There is a lot to digest in this piece. Work environments are very dynamic and context and time-in-point is very important. I did not see this behavior, but I was not part of that group at Apple.
I worked with Jony after we were acquired. The original Siri linen background was his idea, the bubbles had to be perfect, the padding, the text size, the lists goes on. I inferred this as design obsession and did not find it offending, he was right 95% of the time.
When I left Apple, I emailed with Jony on a device I had designed and pitched internally in 2011 but was shelved. His response has stayed with me to this day, “not all ideas make the cut, even the best ones”.
He could have cut me down or ignored me, but he responded with honesty.
I think that void he left when he moved on was too big to be filled. Steve and Jony were always together, pretty much every day we would see them at lunch.
>“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.
But that's "good" ideas. I wouldn't object to that. Instead, Jony said the best ideas. By definition, this means you're necessarily choosing a worse idea, because there's nothing better than the best idea. Seems like a bad process to me!
Quantifying best is very difficult. Is it the best technically but market conditions makes it less appealing? Or is it the best fit for the market but it’s a nightmare to build and so they can’t pump enough of them out to be reasonable.
The products that launch end up being good enough in all areas but rarely/never the best in all areas.
If quantifying "best" is so difficult, then maybe Ive should have worded his words of consolation better, maybe? Otherwise it's just an empty platitude.
Someone like Ive, and anyone within his professional circle, would necessarily be intimately familiar with the concept of “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, just as best is. Any one designers design is the best for that designer. Best, by anyones definition, doesn’t always make the cut.
The context here is product design. Does this mean that you think there's one perfect form of a product that everyone would agree is the best, from the bean counters, to the fabricators, to the users?
Well, if there isn't, Ive shouldn't have used the word "best"! It sends the wrong message. Designers should be careful with their words.
(As an aside, in my opinion -- and many others on HN, as I've read through the years -- Ive sometimes made the worst choice between two design decisions, so he definitely sometimes cut the best in favor of the less good).
(Also, judging by the reactions to my top-level comment, others agree with me!)
I think you're coming from a context that isn't design, so there's a language mismatch here. In design, and basically everything not dictated by maths/optimization, the precise definition of "best" is that it's subjective. From the dictionary: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/best
> 1. excelling all others
> 2. offering or producing the greatest advantage, utility, or satisfaction
Different models of products exist because "best" is subjective. The phone that is best for me is not best for you, but both are precisely, by definition, best for each of us. You seem to be thinking that the word "best" means some absolute global maximum, which is not the definition of the word. That maximum is made from weights in some huge vector space, with those weights being different depending on the perspective of each of us. There is no "correct" perspective that can allow this global maximum, that you seem to be searching for, to exist.
You're making the assumption that he, a celebrated consumer product designer, was not aware of the subjective, multivariate, nature of "best", when used in the context of consumer product design. I don't think that's an appropriate assumption, for any professional designer.
Both definitions 1 & 2 are universal and not exclusive to design, and furthermore, prove my point.
I stand by my opinion: Ive was either careless about words, or pointing out a flaw in Apple's process.
Please, don't try to convince me I don't understand product design or what "best" means. At this point, this intellectual match trying to save Ive from his own words is not productive.
How about an example then? Could you tell me what the best car to buy is? If you present the same make, model, and year as me, then perhaps you’re right. From what you've said, I think we can agree that you don't need details like my location, income, number of passengers, range, or driving habits.
> From what you've said, I think we can agree that [...]
No, we cannot agree on nothing of the sort. Where did I say I'm a car design expert?
Please stop trying to make me say things I don't want to. I'm just pointing out Ive's misleading use of language. Since Ive is a design expert, I hold him to a higher standard, but he certainly didn't "make the cut"! Maybe he wasn't the "best" after all.
There is Product Category A, Product Category B, and Product Category C. In each of those categories there is a "best" product.
But a company may not have the bandwidth to release in all three categories. So it may choose to focus on Product Category B, and the best implementation for B, and leave A and C (for now). Even though there are "best" implementations/ideas available for A and C.
Sometimes it is not possible for a company to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Not all the best ones do, it is quite straightforward. Some bad ones also do occasionally make the cut, but it tells more about the nature of ideas than Apple’s process at this point.
Excellent point. I don't know, maybe there was no clear-cut "best" in that case. Refreshing my memory about that formats war by reading Wikipedia, it wasn't obvious Betamax was "better" (it didn't check many of the boxes consumers wanted, like cheaper, longer running time, faster; instead, it checked boxes video professionals wanted, so it can be argued Beta was not "the best" for consumers!).
That said, in this case Ive seems to be arguing even in cases where the "best" can be identified and has a known meaning, it won't make the cut. By definition of "best", this means something "worse" will be chosen instead. Seems like a flawed process to me!
PS: if you ask me, I think Ive wasn't careful with his words, and instead he meant "even extremely good products sometimes don't make the cut, because they are competing with something even better here at Apple". But he said "best", an unfortunate word which made his statement... wrong. Someone so careful about design should also be careful about words, because words are also design.
An unqualified "best" means it's the best. It was an unfortunate turn of phrase by Ive, a person known to make mistakes, as pointed out several times here on HN.
No not really, real life does not work that, you can be best in some aspect while not the best in other aspects but for some reason you dont seem to understand nuance, its probably your hatred for Ive that seems to be clouding your judgement.
"Best in some aspects" is not an unqualified best. Maybe Ive should have been more careful about his wording -- which was my point, after all!
> its probably your hatred for Ive that seems to be clouding your judgement
Wow. Hatred. I don't even know the guy, how can I hate him? I don't own a Mac, I just use one provided by my work. I don't own an iphone. I really don't pay much attention to Ive at all, just pointing out a flaw in his wording.
Is that how you normally debate by making personal attacks? You have already made up your mind the Ive makes many mistakes.
> Maybe Ive should have been more careful about his wording -- which was my point, after all!
and my point was that there are nuances which for some reason you still dont understand because you have already made up your mind about Ive, so lets agree to disagree because you are not going to change your opinion.
You are making personal attacks saying Ive has made many mistakes, instead of just arguing about the main point you have already made up your mind that whatever he does is a mistake and then you refuse to understand why you are wrong.
I dont need luck when facts are on my side. Good luck understanding nuance in the future.
That bit about the firing of the designer who used the river metaphor in that email is such a good lesson for anyone:
Never ever ever ever announce moves like this if there is still money on the table that can still be taken away from you.
No matter how awesome your company is, how great the team, product or how wonderful the atmosphere is. This guy thought he wrote a heartfelt goodbye to his beloved team and was instead brutally punished for it.
I also don’t quite get it. Firing that designer would not increase my trust in the design leadership.
It would seem thin skinned, skittish, cruel, deeply immoral and evil, leading me to lose a lot of trust, feeling as though creating a culture of fear is the goal. That behavior seems completely incomprehensible to me, especially since you need to have an extremely tortured reading of that e-mail to read it as an attack on Apple. It’s simply so extremely weird and wrong to do that. It also seems completely ineffective. What’s the intended effect here?
I’m not sure what the general vibe here’s on that, but it seems abhorrent to treat people that way.
