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Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

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Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#131

Post by PunksATawnyFill »

scarface74 wrote: post #111
idlewords wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs had plenty of design failures on his conscience, like the G3 cube, the skeuomorphism fad, and the hockey puck mouse. We should not pretend the guy had irreplaceable design sense.

Skeuomorphism wasn’t a failure. The iPhone and the touch interface were new to the market. Making the interface look familiar was important at the time even though it went too far. The iPhone did well from iOS 1 - iOS 6 and I don’t remember too many complaints until iOS 6.

Exactly. GUIs are supposed to look like things: buttons and displays, because the state of those things is immediately understood. Simple beveling and shadowing on a rectangle can tell you if the button is on or off. No one is calling for it to have a "brushed-metal" finish or dust motes on it.

Ive's (and others') asinine "flat" look tells you nothing. Buttons masquerade as plain text, and colored boxes next to each other are supposed to tell you which one (out of two) is active.

Apple's childish and ridiculous "skeuomorphism" wasn't just over the top and cheesy; it was just plain INCORRECT. They had controls designed to look like the paint on the felt surface of a blackjack table. WTF? You don't interact with the paint on a blackjack table in real life, so why the hell would I expect to do so in a program?

iTunes had a similarly defective UI: The "LCD" panel at the top (which was even depicted as having a sheen over it, to represent a glass cover) had controls in it you could click on. Again, WTF? You can't poke at the sealed LCD display on a tape deck, so... this is laughably stupid.

Yet year after year, very few decry the fallacy of reacting to plain old bad UI with even worse: the failure and design dereliction that is "flat" UI.

Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#132

Post by chiffre »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #33
piinbinary wrote: post #3

I 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…

I've owned multiple Thinkpads, and have a MacBook Air at home. I'm a pragmatist, so I don't mind that my work Thinkpad is all black and looks like it's from the 1990s. I enjoy that it has a built-in Nvidia GPU (which I use for machine learning). What makes me sad that with a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 install, my work Thinkpad can't even do two hours of battery life. My MacBook Air at home is 3 years old, but it's thin and l…

> built-in Nvidia GPU

  GPUs could consume a lot of power.
Source: I used a Windows 10 laptop (not Thinkpad) with Nvidia GPU and it usually lasted less than two hours on battery. I work on another laptop, Thinkpad without Nvidia or AMD GPU, it lasts 6-8 hours on battery.

Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#133

Post by w0mbat »

bangonkeyboard wrote: post #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 practic…

Some small vestige of this remained. There is a sharp edge on the original iPhone 1 in the area of the headphone socket and you can cut your finger on it if you are not careful.

Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#134

Post by PunksATawnyFill »

sjwright wrote: post #104
idlewords wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs had plenty of design failures on his conscience, like the G3 cube, the skeuomorphism fad, and the hockey puck mouse. We should not pretend the guy had irreplaceable design sense.

The misses are noteworthy for their relative rarity. The G3 cube was a good idea but was overpriced, as it was inferior to the regular G4 in every aspect other than size. It was priced to be a 2000’s-era executive desk ornament, a relatively tiny market segment. A few years later a substantially similar product was released to massive success—the Mac mini. The puck mouse was stupid, but it wasn’t as bad as people mad…

The follow-up to the puck mouse sucked just as much, because its entire body was the button... meaning you couldn't pick the mouse up while holding the button, to continue a long drag operation. Then the asinine "Magic Mouse," which somehow expected you to hold the mouse in position and then swipe across its surface horizontally with several fingers...

Not to mention media-centric phones without headphone jacks. Remember how services like Apple Music are supposed to be the company's future? Hey, let's make it HARDER for users to consume those services, by removing the audio output and battery life! COURAGE!

Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#135

Post by Causality1 »

chiffre wrote: post #132
tachyonbeam wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've owned multiple Thinkpads, and have a MacBook Air at home. I'm a pragmatist, so I don't mind that my work Thinkpad is all black and looks like it's from the 1990s. I enjoy that it has a built-in Nvidia GPU (which I use for machine learning). What makes me sad that with a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 install, my work Thinkpad can't even do two hours of battery life. My MacBook Air at home is 3 years old, but it's thin and l…

> built-in Nvidia GPU GPUs could consume a lot of power. Source: I used a Windows 10 laptop (not Thinkpad) with Nvidia GPU and it usually lasted less than two hours on battery. I work on another laptop, Thinkpad without Nvidia or AMD GPU, it lasts 6-8 hours on battery.

