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The dissolution of Apple’s legacy design team

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Re: The dissolution of Apple’s legacy design team

#171

Post by stephc_int13 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #153
stephc_int13 wrote: post #105

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!

From my point of view, the beige boxes era was ugly, but there have been many interesting and innovative designs over the years.

In my opinion, there should be enough space for multiple design schools and trends.

https://archive.curbed.com/2016/8/31/12700054/richard-sapper...

Re: The dissolution of Apple’s legacy design team

#172

Post by sportslife »

jiggawatts wrote: post #153
stephc_int13 wrote: post #105

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!

Maybe that was past-tense good: The first all black computer I got to use was the most beautiful, amazing machine I had ever seen. It looked fast! Unlike the plodding old beige Macintoshes I had been using. But that was a long, long time ago.

Design is funny: what was new and amazing eventually becomes old and dated, and then sometimes, later still, beloved.

Re: The dissolution of Apple’s legacy design team

#173

Post by geraldwhen »

kzrdude wrote: post #123
scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the other lesson - don’t use poetry or metaphors to express your self because they will inevitably be twisted to suit the corporate interests and not yours.

It's not so far from that to, "don't show your human side to the soulless corporation." And why even work for them, then?

To get paid. Work is not your family. Family doesn’t fire you for sending an email.

Re: The dissolution of Apple’s legacy design team

#174

Post by duskwuff »

burnished wrote: post #131
KptMarchewa wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually like that I can connect everything - keyboard, mouse, two monitors, headphones, power, ethernet via one thunderbolt cable. What I'd hate is the fact that I'd have to unplug everything and take this dock with me if I wanted to connect in the conference room.

Wait what? How are you doing that? I want this thing so my laptop can be more easily unplugged and stop being a stylish desktop pc

What you want is a Thunderbolt dock.

Be warned that they aren't cheap. Most of the good ones cost $300 - $400; I'd recommend looking at options from Caldigit and Anker.

Re: The dissolution of Apple’s legacy design team

#175

Post by paulryanrogers »

SllX wrote: post #147
thoms_a wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: The dissolution of Apple’s legacy design team

#176

Post by CodeWriter23 »

Unfortunately, the design team isn’t the only thing afflicting Apple’s products. macOS crashes, previously extremely rare are no a weekly event for me. On Apple gear. My iPhone 8 Plus only intermittently generates notifications from colleagues while at work. Flaky Wi-Fi. Autocorrect has learned too much and instead of correcting typos natural to an onscreen keyboard, now materially changes sentences on the fly, respelling correctly-spelled words, apparently based upon some engineer’s idea of ML Nirvana and contextual language processing. Hey MF I don’t write _your_ way. Lock Screen appears abruptly during use and is unlockable, requiring a reboot. It’s almost like the “the new windows will fix all the crashes” (3.1/95/98bXP) guys have set up shop at Apple and are perpetrating Jobs’ feared “Bozo Explosion”. Ironically, Windows on my aging MBP is my most stable compute experience on the daily now. Well, except for the Linux servers and their mult-year uptimes.

Re: The dissolution of Apple’s legacy design team

#177

Post by kzrdude »

geraldwhen wrote: post #173
kzrdude wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so far from that to, "don't show your human side to the soulless corporation." And why even work for them, then?

To get paid. Work is not your family. Family doesn’t fire you for sending an email.

If you're a valuable worker, go find a place that does more to you than pay :)

Re: The dissolution of Apple’s legacy design team

#178

Post by DRW_ »

ghaff wrote: post #84
DRW_ wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to prefer some of the more 'flat' modern designs in many ways, but I do think people are too binary about the skeuomorphic stuff. They could have modernised the design and still kept some of the useful skeuomorphic cues. I think what pushed people away from the skeuomorphic stuff is that it feels like the aesthetics can become to feel dated quicker? But I don't think that necessarily needs to be the case. Like…

I think if you went back and looked at some of the OS X and, especially, iOS design elements of a decade or so ago you'd probably find some of them pretty dated. Another thing worth observing is that Apple exists as part of essentially the fashion industry which is design. And I don't necessarily wholly blame Apple for all the thin, grey, minimalist design that we see everywhere these days.

> I think if you went back and looked at some of the OS X and, especially, iOS design elements of a decade or so ago you'd probably find some of them pretty dated.

I mean that's kinda what I was saying in that the aesthetics are dated, but I think the aesthetics chosen are distinct from the concept of 'skeuomorphism', the aesthetics of a particular implementation can be dated, but the idea of skeuomorphic design might not be.

Re: The dissolution of Apple’s legacy design team

#179

Post by lynguist »

chongli wrote: post #107
dbspin wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question, do you know any artists? This isn't the case generally; certainly amongst ordinary working visual artists - who are demonstrably open minded, centred, and interpersonally engaged. I can't speak to Damien Hirst level centimillionaires, who represent an invisibly small fraction of working artists.

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-

Re: The dissolution of Apple’s legacy design team

#180

Post by roflyear »

mickelsen wrote: post #112
coldtea wrote: post #12

I prefer the current balance of Ive-inspired-designs WITHOUT Ive's obsessions. But something also not frequently said: Apple had amazing designs (compared to the rest of the industry), for 2 decades before Ive started his thing. Heck, NeXT too. Also, if I had to suffer yet another cookie-cutter Ive post-release video about a product, I'd kill myself...

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.

Apple keynotes we're such an amazing thing that every 6-12 months to this day I remember how much I enjoyed them almost two decades ago.
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