Vindictive? Artists? BS.
You're clearly extrapolating on an unfounded assumption. I'm an adult art student getting a BFA as part of a career change and have known hundreds of artists and designers over the years. Firstly, there is no unifying culture among even large subsets of artists, let alone artists in general. Secondly, claiming that artists in general are vindictive is flat-out absurd.
At a certain type of design-centric company the culture shifts, and divas are both created and elevated to a degree that you don't see elsewhere. Most companies don't tolerate that sort of artist/designer because they're obnoxious and generally horrible people (and they don't work well with others so unless the culture is one that prioritizes them over everyone else they tend to flail and fail pretty quickly) but here and there you'll find pockets where they thrive.
I think you're absolutely right that in general artists are not like that. It's a few bad apples, and for the most part they don't ever have much opportunity to do damage because it takes an exceptionally weird company to enable them.
Well aware of the conspicuous minority that comprise that (stereo)type, but you can levy similar charges against any knowledge job from engineering to academia to the priesthood and I highly doubt those sorts of people are more highly represented in art than most other professions.
Beyond never having heard anyone conflate the terms 'artist' and 'corporate designer,' the sentiment would still be wrong. I've worked in corporate software projects as a developer, designer, support person, project manager, QA engineer, and even IT/Ops guy and would rank designers, on a whole, somewhere near last in terms of likeliness to be vindictive. Sales? Management? Even support? Sure.
You can have vindictive jerks in any job, but considering that design's fundamental purpose is to empathize with people and manifest that it some medium, vindictive people tend to filter themselves out.
From the media you’d think he and Steve Jobs were the only two employees and responsible for 100% of any success.
It’s much easier to personify a monolith under a specific individual. Tesla is only Musk. Gas prices and inflation are only because of Biden. The list goes on.
I think you really captured the somewhat unspoken reality of it.. When you are a leader, things that go right are credited to you (Jobs, Musk) but when things go wrong, you get the blame (Biden).
Of course the world is more nuanced than that but the power of narrative combined with the romance of “leadership” and you end up playing a high-risk, high-reward game
All the designers I know are awesome at being open and responding to outside inputs.
I work as a user researcher and in general designers tend to be the very best, both at showing a real interest and investing themselves into the research and also at incorporating the results.
Designers tend to have a real interest in improving their designs and getting clarity on things they themselves may be uncertain about.
However, I’m not working in the context those people talked about there work in. (Also, UI design, not hardware design. So not very comparable.)
Genuine question, do you know any artists? This isn't the case generally; certainly amongst ordinary working visual artists - who are demonstrably open minded, centred, and interpersonally engaged. I can't speak to Damien Hirst level centimillionaires, who represent an invisibly small fraction of working artists.
Apologies for nitpicking but the prefix you're looking for is hecto-. The prefix centi- means 1/100 [1], implying that Damien Hirst has only $10,000 to his name, starving artist level wealth!
Maybe that is the reason why design sucks so much nowadays (in nearly every domain of technology). Design is much more objective and measurable, while personal aesthetics aren't.
Anyone in a leadership position has a responsibility to measure their words carefully, especially in a farewell email.
"Sadly, rivers dry out, and when they do, you look for a new one." broadcasts extreme negativity to the people who remain. It almost reads like a cautionary warning followed by advice.
One can write a heartfelt goodbye without ambiguity. Assuming the ambiguity was unintentional, the author was careless and paid the price. He could've gotten away with it in other places (large companies are generally too bureaucratic to fire someone who's already leaving) but obviously not in this case.
Your point is valid, but in my experience it can be hard to get concensus on what the problems are, much less what the solutions are. And I work in a tiny company - I can't imagine what it's like for Apple.
Part of the problem is that everyone sees everything from their point of view, and not always from a holistic point of view.
Someone working on homepod sees the potential there and gets frustrated that its not equivalent to an iPhone or ipad. Someone else, in the siri division has his own list of priorities and demands (perhaps from the iPhone team).
Management isn't trying to fix every problem, or make everyone happy, they're trying to triage as best they can.
In my personal context we get all kinds of feedback from employees, but ultimately we have more ideas, and suggestions, than money. For some problems everyone has a proposed solution, half of which conflict with the other half. Sometimes suggestions fix some of a problem, but are short term, we may be holding out for a long term approach.
I guarantee that wherever you work you won't be happy with all decisions and directions - and I'm sure that includes people making those decisions and directions.
I've had people leave. Some on good terms, some on bad. Some are positive on the way out, but we stomp on negative. There's a place for negative feedback, and that's up the pipeline (where we always take it seriously) but whining to co-workers who have no authority to effect change, especially after resigning, is not a good look, and is not constructive.
Sounds like you demand that people walk on eggshells around some thin skinned psychopath. It is human to make some mistakes or miscommunicate. The normal thing would be to have a talk and clear things up. Management must react when an employee keeps screwing up despite feedback. Here was a one strike rule. Even the California prison system is more easy going than that ;-)
Indeed, life is not easy going when someone is senior enough to work with a CxO at a giant company, and writes emails with thoughts that influence entire organizations.
I just don't buy that the river metaphor wasn't about Apple. It just doesn't make sense unless he was retiring or leaving design entirely. Otherwise the lack of water is clearly related to Apple.
If it really was solely about himself it's a really poor metaphor. So the river is moving to a new mountain? And the river's lack of water has nothing to do with the current one? Or, the mountain (Apple) has plenty of water but somehow this river (employee) can't receive any of it?
The non-critical-of-Apple reading is convoluted and tortured, imo.
Well, it’s not his own poetry - it’s some Persian classic he’s quoting so you could probably look into it and find a whole well-spring of deep knowledge explaining exactly what he meant by it.
In the letter he talks about his own soul, and the experience of deep work being like that of a river. So it’s pretty clear he’s talking about what’s on his interior spiritually. From a designer “I am barren and in a creative rut” pretty much means “I can’t come up with good stuff and I’m of no use to all of you here”.
However, regardless of what he actually said, he was on his way out from a tight-knit and emotionally connected team in which expressing your feelings and being sensitive is sort of expected, only the guys running that team were so paranoid that they decided to burn him and smear shit all over his beautiful farewell letter. That’s a dark thing to do to someone’s career/reputation etc.
Getting that glimpse, I do wonder to what extent Ive and his buddies have other ugly deeds on their accounts. Perhaps Ive running that separate company of his is really only a way of gracefully pushing this kind of toxicity away from the house just in case.
If the team was truly so tight knit then you wouldn't need to write an email to convey that you are leaving. I'm personally always flabbergasted by people who write company wide farewell messages. It's a net negative for the company to hear about people leaving. It doesn't matter what the reason for leaving is except if it's that the person won the lottery. Any other reason: Why not stay here? What's so unsustainable about working here?
I’m the opposite. My company has this thing where people that leave send an email they’re leaving literally the afternoon they disappear, and sometimes nothing at all.
It feels like they’re sneaking out under the cover of night, and it makes everyone I need to work with feel very fungible. Getting attached to any given person is a dangerous excercise, since one day they might suddenly be gone, and you wouldn’t know it.