For a given CPU and battery capacity, Nvidia Optimus and AMD XConnect mean there's effectively no difference in battery life between a laptop with and without a dGPU, assuming you keep the dGPU disabled while you're using it. There are of course gaming and workstation laptops that run the dGPU at all times but you get what you expect with those.

Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#136

Post by Phillipharryt »

Retric wrote: post #127
akrulino wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a Nokia N95 when the iPhone was released. The N95 was far more functional: * Multitasking was allowed * Good maps app for navigating * Rhapsody subscription service for all your music needs * 3G support * Built-in SIP client The iPhone had none of this, but it had the superior UI. It took years for Apple to catch up to the technology of the klunky N95.

The N95 sold well and was a solid great phone for the time. However, the Nokia N95 suffered from a small screen 2.6 inches relative to the iPhone’s 3.5 inch display. It mostly sucked for web browsing, which seemed less import because all phones sucked for web browsing. What separated the iPhone was a useful touch screen enabling large screens, an acceptable web browser even if it lacked flash etc, and an unlimited ba…

The N95 and the iphone both sucked for web browsing. Websites just weren't made for small screens, you had to zoom in so far and links were hard to click. I wouldn't say the iPhone's browsing experience was any better than the rest, but perhaps that unlimited data plan (not bandwidth) changed things up.

Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#137

Post by scotth »

jacobolus wrote: post #13
tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #9

Earlier 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…

Leave my the state of my wrists alone.

Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#138

Post by Phillipharryt »

bangonkeyboard wrote: post #128
morpheuskafka wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just bought a new Mac and spent all of ten seconds looking at the "well-designed" Apple keyboard and mouse before buying the best third-party input devices I've ever had for less than half the cost. The Magic Mouse looks like it was build by someone who has never used a mouse in their life. The stupid little ball is so small it's basically impossible to scroll to boot.

> The stupid little ball is so small it's basically impossible to scroll to boot. Are you claiming to have just bought a new Mac with a Mighty Mouse?

We could be talking to someone still in 2009, perhaps we can help them navigate the next 10 years.

Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#139

Post by dwaite »

While it is obvious that the 2013 "Trashcan" Mac Pro was not a successful design, it seems a lot of people don't get what Apple was going for.

Their goal was a computer heavily focused on multithreaded and OpenCL loads, as most vendors were still preaching to developers that the single threaded performance increase ramp was dead, and workload would have to scale out instead.

At the same time, it is quite easy to point to the Mac Pros before and after it and say that they have a lot of wasted power and space. The new Mac Pro design has a 1400W power supply and is mostly empty space to accommodate the "fully loaded" expansion options that most buyers quite frankly will not purchase.

As Thunderbolt is basically an externalized PCIe interface, there is certainly a case to be made that extensibility is better served as a separate unit. This allowed the design of the core system to forgo modularity, and have an extremely compact design. This also allowed them to have a reduced parts cost.

But the reality was: - Component thermals did not stay balanced, with GPUs using far more power and giving off far more heat on the high end. This meant that there was a shortage of pro-level parts usable without redoing the core design. - As Apple didn't upgrade the core design, it wound up having dated thunderbolt support. - There is certainly an argument to be made that extensibility within the case is a cleaner, more manageable design for the end user - Intel's licensing for Thunderbolt has been guarded, and thus the market has been sub-par. For example, eGPU took ages to become available. Another example - Intel forbid RAID assemblies to be sold without disks.

In the end, I personally see what they were trying to go for, but in a lot of ways the way they thought technology and needs would evolve were missed by the 2013 pro. I don't see an issue with the design based on where they thought things were going - the issue IMHO is that it took them six years to react with a new product.

(FWIW, I was planning to buy the second rev of the trashcan pro - which I slowly realized would never happen)

Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#140

Post by Phillipharryt »

baggy_trough wrote: post #67
milemi wrote: post #38

I don't understand how Apple TV remote ever came into being, let alone how it still exists. Even when you somehow break the symmetry, in my case by sticking an ugly address label on the bottom part, skating around the screen with the touch pad is a game of skill that you are forced to play when all you want to do is just select a damn thing on the screen. Not to mention having to undo whatever I've done by touching t…

If you buy a $6 case for the remote, it becomes quite usable.

How would a case change the touchpad being a terrible control method?
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