When Stephen Fry Met Jony Ive

This seems like little more than an Apple puff piece.

> Apple has recently developed a standard British power plug whose prongs fold elegantly back flush into their body. Easily stowed, no agony if accidentally trod on. A separate and wholly different solution to that offered by the Mu Plug which solves the problem in another way.

> “It took ages to solve,” Ive says wistfully. And that is the point. No one else cares as much. Of course it took ages, because anything worth doing does. People who take pains to the extent he and his team do are very very rare.

This sort of design has been present in countless cheap, $3 international power adapters. Ive's ego and insistence on exalting his own genius at the expense of others' is maddening, and to call something so simple an "innovation" illustrates how little is necessary for something to be deemed a work of ingenuity.

Like Marc Newson, much of his work is design for the sake of design, with little regard for functional implications. To have a company's philosophy be singularly focussed on aesthetics and minimalism alone is not a bad thing. But as Larry Wall prophetically said several years ago, "Apple is the arbiter of good taste. But when good taste becomes mandatory, it's no longer good taste, just manners."

I feel similarly about Apple's design philosophy. Their level of influence doesn't inspire opposing philosophies from their competitors, it inspires imitation-- since imitation is a basic, natural, fundamental reaction to something successful. The problem is that it alienates those who have other requirements that differ vastly from those of Apple's, and who would be better served with a little less aesthetic sense, and more functionality or durability at the expense of (largely arbitrary) things such as thickness, gloss, polish, and shine.

There is a reason you only see ThinkPads on ISS rather than MacBooks. Similar design goals -- minimalism, starkness, and abstraction -- but with vastly different approaches.

> design for the sake of design, with little regard for functional implications

This is a fundamental misunderstanding. The minimalist aesthetic is underpinned by the principle that form follows function, and is absolutely opposed to ornament or visual additions. Aesthetic === functional in this worldview; it's not a separate thing which gets added in. (This is precisely why Ives and others eschewed skeumorphism.)

"The development costs and development times of everything from those first iPods to the new line of Apple watches were far higher and far longer than any other company in the sector might tolerate.

And AS A RESULT the revenues from those products are far, far higher than any other company can dream of." [My emphasis]

I call post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this). While possibly just some lazy copy editing, I think everyone who's backed a hardware Kickstarter is well aware that blown out costs and development times do not normally result in far greater revenues.

Apple, in so many ways, is the exception not the rule. And in general this "fanboi" piece does a good job of highlighting some of their exceptions.

But yet its one of the best phone cameras available today. It pains me to see the horrible pictures many of my Android friends post to Facebook. And after the iPhone 5 battery the 6+ battery is serving me more than well. I can go a day and a half without a charge. Would a thicker version that could go a week serve customers better? I don't think so, I rather like its slenderness.

Another example is the philosophy of trying to jam all possible functionality into one [phone|mouse] button.