Apple did a good job of executing on a bad idea with the iPhone X notches. But I don't believe Steve Jobs would've let the iPhone X (or Touchbar) out the door because they're so clearly half-measures.
Apple is implementing temporary workarounds (that won't exist in future devices) in their top of the line products. This is the kind of short-term thinking that they're so famous for avoiding.
They're still doing quite good overall but this is clearly something they're struggling with.
> I don't believe Steve Jobs would've let the iPhone X (or Touchbar) out the door
This is a ridiculous trope that needs to die. Among the many ‘half-measures’ people whined about during Steve Jobs’ tenure are things such as the original iPhone not having 3G, the iPhone 4 antennagate, the infamously scratch prone iPod Nano, the crack prone poly MacBooks, etc etc.
Apple was never a company that produced only flawless, non-controversial products, and Steve was perhaps the most controversial and opinionated product person to have ever lived.
Another really obvious half-measure was that the original iPhone didn't have an app store. "HTML5 is your SDK", basically, and adding sites to your homescreen was all you could do. Steve Jobs tried to pretend this was a good thing:
> And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today.
One might argue that it was merely to early for that, since web standards around it didn't exist and weren't provided by Apple either. Not having the required focus on the App Store could have been great!
Apple store is primarily a distribution/discovery channel, I would not be surprised if it started as - hey let's build a catalogue of all the websites that work well on iPhones.
Apple's biggest asset has always been design. On a tehnical basis Apple products sometimes beat the competition and sometimes are outdone by the likes of Samsung, Thinkpad, etc. They have dominated the American consumer market because of fit and finish, attention to detail, and overall functional beauty in design. The flaws you're speaking of are a different sort from the, frankly weird looking, notch. While executed as well as possible, its a design compromise.
The notch is a literal non-issue that only people who don’t actually use this damn device seem to complain about or even notice. I for one am happy that an entire strip of nearly-useless status icons has been shifted upward into the extra area afforded by the notch. The number of times I notice it in a given month easily rounds to zero.
It’s the same story every time Apple releases a new product. People who overwhelmingly don’t buy Apple products in the first place lose their minds over some nit, while the overwhelming majority of their actual customers never seem to understand what the big deal is.
I’m not surprised at all: these people knee-jerk so hard and often, they probably can’t afford Apple products after the paying for orthopedic surgeons.
And the “ignorant Apple fanboy” narrative that seems to be the counterargument to this falls laughably short when you realize that the number of Apple’s customers has been increasing exponentially for the last fifteen years, all while they continue to enjoy the top spot in consumer satisfaction surveys across virtually their entire product line.
It's "weird looking" at the moment because Apple was the first[1] with the <cough> "courage" to do this in order to integrate what's basically a Kinect into the front of a phone. But phones are already showing up that copy this solution.
[1] Well, Essential did it, but didn't commit to the degree that Apple did.
ALL design is compromise. The options available for this design are a) stop the entire screen below the sensors b) extend the screen around the sensors or c) remove the sensors.
A gives you less overall screen space, and leads to other problems like an imbalance between the ‘chin’ and ‘forehead’ areas. Of course you could remove even more screen sapce to balance that out, but...
C means you have no Face ID, which is closer to giving up than compromising.
B is obviously the option they went with, and having used the phone for several months, I’d have to say I agree with this compromise. I get some extra screen space by moving the status stuff up in to the ‘ears’ and I still get faceID.
Except your list of misfeatures is actually a missing feature and a list of bugs. No one would claim Steve Jobs or Apple was ever perfect, just that he wouldn't have released these blatantly obvious misfeatures.
Can you think of anything similar to these weird misfeatures? I'm genuinely curious.
If you look at iPhone iconography -- it's always been basically a rounded rectangle with a circle and square for the home button. Easily identifiable as an iPhone with just 3 shapes. With the home button gone, the notch is used to distinctively represent an iPhone.
Perhaps the whole thing is purposely form over function.
Form over function? I think you nailed it.
Would it be less expensive to manufacture using circles? Would sales decrease if they had? Would anyone really notice?
I wonder how many man-hours were spent debating the shape of the corners.
In addition to the attention to design detail it speaks to the brand strength of Apple that if any of their competitors released a phone with a similarly unconventional screen shape it would have been a weakness that would drastically affect the acceptance of the phone, even if it was engineered in the exact same way. The notch is truly a feature only Apple would be able to have success with.
What is wrong with the touchbar? What is wrong with the notch?
I've been on a touchbar mac and it's just as usable as having keys, with the added flexibility of changing them around (adding a lock button, etc.). It's mostly a non issue and does everything the prior bar did.
The notch essentially houses the 1 feature most people love on their X's, it becomes a non-issue once you use it. Or, if you're like me, you recognize that instead of losing a notch, you gained 2 ears of information.
I find the Touch Bar frustrating. It's probably because of the way use my MacBook Pro on my lap a lot. I find that I often accidentally press buttons on the Touch Bar because my hands naturally rest in that area.
My real problem with that model is the sticky keyboard, though. My space bar and several other keys are intermittently unresponsive, which irritates me no end.
I don't know, I have one and I genuinely love the notch (and the other rounded corners). The device feels organic and sci-fi in a way that strictly rectangular screens do not. (But I haven't seen an all-screen phone yet, so maybe I'd change my tune if I did.)
Apple is implementing temporary workarounds (that won't exist in future devices) in their top of the line products. This is the kind of short-term thinking that they're so famous for avoiding.
They're still doing quite good overall but this is clearly something they're struggling with.