Maybe the lesson is that for employees who happen to believe that Apple's river had run dry, the message would be hard to interpret as personal to the author.
Or that the river running dry personally is potentially contagious.
This whole story highlights how top-of-mind this fear that the "river" of innovation at Apple might be running dry really was for the leadership of this design team.
That’s the other lesson - don’t use poetry or metaphors to express your self because they will inevitably be twisted to suit the corporate interests and not yours.
> If it really was solely about himself it's a really poor metaphor.
The point of the story was that he was fired for what very well might have been a poor metaphor. I mean, even taking your point as a prior and assuming that the guy was clearly saying that Apple's design primacy was fading as he announced his retirement... why is that a termination-worthy act?
I mean, yeah, he was firing some mildly poetic shots at his employer. Who among us, as it were. That quote was a little bit of passive aggression. Firing him was an act of deliberate malice.
It reads to me as obviously about the author, and the critical-of-Apple reading the convoluted and tortured version, only making sense if your model of humans is fundamentally... I dunno, manipulative, or Machiavellian. (shrug)
Well put, my thoughts as well. It just makes me sad on behalf of humanity that we turn out having such bleak and cynical perspective on other people. Benefit of the doubt? Guilty until proven otherwise? Are such ideals just unfashionable today or something?
People should put more faith in each other. Look for the positive instead of just the flaws and shortcomings.
"The non-critical-of-Apple reading is convoluted and tortured, imo."
Perhaps you are also reading things with a certain context - "poor", "convoluted", "tortured", "lack", "can't" - all negative words used in this comment. People often see things through lenses, - if management is negative, thin skinned, looking at a statement like that as anything but an indictment of the company would be wondrous.
As others pointed out, the context of the letter speaks very differently. Whether it is "Apples" river or the river of inspiration of the employee, is hardly worth arguing over, inspiration comes from without and is experienced by the employee, there is nothing innately inspiration about a company, ever, only about its employees...who make up said company.
I suppose you might want to argue that employees can inspire other employees - perhaps, but only to the limited degree which some employees have different experiences than others. As a senior employee, you are somewhat expected to be that source of inspiration, saying rivers dry up, e.g. yours, is not saying that Apple the company, can never be a place employees will experience inspiration, just that you aren't experiencing it anymore, and that's perfectly fine.
What's also perfectly fine is that management reacted this, way, which, ironically, foreshadows the absolutely lack-luster dumpster fire which was Apple in the past decade. It illustrates perhaps why there was not inspiration, because leadership failed to provide it.
It looked like a a description of personal journey to me immediately. It makes no sense for a person to say such a thing about the company. To simple assume that I find a bit sad. Like to people really think so low of their fellow man?
I think our society has gotten to much cynicism. Maybe we need more nativity, compassion and empathy.
I read it as there not being anything else at Apple left to inspire him, which is a reflection on his story at Apple, not Apple itself. If you work at one place for well over a decade, it makes sense to me that you would eventually run out of things you want to do there and have to move on.
But regardless of the interpretation, firing the dude was completely unacceptable.
> That made me lose a whole lot of respect for Ive.
I dunno... It sounds like they let him rest and vest for a few months as a courtesy even though he was already checked out.
And then, during that time, he sent an email to the entire team that implied (either intentionally or through carelessness) that Apple's river of ideas had run dry.
It seems pretty reasonable to ask him to leave immediately after doing that.
I read the book, and it says a few things that contradict other stories I’ve read about Apple, by people who were there. After a while I started taking things with a grain of salt.
Considering how awful the story is, I think it’s likely that there was more to the guy who got fired than the book let on. They were worried about an exodus so they treated a guy like shit? And why did he announce his departure before his benefits were locked in? The whole story is sus.
It’s hearsay, as even the article says it was Dye who did the firing.
I’ve read many articles/interviews where Jony talks about being “hurt” by something. As in, he puts everything he has into these creations and certain things he takes very personally, as if someone is trying to stomp on a rose in his garden.
Chaudhri is known to have a big personality himself and went to start a company that has hired a lot from Apple (not exclusively but sometimes browsing LinkedIn it looks that way). So he sends an email while resting and vesting (and also planning his next big thing), and they decide to cut ties, as he’s now seen as a potential liability. It doesn’t need to be petty or vindictive, but a decision based on bad vibes they got. Chaudhri could have given his notice two months in advance and cruised and sent the email on his last day, but he didn’t.
> It’s clear from the article that both Ive and Dye were directly involved in the firing.
It's really not. The part you quoted doesn't say that Ive was "directly involved" in the firing, it says he felt something about the message Chaudhri sent. The article states Dye was directly involved in the firing, and mentions nothing about if Ive was involved or not, so we should presume he wasn't. Otherwise the article would say so.
This and what Elon Musk did keep getting me struck by how little protection workers in the US have. Fired on a whim. But so do remember when working at American companies all the horror stories we heard about how our colleagues working in America got treated.
It became these “did you hear the latest crazy thing they did in the US office?”
I am not saying this to dump on America but hopefully to get people to demand better. If this is how people want their work life that is fine, but I hope people realize it doesn’t have to be like this.
What is actually pretty bad corporate culture has been normalized IMHO.
If you publicly trash your company (externally or just broadly internally) in other countries you’re saying you won’t be fired? Or face some discipline?
There's a lot of nuance as usual. Firing you over provably true statements or things you said strictly as a private individual can have harsher consequences for the company (you can be let go but they'd need to pay a pretty heavy severance)
I am not a lawyer, but I'd expect you'd need to be revealing company secrets, or have a public speaking position in the first place (e.g. you work for PR) and your declarations make you unfit for the job, or leave proofs that your goal was to damage the company, to be in a position as weak as in the US.
imagine otherwise how tough it would be to do political or ideological activism on your private time.
Use the example in the article. You basically write a letter to your fellow employees saying (I’ll paraphrase) “im outta here because the talents and ideas that made this place successful are gone”.
Can you do that in Europe and face no consequences?
> "He was fond of a line from the Persian poet Rumi, who said, “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” Playing off that line, Chaudhri wrote, “Sadly, rivers dry out, and when they do, you look for a new one."
No, an employer wouldn't be in a great position firing an employee about a reflexion on a poem, that was used to explain his motivation drying out. To be clear, the employer would face the consequences.
More precisely, in Europe firing someone has consequences for the company. So they would need rather more motivation to do that than an artfully worded leaving email.
I really enjoy that it’s basically impossible for my company to fire me on a whim (at least it’ll be a multi month process that you can see coming months away).
I can be openly critical to my boss, or leadership, or mess up in general and recover my good graces without constantly worrying that my job and life depend on it.
That said, we have to work with one another, so it’s in all our interests to keep a good relationship.
Can someone explain to me how you can fire someone that already declared to leave and do financial damage to the employee with that?
I guess it's some clause of a vesting schedule that gets triggered when being fired and he already declared his resignation before his shares were vested, but they would've been after his last day?
I find it so weird that he already quit the job but the company could actually save money by firing him. Shouldn't something except fear of a bad reputation prevent this kind of move to do actual damage?
