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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

#231

Post by skohan »

killjoywashere wrote: post #126
treve wrote: post #41

There's lot of focus in this article on failure. I enjoy Apple bashing as much as the next guy, but one has to assume in the same 20 years Apple's head of design would have had as many, if not more successes? I've seen a bunch of anti-Ive comments and articles here recently. Is everyone just picking out all failures and attributing them to him and design successes to Jobs? Is that really representative and based in t…

Jobs made Ive, very publicly, which made Ive untouchable. I think what you're hearing is a mix of catharsis and a hope that someone in Cupertino will actually take note of some of it. The 2012 retina MacBook an the various iPhones were probably the high water mark for the Jobs-Ive collaboration. It is well known that Ives proposed and Jobs disposed. Lacking the disposer, the increased rate of fails was just half a no…

I think this reading appeals to our human desire to interpret things as personality-driven narratives, but I'm not convinced it's accurate. I think many of "Ive's missteps", and the behavior of Apple post-Jobs can be adequately explained by market forces and changes in the incentive structure driving Apple's product development.

During that period, Apple went from being a somewhat niche player for digital artists and enthusiasts to being one of most valuable brands on the planet. They went from having to work very hard to convince consumers that they were worth taking a risk on, to being a coveted status symbol which some customers would pay virtually anything for. I don't think it's surprising that during this period they would push their product line toward higher-margin, less utilitarian products you might want to replace more often for their various flaws.

I also don't think it's surprising that we're seeing Apple signaling a shift towards their old, pro-consumer ways now that the smartphone market is weakening.

Yes it's compelling to think about things in terms of the interplay of a few individuals, and the hubris of a rouge designer, but in general understanding the behavior of corporations through the lens of incentive structures is much more accurate.

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

#232

Post by arcturus17 »

proee wrote: post #22
jacobolus wrote: post #13

Earlier 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.

This was not framed in any shape, way, or form as a justification to the MacBook design. OP just provided some related and useful info.

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

#233

Post by skohan »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #63

All the designers I've worked with have all put beauty over function. That's just who they are. I suspect that if they emphasized function their career would have been greatly impacted towards the negative. One big project that comes to mind is The Getty Museum in Los Angeles -at a billion dollar cost. The architecture is beautiful but it lacks function. Getting around the museum as a visitor is like entering a mase.…

The Guggenheim in New York is another example of this. I've heard it told that the reason the bathrooms are all tucked away under stairwells and in other awkward places is because their inclusion at all was a detail the architect originally overlooked.

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

#234

Post by skohan »

gigatexal wrote: post #193

The iPhone 4 and 4s were the best looking iPhones ever made in my opinion.

Agree. The back glass was not completely practical, but mine survived plenty of drops, and the whole thing had a nice weight/density to it, and a very premium feel.

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

#235

Post by rusk »

Phillipharryt wrote: post #136
Retric wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the iPhone's defense, vs the other smart phones I had used up until I got my iPhone 4, it was the first one to have a web browser that worked reasonably well on all non-mobile websites, and it was that factor alone at the time was enough to get me hooked.

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

#237

Post by [deleted] »

rusk wrote: post #230
traderjane wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#238

Post by lloeki »

zokula wrote: post #164
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.

And don't forget iPhone lacked MMS on release and almost a year or two after if I remember correctly

Unexpectedly, MMS was so crappy at the time and full of spam that it was actually a feature for me. Total count of legit MMS I ever received was half a dozen, and again half of that that I sent.

(I did not own an iPhone 1, only a 3G one, but I skipped on MMS as hard as I could)

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

#239

Post by infosecdude64 »

ansible wrote: post #228
insulanus wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

WSL is what finally got me to move off of OSX and back into Windows. IMHO, I prefer a thin MSI laptop to a MBP and a Surface to a MacBook Air. I'm trading my work MBP in for a Win 10 laptop with proper ports and docking station.

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

#240

Post by thom »

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…

They made laptops out of plastic that went yellow and fell apart when humans touched them under Jobs' watch. They pushed out plenty of thinner machines with fundametal thermal issues under Jobs' watch. They pushed out apps daubed in rich Corinthian leather under Jobs' watch.

This idea that somehow Steve Jobs was the only thing between Jony Ive and disaster has to stop. All design is hit and miss. Internal forces in large, complex organisations are always at odds with each other. There are plenty of examples of post Jobs' designs which are entirely pragmatic or just market driven, instead of being examples of someone's decadent taste.

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