffle, it would make sense that a device you might go running with would be better if absolutely tiny. And if you are on the run, there would be an argument for having controls on the cable rather than the device. I think these kinds of things are clearly getting a lot of attention as we see the designs are being iterated and previous mistakes corrected.
Likewise, things like sealed devices are absolutely functional design decisions from the point of view of creating a mass-produced device. The success of the ipad bears this out. It may appal me that apple will only completely swap an ipad with cracked screen, or that I can't upgrade RAM in my macbook - but I can understand that standardisation and non-customisation is key to things like a predictable user experience, manufacturing and supply chain, worldwide warranties. Apple have always been about this and it's why they manufacture both hardware and software. I won't buy the 12" macbook computing device myself, but for family members it might be the ideal laptop. Anything else and I know I'm going to get several more messages a week asking me why facebook and twitter aren't working.
"This sort" is not "the same". And that's for the design part -- we haven't even discussed implementation at all.
Except the only quote we have from Ive was "It took ages to solve". He didn't talk about his genius, about how it was an innovation. It's all just a mix of what the reporter said and your personal biases.
I also don't think that ThinkPads on the ISS is a particularly good indicator of anything, besides perhaps the difference in the vendor's willingness to work with third parties on radiation hardening?
Because patenting "rounded corners"[1] is really an impressive achievement. Not to mention other trivial/stupid patents (see lawsuit against Samsung).
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-ipad-design-patent-2012...
And AS A RESULT the revenues from those products are far, far higher than any other company can dream of." [My emphasis]
I call post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this). While possibly just some lazy copy editing, I think everyone who's backed a hardware Kickstarter is well aware that blown out costs and development times do not normally result in far greater revenues.
Apple, in so many ways, is the exception not the rule. And in general this "fanboi" piece does a good job of highlighting some of their exceptions.
I think Apple follows traditional device manufacturing rules pretty closely. It takes 3-7 years to get a new hardware product market ready. The exceptions are startups or crowdfunded doodads that are able to launch in 18 months.
Nobody's going to crowdfund on 3-7 year timescales though, so you end up with a lot of optimistic lies (even the creators lying to themselves about how quickly things can get made).
The "as a result" line implies that for Apple, higher costs and longer development times has yielded more revenue.
The subject of the line is Apple, not the other companies.
Good!