I dont think the management cared about the money the company saved; top level management rarely preoccupies itself with such pedestrian matters. It was about sending a message and reasserting authority. Management 101 in large, deep pocketed orgs.
Btw, disciplinary firing of employees on leave is of course pretty rare but happens - also in those countries that make it difficult to fire salaried staff. People do stupid things, like steal, download thousands of documents, or write stupid emails.
Something like: When he quit, he chose a last day that was after his shares vest, which his managers agreed to. When they fired him, it was immediate, before the shares vest.
I prefer the current balance of Ive-inspired-designs WITHOUT Ive's obsessions.
But something also not frequently said: Apple had amazing designs (compared to the rest of the industry), for 2 decades before Ive started his thing. Heck, NeXT too.
Also, if I had to suffer yet another cookie-cutter Ive post-release video about a product, I'd kill myself...
Oh man, those trailers with him speaking are the stuff I MISS the most, it was the last reminder of that old Apple now that keynotes and product launch commercials are so bland and boring I don't even bother to watch them anymore.
As a counterpoint, I bought my first iPhone (first ever Apple product) this week, and it was specifically because it seems like Apple is finally designing products with usability and functionality as their top priority.
Ive was great, but he was way too much of an artist to understand that computers are mostly tools. Ive was more interested in folding katanas and the process of creation than the mundane design of a productivity tool.
As an example, I remember being utterly bemused by the relentless port-pruning on the Macbook Pro. It just didn't make sense to me to remove ports on a machine designed primarily for productivity. But Ive didn't like ports, because katanas don't have ports. So the MBP didn't have ports.
I think he understood perfectly that computers were tools.
The PowerBook/MacBook Pro designs up through 2016, the MacBook Air from 2010 onwards, the Power Macs G3-G5/Macs Pro through 2013 and the 2019 Mac Pro, the iBook/MacBook line through 2011, and the entirety of the iMac’s history all reflect a recognition that computers are fundamentally tools. They just held the conceit that tools can also be beautiful.
But yes, sometime between Job’s death and 2017, the wheels just completely fell off when they introduced new Mac designs, and they spent the better part of the last 5 years putting them back on after Ive was promoted into the sky and left the company.
IDK. Doggedly sticking to a single button mouse. Putting charging port on the bottom of a mouse because designers know best. Calculators that produce wrong answers if one types before the beautiful animations finish. Keyboards so thin and heavily integrated dust can break them, and cannot be repaired without accessing main board.
Evidence suggests to me that Apple's record on utility is mixed.
I personally like the single button mouse. It is the only mouse I got so far that on MacOS let me scroll webpages up and down, left and right without any effort.
I really like that the almost the whole surface is active and have gestures.
I agree that for video games not having dedicated buttons is not ok. I dont play those so for me this is the perfect mouse.
Being using them from the first generation I think 2010-2011 and it is hard for me to go back to normal mouse.
Loads and loads of mice can do horizontal scrolling while having two mice buttons, e.g. Logitech MX Master, Razer Naga, etc. It's not uncommon for high end mice to have a mouse wheel you can tilt left or right to scroll left or right or some other system.
The Magic and Mighty mice support horizontal scrolling in spite of being one button mice and not because they are one button mice. Apple laptops kept with the whole one button thing even into 2000s where it was pretty painful as there was no scroll mechanism at all, no right click mechanism at all besides a key combo.
Let’s be fair: Apple has had sufficient time to revise all of these post-Jobs Ive-era designs. Ive himself was still in charge when the trash can hit the bin, and they’ve more or less fixed the port situation on most of their models (I still have disagreements with some of their choices but we can at least say they’re debatable now).
But they just released a revision of the 13” MacBook Pro with the touchbar. And while I know they have a hard time course-correcting bad design choices on their biggest product lines, there’s no excuse for not having revised the Magic Mouse 2 by this point.
Also while this discussion has been mostly focused on hardware, let’s not forget that Apple is selling 6K displays while displaying all the signs and symptoms of an organization absolutely allergic to on-screen chrome in every release of Mac OS X for the past few years as well as the next major revision they just announced.
I’ll put a lot at Ive’s feet, but only for the time he was actually there and in charge of design.
Window or user interface chrome, which incidentally is where Google Chrome gets its name (as the “chrome” for the web) which is probably infesting your results. Going to Wikipedia’s “Chrome” disambiguation would get you a one-line description too but the page-link would just direct you to graphical user interfaces.
Chrome is all the stuff that’s not the content area in a GUI. So the user-agent you’re reading this in has a content area loading the page this thread is on (most likely a web browser but maybe you’re using an HN-specific app), and then a toolbar where the location bar lives, maybe a favorites bar and the window controls like close and minimize unless you’re on a phone. Basically chrome is all the overhead GUI like menus, toolbars, sidebars, pop-overs and controls around the stuff you’re focused in on.
I on the other hand am happy to have the last of the laptops without extra dust-collecting holes (a hub has more than a laptop could ever offer) and with touchbar (I'd hate having to switch to adjusting sound volume/screen brightness the old way).
At work, the new MacBooks with HDMI are trickling in and I've never seen so much excitement around a laptop. People (mostly Product people) just giddy they don't need a dongle to connect to screens.
I mean, I buy a dongle and maybe it’ll support 1080p, maybe 1440p, maybe 4K? Who knows! The Amazon review certainly won’t tell you, the company selling it to you will lie through their teeth. You won’t find out until you’re plugging it in (probably during a presentation) It’s just so much fun playing dongle roulette.
Well that depends. The old Apple HDMI to USB C dongle doesn't do 4K 60Hz so if you buy used or the shop you're at has old stock...
The other adapters like the VGA one they make also don't support more than 60W PD passthrough and they don't really make this clear on the store page or packaging either.
Kind of makes me wonder if Ive’s late Apple designs would stand up better in a world where Amazon was better and you could reliably receive what you ordered. Does anyone else remember that gentleman who worked at Google with one of their USB-C charging Chromebooks that would test various USB-C cables to see if they met spec until one fried his Chromebook?
But dongles would still suck so probably the answer is “technically yes, but not in a meaningful way”.
It’s a good example of the difference between product and service design —- the product designer wants to prune ports to make the hardware smaller, lighter, and sleeker, while the service designer wants the user to not have to spend an hour browsing paid Amazon reviews to find the one dongle that will work, won’t catch on fire, and can get delivered before they have to get on a flight for a client presentation.
When I bought in to usb-c I was pretty excited about this, but man to get a dongle to do all of that you listed and working as expected was like a couple hundred dollars, or you roll the dice with the no name brands. Eventually that laptop died and I went back to a macbook that had all the ports I needed on the dongle already built in, and life has been somewhat simpler.
The legendary dongle! The one that serves as a docking station! I’ve heard of this one, a major company here has it. Even for them, they had their IT team to research it, and it’s valued $300 on the internal resale forum.
So, the magic dongle that delivers the USB-C dream is ultra expensive and rare and only worth finding if you have 6000 employees to provide.
No, I bought a dongle on Amazon that I use for my M1 Air for $60. It takes up both USB-C ports, but it handles power, can do 4K@60Hz HDMI (only for 1 display though), has an SD card reader, a few USB-A ports, and maybe another USB-C port. More ports than I’ve ever had to use. The read/write speeds aren’t best in class, but it was only $60.
