31 ms·

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

362 points by mnm1 7y ago

omershapira 7y ago
10 points for resisting the temptation to call it "Ive Made a Mistake".
- dbuder 7y ago
  Jony, Ive Made a Mistake
piinbinary 7y ago
I think it's good to draw a distinction between visual design and functional design. Design that focuses on function can sometimes (but definitely not always) result in designs that are also visually appealing, but design that focuses on the visual rarely produces a very functional result. I'd much rather look at a mac book pro than a thinkpad. Next to the minimalist design of the mac, a thinkpad looks like you ripped out part of a server and started carrying it around. But, I'd rather type on a thinkpad than on a mac. The keys are better (if not as good as they once were), the surface is neither too cold nor too hot to rest my wrists on, and the edge of the laptop isn't sharp like the edge of a mac pro. Once you start using a thing, the visual details melt away and the functional details take over.
- foolfoolz 7y ago
  iphone is the best counter argument to this. when released it was 1000x more functional and 1000x better looking than any phone available
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    That's revisionist. People tend to forget that when the iphone was released it had no appstore and Apple was telling people to develop webapps. This was less functional than existing offerings on the market, but it sure looked and felt better.
    - ct520 7y ago
      I'm curious when you say less functional than existing offerings you mean .... exactly what? Those java apps you could download from your cell phone carrier that ran incredibly slow? Or the robust ecosystem windows mobile <6 had at the time?.. Because Android wasn't out... I agree with foolfoolz, iphone raised the bar both functionally and visually, regardless of having a app store at launch.
      - darkpuma 7y ago
        In an age before android or iphones, blackberry ruled the world. The iphone as it was released was a functional regression for blackberry power users. And it didn't catch on with that demographic until Apple iterated on the iphone to close the gap.
        ct520 7y ago
        You are correct - I totally spaced the blackberry. I was focused on the app store comment. LOL them blackberry power users hung on for awhile huh?
        Sharlin 7y ago
        Blackberry ruled the US. It was mostly unknown in the world.
        darkpuma 7y ago
        Nitpicks aside, if Blackberry preceded the iphone only in America, it still preceded the iphone. Note that I never claimed that predecessors to the iphone, with more functionality than the iphone, were also more commercially successful in America, let alone worldwide. Claiming that would be ridiculous.
      - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
        > Or the robust ecosystem windows mobile <6 had at the time? Huh? Windows CE and, later, Windows Mobile had quite a large number of apps for its era since the programming model was similar to desktop Windows (pre .NET) meaning that there was a ready-made base of developers for it. They weren't necessarily easy to find since the idea of an app store (and Apple/Google eating 30% of your revenue) didn't exist yet but they were there.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    A Blackberry was probably more functional at that time but wasn't as nice as to use and look at.
    - acdha 7y ago
      Whether you believe that to be true probably depends on whether you more frequently used email or the web. The Blackberry was great for messaging but the browser & other non-core apps were a bad joke.
      - Ididntdothis 7y ago
        True. back then a mobile phone was mainly a messaging device.
      - bluedino 7y ago
        The browser was great for sites that were optimized for it. ESPN at my fingertips...that was Amazing.
    - schnable 7y ago
      Blackberry failed by not embracing apps. The app landscape was a mess of incompatibility, had poorly made apps, and no unified App Store. This where iOS killed Blackberry.
  - akrulino 7y ago
    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.
    - Retric 7y ago
      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 bandwidth option. If anything it was really bandwidth that changed how people used their phone.
      - Phillipharryt 7y ago
        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.
        rusk 7y ago
        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.
        toasterlovin 7y ago
        I would argue that tap to zoom on desktop sites on the iPhone worked better than most “mobile optimized” sites.
  - mch82 7y ago
    “The iPhone Is a Breakthrough Handheld Computer”, Walt Mossberg’s original review. Maybe not 1000x, but definitely multiple X better (especially compared to leading US phones). - First phone emphasizing Wi-Fi - Full web browser - Integrated iPod http://allthingsd.com/20070626/the-iphone-is-breakthrough-handheld-computer/ http://allthingsd.com/20070626/the-iphone-is-breakthrough-ha...
    - vardump 7y ago
      My old Nokia E90 would beg to differ. It was released before the first iPhone, WiFi works very nice, thank you, has a full web browser, and worked more than well enough as an MP3 player. It also sported a screen comparable to a "retina" display.
  - Fins 7y ago
    Umm, no, it was not. Even Windows Mobile was far more functional than iPhone. But iPhone looked cute, and had some ease of use affordances for people who could not be bothered actually learning anything (but then this had always been Apple's target audience).
    - scarface74 7y ago
      I wrote field service apps for Windows Mobile devices around 2006-2008. Windows Mobioe could do more, but it wasn’t more functional.
      - Fins 7y ago
        What is your definition of functional then? Obviously, Apple did something (likely marketing, imho, and of course extreme ease of use) right to make the iPhone as popular as it is, but I would need to be convinced that it had something to do with functionality.
        scarface74 7y ago
        Windows CE was not functional with an easy to lose stylus, the touch screens were horrible and it was mostly a miniature Windows desktop. The apps were not exactly touch friendly. The version of IE was unusable for most of the web. But you don’t think “extreme ease of use” made the iPhone more functional? The devices we use to deploy were $1000-$2000 (ruggedized devices) so they definitely weren’t cheap devices for the time.
        Fins 7y ago
        My first WinMo device (and still the most convenient smartphone I've ever had, the SCH-i760) was perfectly well operable 95% of the time even without the stylus -- there was a joystick (and a dialpad) on the front. I rarely had to actually use a stylus. IE eventually got pretty useless, but unlike iPhone you could always load alternative browsers, shells, and what not. Sorry, I am still seeing that yes, iPhone is easier to use, as long as you don't need to do much, but functional? Not back then. And whether capacitive or resistive screen is better is a big question -- at least resistive is far more precise.
- tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
  So many people I've talked to have never noticed the sharp edges of the mac pro. But they irritate the living crap out of me. After a few hours use, it starts to feel like I've been grinding my forearms with sandpaper.
  - proee 7y ago
    When the unibody Mac first came out the edges were so sharp they sliced your wrists. It took a few years for them to finally release them with a small radius on the edge. Just a few mm made a huge difference. There were some YouTube videos of people sanding them down to make it more bearable. Terrible design decision to have such a sharp edge but somebody really wanted that "crisp" edge look.
    - ohazi 7y ago
      Which unibody Macs ever had a "few mm" radius? They're all < 1 mm.
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    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 wrists while actively typing. You want your hands “floating” with the fingertips resting very lightly on the key tops. But even if you must rest your hands or arms on something, please keep your wrists as straight as possible, and especially avoid wrist flexion or extension. The surface of your laptop should be more-or-less parallel with the plane of your forearms, with the keyboard kept close to your torso so that your shoulders can remain relaxed with your upper arms hanging down at your sides. (This reduces the torque your arms put on your shoulder, allowing you to comfortably support your arms without any need for external props.) If you have a tall desk and a low chair, and can’t change furniture, the way to work around the poor furniture design is to either (a) move the laptop to a low tray or directly onto your lap, or (b) prop the back side of the laptop up so that the base of the laptop is tilted toward you, with the keyboard parallel to your forearms. Keep the laptop (or whatever other keyboard) near the edge of the desk.
- sverige 7y ago
  From the article: >In the first interview, he also admitted to admiring people who work on satellites, where you have to justify every iota of space consumed, every gram of weight, because they’re expensive and you only get one chance to get them right. The thing is, laptops aren't satellites. I've never understood the obsession with saving even a pound of weight for a laptop. (OK, maybe if you're one of those people who flies a million miles a year.) It's a tool, not an objet d'art or a satellite. The Thinkpad was the best expression of this idea. I've never liked using a Mac more than a Thinkpad. Maybe I'm strange that way, or maybe I'm just that much further skewed toward utility that it makes all the difference for me.
  - em-bee 7y ago
    uh, even when just commuting to work every day, every gram saved makes a difference. when buying a new laptop, weight is my primary selection criteria, next is size and price, and only then any features. (although features factor into price) the only time when weight is not a consideration is when getting a machine that i don't intend to move but just keep at home/work. but even then, i get annoyed when i occasionally have to carry around, or decide to change the purpose of the device.
- tachyonbeam 7y ago
