I've always wondered why the camera sticks out in the more recent iPhones. Do they hedge bets that people will put a case on? Without a case, it bothers me that it can't lay flat on a table, desk, etc...
Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
151–160 of 301 posts
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#152I loved my cube which I tuned with new graphics cards, processor cards - there was a whole community around extending cubes with hardware without active cooling.
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#153I for one quite like the Apple TV 4 remote. It has one major issue in that it's symmetrical and you sometimes pick it up the wrong way. But other than that I love it. The touchpad is great with the Apple TV, especially once you figure out that you can single-tap the edges like a D-Pad for precision. It lays flat, so you can tap the play/pause button on your coffee table rather than picking up the remote. There are ju…
The AppleTV 4 remote has the best scrubbing interface of any remote I’ve used. Having the conventional forward back buttons just makes it slower.
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#154The article points out some very high visibility things that Ive was either responsible for, or at least signed off on. The author though misses what I think is the one that has had the most impact on people - Apple's insistence on removal of strain relief on cables. Apple's cables have for generations now been fraying and cracking all because someone decided that strain relief was an unsightly and unnecessary thing.…
I don't think strain reliefs is the issue as much as the thinness of the cables. The magsafe power supplies do have minimal strain reliefs[1] but the insulation cracks at the end of the relief. If you tape up or reinforce the ends with tape, as I've done on numerous cables, they'll eventually crack and fray at the end of the tape. I've learned to just be very careful winding and unwinding mine and have them last for…
It's not just the lack of strain relief. As 'paranoidroibot noted in a sibling comment, the magsafe2 cables have more of it, but there seems to be some sort of degradation in whatever they're using as insulation -- the magsafe end of my cable is noticeably yellow and stiff compared to the rest of the cable. In fact this is my second cable, the first one having failed due to the insulation splitting after showing the same symptoms. This is in contrast to my earphone cables that have thinner insulation and more wind/unwind cycles yet are still going strong.
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#155I for one quite like the Apple TV 4 remote. It has one major issue in that it's symmetrical and you sometimes pick it up the wrong way. But other than that I love it. The touchpad is great with the Apple TV, especially once you figure out that you can single-tap the edges like a D-Pad for precision. It lays flat, so you can tap the play/pause button on your coffee table rather than picking up the remote. There are ju…
Completely agree. With HDMI-CEC and moving off of old Campos it is the only remote used in our house and nobody ever asks me how to do X. They click it, everything turns on and the navigate to the thing they want. A bit of rubber on the lower half so could feel up from down would be my only change.
The fatal flaw of CEC, at least with my particular setup, is that there is no way to play music on my receiver via the Apple TV while having the TV off. When CEC is enabled, turning on the receiver turns on the TV, and turning off the TV turns off the receiver. It’s insanely frustrating, but hey, how could it know when I really don’t want to turn off the receiver?
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. As CEO, one of Steve’s key functions was to serve as chief product officer. Design is an element of great products, and at Apple it has been a key element and key differentiator. As has been oft-noted, Tim is in no way a product person, and so without Steve we have seen design imperatives (thinness) unchecked
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.
Ultimately, a hit is worth 100 misses and he had 7 colossal hits in his career (Apple II / Mac / NextOS / MacBook / iPod / iPhone / iPad)
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
People also tend to forget that it was incredibly refined already in v1. I remember hooking it up to my car and being super impressed that I could pick whether I wanted sound to go to the car, my phone, or my headphones. Each makes sense in a different context, but other products at the time assumed that as long as there was a BT connection available it should use that. They also clearly did some great usability work…
Refined yes, featureful no.
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#158I 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
Umm, no, it was not. Even Windows Mobile was far more functional than iPhone. But iPhone looked cute, and had some ease of use affordances for people who could not be bothered actually learning anything (but then this had always been Apple's target audience).
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#159Earlier 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.
This. People forget how new touch was to a generation coming from the mouse, windows and scroll wheels.
Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
#160Earlier 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 G3 cube would power off if you put a sheet of paper on it.