181–190 of 330 posts
Today, none of Apple’s products spark my excitement and joy like they did from 1999-2011. Everything today is predictable, safe and iterative. I look forward to reading this book. Maybe it can provide some insight. I hope Apple’s design team can recover.
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I think part of the reason they sold insanely expensive Apple Watches is that they wanted to compete with luxury watches. Of course, the functionality is very different; the similarity is that both are methods of conspicuous consumption. I’m not an Apple Watch fan myself (still clutching my Pebble for dear life), but I can understand why the uber-expensive Apple Watches would appeal to a certain audience.
> I can understand why the uber-expensive Apple Watches would appeal to a certain audience. I never could understand why Apple (or anyone else) this would be a possibility. Luxury watches are almost synonymous with heirloom; there is no way anyone will be wearing a functional Gold Apple watch in 2085 with the anecdote "This was my dad's watch" - it would be hopelessly outdated, and likely non-functional by then. This…
This is somewhat true throughout all of apple's products. Release a new Mac or iPhone, you'll notice a lot of people (especially musicians) buying them for no utilitarian reason other than because it's new and because it'll be theirs - and it's expensive. Apple's marketing and reputation is so brilliant it's ingrained almost like a religion (Certainly socially what religion was to a ye olde' peasant)
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Oh man, those trailers with him speaking are the stuff I MISS the most, it was the last reminder of that old Apple now that keynotes and product launch commercials are so bland and boring I don't even bother to watch them anymore.
As a counterpoint, I bought my first iPhone (first ever Apple product) this week, and it was specifically because it seems like Apple is finally designing products with usability and functionality as their top priority. Ive was great, but he was way too much of an artist to understand that computers are mostly tools. Ive was more interested in folding katanas and the process of creation than the mundane design of a p…
In my opinion, the work Ive did at Apple is greatly over rated. Yes it is clean and minimalist, and some devices like the iPhone 4 were truly innovative, bold and impressive designs. But overall, this is mostly bland, generic, boring. In the same minimalist style, I prefer the work of Dieter Rams. Some Sony products have really good design, including devices that were released a few years before the iPhone, but that…
Citing IBM as good at design makes this read like a parody. Everything IBM does is so hilariously ugly in the least imaginative, boring, industrial way that they’ve gone through “boxy” into some other universe where it’s almost — but not quite — good style. For crying out loud, everything they make is black . There are famous Apple ads deriding the bland corporate look of IBM!
In my opinion, the work Ive did at Apple is greatly over rated. Yes it is clean and minimalist, and some devices like the iPhone 4 were truly innovative, bold and impressive designs. But overall, this is mostly bland, generic, boring. In the same minimalist style, I prefer the work of Dieter Rams. Some Sony products have really good design, including devices that were released a few years before the iPhone, but that…
Citing IBM as good at design makes this read like a parody. Everything IBM does is so hilariously ugly in the least imaginative, boring, industrial way that they’ve gone through “boxy” into some other universe where it’s almost — but not quite — good style. For crying out loud, everything they make is black . There are famous Apple ads deriding the bland corporate look of IBM!
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Apologies for nitpicking but the prefix you're looking for is hecto-. The prefix centi- means 1/100 [1], implying that Damien Hirst has only $10,000 to his name, starving artist level wealth! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_SI_prefi...
It’s really funny because centi- means both hundredth and hundred. And it’s a doublet of hecto! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/centi-
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I also don’t quite get it. Firing that designer would not increase my trust in the design leadership. It would seem thin skinned, skittish, cruel, deeply immoral and evil, leading me to lose a lot of trust, feeling as though creating a culture of fear is the goal. That behavior seems completely incomprehensible to me, especially since you need to have an extremely tortured reading of that e-mail to read it as an atta…
Artists are a petty and vindictive culture, since value is subjective and there's no profit for being pretty good but not the annointed winner.
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I think he understood perfectly that computers were tools. The PowerBook/MacBook Pro designs up through 2016, the MacBook Air from 2010 onwards, the Power Macs G3-G5/Macs Pro through 2013 and the 2019 Mac Pro, the iBook/MacBook line through 2011, and the entirety of the iMac’s history all reflect a recognition that computers are fundamentally tools. They just held the conceit that tools can also be beautiful. But yes…
IDK. Doggedly sticking to a single button mouse. Putting charging port on the bottom of a mouse because designers know best. Calculators that produce wrong answers if one types before the beautiful animations finish. Keyboards so thin and heavily integrated dust can break them, and cannot be repaired without accessing main board. Evidence suggests to me that Apple's record on utility is mixed.
I suspect Ive was fired because he created the craziness of 2012-2017 post Jobs era.
Trashcan, no ports, touch bar, mouse charging etc etc.
These days I have moderate confidence Apple will fix its issues. Eventually.
Putting software design under the hardware design folks after Forstall was outed was and remains disastrous IMO. Dye and his team continue to make beautiful hardware but fuck me hiding every function of a program behind a hover state or overflow menu absolutely kills usability. Productivity is being sacrificed for some weird notion of “cleanliness”. We’re all running displays with millions of pixels, we can afford bu…
The hardware is getting better. The software is getting worse.
They're hiding usability.
I respect Ive's design skills but I think that Ive leaving is one of the best things to happen to Apple in decades. They're slowly going from Ive's minimalist artistic designs back to useful computing devices and user interfaces.
Another point of the article that's compatible with what you're saying but still a concern - anything under Tim's $10b potential threshold gets more excluded from cross-team collaboration and attention and resources than they did previously