  I've owned multiple Thinkpads, and have a MacBook Air at home. I'm a pragmatist, so I don't mind that my work Thinkpad is all black and looks like it's from the 1990s. I enjoy that it has a built-in Nvidia GPU (which I use for machine learning). What makes me sad that with a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 install, my work Thinkpad can't even do two hours of battery life. My MacBook Air at home is 3 years old, but it's thin and light. I take it with me when I travel, and the battery will last through a whole trans-atlantic flight. I don't actually care about the visual design, but the 2016 MacBook Air's keyboard feels very comfortable to type on, and the battery life is awesome. Unfortunately, when this MacBook Air dies, it will probably get replaced by a PC. I don't really want to shell an insane amount of money on a new Mac, especially in an era where you can't get one without a touchbar, and I won't get the convenience of a non-USB-C port.
  - jeswin 7y ago
    > What makes me sad that with a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 install, my work Thinkpad can't even do two hours of battery life. This has everything to do with the unresolved problems of Linux power management. I use Ubuntu on Thinkpads too, and battery life is decent after a bit of configuration. Windows meanwhile gives all day battery life on Thinkpads.
    - nextos 7y ago
      I have managed to achieve the same battery life, down minute differences in the single digit either side, between macOS and Linux on a MacBook Air (which is a simple all Intel machine). I think the problem is that most distributions ship with no Powertop or udev rules, plus lots of unnecessary services and devices on by default. One really nice thing Apple does is optimizing Safari for battery life. My comparison was Firefox on macOS vs Linux. With Safari, I'd get 20-30 min more. I bet Firefox and other programs would benefit from some black-box GCC/LVM flag optimization to improve battery usage.
      - nicoburns 7y ago
        Firefox on Mac's big battery life problem is apparently lack of integration with the system compositor. There's a fix in the works for this. Although I expect safari will still be better in this regard. Safari is pretty impressive.
- jxramos 7y ago
  Ditto on the cold/hot front. When I first worked on a macbook pro I thought if there's someway I could stick a layer of insulation on all the metal I had to make contact with. I frequently rest my palms and wrists on the keyboard pads and with metal as the only thing present I am forced to have this aluminium chassis constantly attempt to reach thermal equilibrium with my body temperature. Not fun.
- em-bee 7y ago
  i literally have both a macbook pro and a thinkpad x230 right now on my desk side by side, and i concur. the thinkpad keyboard is just so much more comfortable. it pains me to see how the newer thinkpads don't have that keyboard anymore. if only i could find a more lightweight version the same size as the x230, then i'd probably stop using the mac.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  > I'd much rather look at a mac book pro than a thinkpad. Next to the minimalist design of the mac, a thinkpad looks like you ripped out part of a server and started carrying it around. Personally that's the aesthetic I want in a laptop. I'll accept minimalism, though. Or anything that's not too flashy and doesn't scream GAMER.
- ZoomZoomZoom 7y ago
  >>I think it's good to draw a distinction between visual design and functional design. There's no such thing as a non-functional design! If it's non-functional, than it's either a piece of art or a piece of crap.
tomger 7y ago
I think the author of this article thinks a design team is run as some sort of isolated dictatorship. In reality design teams balance stakeholder feedback, technical constraints, timelines and so on.
- idlewords 7y ago
  That's the point the author makes in the article—that Ive's team did better work when it had tradeoffs imposed on it.
- mwfunk 7y ago
  That's how it works when different teams within a company have an ideal balance of power. When everything's correctly balanced, the right people make the right decisions, and help to correct each other's wrong decisions. I bet at most companies though, there isn't an ideal balance of power between teams, or between the different divisions of a company. I don't think that balance happens naturally. It might even become harder to maintain that balance, as a company becomes more successful. Supposedly Microsoft during the Ballmer years was known for political conflict between the Office and Windows divisions. Sometimes what would be good for one (putting Office on as many platforms as possible) might be bad for the other one (the Windows people might want Office on as few platforms as possible). Conflicts like that are inevitable, but resolving them can be a crap shoot. If there's a lack of executive leadership, or a political power imbalance between the groups, the wrong group can win sometimes.
minimaxir 7y ago
I'm surprised the article didn't mention the Lightning-charged Magic Mouse given the infamous memes. (IMO, it's not bad design; you're not supposed to be using it plugged-in 24/7, you're supposed it to plug it in for occasions when you aren't using the mouse anyways) EDIT: it was mentioned, I missed it
- foolfoolz 7y ago
  they did mention the upside charged mice. it is a great example of bad design
- idlewords 7y ago
  Gratuitously making a mouse unusable during charging, where there was an easy and obvious way to make it usable during charging, is bad design.
  - leoc 7y ago
    But there's no easy and obvious way to make a good cable connector that will make the mouse usable during charging. You could add a connector that works somewhat poorly, on the theory that those shortcomings don't matter since the mouse will only be plugged in occasionally and briefly. But if you do that then many users will in fact leave the mouse plugged in permanently, "just in case", effectively transforming it, in their experience, from a nice wireless mouse to a dodgy wired mouse. (It's much the same story if you add a connector which is mechanically robust and doesn't make the mouse feel horrible to use while in use, but makes it laborious to plug and unplug the cable.) Now you could argue that the decision to avoid that is patronising design, or manipulative design, or design that doesn't respect the user's authority. But it's not an obvious mistake, at least.
    - idlewords 7y ago
      Of course it's an obvious mistake. That's why people laugh out loud when they see the photo of the thing charging.
Glyptodon 7y ago
In my opinion the hated puck mouse is far and away better than the current Magic Mouse, which will will pretty much destroy your hands and give you carpal tunnel guaranteed. The puck mouse had an orientation trough on the button that was easy enough to get used to and, more importantly, was huge enough to be substantive and supportive under a hand. As far as I'm concerned the magic mouse is a class action lawsuit in a box. I used one daily for a few months once and it took years for my hand to recover.
- simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  You are right, but unfortunately nothing beats the Macbook trackpad, and that's what I tend to use 99% of the time nowadays.
  - beezischillin 7y ago
    Some of that must be due to the features and gestures MacOS offers but I generally use my personal laptop at home without an external screen, keyboard, etc. because I never wanted to use a Windows / Linux machine with the trackpad a second more than I had to. I didn't expect much from my Macbook when I bought my first one and ended up using it almost exclusively with the touchpad only. From what I hear Microsoft's been trying to catch up with some new updated drivers, though according to LinusTechTips, they're still not there. I used to have a Logitech G700 mouse for my old Windows machine and it had this ability to unlock the scroll wheel for smooth / fast scrolling but it was a disaster due to Windows' shoddy support of it. More often than not it just overloaded the window with scroll events and it bingbonged from the speakers for a while until the scroll events stopped. Glad to see that at least that's getting addressed.
- bootlooped 7y ago
  It fails so horribly on ergonomics it's hard to believe it even got released. I was furnished one at work and quit using it after an hour.
- jdofaz 7y ago
  That was the second version, the original model didn’t have the dent.
m3kw9 7y ago
This article is perfect for submission to The Onion
- dang 7y ago
  Maybe so, but could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments here?
jdofaz 7y ago
In my opinion the fruit flavor iMacs and the clamshell iBooks were incredibly ugly. Same feeling towards the original versions of MacOSX with the “lickable” candy color theme.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  Well, I felt that the original theme was far more attractive than trying to imitate grey brushed metal. However, it also seemed gratuitously hostile to the color blind. I never understood why the window controls eliminated the symbols that the original Mac OS and Windows used.
- pkamb 7y ago
  the eMac looks amazing today
- meddlepal 7y ago
  The colorful iMac and iBook were a fun for the times reaction to the banality of mostly beige and sometimes black boxes most 90's computer users were used to seeing. You have to kind of look at and consider them in the context of their time. I do kind of miss fun colored devices. We're in a new era of beige with all this brushed aluminum and glass. I really would love some funky colored electronics again.
- Kimitri 7y ago
  The iBook did look a lot like a toilet lid but some colors looked great on the G3 iMac. I used to own a graphite one and I think it still looks cool.
bangonkeyboard 7y ago
"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 practical problems. It took Steve Jobs to finally step in, point out the obvious, and check Jony Ive's worst tendencies. [1] Steve Jobs is gone, and nobody is left to fulfill his roles. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17056930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17056930 [1]: https://www.cultofmac.com/488008/jony-ive-book-excerpt-iphone/ https://www.cultofmac.com/488008/jony-ive-book-excerpt-iphon...
- thomasjudge 7y ago
