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>Design has always taken more prominence at apple over usability

I strongly disagree with you there. In fact, I'd say the exact opposite.

The experience of using the product has always been at the very core of Apple's design philosophy. The entire desktop metaphor, include the Trash, the files in folders, etc. is about simplifying the user experience with the computer.

The fact that anyone can just pick up an iPhone and pretty much immediately know what they should be doing, without reading a manual, tells you exactly that usability has been so thought out that it has become invisible. You just do what you want to do, without having to think about how to do it. So, it's the embodiment of the Steve Krug "Don't make me think" mindset: usability is design.

As someone who is a big fan of "don't make me think" (just bought the third edition a few days ago, actually) I can attest that there are things that apple has done/designed that make me think or pause. I Don't think it's core to their philosophy - perhaps it is a part of it, but not front and center. I get snagged on too many things for that to be the case; and it's become noticeable in the past few years to the point of hindrance for me in some cases.

Their keyboards and mice particularly showcase this: they look pretty and sleek, but try using them all day, and then try using a regular keyboard and mouse. They weren't thinking about the human who has to use it, they were thinking of appeal and looks.

You're not wrong about the approachability of IOS; that's no accident, and required a good deal of thought and attention. But I think whenever there is a tie, and they can either improve the aesthetics or improve the usability, they lean towards the former, because it's sexier and will sell.

Good point re: keyboard and mouse. Especially the round mouse, just looking at that gives me a funny feeling in the metacarpals.

Do you mean the round one-button mouse from the 1998 iMac?

Indeed. Sorry, I guess I'm showing my age assuming everyone knows which one I meant.

Here it is: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Apple_iM...

> Their keyboards and mice particularly showcase this: they look pretty and sleek, but try using them all day, and then try using a regular keyboard and mouse.

Having done this, I prefer the Apple products:

1. The keyboards have very little travel so it is considerably less effort to type on them then to type on a standard keyboard.

2. The Magic Mouse has a large multitouch surface on it that enables gestures that I have a hard time going without. Also, it fits my hand. YMMV.

Matter of taste or what you're accustomed to. I use a mechanical keyboard on my MacMini but genuinely like both the Apple Bluetooth trackpad and mouse--and have gotten beyond the trackballs I used for ages without much in the way of angst.

Have you tried the new keyboard and trackpad on the new macbook? the keyboard feels like buttons more than keys, and the trackpad is... not good.

but, still; matter of taste. there will always be lovers and haters, and you're certainly welcome to prefer one over the other.

I haven't tried the USB MacBook yet.

I'd say the entire history of Apple products compared to any other popular product that is a 'computing device' indicates that you're wrong. They've consistently made traditionally complex things easy enough for mainstream adoption and perhaps more importantly, enjoyment.

Sure, they make mistakes. Probably quite a number of them. Nobody is perfect. But I'd say their mistakes are insignificant compared to their achievements.

Plus, sometimes they're not mistakes; they just don't target power users. A single-button mouse is an example of that. And to some extent choosing aesthetics over usability can be an example of this too. A non-tech person might prefer a pretty mouse and keyboard because he only checks his email occasionally and he's not a great typist anyways.

(mind, I do realize Apple often did not 'invent' these things. They just were clever enough to polish these things up and productize them, which rather bafflingly few companies did before them)

Not that I disagree, but have you tried an Apple Watch? The UI is bewildering.

Haven't used it yet, but it seemed that the focus on apps was the wrong place to start. I think Marco Arment said something about the priority being notifications, glances and _then_ apps. Totally makes sense to me - in a UI meant to save you from the relatively cumbersome interaction with a phone, you don't want to replicate the functionality of the app. That's what the phone is still for. Any time saved not pulling the phone out would be spent navigating a smaller screen.

Not surprised that developers would start on the wrong end, but I wonder what Apple could've done to get them to start with glances. Perhaps not even include app support in v1 of the Watch OS.

> The entire desktop metaphor, include the Trash, the files in folders, etc. is about simplifying the user experience with the computer.

The work of the first iPhone team including Jony Ive might fit into Apple's philosophy, but those individuals deserve so much credit for Apple's small-device turnaround because iPhone wasn't inevitable and neither was Apple's recent success. Apple actually struggled for years in the personal computer market, made lots of now-forgotten stinker products with huge flaws, and mostly just continued to sell computers to a fanatical but tiny following. For example: yes, certainly I'll drag my floppy disk to the trash when I'm done working with it because there is no eject button, that sounds safe enough not to think about. What? To Apple's hardcore fans, that was always intuitive, and it does remove an ugly button from the front, but it is not "usable." It's just characteristic Apple. Apple never had a monopoly on usability.

iPhone was inevitable because it was basically a iPod with a mobile radio.

Its main selling point of the day (besides visual voice mail) was that it could hook into the existing ITMS infrastructure without the limitations that their previous cooperation with Motorola was saddled with.

Back when it launched, all but the highest capacity iPods were competing with cheaper and cheaper featurephones packing more and more storage.

The press was basically screaming for Apple to get a phone out the door or go down in flames.

I think the biggest turnaround for Apple was when they got Jobs off the "tech hub" idea he was riding. The idea that the Mac would the center of "your" (his) technological life.

This turned the company from a computer company into a consumer electronics company.