It’s nice to only have to unplug one thing to be able to take my laptop somewhere, and I like the 2 port design more than I thought I would.
What? I have a 2016 MacBook Pro (Touch Bar, maxed out), 2019 MacBook Pro (16” Intel, maxed out) and a 2021 MacBook Pro (16” M1 Max, maxed out). All can connect with the same single cable to my 2 x 5K displays, ATEM + DSLR webcam, audio interface and gigabit ethernet without any issue. The difference is the M1 can ALSO connect more easily to projectors, and have the protection of MagSafe when away from the desk. The keyboard is hands down the most comfortable on the 2016 (butterfly) though, so I tend to use that away from my desk.
That’s great. We have lots of large TVs for sharing in meeting spaces but these tend to have an HDMI cable hanging off them (you don’t want to try to plug your own cable in as it can be tricky to reach) so being able to plug that cable into your laptop is good. I carry an adapter.
Having said that, most of our spaces now have a box that lets you share via Teams meeting, which generally works fine too.
No cables is the holy grail!
All our monitors on desks have a USB-C cable so that’s nice and easy to get connected with these days.
Putting software design under the hardware design folks after Forstall was outed was and remains disastrous IMO.
Dye and his team continue to make beautiful hardware but fuck me hiding every function of a program behind a hover state or overflow menu absolutely kills usability. Productivity is being sacrificed for some weird notion of “cleanliness”. We’re all running displays with millions of pixels, we can afford buttons for stuff.
I also find software quality to be getting worse (more glitches and bugs, which can be very distracting), but I actually like having the main UI as free of distraction as possible. Though I'll agree they've overshot their goal a little/are focusing on the wrong things in places (I always use the search to crop things in preview).
In my opinion, the work Ive did at Apple is greatly over rated.
Yes it is clean and minimalist, and some devices like the iPhone 4 were truly innovative, bold and impressive designs.
But overall, this is mostly bland, generic, boring.
In the same minimalist style, I prefer the work of Dieter Rams.
Some Sony products have really good design, including devices that were released a few years before the iPhone, but that were unfortunately built around a weak and already dying software stack (PalmOS). The Sony Clié are, in my opinion, less boring and better designed than most Apple products.
IBM comes also to mind, the ThinkPad was a stylish and sturdy computer.
There is a world outside of Apple headquarter, and I feel that they reached a dead-end, design wise.
Citing IBM as good at design makes this read like a parody.
Everything IBM does is so hilariously ugly in the least imaginative, boring, industrial way that they’ve gone through “boxy” into some other universe where it’s almost — but not quite — good style.
For crying out loud, everything they make is black.
There are famous Apple ads deriding the bland corporate look of IBM!
You're mixing up design and style. The Thinkpad was very well designed, in that it solved a problem well given a set of requirements and constraints. It was a workhorse laptop meant for business travelers, not a consumer device like the iPhone. Both were well designed, but for different purposes.
> Everything IBM does is so hilariously ugly in the least imaginative, boring, industrial way
Their mainframes and HPC clusters have a sort of "intentional brutalism", almost skewing into a "dystopian, corpocratic sci-fi evil-idol the protagonist blows up at the end of the movie" look, that's actually kind of appealing/fitting for what those clusters are/do. It's the "Hugo Boss SS uniform" of computing.
The ThinkPad is and was it's own world of design, it was well thought of at the time of its introduction - because it looked different than other laptops.
And they designed it with channels to egress a water spill into the keyboard past critical components, thus providing a very reasonable chance of laptop survival.
Unlike Apple who put the high power display powerline immediately next to the CPU one. One drop, and the CPU is gone. (IIRC from Rossman's repair videos).
Maybe that was past-tense good: The first all black computer I got to use was the most beautiful, amazing machine I had ever seen. It looked fast! Unlike the plodding old beige Macintoshes I had been using. But that was a long, long time ago.
Design is funny: what was new and amazing eventually becomes old and dated, and then sometimes, later still, beloved.
IBM has made lots of not black things. Were any of their typewriters black? The IBM PC sure wasn't and many models after that weren't. I think the ThinkPad was their first black computer at the very least. IMO ThinkPads look great and they've done some really cool things like the butterfly keyboard.
I'd strongly recommend checking out the work of Richard Sapper. he's like an Ive from a mirror universe. His design is really excellent, delightful, and absolutely user- focused. I wish Sapper's vision had won.
I agree. Jon Ive was a genius with design when he had to work under constrained scenarios. But the moment he had unconstrained power, form was able to win over functionality.
I think Ive was a fantastic and visionary industrial designer, but when he debuted as the design czar over software as well I think Apple’s UX kinda entered a nosedive. The actual designers “on the ground” there really pulled iOS through those times and I agree with other commenter that nowadays Apple is really so much better.
Yes, it felt like Ive had too much unilateral decision making power. Steve loved the push and pull of constructive arguments and disagreements and famously lamented that even he didn’t always get his way if others had compelling arguments. Ive is and was a designer. Design and—more specifically, his design asthetic—always came first under his tenure post Steve.
He needed to have Fadell around to argue with, but Tim prefers an office style with less tension. Which has been great for shareholders, bad for consumer design tho. It’s hard to know what is more “right” since more people have apple products than ever before, but wow I love my post-Ive Mac a lot more, and design across the board has focused a bit on function w/ Craig getting a bigger role
From what I have read Fadell didn’t seem to have a lot of internal fans, and there were some major software issues under his leadership, but there is no doubt he has clout with Jobs and provided a different perspective. Jobs was always willing to play the role of tie breaker that I am not sure Cook is comfortable in, so it makes sense to have a more harmonious leadership team that can come to a consensus more often than not without an intermediator.
There does seem to be more collaboration and sensible compromises from all internal stakeholders than at any time at Apple, at least that is how it feels as an end user. Apple products of the last few years have less head scratching omissions and/or design/engineering decision.
The MacBook Pro from 2016 to 2021 is the embodiment of that weirdness.
Apple's post-Jobs success has been the snowball effect of iPhone capturing more of the market.
Mac suffered a lot under Jobsless Ive (Cook doesn't care about product one way or the other), surviving the butterfly / touchbar winter because customers were able to keep their old Retina laptops, customers groaned and beared with lemon laptops for a few years, and desktop declined in overall relevance (except gaming where Apple never had a presence anyway), and started to recover in the post-butterfly/post-touchbar/M1 era.
I’m not sure if having some badly designed products doesn’t make one a great physical product designer. It’s completely possible to be a great product designer with few bad products.
I’m not arguing that Ive is a great designer. Ok just saying that the iMac hockey puck mouse doesn’t invalidate that claim.
Fair. I use it as an example of uncontroversially bad design, and his most infamous mistake being ages ago does count in his favour (even if the dead cockroach charging mechanism of the modern mouse is also his), even though I chose that example in part because people argue both ways about his more recent design choices. Myself, I do not like any design choice I’ve heard attributed to him, but that’s not enough by itself either.