  This. As CEO, one of Steve’s key functions was to serve as chief product officer. Design is an element of great products, and at Apple it has been a key element and key differentiator. As has been oft-noted, Tim is in no way a product person, and so without Steve we have seen design imperatives (thinness) unchecked
  - idlewords 7y ago
    Jobs had plenty of design failures on his conscience, like the G3 cube, the skeuomorphism fad, and the hockey puck mouse. We should not pretend the guy had irreplaceable design sense.
    - sjwright 7y ago
      The misses are noteworthy for their relative rarity. The G3 cube was a good idea but was overpriced, as it was inferior to the regular G4 in every aspect other than size. It was priced to be a 2000’s-era executive desk ornament, a relatively tiny market segment. A few years later a substantially similar product was released to massive success—the Mac mini. The puck mouse was stupid, but it wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be. It was eminently useable once you got used to it. Jobs’ biggest design failure has always been his refusal to acknowledge the importance of cable strain relief. Also the third generation iPod. Yeesh.
intopieces 7y ago
I read this article from start to finish. It never gets off the ground, so I don't recommend bothering. There are much more interesting critiques of Ive's design.
paranoidrobot 7y ago
The article points out some very high visibility things that Ive was either responsible for, or at least signed off on. The author though misses what I think is the one that has had the most impact on people - Apple's insistence on removal of strain relief on cables. Apple's cables have for generations now been fraying and cracking all because someone decided that strain relief was an unsightly and unnecessary thing. It could be forgiven if it was on one era of products, and learned their lesson when people started getting electrical shocks, devices started dying, and things being set on fire - but no, they persist. Even today they've only made the most minor of attempts at introducing strain relief.
- ghostpepper 7y ago
  I'm afraid I can't picture what a cable with strain relief would look like. Can you post an example photo?
  - CaliforniaKarl 7y ago
    For an example, see http://www.blogquail.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/pic-1.jpg http://www.blogquail.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/pic-1.jp... The part circled in red is the strain relief, separate from the cable itself, and from the connector. Image taken from http://www.blogquail.com/strain-relief/ http://www.blogquail.com/strain-relief/
  - mrandish 7y ago
    http://www.interpower.com/ic/InfoPower/images/flex-style-02.png http://www.interpower.com/ic/InfoPower/images/flex-style-02.... http://heyco.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PG-M-Type-Nylon-Cable-Glands-with-Strain-Relief.jpg http://heyco.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PG-M-Type-N...
  - x3haloed 7y ago
    https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Vy2liiLaL._AC_SY400_.jpg https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Vy2liiLaL...
  - paranoidrobot 7y ago
milemi 7y ago
I don't understand how Apple TV remote ever came into being, let alone how it still exists. Even when you somehow break the symmetry, in my case by sticking an ugly address label on the bottom part, skating around the screen with the touch pad is a game of skill that you are forced to play when all you want to do is just select a damn thing on the screen. Not to mention having to undo whatever I've done by touching the touch pad every time I grab the thing.
- mhh__ 7y ago
  I don't have one personally but every time I use one at a friend house it just feels crap in a way that I've never felt with an apple product before. It's obviously well made but it just feels pretentious compared to a phone or remote than you can actually type with.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > remote than you can actually type with Wouldn't that be a reasonably large remote?
    - mhh__ 7y ago
      https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/31xFU74uJ6L._AC_SL1500_.jpg https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/31xFU74uJ6L... It doesn't even need letter/number buttons, just some proper tactile feedback rather than this smooth hello-my-owner-has-more-money-than-sense rotating action thing i.e. the scroll wheel on an iPod classic from the mid 2000s was miles better.
- baggy_trough 7y ago
  If you buy a $6 case for the remote, it becomes quite usable.
  - Phillipharryt 7y ago
    How would a case change the touchpad being a terrible control method?
treve 7y ago
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 truth? The article reads as conjecture which makes me wonder about the authors motivation.
- killjoywashere 7y ago
  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 notch higher, but that was the half notch that sent a lot of folks over the edge.
  - skohan 7y ago
    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.
pier25 7y ago
I don't know why, but Apple has constantly had bad mice. The hockey puck is mentioned in the article which is probably the worst mouse Apple has made. Then came the Apple Pro Mouse (the transparent one) which didn't have a scroll wheel and IIRC didn't have a right click either. In the early 00s those features were super common. I remember having a Microsoft's Intellimouse with a scroll wheel in the late 90s. Then came the Mighty Mouse. Apple added the scroll ball and right click but the scroll ball was prone to failure. Mine died after 6 months of use because the ball got a bit of dirt. Unfortunately it wasn't possible to open the mouse to clean the ball without breaking it. Then came the Magic Mouse 1. Apple added the touch functionality but the mouse was pretty heavy including the weight of the batteries and IMO the noise of the click was quite annoying. Apple worked on the weight problem with v2 by adding their own battery, but they added the charging port at the bottom of the mouse (facepalm). Not sure if the noise of the click was solved, I didn't personally try v2.
- asark 7y ago
  > they added the charging port at the bottom of the mouse (facepalm). I thought this was incredibly stupid until I actually used one. The battery lasts so long and charges so fast that it's not a problem, to the point that I wouldn't pay so much as a dollar to "fix" it by moving the port to the edge.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
    I dislike the inconsistency where the corresponding keyboard is a USB keyboard with a cable connected, but the mouse isn't (and physically couldn't be).
    - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
      The big difference is you don’t drag your keyboard around the table putting a strain on the connector.
      - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
ricardobeat 7y ago
There are so much better choices to critique than the Apple remote. That Sky remote is awful regardless of how you slice it.
WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
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. I'm sure you could not convince the architect that he should have changed it. I don't have the know how to know if it could have been designed with an emphasis towards function. But I do know that it's beautiful so in my mind, the architect was a genius. Ives should get the same consideration.
- SirLuxuryYacht 7y ago
  I have never been to the Getty, but from my experience going to plenty of other museums it has always seemed like getting "lost" was the whole point. You can remove yourself from the real world for a bit and have total focus on the exhibition. Designers should tend to put emphasis on beauty, otherwise they would just be called engineers. I'm not a designer either, but I think the secret sauce is convincing users (of hardware, software, no matter) that form followed function. Ive is most certainly a designer so the changes he made, e.g. removing ports, were driven by aesthetic rather than function. Without the checks and balances named Steve Jobs these were allowed to ship, and is a reason why Apple is getting a bad rap.
- skohan 7y ago
  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.
mrandish 7y ago
I think the best observation in the article is the one about "as simple as possible, but no simpler", but Apple under Ives too often forgetting the second part. I've come to dislike the copycat trends that Apple's stringent design ethos has unleashed. Sure, it's occasionally been brilliant but the article does a good job outlining the significant errors - and other posters here fill in the blanks. I'm glad the end of the Ives era seems to be sparking some healthy reassessment and introspection in the industry.
pkamb 7y ago
I for one quite like the Apple TV 4 remote. It has one major issue in that it's symmetrical and you sometimes pick it up the wrong way. But other than that I love it. The touchpad is great with the Apple TV, especially once you figure out that you can single-tap the edges like a D-Pad for precision. It lays flat, so you can tap the play/pause button on your coffee table rather than picking up the remote. There are just enough buttons for the Apple TV functions, all of which are big and easy to press and work with a satisfying click. No mushy rubber. I wouldn't want a game controller designed with the same sensibilities. That's something you're holding for hours at a time and needs to be designed for your hand. But I don't need a "comfortable" cable remote. I'll take the nice objet d'art.
- nathantotten 7y ago
  Completely agree. With HDMI-CEC and moving off of old Campos it is the only remote used in our house and nobody ever asks me how to do X. They click it, everything turns on and the navigate to the thing they want. A bit of rubber on the lower half so could feel up from down would be my only change.
  - pkamb 7y ago
    Yeah I use HDMI-CEC to turn on and off my TV from the Apple remote. I use an HD HomeRun and the app Channels to watch local antenna TV via the Apple TV, so no need for channel buttons. I do wish that the Apple TV volume buttons worked without HDMI-CEC so I could use those to control the volume when playing games. That and the occasional need for the Input button are the only reasons I keep the TV remote handy.
  - baddox 7y ago
    The fatal flaw of CEC, at least with my particular setup, is that there is no way to play music on my receiver via the Apple TV while having the TV off. When CEC is enabled, turning on the receiver turns on the TV, and turning off the TV turns off the receiver. It’s insanely frustrating, but hey, how could it know when I really don’t want to turn off the receiver?
