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It's just incomprehensible (and an unfortunate indictment of Jony Ive's design leadership) that the 2016 MacBook Pro has continued to prove such a regression fr
by mortenjorck 9y ago
It's just incomprehensible (and an unfortunate indictment of Jony Ive's design leadership) that the 2016 MacBook Pro has continued to prove such a regression from the 2012 design.
Professionals demand good design: tools that meet our needs in efficient, reliable, and even elegant ways. Apple's line of professional laptops has traditionally delivered this by and large, but the problem with the 2016 platform is that vanity finally overtook good design.
Good design weighs the trade-offs inherent in any design decision and decides based on the greatest benefit to the user. Vanity design decides based on the greatest benefit to the designer. And based on the dongles I've seen co-workers cart all over the office because Apple abandoned HDMI, based on the keyboard reliability issues that have affected the same co-workers, and based on the dearth of compelling Touch Bar applications that have sprung up in the past year and a half, I don't think there's any question that vanity has taken over.
Honestly, I think it's time for Ive to take more of an advisory role at Apple and let some of the many talented industrial designers in his org take Apple's hardware design back to fundamentals.
- bebna 9y agoMy notebook is from a time, where HDMI wasn't the most common port yet for modern displays and it came with regular display port and an VGA. While I do have an adapter for the display port, the VGA shows significant marks from all its usage over the years. So many locations still only supply VGA from their beamers. Sometimes I find those mini-dp to vga adapters broken in the corners of those rooms. They seem to work fine for you mac users...
- madeofpalk 9y ago> (and an unfortunate indictment of Jony Ive's design leadership) Ive has been leading design at Apple for 26 years. I think the failure lies elsewhere.
- entee 9y agoCounterargument: for a long time Ive had Jobs to push back on Design excesses. Now there's nobody that has the same kind of design sense at the top to push the product in practical directions. It's like Lennon and McCartney, they wrote better songs when they were together than apart (I'd argue).
- madeofpalk 9y agoI actually don't think that's a counterargument at all. If someone like Ive is able to run unchecked and produce the failure that is the MBP keyboard, then that's a problem outside of Ive.
- mortenjorck 9y agoBased on the folklore, I don't think it's a stretch to imagine Jobs holding up an iPhone USB cable at a meeting and yelling "why the hell can't I plug this into my MacBook Pro?" I can't imagine Cook doing the same.
- entee 9y agoSure, in a limited sense yeah. I think the Parent's view is that younger designers may be a little more grounded due to not having been worshiped as a god for years. Or just may have different/fresh ideas that are more responsive to current users. In other words if Ive is running amok, yeah maybe he should be replaced/challenged, and that's a failure of leadership, but it's still Ive who's doing the damage. In my view every Apple product launch/update since Job's death has increasingly tended to make more choices that are pretty from a design perspective but clueless from a utility perspective. Eventually we'll just have some sort of glass slab that soothingly glows but doesn't actually do anything, oh wait... touchbar.
- whywhywhywhy 9y agoThe real question here is would he consider this outcome a failure? What were the design goals of that MBP? Looking at it with an industrial designer eye I feel "symmetry" and "thinness" were higher up the list of requirements than "a good keyboard".