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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

#221

Post by scarface74 »

kerng wrote: post #165
scarface74 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ipaq had touch 3-4 years before iPhone came out. Obviously not as slick. People seem to always forget that the iPhone was just an evolution not some kind of magically unexpected or unanticipated device.

Seeing that I was programming ruggedized Windows CE based devices before the iPhone came out, I didn’t forget anything. But, the generally consumer market didn’t use Windows CE devices and Windows CE wasn’t exactly the definition of user friendly mobile design.

This is just like the initial reaction to the iPod on Slashdot back in 2001. “less space than the Nomad. No wireless. Lame” and why computer geeks don’t get the general consumer.

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

#222

Post by nicoburns »

duncanawoods wrote: post #207
WoodenChair wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What both you and grandparent are missing is the biggest iPhone touch innovation of all: multitouch. Multitouch was invented largely by a one-person startup that Apple purchased, and the iPhone became the first device to mass-produce it. The book The One Device covers its development well: https://amzn.to/2lrbKA7

IMHO multi-touch is really overrated in significance. The only multi finger gesture I use is pinch zoom and it’s like once a week. If that was a widget or triple tapping or something, I wouldnt notice. The improvements to touch that made it magical was the super responsive typing and momentum scrolling and it’s all just one fingered.

Super responsive typing actually does depend on multitouch, because if you type fast then you will have multiple fingers touching different keys at the same time.

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

#223

Post by nicoburns »

nextos wrote: post #73
jeswin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes me sad that with a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 install, my work Thinkpad can't even do two hours of battery life. This has everything to do with the unresolved problems of Linux power management. I use Ubuntu on Thinkpads too, and battery life is decent after a bit of configuration. Windows meanwhile gives all day battery life on Thinkpads.

I have managed to achieve the same battery life, down minute differences in the single digit either side, between macOS and Linux on a MacBook Air (which is a simple all Intel machine). I think the problem is that most distributions ship with no Powertop or udev rules, plus lots of unnecessary services and devices on by default. One really nice thing Apple does is optimizing Safari for battery life. My comparison was…

Firefox on Mac's big battery life problem is apparently lack of integration with the system compositor. There's a fix in the works for this. Although I expect safari will still be better in this regard. Safari is pretty impressive.

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

#224

Post by skohan »

samstave wrote: post #75
paranoidrobot wrote: post #35

The 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.…

This was completely intentional. As they make a fuck-ton on resale of these accessories. (planned obsolescence)

I had the same feeling about the evolution of the magsafe connector. The second generation, for which the cable ran parallel to the edge of the laptop where you plugged it in, was an upgrade in every way over its predecessor. The way it was constructed, and the forces you would typically put on it from day to day use made it much more robust than the T-shaped design.

But despite the obvious advantages, the next generation went back to the old design, but a little bit smaller, and back to all the old issues. I probably spent a few hundred dollars on replacement 3rd gen chargers alone, while the 2nd gen charger which came with my laptop is still in perfect working order in a box in my closet.

The cynical of me honestly wonders if they didn't see a decrease in peripheral revenue after the first iteration, and reverted to the old design only because of that.

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

#225

Post by Shivetya »

dwaite wrote: post #139

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 poin…

The trashcan was a bad design from day one. It was more oriented towards the pretentious developers instead of the professional developer. I suggest the new Mac Pro is as well. It is more about being seen with it than being able to use and considering its price point that exclusivity seems to have been an Apple goal, as in you are not worthy of our hardware if the price makes you flinch. Same for that monitor.

The new Mac Pro's modular feature ties you completely to Apple for GPU improvements, I did not verify if it also ties you to them for CPU upgrades. Simply put, they designed a system by which you are stuck with them that added cost but no value.

I am hoping that with Ive gone that we leave the pretentious era of Apple behind, the era that resulted in the trashcan, designer bands for a watch let alone a gold 10k watch, and even to the point of their new headquarters.

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

#226

Post by skohan »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #84
samstave wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was completely intentional. As they make a fuck-ton on resale of these accessories. (planned obsolescence)

Perhaps. I'd be inclined to believe more if it wern't for Apple and Ive's focus on the beauty of their products at the expense of everything else, including usability. The article itself goes over a bunch of examples of this. Strain relief is, or can be, somewhat ugly. More angles, thicker cables, varying widths - it all adds up to muddying the lines of their product. Compared to how much they make on device sales -…

It might not be one or the other. In a profit driven company, outcomes which result in a material benefit to the bottom line have an easy time being justified even if the justification used is not explicitly related to profit.

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

#227

Post by baq »

baddox wrote: post #155
nathantotten wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

my receiver (denon x1400) doesn't turn on the tv when it turns itself on, but the tv turns on the receiver and turns it off. i've set it up a long time ago but IIRC it was configurable.

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

#228

Post by ansible »

insulanus wrote: post #179
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…

Regarding the Thinkpad: I know this may sound crazy, but consider using installing windows, and using Linux in a VM. You get all the OEM and MS drivers for the hardware that way.

As long as I don't have to do hardware development, the Windows Services for Linux works pretty well for me with regards to command-line tools. I've been un-installing cygwin on my systems recently.

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

#229

Post by mhh__ »

saagarjha wrote: post #206
mhh__ wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have one personally but every time I use one at a friend house it just feels crap in a way that I've never felt with an apple product before. It's obviously well made but it just feels pretentious compared to a phone or remote than you can actually type with.

> remote than you can actually type with Wouldn't that be a reasonably large remote?

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/31xFU74uJ6L...

It doesn't even need letter/number buttons, just some proper tactile feedback rather than this smooth hello-my-owner-has-more-money-than-sense rotating action thing i.e. the scroll wheel on an iPod classic from the mid 2000s was miles better.

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

#230

Post by rusk »

traderjane wrote: post #208
thomasjudge wrote: post #50

Earlier 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

At some point even Steve Jobs may have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of products, and we don't expect the CEO to be able to provide every product with love. At some point the responsibility must fall on the design team and Jony Ives, because what is design if not the tasteful balance of factors resulting in a vision of experience, as opposed to the tunnel vision pursuit of maximizing on a metric?

> what is design if not the tasteful balance of factors resulting in a vision of experience

Determining the essential functional qualities of a product, and balancing these with aesthetics. When you throw in the industrial factor as in industrial design you're also considering cost at scale.

Design is not a purely visual discipline.

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