blunte 7y ago
"Keep the story going. Sign up for an extra free read." Why, why, why do people create content and give it to Medium to wall it off?
- dbuder 7y ago
  As explained every day on HN, you get money and exposure.
- lacampbell 7y ago
  Same issue here. It's not a dialog I can close off, I've reached my monthly limit.
product50 7y ago
I really like the Apple TV remote. It takes some time getting used but once you are, you can navigate within any app so very quickly. Even in this comment thread, I can see this is a polarizing topic - but I am going to disagree that it is a terrible design.
js2 7y ago
The thing that drives me crazy on the remote is that the buttons aren't backlit. I can't think of a better use of backlit keys. A $5 rubber case fixes the ergonomic issues, but in a dark room, not being able to see the buttons, which are impossible for me to memorize, pisses me off.
- scarface74 7y ago
  I use the remote app exclusively for both my AppleTVs and the Roku app to control my Roku TVs for that reason.
tus88 7y ago
I think Job's visionary pragmatism is what made Apple products awesome (past tense) rather than Ive's design chops.
dwaite 7y ago
While it is obvious that the 2013 "Trashcan" Mac Pro was not a successful design, it seems a lot of people don't get what Apple was going for. Their goal was a computer heavily focused on multithreaded and OpenCL loads, as most vendors were still preaching to developers that the single threaded performance increase ramp was dead, and workload would have to scale out instead. At the same time, it is quite easy to point to the Mac Pros before and after it and say that they have a lot of wasted power and space. The new Mac Pro design has a 1400W power supply and is mostly empty space to accommodate the "fully loaded" expansion options that most buyers quite frankly will not purchase. As Thunderbolt is basically an externalized PCIe interface, there is certainly a case to be made that extensibility is better served as a separate unit. This allowed the design of the core system to forgo modularity, and have an extremely compact design. This also allowed them to have a reduced parts cost. But the reality was: - Component thermals did not stay balanced, with GPUs using far more power and giving off far more heat on the high end. This meant that there was a shortage of pro-level parts usable without redoing the core design. - As Apple didn't upgrade the core design, it wound up having dated thunderbolt support. - There is certainly an argument to be made that extensibility within the case is a cleaner, more manageable design for the end user - Intel's licensing for Thunderbolt has been guarded, and thus the market has been sub-par. For example, eGPU took ages to become available. Another example - Intel forbid RAID assemblies to be sold without disks. In the end, I personally see what they were trying to go for, but in a lot of ways the way they thought technology and needs would evolve were missed by the 2013 pro. I don't see an issue with the design based on where they thought things were going - the issue IMHO is that it took them six years to react with a new product. (FWIW, I was planning to buy the second rev of the trashcan pro - which I slowly realized would never happen)
- Shivetya 7y ago
  The trashcan was a bad design from day one. It was more oriented towards the pretentious developers instead of the professional developer. I suggest the new Mac Pro is as well. It is more about being seen with it than being able to use and considering its price point that exclusivity seems to have been an Apple goal, as in you are not worthy of our hardware if the price makes you flinch. Same for that monitor. The new Mac Pro's modular feature ties you completely to Apple for GPU improvements, I did not verify if it also ties you to them for CPU upgrades. Simply put, they designed a system by which you are stuck with them that added cost but no value. I am hoping that with Ive gone that we leave the pretentious era of Apple behind, the era that resulted in the trashcan, designer bands for a watch let alone a gold 10k watch, and even to the point of their new headquarters.
stock_toaster 7y ago
> Given that the yields are said to be worse for the “butterfly” keys than normal scissor keys, and that they’re more expensive to make, one can only think that either Apple is stubborn as hell at the executive level, or so tightly constrained by its design goals that it can’t figure out a way to reintroduce scissor-switch keys because that would mean designing an entirely new body and case for the whole line. I think the author underestimates large scale production pipelines, where you may be many years out (due to things like design, test, assembly creation, assembly optimization, backchannel buildup, etc). Most products are several years in development before they are released.
unstatusthequo 7y ago
I've always wondered why the camera sticks out in the more recent iPhones. Do they hedge bets that people will put a case on? Without a case, it bothers me that it can't lay flat on a table, desk, etc...
- kmlx 7y ago
  i never put a case on my iphone x. the biggest problem? it keeps sliding everywhere. the glass surface is so smooth that it never catches grip. this is a major design flaw. their solution? put a case on (facepalm)
_Codemonkeyism 7y ago
I loved my cube which I tuned with new graphics cards, processor cards - there was a whole community around extending cubes with hardware without active cooling.
andy_ppp 7y ago
The article contains here-say mixed with facts about how bad Apple’s design process. It’s worth pointing out that while there have been some failures there have been some beautiful successes too. I love how the author blames the design team for complicating the touch wheel in one design, who knows if this is true it just fits with the narrative that is trying to be told. My guess is that all of this is a lot more complicated than the author thinks and the road to simplicity is a very difficult one that has changed our technical devices for the better (overall). We’d still have plastic phones with “ergonomic” slide out keyboards if it was up to the author.
xhgdvjky 7y ago
you're basically saying ive over prioritized visual design over all else but remember that a picture is usually your first impression. their goal is to sell.
gigatexal 7y ago
The iPhone 4 and 4s were the best looking iPhones ever made in my opinion.
- skohan 7y ago
  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.
  - gigatexal 7y ago
    Yup. I loved the almost analog feel to it, very industrial. Much like a Pagani Hypercar
  - Technetium_Hat 7y ago
    The closest thing I have felt to its just solid feel is my essential phone. don't get me wrong - it is not a good phone, but the build quality is unbelievable.
Animats 7y ago
Usability and beauty often clash. See Bang & Olufsen audio equipment from the 1980s and 1990s. They're works of art, but a pain to use.
teekert 7y ago
“In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service” Steve Jobs
leejcarol 7y ago
https://www.yourteaminindia.com/hire-java-developer https://www.yourteaminindia.com/hire-java-developer
wastedhours 7y ago
I'm not usually an Apple apologist, but I appreciate their tenacity in trying to turn beautiful visual design into genuinely functional design. They might fail at it, but it feels like they put a stake in the sand, and then run to get there. Sometimes they trip up and don't get there (Magic Mouse 2, "you're holding it wrong"), and sometimes they do (MBPr, Watch, several iterations of iPhone). I don't have the disposable income to fund said tenacity at the bleeding edge (in case they do trip), but my iPad Mini v2 and MBPr are both examples of a product they doubled-down on and got right from both ends.
- Technetium_Hat 7y ago
  Macbook pro right from both ends? I guess we're ignoring that - the keyboards don't work - the touchbar exists - all the thermal issues it has had
  - wastedhours 7y ago
    Sorry for my shorthand, but "MBPr" is usually used to refer to "Macbook Pro Retina", so the c.2015 model. That one they very much got right from a usability and aesthetic perspective.
infosecdude64 7y ago
My wife, kids and I have slowly been replacing all our Apple products over the past couple of years. We've replace the kid's MacBook Airs with MS Surface and my MBP was replaced with an MSI laptop with proper dedicated GPU. The decision to change was quite natural. The kids like the Surface and how it was a touch screen, but could also be used as a laptop that they could do school work on. Moving to Windows was easy for me once WSL was introduced. I no longer needed OSX to do development as I am now able to do everything I was doing on my MBP on my MSI in WSL. I still can't believe that Apple has yet to come out with a laptop with a touch screen that isn't an iPad. The touchbar is very clever, but I never use it. The last couple of straws for me for moving off of Apple at 10+ years was the MBP. Touch Bar, shitty keyboard, and no proper USB ports....I hate having to keep dongles at the ready. For me, at least, the magic that was Apple died when Steve died. Now they just push out product and services and nothing that can be considered "magic" or unique.
gdubs 7y ago
I love a lot of Apple’s design, but there is one particular example that frustrates me often: the mouse that comes with the iMac Pro. It perfectly illustrates Jobs’ mantra that design isn’t just about looks. The problem is that in order to produce the beautiful silhouette, they put the charging port on the bottom. I never seem to remember to charge the thing, so it’s always needing to be plugged-in. And then you can’t use. What I find bonkers about this is that mice were wired for the majority of their existence, so it’s not like this was a hard one to figure out. They just chose to go with what looked nice. It is pretty, though.
- specialist 7y ago
  Ya, the belly port is ridiculous. After long distain, I finally adapted to the Magic Mouse: Movable trackpad. I now nudge it around a bit and then take my hand off to do the gestures on the top surface. Previously, I tried to continue holding it while doing gestures, and it's way too small for my hands. I still prefer the trackpad, but now the Magic Mouse feels usable.

