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To be fair, I’d counter with Jobs picking Jony Ive. Ive made gorgeous, lustworthy art objects that sucked as computers. The nadirs for me were iPhone 6’s bendga
by kstrauser 2y ago
To be fair, I’d counter with Jobs picking Jony Ive. Ive made gorgeous, lustworthy art objects that sucked as computers. The nadirs for me were iPhone 6’s bendgate and the 2015 MBP. Damn the functionality, we’ll make these suckers so slim you can shave with them! No one was begging for a MBP so thin it had to have compromised keyboard switches. Also consider the mouse that couldn’t charge while you use it, and the trashcan Mac Pro.
Those devices looked beautiful but they weren’t good at actually being used. Jobs let Ive design for a museum, not for the people using his creations. Cook let that continue for a while but finally reined it in and gave us useful designs again.
Which isn’t to say that Cook hasn’t made or isn’t making mistakes. I just meant that as a reminder that it wasn’t all wine and roses under Jobs.
- eric-hu 2y agoDon’t forget the Touch Bars.
- sroussey 2y agoI love the Touch Bar. Should have been above the function keys
- kstrauser 2y agoOuch, yeah. I loved the idea of it. I mean, I have a Stream Deck sitting on my desk as I type this, and that's basically a large, freestanding Touch Bar. But whoever decided to replace physical keys instead of augmenting them with an additional control was out of their mind. And an undifferentiated escape key? On a pro laptop with lots of programmers? The mind boggles.
- kemayo 2y agoThe real problem with the Touch Bar was that they never made an external keyboard with it. So I could never actually build it into my habits, since it was only actually available to me half the time. (I'm demonstrably willing to spend money on fancy Apple external peripherals! I have the touchID keyboard, and think the convenience of it was worth the kinda silly price. I'd absolutely have wound up getting an external Touch Bar keyboard...)
- PlunderBunny 2y agoThere were so many problems with the Touch Bar to pick any one as the ‘real’ problem. As a software developer, I’m used to resting my finger on the F5 key when I’m thinking or in the few seconds before a build finishes. Can’t do that with the Touch Bar. Also, it reflected the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling in a way that normal keys don’t. There are plenty more complaints of course, but I never heard anyone say they found a ‘must-have’ use case for it. In a nutshell - all kinds of problems, no significantly better solutions.
- xxpor 2y agoI'd argue Jobs mostly kept Ive under control. Tim Cook let him go nuts (didn't act as an editor) until it was finally seriously hurting the business (butterfly keyboard era) and went in the complete opposite direction by firing him.
- jjtheblunt 2y agoHaving sat beside both of them together in Caffe Macs some years ago, your assertion seemed exactly correct.
- MPSFounder 2y agoI never met Steve. I met Cook and on a separate occasion Forstall. Cook always struck me as a shy business bean counter. Forstall is an engineer through and through. Such a shame we never got to experience an alternate timeline where Apple was under his leadership.
- ksec 2y agoI think Ive has burn out issue at the time and has clearly thought about departing Apple. ( A book chronicling 20 years of Apple's design in 2015 ) He wanted to design the perfect and final thing and so MBP was rushed. Steve Jobs would have worked him and likely said hey this is good but we must do it incrementally so our user can adopt to changed. How about the Keyboard keys goes to 1.2mm instead of straight to 0.7mm key travel. It took us 20 years for humans to adopt from the good old 2.5mm keyboard to 1.5mm. And you want to cut in half again in one go? I think it is best summarised as Steve Job's quote in the movie; "Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra."
- caycep 2y agothat being said, Ive was important in asking why physical form factors should make sense in human terms. Big computers w/ a lot of ports make sense to comp sci/ee ppl in the lab but people in the real world have priorities more in line with Ive. Without Ive challenging the design, Apple wouldn't have even tried.
- madeofpalk 2y agoWho's responsible for designing the trash can Mac Pro? > “I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner, if you will,” one of Apple’s top executives reportedly said. https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-failure-admission https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-fai...
- kemayo 2y agoI kinda wonder how that design would play nowadays, after the Apple Silicon transition. They were stuck because of Intel's thermals, but their own chips seem to be a lot better in terms of performance/watt...
- kjkjadksj 2y agoIt is just funny how this hyper lean design philosophy ushered in an era of littering your desk, school, and workplace with random usbc dongles from storied $5 chinese brands like iKLingKing or Daehoo and whatever else. So much for the minimalism in practice. At least they created a great deal of work for these chinese producers on amazon.
- sroussey 2y agoI it new cables. No dongles anywhere.
- tracerbulletx 2y ago4 USB-C ports almost 10 years ago was inspired actually.
- 2y ago
- rowanG077 2y agoIphone 6, 2015 MBP, thrashcan where all under Cook. To me this precisely shows Cook did not have Ive under control.
- kstrauser 2y agoBut there's a dev pipeline. I'm certain those didn't all start their lives 6 months before release.
- rowanG077 2y agosure, but I don't think that's really relevant here since the products are years after cooks rise to power.
- xeonmc 2y agoWith all this talk about reining Ive under control, I can’t help but be reminded of that CollegeHumour skit implying Ive is a HAL9000-esq robot holding Tim Cook hostage[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgBDdDdSqNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgBDdDdSqNE
- herbturbo 2y agoSo every other iPhone, the iPad, the MacBook Air, AirPods and the Watch were not useful because of one bendy phone and a bad keyboard? What great feat of design did Tim Cook bring us?
- Dylan16807 2y ago> Also consider the mouse that couldn’t charge while you use it I've come around a lot on that design. Well, it's still an awful mouse shape as far as I'm concerned. But putting the port on the bottom gets people to unplug the mouse. I like that as a goal. And it can do a temporary charge pretty fast, so the downside isn't very big.
- airstrike 2y agoSorry, what's the advantage here? People are going to unplug the mouse anyway when it doesn't need charging because it feels much more natural. _Forcing_ people to stop using the mouse to charge is a braindead decision
- FredPret 2y agoIt might be wrong but it's not braindead. The idea was to prevent non-techy users from using it plugged-in all the time, which would look stupid. They wanted to accentuate the wireless nature and easy connectivity of the mouse. Essentially a marketing decision. I disagree with this take but it's worth remembering that it's marketing that turned computing from a niche activity to what it is now (which, by the way, is what makes it a viable career to the people here)
- ryandrake 2y agoThis is ugly. User behavior modification as a product goal. The reverse of how you should build products. You need to start with "The user wants to do X." rather than "I want the user to do X." Who is Apple to dictate the "correct" way for me to use a mouse?
- Dylan16807 2y agoI don't know how much users "want" to have a cord dangling off the mouse and doing nothing. If your starting premise is "the user wants to use the mouse and have a good experience", you can see how a designer can get from there to a feature that causes/encourages an unplug. Even if you disagree, they're not going backwards.
- m463 2y agoI think Jobs failed, but learned a lot from Sculley That said I hated everuthing about ios 7 from a usability standpoint.