I feel like you can't be a great designer if you neglect human interfaces, at that point you're just an artist. Nothing wrong with that, but good design it is not.
Jonathan Ive got rich and started designing luxury products for himself. Stuff like gold Apple Watches that were soon obsolete or ridiculous luxury bands for them. Even a regular leather Apple Watch strap ended costing hundreds of dollars. At one point I needed a new leather band for mine and I bought a perfectly nice third party band for the same price as the sales tax on the equivalent Apple one.
I think part of the reason they sold insanely expensive Apple Watches is that they wanted to compete with luxury watches. Of course, the functionality is very different; the similarity is that both are methods of conspicuous consumption.
I’m not an Apple Watch fan myself (still clutching my Pebble for dear life), but I can understand why the uber-expensive Apple Watches would appeal to a certain audience.
> I can understand why the uber-expensive Apple Watches would appeal to a certain audience.
I never could understand why Apple (or anyone else) this would be a possibility. Luxury watches are almost synonymous with heirloom; there is no way anyone will be wearing a functional Gold Apple watch in 2085 with the anecdote "This was my dad's watch" - it would be hopelessly outdated, and likely non-functional by then. This is not the case with other luxury watches. This has little to do with branding, but everything to do with expected longevity and utility.
That heirloom stuff is purely marketing the fantasy of rich parents handing down a bauble (instead of, say, a business or real assets) aimed entirely at middle class and upper middle class people. It’s not real.
I may not be understanding your point: are you suggesting that 60-year-old still-functional swiss-made "baubles" don't get inherited? Old money is almost entirely defined by items inherited from forebears.
Old money is not about baubles it’s about the means to earn a living, connections and the knowledge of how to retain wealth.
Passing down a watch or car is an incidental thing and the watches real old money passes down are not the ones like Patek Phillipe who find it necessary to run ads suggesting otherwise to the middle class readers of The Economist.
I can. It's for an interval including instagram-flexing up to heirloom, not actually competing properly with a really nice watch. You wouldn't see a the drivers at a Grand Prix wearing an Apple Watch but the influencers (grumble) are.
This is somewhat true throughout all of apple's products. Release a new Mac or iPhone, you'll notice a lot of people (especially musicians) buying them for no utilitarian reason other than because it's new and because it'll be theirs - and it's expensive. Apple's marketing and reputation is so brilliant it's ingrained almost like a religion (Certainly socially what religion was to a ye olde' peasant)
I agree that they won’t be heirlooms, and old money folks would never be fooled into thinking they would.
But a lot of people wear luxury watches simply to show off how much disposable income they have. To these people, having a watch that is recognizably expensive is the only requirement.
I saw a woman using one of the new Macbook Pros in an airport a few weeks ago, and I was confused, because it looked exactly like my beloved silver Macbook Pro from 2007. It even had lots of ports!
With the speed of the M-series processors, and the fact that I can get one with ports and without an idiotic touchbar, I've started considering an Apple laptop for the first time in years.
I'm sure it's just a matter of time before the pendulum swings back again, alas.
I have an M1 Pro MacBook Pro and it's quite nice. Wish they could have squeezed a USB-A in there for travel but otherwise it's pretty perfect. And the recently announced MacBook Air I assume is nice if you want something a bit lighter--although the MacBook Pro is still a pretty light and svelte laptop by historical standards.
The MacBook Pro can support several external displays simultaneously:
Up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Pro) or up to three external displays with up to 6K resolution and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Max)
I think you remember right, this is the same issue as with the M1. The continued existence of this specific model (M2 13“ Pro) is by far the most confusing aspect of the current Mac lineup
The just-updated base MBP still can't do this. But surely it will be updated before next decade, as GP suggested (perhaps exaggerating). I assume the base model will be updated with 2 years, or retired. I can't imagine they'll sell many units, considering how the MBAs are less expensive, sleeker, and have better camera/IO.
What do you mean by that? Multiple monitors without an adapter? I have 2017 and 2019 Macbook Pro's and I use 2 27" monitors with a thunderbolt -> 2 HDMI out adapter. I don't think I'd use it without an adapter even if I could, no need to take up extra ports.
Except all the parent comments of the discussion just said "Pro" and/or "M1 Mac", yours is the first that specified 13" MBP. So there seems to be some confusion and/or disagreement about what is being discussed.
To clarify the M1 Macs, not Pro, Max, or Ultra can only support one external display. This also seems to be the case with the non-Pro/Max/Ultra M2 macs.
I'm not sure most people (including reviewers and resellers) assume the phrase "M1 Mac" excludes macs with M1 Pro, M1 Max, or M1 Ultra chips (or even know which Mac models include which M1 variants), so beware this communications confusion may be likely to reoccur.
That is true only of the 13" m1 Pro, and the 13" m1 macbook air. The 14" m1 mbp, 16" m1 mbp, the m1 mac mini, and m1 studio all support more than 1 external display.
Larry Ellison was prescient when he said that Jony Ive would run amok without an editor in Steve Jobs, in an interview after Jobs' death (Ellison was good friends with Jobs). Perhaps the utter lack of design innovation and frankly, new consumer products led Jony Ive to obsess over the ring campus, going to ridiculous lengths to make things just so. All that money and creative energy could have been put into groundbreaking product, but with Steve Jobs gone, I doubt there was anyone else who could do what he did.
On the other side, maybe it is a good thing he could distract himself with the ring campus instead of submitting the MacBook pro to "more design."
My opinion of Jony Ive is that he is better consumed in moderation, as some cheeses. Just a little bit of Jony at a time is just about perfect.
Neither do I. But if Apple created a new category of device that drastically changes how people use computing in their everyday lives, would you like to own one or not, eventually? Chances are you'd eventually buy one and start using it.
I steadfastly refused to use a smartphone and a tablet when the products came out but ended up making them an integral part of my daily life. Apple has made products that have fundamentally altered our idea of a computer a few times, our idea of a phone once, and our idea of a music player once, and a consumer information consumption device (tablet). I'm talking about that level of innovation here. A laptop without ports and that is x mm thick is not a 'new' consumer product from this perspective.
One thing I wonder about is whether Apple could have ever built the current crop of laptops if it hadn't gone through the terrible design that over-emphasized minification. That is, were there gains in space-saving that were only possible because of the single-minded focus on making small laptops, which we now enjoy in our more-sensibly sized MBPs?
As an outsider, I have no idea whether this is the case. But I could imaging that if they had stayed on a more evolutionary design path, their current laptops might not be quite so amazing.
I can't tell for iOS, but for macOS the UI has only gone downhill since Ive's departure. Broken navigation gestures and shortcuts, UI inconsistencies, indistinguishable toolbar icons, wasted space everywhere... Since Big Sur I feel like I'm using a bad Linux clone of macOS.
They desperately need someone running the show who is obsessive about consistency, will QA the UI obsessively, and will terrorize the UI designers into compliance. Jobs’ biggest role was to demand conformance to his design tastes.
I felt because current Apple is all about optimising. From Hardware Cost, Market Fit, and even Software. Making Software that looks and feels the same across iPad, iPhone and macOS may save some engineering cost or design cost. But to me, that is still a very toaster fridge design.