362 points by mnm1 7y ago

omershapira 7y ago

10 points for resisting the temptation to call it "Ive Made a Mistake".

dbuder 7y ago
Jony, Ive Made a Mistake

piinbinary 7y ago

I think it's good to draw a distinction between visual design and functional design. Design that focuses on function can sometimes (but definitely not always) result in designs that are also visually appealing, but design that focuses on the visual rarely produces a very functional result. I'd much rather look at a mac book pro than a thinkpad. Next to the minimalist design of the mac, a thinkpad looks like you ripped out part of a server and started carrying it around. But, I'd rather type on a thinkpad than on a mac. The keys are better (if not as good as they once were), the surface is neither too cold nor too hot to rest my wrists on, and the edge of the laptop isn't sharp like the edge of a mac pro. Once you start using a thing, the visual details melt away and the functional details take over.

foolfoolz 7y ago
iphone is the best counter argument to this. when released it was 1000x more functional and 1000x better looking than any phone available
- darkpuma 7y ago
  That's revisionist. People tend to forget that when the iphone was released it had no appstore and Apple was telling people to develop webapps. This was less functional than existing offerings on the market, but it sure looked and felt better.
  - ct520 7y ago
    I'm curious when you say less functional than existing offerings you mean .... exactly what? Those java apps you could download from your cell phone carrier that ran incredibly slow? Or the robust ecosystem windows mobile <6 had at the time?.. Because Android wasn't out... I agree with foolfoolz, iphone raised the bar both functionally and visually, regardless of having a app store at launch.
    - darkpuma 7y ago
      In an age before android or iphones, blackberry ruled the world. The iphone as it was released was a functional regression for blackberry power users. And it didn't catch on with that demographic until Apple iterated on the iphone to close the gap.
      - ct520 7y ago
        You are correct - I totally spaced the blackberry. I was focused on the app store comment. LOL them blackberry power users hung on for awhile huh?
      - Sharlin 7y ago
        Blackberry ruled the US. It was mostly unknown in the world.
        darkpuma 7y ago
        Nitpicks aside, if Blackberry preceded the iphone only in America, it still preceded the iphone. Note that I never claimed that predecessors to the iphone, with more functionality than the iphone, were also more commercially successful in America, let alone worldwide. Claiming that would be ridiculous.
    - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
      > Or the robust ecosystem windows mobile <6 had at the time? Huh? Windows CE and, later, Windows Mobile had quite a large number of apps for its era since the programming model was similar to desktop Windows (pre .NET) meaning that there was a ready-made base of developers for it. They weren't necessarily easy to find since the idea of an app store (and Apple/Google eating 30% of your revenue) didn't exist yet but they were there.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  A Blackberry was probably more functional at that time but wasn't as nice as to use and look at.
  - acdha 7y ago
    Whether you believe that to be true probably depends on whether you more frequently used email or the web. The Blackberry was great for messaging but the browser & other non-core apps were a bad joke.
    - Ididntdothis 7y ago
      True. back then a mobile phone was mainly a messaging device.
    - bluedino 7y ago
      The browser was great for sites that were optimized for it. ESPN at my fingertips...that was Amazing.
  - schnable 7y ago
    Blackberry failed by not embracing apps. The app landscape was a mess of incompatibility, had poorly made apps, and no unified App Store. This where iOS killed Blackberry.
- akrulino 7y ago
  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.
  - Retric 7y ago
    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 bandwidth option. If anything it was really bandwidth that changed how people used their phone.
    - Phillipharryt 7y ago
      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.
      - rusk 7y ago
        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.
        toasterlovin 7y ago
        I would argue that tap to zoom on desktop sites on the iPhone worked better than most “mobile optimized” sites.
- mch82 7y ago
  “The iPhone Is a Breakthrough Handheld Computer”, Walt Mossberg’s original review. Maybe not 1000x, but definitely multiple X better (especially compared to leading US phones). - First phone emphasizing Wi-Fi - Full web browser - Integrated iPod http://allthingsd.com/20070626/the-iphone-is-breakthrough-handheld-computer/ http://allthingsd.com/20070626/the-iphone-is-breakthrough-ha...
  - vardump 7y ago
    My old Nokia E90 would beg to differ. It was released before the first iPhone, WiFi works very nice, thank you, has a full web browser, and worked more than well enough as an MP3 player. It also sported a screen comparable to a "retina" display.
- Fins 7y ago
  Umm, no, it was not. Even Windows Mobile was far more functional than iPhone. But iPhone looked cute, and had some ease of use affordances for people who could not be bothered actually learning anything (but then this had always been Apple's target audience).
  - scarface74 7y ago
    I wrote field service apps for Windows Mobile devices around 2006-2008. Windows Mobioe could do more, but it wasn’t more functional.
    - Fins 7y ago
      What is your definition of functional then? Obviously, Apple did something (likely marketing, imho, and of course extreme ease of use) right to make the iPhone as popular as it is, but I would need to be convinced that it had something to do with functionality.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        Windows CE was not functional with an easy to lose stylus, the touch screens were horrible and it was mostly a miniature Windows desktop. The apps were not exactly touch friendly. The version of IE was unusable for most of the web. But you don’t think “extreme ease of use” made the iPhone more functional? The devices we use to deploy were $1000-$2000 (ruggedized devices) so they definitely weren’t cheap devices for the time.
        Fins 7y ago
        My first WinMo device (and still the most convenient smartphone I've ever had, the SCH-i760) was perfectly well operable 95% of the time even without the stylus -- there was a joystick (and a dialpad) on the front. I rarely had to actually use a stylus. IE eventually got pretty useless, but unlike iPhone you could always load alternative browsers, shells, and what not. Sorry, I am still seeing that yes, iPhone is easier to use, as long as you don't need to do much, but functional? Not back then. And whether capacitive or resistive screen is better is a big question -- at least resistive is far more precise.
tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
So many people I've talked to have never noticed the sharp edges of the mac pro. But they irritate the living crap out of me. After a few hours use, it starts to feel like I've been grinding my forearms with sandpaper.
- proee 7y ago
  When the unibody Mac first came out the edges were so sharp they sliced your wrists. It took a few years for them to finally release them with a small radius on the edge. Just a few mm made a huge difference. There were some YouTube videos of people sanding them down to make it more bearable. Terrible design decision to have such a sharp edge but somebody really wanted that "crisp" edge look.
  - ohazi 7y ago
    Which unibody Macs ever had a "few mm" radius? They're all < 1 mm.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  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 wrists while actively typing. You want your hands “floating” with the fingertips resting very lightly on the key tops. But even if you must rest your hands or arms on something, please keep your wrists as straight as possible, and especially avoid wrist flexion or extension. The surface of your laptop should be more-or-less parallel with the plane of your forearms, with the keyboard kept close to your torso so that your shoulders can remain relaxed with your upper arms hanging down at your sides. (This reduces the torque your arms put on your shoulder, allowing you to comfortably support your arms without any need for external props.) If you have a tall desk and a low chair, and can’t change furniture, the way to work around the poor furniture design is to either (a) move the laptop to a low tray or directly onto your lap, or (b) prop the back side of the laptop up so that the base of the laptop is tilted toward you, with the keyboard parallel to your forearms. Keep the laptop (or whatever other keyboard) near the edge of the desk.
sverige 7y ago
From the article: >In the first interview, he also admitted to admiring people who work on satellites, where you have to justify every iota of space consumed, every gram of weight, because they’re expensive and you only get one chance to get them right. The thing is, laptops aren't satellites. I've never understood the obsession with saving even a pound of weight for a laptop. (OK, maybe if you're one of those people who flies a million miles a year.) It's a tool, not an objet d'art or a satellite. The Thinkpad was the best expression of this idea. I've never liked using a Mac more than a Thinkpad. Maybe I'm strange that way, or maybe I'm just that much further skewed toward utility that it makes all the difference for me.
- em-bee 7y ago
  uh, even when just commuting to work every day, every gram saved makes a difference. when buying a new laptop, weight is my primary selection criteria, next is size and price, and only then any features. (although features factor into price) the only time when weight is not a consideration is when getting a machine that i don't intend to move but just keep at home/work. but even then, i get annoyed when i occasionally have to carry around, or decide to change the purpose of the device.
tachyonbeam 7y ago
I've owned multiple Thinkpads, and have a MacBook Air at home. I'm a pragmatist, so I don't mind that my work Thinkpad is all black and looks like it's from the 1990s. I enjoy that it has a built-in Nvidia GPU (which I use for machine learning). What makes me sad that with a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 install, my work Thinkpad can't even do two hours of battery life. My MacBook Air at home is 3 years old, but it's thin and light. I take it with me when I travel, and the battery will last through a whole trans-atlantic flight. I don't actually care about the visual design, but the 2016 MacBook Air's keyboard feels very comfortable to type on, and the battery life is awesome. Unfortunately, when this MacBook Air dies, it will probably get replaced by a PC. I don't really want to shell an insane amount of money on a new Mac, especially in an era where you can't get one without a touchbar, and I won't get the convenience of a non-USB-C port.
- jeswin 7y ago
  > What makes me sad that with a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 install, my work Thinkpad can't even do two hours of battery life. This has everything to do with the unresolved problems of Linux power management. I use Ubuntu on Thinkpads too, and battery life is decent after a bit of configuration. Windows meanwhile gives all day battery life on Thinkpads.
  - nextos 7y ago
    I have managed to achieve the same battery life, down minute differences in the single digit either side, between macOS and Linux on a MacBook Air (which is a simple all Intel machine). I think the problem is that most distributions ship with no Powertop or udev rules, plus lots of unnecessary services and devices on by default. One really nice thing Apple does is optimizing Safari for battery life. My comparison was Firefox on macOS vs Linux. With Safari, I'd get 20-30 min more. I bet Firefox and other programs would benefit from some black-box GCC/LVM flag optimization to improve battery usage.
    - nicoburns 7y ago
      Firefox on Mac's big battery life problem is apparently lack of integration with the system compositor. There's a fix in the works for this. Although I expect safari will still be better in this regard. Safari is pretty impressive.
jxramos 7y ago
Ditto on the cold/hot front. When I first worked on a macbook pro I thought if there's someway I could stick a layer of insulation on all the metal I had to make contact with. I frequently rest my palms and wrists on the keyboard pads and with metal as the only thing present I am forced to have this aluminium chassis constantly attempt to reach thermal equilibrium with my body temperature. Not fun.
em-bee 7y ago
i literally have both a macbook pro and a thinkpad x230 right now on my desk side by side, and i concur. the thinkpad keyboard is just so much more comfortable. it pains me to see how the newer thinkpads don't have that keyboard anymore. if only i could find a more lightweight version the same size as the x230, then i'd probably stop using the mac.
Dylan16807 7y ago
> I'd much rather look at a mac book pro than a thinkpad. Next to the minimalist design of the mac, a thinkpad looks like you ripped out part of a server and started carrying it around. Personally that's the aesthetic I want in a laptop. I'll accept minimalism, though. Or anything that's not too flashy and doesn't scream GAMER.
ZoomZoomZoom 7y ago
>>I think it's good to draw a distinction between visual design and functional design. There's no such thing as a non-functional design! If it's non-functional, than it's either a piece of art or a piece of crap.

