In my opinion the fruit flavor iMacs and the clamshell iBooks were incredibly ugly.
Same feeling towards the original versions of MacOSX with the “lickable” candy color theme.
Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
21–30 of 301 posts
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
So many people I've talked to have never noticed the sharp edges of the mac pro. But they irritate the living crap out of me. After a few hours use, it starts to feel like I've been grinding my forearms with sandpaper.
Tangential public service announcement: Your forearms should not be digging into the edge of the laptop. If they are, you are positioning your hands and wrists in an uncomfortable and inefficient way which has a good chance of leading to RSI. Irrespective of the smoothness of the laptop corners, don’t do this! Ideally you shouldn‘t be putting any significant pressure on any surface with your forearms, palms, or wrist…
This is a terrible argument to justify a poor design. There are plenty of times you need to use a laptop in non-ideal situations, such as a car or plane. The laptop should not punish you for having to operate it outside perfect conditions.
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tangential public service announcement: Your forearms should not be digging into the edge of the laptop. If they are, you are positioning your hands and wrists in an uncomfortable and inefficient way which has a good chance of leading to RSI. Irrespective of the smoothness of the laptop corners, don’t do this! Ideally you shouldn‘t be putting any significant pressure on any surface with your forearms, palms, or wrist…
Different people type in different ways.
Yes this is true, but many of those ways put considerable strain on their hands and wrists and commonly lead to serious injury. If the forearms are digging into the corners of the laptop, that almost certainly means that the wrists are extended (bent downward), which puts the tendons/joints used for typing into a weak and injury-prone part of their range of motion.
People should do whatever works for them and listen to their own bodies, but should be really careful with computer keyboards. I know many professional computer-users who did themselves serious harm with significant impact to their careers.
If something hurts even a little bit, please don’t try to work through the pain.
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
iphone is the best counter argument to this. when released it was 1000x more functional and 1000x better looking than any phone available
That's revisionist. People tend to forget that when the iphone was released it had no appstore and Apple was telling people to develop webapps. This was less functional than existing offerings on the market, but it sure looked and felt better.
I'm curious when you say less functional than existing offerings you mean .... exactly what? Those java apps you could download from your cell phone carrier that ran incredibly slow? Or the robust ecosystem windows mobile <6 had at the time?.. Because Android wasn't out... I agree with foolfoolz, iphone raised the bar both functionally and visually, regardless of having a app store at launch.
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#25I think it's good to draw a distinction between visual design and functional design. Design that focuses on function can sometimes (but definitely not always) result in designs that are also visually appealing, but design that focuses on the visual rarely produces a very functional result. I'd much rather look at a mac book pro than a thinkpad. Next to the minimalist design of the mac, a thinkpad looks like you rippe…
From the article:
>In the first interview, he also admitted to admiring people who work on satellites, where you have to justify every iota of space consumed, every gram of weight, because they’re expensive and you only get one chance to get them right.
The thing is, laptops aren't satellites. I've never understood the obsession with saving even a pound of weight for a laptop. (OK, maybe if you're one of those people who flies a million miles a year.)
It's a tool, not an objet d'art or a satellite. The Thinkpad was the best expression of this idea. I've never liked using a Mac more than a Thinkpad. Maybe I'm strange that way, or maybe I'm just that much further skewed toward utility that it makes all the difference for me.
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#26"That vague hostility towards humans keeps peeping through."
A story recounted here last year [0]:
During the development of the first iPhone, Ive and his team became enamored with the look of an extruded aluminum prototype. Even though it was immediately apparent that the model's sharp edges made it physically painful to use as a phone, they persisted in trying to push the design and paper over its principal practical problems. It took Steve Jobs to finally step in, point out the obvious, and check Jony Ive's worst tendencies. [1]
Steve Jobs is gone, and nobody is left to fulfill his roles.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17056930
[1]: https://www.cultofmac.com/488008/jony-ive-book-excerpt-iphon...
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tangential public service announcement: Your forearms should not be digging into the edge of the laptop. If they are, you are positioning your hands and wrists in an uncomfortable and inefficient way which has a good chance of leading to RSI. Irrespective of the smoothness of the laptop corners, don’t do this! Ideally you shouldn‘t be putting any significant pressure on any surface with your forearms, palms, or wrist…
This is a terrible argument to justify a poor design. There are plenty of times you need to use a laptop in non-ideal situations, such as a car or plane. The laptop should not punish you for having to operate it outside perfect conditions.
There is no condition where you should have your forearm digging into the front edge of the laptop.
If you come up with a body shape and context and I guarantee you we can come up with a more comfortable way to position the laptop than anything requiring wrists bent downward.
This is not about the design of the Macbook: the same goes for any other laptop, however smooth and soft its front edge might be.
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#28I read this article from start to finish. It never gets off the ground, so I don't recommend bothering. There are much more interesting critiques of Ive's design.
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
So many people I've talked to have never noticed the sharp edges of the mac pro. But they irritate the living crap out of me. After a few hours use, it starts to feel like I've been grinding my forearms with sandpaper.
When the unibody Mac first came out the edges were so sharp they sliced your wrists. It took a few years for them to finally release them with a small radius on the edge. Just a few mm made a huge difference. There were some YouTube videos of people sanding them down to make it more bearable. Terrible design decision to have such a sharp edge but somebody really wanted that "crisp" edge look.
Which unibody Macs ever had a "few mm" radius? They're all < 1 mm.
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#30I think it's good to draw a distinction between visual design and functional design. Design that focuses on function can sometimes (but definitely not always) result in designs that are also visually appealing, but design that focuses on the visual rarely produces a very functional result. I'd much rather look at a mac book pro than a thinkpad. Next to the minimalist design of the mac, a thinkpad looks like you rippe…
iphone is the best counter argument to this. when released it was 1000x more functional and 1000x better looking than any phone available
A Blackberry was probably more functional at that time but wasn't as nice as to use and look at.