>The fact that anyone can just pick up an iPhone and pretty much immediately know what they should be doing

Because every last TV ad Apple ran for years were "here is how you get to map/music/web" under the guise of "see how simple iPhone is to use".

Without Steve Jobs, Jony Ive is just another designer. No doubt he's a very good one, but many others are just as good, if not better.

It's sad that Steve couldn't be there to tell Jony that the iOS 7 design sucked, big time, to tell him to do it over. It has ruined iOS for me, and not a few others I gather.

And they're in the process of ruining OS X with that ugly, flat iOS 7 look, too.

It's truly a shame what's become of Apple since Jobs passed.

and I suppose that without Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak is just another engineer?

Yes. Without Jobs there would be no apple, Wozniak failed to see the appeal and vision steve jobs had about computers.

Design includes usability. I suspect you are confusing it with aesthetics - a common mistake.

I think you're right. I certainly believe good design reflects good usability; but "aesthetics" feels a bit derogatory to me, which is maybe why i don't use it in my vocabulary when I should.

What's wrong with aesthetics? Certainly aesthetics at the cost of functionality, but good design means that form and function are complementary and aesthetics is certainly part of a fantastic design.

It's just one of those things for me, what the word means and how I feel about the word are not always in alignment.

It could be because I've always fought back against aesthetics at the cost of functionality, and it's left some mark on me like that. But you're right, though. I'm not saying it's a 100% logical thing of me to get hung up on.

I think Jony is even more pretentious than Steve. Isn't he the one that used red anodized aluminum to make a Mac Pro for a charity and then acted as if he "designed" a special version?

I agree. Jobs got away with his act because he more or less invented it. Jony is acting the act. From what I've seen, I find him really off-putting.

Once tasted wine at a place where the host was too slick, too smooth, too rehearsed. I had to walk out and leave our group with it. He reminds me of that.

I think it is more that Jobs was a natural, the guy seemed to be a functioning psycopath/sociopath.

Jony is an industrial designer by trade and heart. So "design" for him and everyone else doesn't just mean how it looks but how it is made.

I don't know about the process for making the Mac Pro red but given how much time Apple spends on material engineering I would assume it is non trivial.

If the Mac Pro was the first object ever made with red anodized aluminum, I'd agree that it was probably a non-trivial process. That's clearly not the case here.

Another perspective would be that by having Ive hype the design for the red Mac Pro, it's value was increased and so too was its contribution to the charity in question. Love him or loathe him, Ive is the preeminent celebrity industrial designer.

Starck, Eames, Dyson, Newson?

That person didn't give a million dollars to charity because he actually thought that a red Mac Pro was worth a million dollars, he gave a million dollars to charity because he was an incredibly nice person.

I think you have a lot of animus for someone who is basically making up a story about someone else "acting like" something, from whole cloth. What do you know about what Ive "acted like" precisely?

It's steel, and it raised $1 million for AIDS. What's the problem?

I don't think Ive is a genius, and I'm not crazy for everything they do, but decline? The state they're in ATM is anything but decline.

> In interviews he was always more real to me, more humble.

Guessing you haven't seen TLI. Watch it then come back and tell us he wasn't humble deep down inside. Steve was just really proud of his company and wanted it to excel past the norms.

TLI = Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview

For those of you confused, it seems TLI is "The Lost Interview": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJenqhpwvlA

Thank you for linking this, it was worthwhile to watch for sure.

I had not, no. I'm not sure that was a particularly humble interview, but he's at least more down to earth than I've seen him otherwise.

The little voice in me still critiques his methodology of working with others: he may have been smart, but he didn't need to be such a dick. I don't say that so much to put him down, but as my own reference that I don't need to be a jerk to people to get good work from them. (I feel some people have different take aways)

It seems Scott Forstall was meant to be an major part of the post-Jobs balance of power, but that didn't last long.

I'm a little disappointed how the top post in here presents design almost as an opposite to usability. That's not how it should work and certainly not how Apple got so successful. I think you might mean "aesthetics", that would be an important difference.

Good design is never just decoration, it's not just an aesthetic hull with the "real" functionality hidden behind it. Good design is from the ground up, how the entire experience is structured, including the stuff under the hood. Apple's main strength is in putting a ton of research into how users actually use their devices (textbook "usability") and making sure things are always ranked by importance. There's stuff iOS doesn't do that most Android devices do and it's not missing because Apple can't pull it off, it's because they decided not to waste space/learning-time for the user on something that might, for most people, not be important. Meanwhile, niche functionality is supported through a myriad of apps. That's not minimalism for the sake of aesthetics, that's a really smart usability decision that has payed off over and over for them. For a counter-example, I'm sure Apple was very tempted to make the Apple Watch touch-only but instead included a somewhat clumsy looking scroll wheel because that makes more sense for such a tiny display.

The few places where aesthetics clash with functionality (a lack of physical buttons that might seem reasonable, some questionable font choices,...) tend to get replaced by a more all-around solution (forget about buttons and go straight to touch) or a willingness to identify and fix problems (a new font for Apple Watch and iOS9).

I really don't think we'll get very far by calling out usability, of all things, as an area where Apple lacks. Apple has other problems, they're not perfect. But if they fail, it'll probably not be because of usability issues. It might rather be that people start asking what reason there could possibly be to upgrade to the next iPhone.