tomger 7y ago

I think the author of this article thinks a design team is run as some sort of isolated dictatorship. In reality design teams balance stakeholder feedback, technical constraints, timelines and so on.

idlewords 7y ago
That's the point the author makes in the article—that Ive's team did better work when it had tradeoffs imposed on it.
mwfunk 7y ago
That's how it works when different teams within a company have an ideal balance of power. When everything's correctly balanced, the right people make the right decisions, and help to correct each other's wrong decisions. I bet at most companies though, there isn't an ideal balance of power between teams, or between the different divisions of a company. I don't think that balance happens naturally. It might even become harder to maintain that balance, as a company becomes more successful. Supposedly Microsoft during the Ballmer years was known for political conflict between the Office and Windows divisions. Sometimes what would be good for one (putting Office on as many platforms as possible) might be bad for the other one (the Windows people might want Office on as few platforms as possible). Conflicts like that are inevitable, but resolving them can be a crap shoot. If there's a lack of executive leadership, or a political power imbalance between the groups, the wrong group can win sometimes.

minimaxir 7y ago

I'm surprised the article didn't mention the Lightning-charged Magic Mouse given the infamous memes. (IMO, it's not bad design; you're not supposed to be using it plugged-in 24/7, you're supposed it to plug it in for occasions when you aren't using the mouse anyways) EDIT: it was mentioned, I missed it

foolfoolz 7y ago
they did mention the upside charged mice. it is a great example of bad design
idlewords 7y ago
Gratuitously making a mouse unusable during charging, where there was an easy and obvious way to make it usable during charging, is bad design.
- leoc 7y ago
  But there's no easy and obvious way to make a good cable connector that will make the mouse usable during charging. You could add a connector that works somewhat poorly, on the theory that those shortcomings don't matter since the mouse will only be plugged in occasionally and briefly. But if you do that then many users will in fact leave the mouse plugged in permanently, "just in case", effectively transforming it, in their experience, from a nice wireless mouse to a dodgy wired mouse. (It's much the same story if you add a connector which is mechanically robust and doesn't make the mouse feel horrible to use while in use, but makes it laborious to plug and unplug the cable.) Now you could argue that the decision to avoid that is patronising design, or manipulative design, or design that doesn't respect the user's authority. But it's not an obvious mistake, at least.
  - idlewords 7y ago
    Of course it's an obvious mistake. That's why people laugh out loud when they see the photo of the thing charging.

Glyptodon 7y ago

In my opinion the hated puck mouse is far and away better than the current Magic Mouse, which will will pretty much destroy your hands and give you carpal tunnel guaranteed. The puck mouse had an orientation trough on the button that was easy enough to get used to and, more importantly, was huge enough to be substantive and supportive under a hand. As far as I'm concerned the magic mouse is a class action lawsuit in a box. I used one daily for a few months once and it took years for my hand to recover.

simonebrunozzi 7y ago
You are right, but unfortunately nothing beats the Macbook trackpad, and that's what I tend to use 99% of the time nowadays.
- beezischillin 7y ago
  Some of that must be due to the features and gestures MacOS offers but I generally use my personal laptop at home without an external screen, keyboard, etc. because I never wanted to use a Windows / Linux machine with the trackpad a second more than I had to. I didn't expect much from my Macbook when I bought my first one and ended up using it almost exclusively with the touchpad only. From what I hear Microsoft's been trying to catch up with some new updated drivers, though according to LinusTechTips, they're still not there. I used to have a Logitech G700 mouse for my old Windows machine and it had this ability to unlock the scroll wheel for smooth / fast scrolling but it was a disaster due to Windows' shoddy support of it. More often than not it just overloaded the window with scroll events and it bingbonged from the speakers for a while until the scroll events stopped. Glad to see that at least that's getting addressed.
bootlooped 7y ago
It fails so horribly on ergonomics it's hard to believe it even got released. I was furnished one at work and quit using it after an hour.
jdofaz 7y ago
That was the second version, the original model didn’t have the dent.

m3kw9 7y ago

This article is perfect for submission to The Onion

dang 7y ago
Maybe so, but could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments here?

jdofaz 7y ago

In my opinion the fruit flavor iMacs and the clamshell iBooks were incredibly ugly. Same feeling towards the original versions of MacOSX with the “lickable” candy color theme.

perl4ever 7y ago
Well, I felt that the original theme was far more attractive than trying to imitate grey brushed metal. However, it also seemed gratuitously hostile to the color blind. I never understood why the window controls eliminated the symbols that the original Mac OS and Windows used.
pkamb 7y ago
the eMac looks amazing today
meddlepal 7y ago
The colorful iMac and iBook were a fun for the times reaction to the banality of mostly beige and sometimes black boxes most 90's computer users were used to seeing. You have to kind of look at and consider them in the context of their time. I do kind of miss fun colored devices. We're in a new era of beige with all this brushed aluminum and glass. I really would love some funky colored electronics again.
Kimitri 7y ago
The iBook did look a lot like a toilet lid but some colors looked great on the G3 iMac. I used to own a graphite one and I think it still looks cool.

bangonkeyboard 7y ago

"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 practical problems. It took Steve Jobs to finally step in, point out the obvious, and check Jony Ive's worst tendencies. [1] Steve Jobs is gone, and nobody is left to fulfill his roles. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17056930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17056930 [1]: https://www.cultofmac.com/488008/jony-ive-book-excerpt-iphone/ https://www.cultofmac.com/488008/jony-ive-book-excerpt-iphon...