Another point of the article that's compatible with what you're saying but still a concern - anything under Tim's $10b potential threshold gets more excluded from cross-team collaboration and attention and resources than they did previously
It's an attack on the butterfly keyboard, removing MagSafe, removing HDMI, removing the headphone jack, reducing battery capacity, the unreadable iOS 7 UI, the trash can, etc.
I wonder if we're being too quick to blame him for the Butterfly keyboard. Sure it was his design, but there were engineering issue. Was Ive powerful enough to overrule Tim Cook and everyone else and keep a faulty keyboard for that long? So far I've only seen a lot of speculation from tech websites, but maybe someone has some proper source, I might be totally wrong.
It could also be a widespread cultural issue where Apple is unable to admit fault. Sure, Apple removed the butterfly after he left, but they're still quite stubborn about not putting USB-C on iPhones, for example.
USB-C itself is great. Love the fact that I can plug a single cable into my MacBook for all docking purposes (charging, display, peripherals).
The annoying thing was the lack of everything else except usb-c. Especially in 2017 when it was uncommon and for devices featuring only 2 ports. „Dongle life“ was a serious step backwards.
From my own observations working at a company with a visionary CEO/founder, people with personalities like this tend to kinda balance each other out — so you need more than one. The CEO would suggest some batshit crazy idea, but the engineering lead would bring it down to earth and make it practical before even beginning to discuss it with the rest of the team. If there's no contention, no one to keep such a person in check, no other visionary person to criticize their ideas and ask the right questions, these batshit crazy ideas end up getting implemented and shipped as is. Guess how I found out.
I really loved the design of the Touch Bar/Butterfly keyboard visually.
It would have been great if:
- They kept the butterfly but completely solved the failure problem.
- Supported Touch Bar with actual haptic feedback that could really be used "professionally" as in a Pro device. It could at best become a gimmick, but if played right, had great potential.
- Had a simplified thin chassis with less ports. I really don't wanna pay for an HDMI port, SD reader, and a headphone jack that I'll never use in my entire life. I still believe after all the years, unification of everything to a single port (USB-C) was right. The industry should have forward to, say, support HDMI over USB-C on ubiqutiously, and really should have adopted a single card type: now we practically have 3: SD, microSD, and CF. My camera has a CF card, my drone has a microSD, and ironically regular SD is the only one that don't use so I still carry a dongle anyway (microSD adapter in this sense can be considered a passive dongle). Instead of the headphone jack it could stream raw audio over USB-C and offload DAC to the connected device. I also get that without a single standard, Apple also couldn't make everyone happy at the same time, but if there was a single standard port, or even a wireless standard that provided Gigabit speeds in around less than a meter, that would have been a great device with much less ports.
Of course, this is not reality, and I of course also get why Apple added all those back, and I love my M1 MacBook Pro regardless. I just wanted to share a vision.
> I really don't wanna pay for an HDMI port, SD reader, and a headphone jack tha
You don't want to pay for $20 worth of components? Like what another comment stated, you're getting components that have been tested by Apple and will have documented specifications.
Forgot to add: also about aesthetics. I'm a minimalist guy who loved simplicity (hence loved Ive'd designs). Less ports and possible slightly thinner chassis as a result of it is something I'd have preferred even if there was no price difference.
I used it too especially in Vscode to move forward/back in views of code locations when debugging/coding.
That was the first thing I missed, along with the custom controls for DND/Focus which was one tap away on Touch Bar.
Though it was a lot of hit or miss to use Touch Bar while looking at the screen, as there wasn't a physical feedback of pressing, and no indication of button bounds by touching.
The first thing I did when I got on M1 without Touch Bar was to open up Karabiner and map right Cmd and right Option keys to navigating back and forward in Vscode. After getting used to it in a few days, it was much smoother than using the Touch Bar as I was using a physical key.
People can (and often will) be vindictive, specially people with the power over you and your career. Call me cynical, but in my few decades of work life I've come across more than a few such people. Say what you will about how you wish leaders would behave, but reality is different.
I've seen ego- and power-tripping at all levels, even in situations where the people playing these games had nothing to gain or lose from torpedoing the other.
Imran Chaudhri would have been best served by keeping all written communications strictly minimal and work related. Something along the lines of "I'm leaving in a months' time for other opportunities. It was a pleasure working here, thank you for your support, wishing you all the best." Nothing would have been misinterpreted.
Keep any and all sentiments out of work related communication.
> Stringer found the HomePod dissatisfying because Apple treated it as a hobby, depriving it of the cross-division focus it lavished on core products, such as the iPhone and iPad.
I mean...yeah? iPod, iPhone and iPad are Apple's whole 21st century legacy. And most recently, arguably Apple Watch and EarPods.
They all have the same thing in common - they're wearables that you see on the person on the street.
Apple is a trillion dollar company (and not a skeleton in a graveyard of companies crushed by Microsoft in the 1990's that it almost was) because of iPhone and iPad.
Every other Apple product is a "hobby" by comparison, and that includes iMacs, and Macbook Pros.
You have to have your eyes open about the product you work on, and where it sits in the company hierarchy. Not everything is a core product, but that doesn't mean it's not important.
This hobby attitude is exactly why Google kills so many products. Google Reader is a hobby; leadership can't ever imagine it being a billion-dollar business so it doesn't justify any more maintenance effort. HomePod is certainly going down that path.
I partly agree. But what makes the iPhone so sticky is ecosystem--and that includes a bunch of other products that might be a lot less interesting in isolation.
Indeed. I'm a staunch Android user, but I seriously envy iPhone users for the Apple Watch. Nobody else has put the same level of care and resources into their smartwatch and if it wasn't for a myriad of personal dealbreakers I have with Apple products, I'd be tempted to switch to iPhone to be able to have an Apple Watch.
The one thing about all this press from "After Steve" - the author is one of those reporters who tend to make speculative guesses about Apple that have not borne out. Granted, perhaps he took extra effort to get sources/research material for the book but I'd take it with a grain of salt.
Today, none of Apple’s products spark my excitement and joy like they did from 1999-2011. Everything today is predictable, safe and iterative. I look forward to reading this book. Maybe it can provide some insight. I hope Apple’s design team can recover.
Unfortunately, the design team isn’t the only thing afflicting Apple’s products. macOS crashes, previously extremely rare are no a weekly event for me. On Apple gear. My iPhone 8 Plus only intermittently generates notifications from colleagues while at work. Flaky Wi-Fi. Autocorrect has learned too much and instead of correcting typos natural to an onscreen keyboard, now materially changes sentences on the fly, respelling correctly-spelled words, apparently based upon some engineer’s idea of ML Nirvana and contextual language processing. Hey MF I don’t write _your_ way. Lock Screen appears abruptly during use and is unlockable, requiring a reboot. It’s almost like the “the new windows will fix all the crashes” (3.1/95/98bXP) guys have set up shop at Apple and are perpetrating Jobs’ feared “Bozo Explosion”. Ironically, Windows on my aging MBP is my most stable compute experience on the daily now. Well, except for the Linux servers and their mult-year uptimes.
