

Has Apple's new iPhone hit the limits of industrial design? - KeepTalking
http://www.slate.com/id/2251322/pagenum/all/

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jamesbressi
I really hope not: "The touch-screen is a fixed element of its design; for at
least the next decade, you can expect the front of every new model to be
dominated by a flat sheet of glass, the same as on every previous model."

I disagree. I can understand why it is easy to make that assertion, but there
is no imagination in that statement nor due respect for progress and
advancement in technology or industrial design.

For instance, as silly as this may seem right now, who is to say that for at
least the next decade there will assuredly be a "front" on the device? Is it
not possible /likely that within a decade front/back won't matter just like
how portrait/landscape/upside-down/right-side-up do not today on iPhone and
iPad?

Just a thought...

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DrSprout
Generally speaking Glass is uncomfortable to rest against your bare skin while
talking. It's one of the things I miss about my flip phone, that it had some
air in there.

Earpieces are a bit better, but I can't stand dealing with a second battery
and the battery hit you take from Bluetooth. It's really a shame you can't
plug in a normal headset to these things.

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gfunk911
You can plug in a normal wired headset into an iPhone.

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ugh
Have a look at this Titanium PowerBook[1]. And now take a look at Apple’s
current MacBook Pro[2]. Do you notice anything? They look remarkably similar!
It’s immediately obvious that Apple is now in its ninth year of selling
essentially a laptop with the same design.

That’s not bad. That doesn’t show that they reached the limits of industrial
design. It shows a relentless dedication to perfection.

Good design is timeless. Good design has to be timeless, especially when you
are technology company. How else could you perfect the design of something in
a industry where you have to update your product every year?

The iPhone is still a bit confused (what with the flashy chrome bezel and all)
but I’m pretty confident that it will settle in sooner or later. The leaked
design seems a step in the right direction (something timeless you can
perfect), some details are off, though (seams?).

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PowerBook_redjar.jpg>

[2] <http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/>

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Tichy
While I like the looks of the new MacBooks (not the looks of the older
models), they are still a matter of taste. In that sense I don't think they
have reached the limits of industrial design yet.

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cloudwalking
If you think about innovation over time, you see big, quick jumps separated by
long, shallow periods of improvement. Apple can't blow your mind all the time;
they can't innovate exponentially.

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pixelcloud
I think that industrial designers have reached a limit within our current
technological and manufacturing capacity.

There are many concepts that are great examples of "form meets function" that
we cannot produce due to these limitations.

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sandipc
This seems a little silly to me. Any hardware features Apple adds and new
technologies will force them to rethink their industrial design, and I'm sure
there will be new additions in the next decade. (front-facing camera is one
addition)

If you put it that way, flip phones should have hit the limits of industrial
design a long time ago, but phones like the RAZR changed things pretty
substantially.

It is also Apple's choice to maintain one consistent look for a product line
for several years (think iPod, iMac, MBPs...)

Also, I wouldn't say that the original iPhone and the 3G/3GS looked the same
at all...

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rimantas
I really enjoyed this bit from the Jhonatan Ive:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0fe800C2CU#t=1m49s> (1:49-2:25)

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shalmanese
There's still plenty of room to innovate in phone design post-iPhone, just as
there has been plenty of room to innovate in PC design post Xerox Alto
(<http://www.davidstringfellow.com/parcimg/GUI.jpg>). The problem is not
innovation, it's that platforms exert a conservative effect on hardware.

Our PCs today still looks _recognizably_ similar to the Xerox Alto in 1973,
the reason is every piece of software is written with the assumption of a
screen, keyboard & mouse. Any attempts to deviate from this, the microsoft
tablet for example, has tended to fail because of the sub-optimal experience
of using a pen for software designed for mouse & keyboard.

We're used to phones looking different all the time because nobody has ever
built a true app platform for the phone. Now that we have, we should be seeing
about the same amount of innovation in phone design in the next 37 years as PC
design since the Alto.

I wrote a blog post about this a while back:
[http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/technological-progress-
happens...](http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/technological-progress-happens-via-
simulated-annealing/)

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chaosmachine
I think the Nintendo DS shows that there are always other possibilities.

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buster
I'd say the only limiting factor is what designers can imagine.