thomasjudge 7y ago
This. As CEO, one of Steve’s key functions was to serve as chief product officer. Design is an element of great products, and at Apple it has been a key element and key differentiator. As has been oft-noted, Tim is in no way a product person, and so without Steve we have seen design imperatives (thinness) unchecked
- idlewords 7y ago
  Jobs had plenty of design failures on his conscience, like the G3 cube, the skeuomorphism fad, and the hockey puck mouse. We should not pretend the guy had irreplaceable design sense.
  - sjwright 7y ago
    The misses are noteworthy for their relative rarity. The G3 cube was a good idea but was overpriced, as it was inferior to the regular G4 in every aspect other than size. It was priced to be a 2000’s-era executive desk ornament, a relatively tiny market segment. A few years later a substantially similar product was released to massive success—the Mac mini. The puck mouse was stupid, but it wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be. It was eminently useable once you got used to it. Jobs’ biggest design failure has always been his refusal to acknowledge the importance of cable strain relief. Also the third generation iPod. Yeesh.

intopieces 7y ago

I read this article from start to finish. It never gets off the ground, so I don't recommend bothering. There are much more interesting critiques of Ive's design.

paranoidrobot 7y ago

The article points out some very high visibility things that Ive was either responsible for, or at least signed off on. The author though misses what I think is the one that has had the most impact on people - Apple's insistence on removal of strain relief on cables. Apple's cables have for generations now been fraying and cracking all because someone decided that strain relief was an unsightly and unnecessary thing. It could be forgiven if it was on one era of products, and learned their lesson when people started getting electrical shocks, devices started dying, and things being set on fire - but no, they persist. Even today they've only made the most minor of attempts at introducing strain relief.

ghostpepper 7y ago
I'm afraid I can't picture what a cable with strain relief would look like. Can you post an example photo?
- CaliforniaKarl 7y ago
  For an example, see http://www.blogquail.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/pic-1.jpg http://www.blogquail.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/pic-1.jp... The part circled in red is the strain relief, separate from the cable itself, and from the connector. Image taken from http://www.blogquail.com/strain-relief/ http://www.blogquail.com/strain-relief/
- mrandish 7y ago
  http://www.interpower.com/ic/InfoPower/images/flex-style-02.png http://www.interpower.com/ic/InfoPower/images/flex-style-02.... http://heyco.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PG-M-Type-Nylon-Cable-Glands-with-Strain-Relief.jpg http://heyco.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PG-M-Type-N...
- x3haloed 7y ago
  https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Vy2liiLaL._AC_SY400_.jpg https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Vy2liiLaL...
- paranoidrobot 7y ago

milemi 7y ago

I don't understand how Apple TV remote ever came into being, let alone how it still exists. Even when you somehow break the symmetry, in my case by sticking an ugly address label on the bottom part, skating around the screen with the touch pad is a game of skill that you are forced to play when all you want to do is just select a damn thing on the screen. Not to mention having to undo whatever I've done by touching the touch pad every time I grab the thing.

mhh__ 7y ago
I don't have one personally but every time I use one at a friend house it just feels crap in a way that I've never felt with an apple product before. It's obviously well made but it just feels pretentious compared to a phone or remote than you can actually type with.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > remote than you can actually type with Wouldn't that be a reasonably large remote?
  - mhh__ 7y ago
    https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/31xFU74uJ6L._AC_SL1500_.jpg https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/31xFU74uJ6L... It doesn't even need letter/number buttons, just some proper tactile feedback rather than this smooth hello-my-owner-has-more-money-than-sense rotating action thing i.e. the scroll wheel on an iPod classic from the mid 2000s was miles better.
baggy_trough 7y ago
If you buy a $6 case for the remote, it becomes quite usable.
- Phillipharryt 7y ago
  How would a case change the touchpad being a terrible control method?

treve 7y ago

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 truth? The article reads as conjecture which makes me wonder about the authors motivation.

killjoywashere 7y ago
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 notch higher, but that was the half notch that sent a lot of folks over the edge.
- skohan 7y ago
  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.

pier25 7y ago

I don't know why, but Apple has constantly had bad mice. The hockey puck is mentioned in the article which is probably the worst mouse Apple has made. Then came the Apple Pro Mouse (the transparent one) which didn't have a scroll wheel and IIRC didn't have a right click either. In the early 00s those features were super common. I remember having a Microsoft's Intellimouse with a scroll wheel in the late 90s. Then came the Mighty Mouse. Apple added the scroll ball and right click but the scroll ball was prone to failure. Mine died after 6 months of use because the ball got a bit of dirt. Unfortunately it wasn't possible to open the mouse to clean the ball without breaking it. Then came the Magic Mouse 1. Apple added the touch functionality but the mouse was pretty heavy including the weight of the batteries and IMO the noise of the click was quite annoying. Apple worked on the weight problem with v2 by adding their own battery, but they added the charging port at the bottom of the mouse (facepalm). Not sure if the noise of the click was solved, I didn't personally try v2.

asark 7y ago
> they added the charging port at the bottom of the mouse (facepalm). I thought this was incredibly stupid until I actually used one. The battery lasts so long and charges so fast that it's not a problem, to the point that I wouldn't pay so much as a dollar to "fix" it by moving the port to the edge.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  I dislike the inconsistency where the corresponding keyboard is a USB keyboard with a cable connected, but the mouse isn't (and physically couldn't be).
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    The big difference is you don’t drag your keyboard around the table putting a strain on the connector.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago

ricardobeat 7y ago

There are so much better choices to critique than the Apple remote. That Sky remote is awful regardless of how you slice it.

WheelsAtLarge 7y ago

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. I'm sure you could not convince the architect that he should have changed it. I don't have the know how to know if it could have been designed with an emphasis towards function. But I do know that it's beautiful so in my mind, the architect was a genius. Ives should get the same consideration.

SirLuxuryYacht 7y ago
I have never been to the Getty, but from my experience going to plenty of other museums it has always seemed like getting "lost" was the whole point. You can remove yourself from the real world for a bit and have total focus on the exhibition. Designers should tend to put emphasis on beauty, otherwise they would just be called engineers. I'm not a designer either, but I think the secret sauce is convincing users (of hardware, software, no matter) that form followed function. Ive is most certainly a designer so the changes he made, e.g. removing ports, were driven by aesthetic rather than function. Without the checks and balances named Steve Jobs these were allowed to ship, and is a reason why Apple is getting a bad rap.
skohan 7y ago
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.

mrandish 7y ago

I think the best observation in the article is the one about "as simple as possible, but no simpler", but Apple under Ives too often forgetting the second part. I've come to dislike the copycat trends that Apple's stringent design ethos has unleashed. Sure, it's occasionally been brilliant but the article does a good job outlining the significant errors - and other posters here fill in the blanks. I'm glad the end of the Ives era seems to be sparking some healthy reassessment and introspection in the industry.

pkamb 7y ago

I for one quite like the Apple TV 4 remote. It has one major issue in that it's symmetrical and you sometimes pick it up the wrong way. But other than that I love it. The touchpad is great with the Apple TV, especially once you figure out that you can single-tap the edges like a D-Pad for precision. It lays flat, so you can tap the play/pause button on your coffee table rather than picking up the remote. There are just enough buttons for the Apple TV functions, all of which are big and easy to press and work with a satisfying click. No mushy rubber. I wouldn't want a game controller designed with the same sensibilities. That's something you're holding for hours at a time and needs to be designed for your hand. But I don't need a "comfortable" cable remote. I'll take the nice objet d'art.

nathantotten 7y ago
Completely agree. With HDMI-CEC and moving off of old Campos it is the only remote used in our house and nobody ever asks me how to do X. They click it, everything turns on and the navigate to the thing they want. A bit of rubber on the lower half so could feel up from down would be my only change.
- pkamb 7y ago
  Yeah I use HDMI-CEC to turn on and off my TV from the Apple remote. I use an HD HomeRun and the app Channels to watch local antenna TV via the Apple TV, so no need for channel buttons. I do wish that the Apple TV volume buttons worked without HDMI-CEC so I could use those to control the volume when playing games. That and the occasional need for the Input button are the only reasons I keep the TV remote handy.
- baddox 7y ago
  The fatal flaw of CEC, at least with my particular setup, is that there is no way to play music on my receiver via the Apple TV while having the TV off. When CEC is enabled, turning on the receiver turns on the TV, and turning off the TV turns off the receiver. It’s insanely frustrating, but hey, how could it know when I really don’t want to turn off the receiver?