You should have a MacBook to be looked at. I have an intel mac from work and a personal M1 mac, and I rarely have to reboot them. The only time I remember having a kernel panic with a recent Mac OS was after installing Bluestack.
>Apple’s operations team determined that making the iPad would require building several new features from scratch. The first-time costs of new machinery, a new logic board, and other components would amount to billions of dollars, an investment that would take years to recoup. Those so-called nonrecurring engineering costs led Apple’s business division to suspend the iPad.
I think this sums up pretty much everything that is wrong with Modern Apple. And as someone who used to scrutinise everything Apple, from their quarterly report to Supply Chains. This is sadly the case. You only need to look at Apple Retail to see how it went from a Marketing, Services and User experiences goal to some financial checkbox.
I would imagine Steve would have authorise the few billions just to build a better iPad.
It is also clear Johny have a some sort of burnout at Apple, Software UX should never have been under his decision making. After the departure of Forstall, Jony went all in and teared everything apart in iOS7 within a year. Spend most of this time on Apple Retail redesign and Apple Park. And clearly trying to make the ultimate product he long dreamed off, the Macbook and MacBook Pro Touch Bar before the tech was ready. And somehow had an Apple Design Book by the end of 2016, which I thought was basically a tribute dedicated to Johny.
Don't quit until the money is in the bank. I mean it. Don't trust your boss or HR or anyone. People can be capricious and you don't want your hard earned compensation to be subject to this. The HR department is not there for you - they are there to protect the company.
From the outside, it seems like the poison of flat design only flourished when Jobs died. The beautiful, thoughtful, intuitive, accessible skeuomorphism was replaced with flat design only after Jobs wasn’t there. Was Jony only able to wrench away the beauty then? It seems like it. Humans live in a 3D world and take visual cues from things like lighting, gradients, shadows, materials and textures. Flat design strips that all away.
I agree, I love skeuomorphic designs even though the common consensus seems to be that it's obsolete/outdated. I guess it's a consequence of the unusually high influence Apple has on the design world. It seems like no matter what Apple decides to do, every single designer will blindly follow them.
I don't know if most people consider skeuomorphic designs obsolete/outdated, but the costs would be far greater today compared to when iOS was only for a handful of different resolutions for the iPhone and iPad. Not only do you have to consider the physical screen size differences with possibly different PPI, but all of the sidebar/split-screen/multi-window modes would require additional work.
It's kind of like when most websites started to switch to responsive designs where image heavy layouts and other fun animations kinda dropped off. It was just too costly to make things work well.
I think it depends on the level of skeumorphism — a button doesn’t need to be a bitmap a-la Bryce or Kai’s Power Tools or Poser to be skeumorphic, it can be a bevelled rounded rectangle like MacOS 8 or a more complex but still procedurally generated 3D effect of the Aqua UI.
ok, yeah. Was thinking of the original Notepad, where the frayed yellow tear-off sheet border drove me nuts! Anything tied to the "desktop metaphor" - bits are not atoms
I tend to prefer some of the more 'flat' modern designs in many ways, but I do think people are too binary about the skeuomorphic stuff. They could have modernised the design and still kept some of the useful skeuomorphic cues.
I think what pushed people away from the skeuomorphic stuff is that it feels like the aesthetics can become to feel dated quicker? But I don't think that necessarily needs to be the case.
Like skeuomorphic design in itself isn't 'dated', but the aesthetics chosen can be.
I think if you went back and looked at some of the OS X and, especially, iOS design elements of a decade or so ago you'd probably find some of them pretty dated.
Another thing worth observing is that Apple exists as part of essentially the fashion industry which is design. And I don't necessarily wholly blame Apple for all the thin, grey, minimalist design that we see everywhere these days.
> I think if you went back and looked at some of the OS X and, especially, iOS design elements of a decade or so ago you'd probably find some of them pretty dated.
I mean that's kinda what I was saying in that the aesthetics are dated, but I think the aesthetics chosen are distinct from the concept of 'skeuomorphism', the aesthetics of a particular implementation can be dated, but the idea of skeuomorphic design might not be.
My mother struggles with her iPad. I presume Apple does usability and discoverability studies with seniors, but clearly they ignore the results. Usability was a sacred goal back in the HIG golden days, but now is sacrificed.
If they had a geriatric mode that concentrated on functional UI over form, I would probably use it myself. Here are the most obvious issues (some are Safari specific):
* Lack of scroll indicators. If you don’t know you have to scroll, then you are screwed. It doesn’t have to be scrollbars, but there must be some visible indication and/or control so that the need for scrolling up or down in particular is obvious and discoverable.
* iPad multiple windows. The usability of this is completely broken. I would also love to disable it for myself, because I don’t use multi-tasking and the UI only ever frustrates me. Horrific UX.
* Keyboard focus indication. Watching your mum type into a field, scroll, and not realise the keyboard focus is not where she expects is hella frustrating. Should a field outside the viewport even retain keyboard focus?
* <input type=number> completely broken. I have watched my mother type in a number using a comma (because other numbers on the page were displayed with commas) and the UI silently fails. Same with $. I’ve experienced this as a developer - it is just sooooo broken because the field accepts invalid characters but input.value == "" which is fucked.
* auto-hiding the tab bar in Safari. Mum opens a hundred tabs. And doesn’t know about the rest of the Safari toolbar. Just leave the chrome visible please.
* Hard to Undo. I remember how fucking magical undo was, and still is. Undo is not accessible (although admittedly far far worse on Android). Implicit save is fantastic for most things, but frightening for some settings. System confirmation modals as a workaround are seriously fucking nasty.
* The top-right swipe system menu is difficult to learn. Especially for system modal changes (rotation lock, wifi, bluetooth).
There are so many complicated things on the iPad that I need to teach my mother, just like Windows of yore. Some of those issues can easily be fixed, if the UI were to be more obvious and less “pretty”.
Maybe they could call it “beginners” mode. Like the opposite of a “pro” model or something.
While I am being a whinging Englishman, they could fix some bugs too. 4 major iPadOS versions, and I still run into the same fucking bugs every day. I mean, the hardware is great, but why do the same bugs persist forever? Obvious bugs, with many appearing to be very shallow. Maybe hire some devs to fix bugs as their only job?
Nonsense given we are still in flat design territory (a several years refined version of it) unless you really consider the current state remains poison
Banks obviously have a lot of financial data at their disposal to use how they see fit. But out of curiosity I checked my bank website which falls under this category and there were only 2-3 trackers picked up by my browser and extensions.
After reading that, Ive is a piece of shit.
That guy went out of His way to be cool. Instead of clarifying the misunderstanding, they just nuked him from orbit.
I worked with Jony after we were acquired. The original Siri linen background was his idea, the bubbles had to be perfect, the padding, the text size, the lists goes on. I inferred this as design obsession and did not find it offending, he was right 95% of the time.
When I left Apple, I emailed with Jony on a device I had designed and pitched internally in 2011 but was shelved. His response has stayed with me to this day, “not all ideas make the cut, even the best ones”.
He could have cut me down or ignored me, but he responded with honesty.
I think that void he left when he moved on was too big to be filled. Steve and Jony were always together, pretty much every day we would see them at lunch.