blunte 7y ago

"Keep the story going. Sign up for an extra free read." Why, why, why do people create content and give it to Medium to wall it off?

dbuder 7y ago
As explained every day on HN, you get money and exposure.
lacampbell 7y ago
Same issue here. It's not a dialog I can close off, I've reached my monthly limit.

product50 7y ago

I really like the Apple TV remote. It takes some time getting used but once you are, you can navigate within any app so very quickly. Even in this comment thread, I can see this is a polarizing topic - but I am going to disagree that it is a terrible design.

js2 7y ago

The thing that drives me crazy on the remote is that the buttons aren't backlit. I can't think of a better use of backlit keys. A $5 rubber case fixes the ergonomic issues, but in a dark room, not being able to see the buttons, which are impossible for me to memorize, pisses me off.

scarface74 7y ago
I use the remote app exclusively for both my AppleTVs and the Roku app to control my Roku TVs for that reason.

tus88 7y ago

I think Job's visionary pragmatism is what made Apple products awesome (past tense) rather than Ive's design chops.

dwaite 7y ago

While it is obvious that the 2013 "Trashcan" Mac Pro was not a successful design, it seems a lot of people don't get what Apple was going for. Their goal was a computer heavily focused on multithreaded and OpenCL loads, as most vendors were still preaching to developers that the single threaded performance increase ramp was dead, and workload would have to scale out instead. At the same time, it is quite easy to point to the Mac Pros before and after it and say that they have a lot of wasted power and space. The new Mac Pro design has a 1400W power supply and is mostly empty space to accommodate the "fully loaded" expansion options that most buyers quite frankly will not purchase. As Thunderbolt is basically an externalized PCIe interface, there is certainly a case to be made that extensibility is better served as a separate unit. This allowed the design of the core system to forgo modularity, and have an extremely compact design. This also allowed them to have a reduced parts cost. But the reality was: - Component thermals did not stay balanced, with GPUs using far more power and giving off far more heat on the high end. This meant that there was a shortage of pro-level parts usable without redoing the core design. - As Apple didn't upgrade the core design, it wound up having dated thunderbolt support. - There is certainly an argument to be made that extensibility within the case is a cleaner, more manageable design for the end user - Intel's licensing for Thunderbolt has been guarded, and thus the market has been sub-par. For example, eGPU took ages to become available. Another example - Intel forbid RAID assemblies to be sold without disks. In the end, I personally see what they were trying to go for, but in a lot of ways the way they thought technology and needs would evolve were missed by the 2013 pro. I don't see an issue with the design based on where they thought things were going - the issue IMHO is that it took them six years to react with a new product. (FWIW, I was planning to buy the second rev of the trashcan pro - which I slowly realized would never happen)

Shivetya 7y ago
The trashcan was a bad design from day one. It was more oriented towards the pretentious developers instead of the professional developer. I suggest the new Mac Pro is as well. It is more about being seen with it than being able to use and considering its price point that exclusivity seems to have been an Apple goal, as in you are not worthy of our hardware if the price makes you flinch. Same for that monitor. The new Mac Pro's modular feature ties you completely to Apple for GPU improvements, I did not verify if it also ties you to them for CPU upgrades. Simply put, they designed a system by which you are stuck with them that added cost but no value. I am hoping that with Ive gone that we leave the pretentious era of Apple behind, the era that resulted in the trashcan, designer bands for a watch let alone a gold 10k watch, and even to the point of their new headquarters.

stock_toaster 7y ago

> Given that the yields are said to be worse for the “butterfly” keys than normal scissor keys, and that they’re more expensive to make, one can only think that either Apple is stubborn as hell at the executive level, or so tightly constrained by its design goals that it can’t figure out a way to reintroduce scissor-switch keys because that would mean designing an entirely new body and case for the whole line. I think the author underestimates large scale production pipelines, where you may be many years out (due to things like design, test, assembly creation, assembly optimization, backchannel buildup, etc). Most products are several years in development before they are released.

unstatusthequo 7y ago

I've always wondered why the camera sticks out in the more recent iPhones. Do they hedge bets that people will put a case on? Without a case, it bothers me that it can't lay flat on a table, desk, etc...

kmlx 7y ago
i never put a case on my iphone x. the biggest problem? it keeps sliding everywhere. the glass surface is so smooth that it never catches grip. this is a major design flaw. their solution? put a case on (facepalm)

_Codemonkeyism 7y ago

I loved my cube which I tuned with new graphics cards, processor cards - there was a whole community around extending cubes with hardware without active cooling.

andy_ppp 7y ago

The article contains here-say mixed with facts about how bad Apple’s design process. It’s worth pointing out that while there have been some failures there have been some beautiful successes too. I love how the author blames the design team for complicating the touch wheel in one design, who knows if this is true it just fits with the narrative that is trying to be told. My guess is that all of this is a lot more complicated than the author thinks and the road to simplicity is a very difficult one that has changed our technical devices for the better (overall). We’d still have plastic phones with “ergonomic” slide out keyboards if it was up to the author.

xhgdvjky 7y ago

you're basically saying ive over prioritized visual design over all else but remember that a picture is usually your first impression. their goal is to sell.

gigatexal 7y ago

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

skohan 7y ago
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.
- gigatexal 7y ago
  Yup. I loved the almost analog feel to it, very industrial. Much like a Pagani Hypercar
- Technetium_Hat 7y ago
  The closest thing I have felt to its just solid feel is my essential phone. don't get me wrong - it is not a good phone, but the build quality is unbelievable.

Animats 7y ago

Usability and beauty often clash. See Bang & Olufsen audio equipment from the 1980s and 1990s. They're works of art, but a pain to use.

teekert 7y ago

“In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service” Steve Jobs

leejcarol 7y ago

https://www.yourteaminindia.com/hire-java-developer https://www.yourteaminindia.com/hire-java-developer

wastedhours 7y ago

I'm not usually an Apple apologist, but I appreciate their tenacity in trying to turn beautiful visual design into genuinely functional design. They might fail at it, but it feels like they put a stake in the sand, and then run to get there. Sometimes they trip up and don't get there (Magic Mouse 2, "you're holding it wrong"), and sometimes they do (MBPr, Watch, several iterations of iPhone). I don't have the disposable income to fund said tenacity at the bleeding edge (in case they do trip), but my iPad Mini v2 and MBPr are both examples of a product they doubled-down on and got right from both ends.

Technetium_Hat 7y ago
Macbook pro right from both ends? I guess we're ignoring that - the keyboards don't work - the touchbar exists - all the thermal issues it has had
- wastedhours 7y ago
  Sorry for my shorthand, but "MBPr" is usually used to refer to "Macbook Pro Retina", so the c.2015 model. That one they very much got right from a usability and aesthetic perspective.

infosecdude64 7y ago

My wife, kids and I have slowly been replacing all our Apple products over the past couple of years. We've replace the kid's MacBook Airs with MS Surface and my MBP was replaced with an MSI laptop with proper dedicated GPU. The decision to change was quite natural. The kids like the Surface and how it was a touch screen, but could also be used as a laptop that they could do school work on. Moving to Windows was easy for me once WSL was introduced. I no longer needed OSX to do development as I am now able to do everything I was doing on my MBP on my MSI in WSL. I still can't believe that Apple has yet to come out with a laptop with a touch screen that isn't an iPad. The touchbar is very clever, but I never use it. The last couple of straws for me for moving off of Apple at 10+ years was the MBP. Touch Bar, shitty keyboard, and no proper USB ports....I hate having to keep dongles at the ready. For me, at least, the magic that was Apple died when Steve died. Now they just push out product and services and nothing that can be considered "magic" or unique.

gdubs 7y ago

I love a lot of Apple’s design, but there is one particular example that frustrates me often: the mouse that comes with the iMac Pro. It perfectly illustrates Jobs’ mantra that design isn’t just about looks. The problem is that in order to produce the beautiful silhouette, they put the charging port on the bottom. I never seem to remember to charge the thing, so it’s always needing to be plugged-in. And then you can’t use. What I find bonkers about this is that mice were wired for the majority of their existence, so it’s not like this was a hard one to figure out. They just chose to go with what looked nice. It is pretty, though.

specialist 7y ago
Ya, the belly port is ridiculous. After long distain, I finally adapted to the Magic Mouse: Movable trackpad. I now nudge it around a bit and then take my hand off to do the gestures on the top surface. Previously, I tried to continue holding it while doing gestures, and it's way too small for my hands. I still prefer the trackpad, but now the Magic Mouse feels usable.