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Interview With iMac designer, Jonathan Ive
rleyton writes "The Independent has an interesting interview with Jonathan Ive, the designer of the new imac (and the iBook, the iPod and original iMac...)" It's actually a pretty interesting
even if you think the new iMac is repulsive. Personally I dig it.
Granted, the new iMac is beautiful on the surface. But that great design is not limited to the outer shell. Check out what the iMac looks like on the inside. This Apple draft service manual has great pictures of the guts of the iMac.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Because building decent speakers into a small design is pretty impossible. It comes with one speaker built into the housing, and the middle and high end models come with some reasonable sounding separate Harmon Kardon speakers. The fact is that most people will be quite happy with the sound that comes as standard, and the people that aren't happy with it are likely to have a decent stereo system to plug the iMac into anyway. You can't satisfy the budget conscious and the audiophile at once, so you might as well deal with the budget conscious and let those who want the best sound set up their own stuff, which they'll no doubt be much happier with.
This interview touches on a few concepts that I think today's geeks (and many of yesterday's geeks too) are no longer in touch with.
Quality. Art. The "soul" of a machine.
There is something to be said for the amount of sheer human effort put in to designing a product like this. A Quality product shines in it's attention to human-machine interaction, but is a result of "inner beauty". For those of you who haven't programmed using Cocoa or haven't messed around much with OS X or actually seen and used a recent iMac in person, there's no substitute for the tangible results of Apple's years of dedication.
When I use Mac OS X, I can *feel* that somewhere in Cupertino there's an English major who was losing sleep at nights trying to make the text in the dialog boxes as clear and understandable as possible. When was the last time you felt that way about the latest d/l off of sourceforge?
The subject/object duality is something that premeates the "geek world" - I beg of the programmers and techs out there try to move beyond it. Apple's certainly tried to.
(I'd post more, but I haven't had my coffee yet... )
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"...and Maddest of all, to see Life as it Is, and not as it Should Be."
"The thing is, it's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better. That's what we have tried to do with the new iMac."
Personally, I like the new iMac. Not enough to abandon my 6 month old PC and switch back to Macs, but I think it's a pretty cool computer. No matter what your opinion of Macintosh or their employees is, you have to like what the designer said. So many times in this industry (think about all Microsoft products) people forget that it's easy to make new and different things, the hard part is making reliable, efficient products that truly are "better." I say score one for Macintosh with this new computer, and even if it doesn't sell like hotcakes, they are in good shape if they all think like this guy does.
~ now you know
Say what you may about the new machine, but I've already purchased one for my parents. It's the logical next step, since my father's got an obscenely expensive AV center, and a nice Sony DV camcorder, all of which he set up himself, yet refuses to check his own e-mail because of some ingrained fear of computers being as hard to use as they were 10 years ago. I'm betting this machine will change that for him.
Michael C. Hollinger
Virtual PC is a fantastic program. Adding it to the base config will mean:
1) Macs would become more expensive, by the cost of VPC+Win??? - and which version of Windows should they include?
2) every user who chooses Apple to avoid paying MS money would be unable to do so
All in all, this would shrink, not expand, their market share.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
However, since the introduction of the PPC, mac hardware has generally been respected by the geek community. Now that macs run OS X, the geeks like it even more.
However, there's always going to be somebody who has to bash the mac for whatever reason. But lets face it, in the year 2002 you can't show how cool of a computer user you are by simply bashing Apple.
Now Microsoft on the other hand....
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
Mostly Mac geeks, since many of us are graphic designers. It's no coincidence ;)
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
This isn't flamebait, but isn't this the situation with all laptop vendors? LCDs drop pixels, and on an all-in-one computer (desktop or laptop) you are stuck with it. Did you post this about the netVista or Thinkpad? =)
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
Having unfortunately dealt with Compaq, I wholeheartedly agree with your assesment on Compaq. I also now own a PowerMac G4 (I'm a UNIX-head who caught the MacOS X bug).
There luckilly is a big difference between the Compaq's you speak of and the Apple's of today. The biggest difference is that you don't *see* the wackiness. Since
Apple both does the BIOS, and the OS, no nasty hack like hidden partitions or weird NT drivers to get things to work properly.
Unlike the Compaq of the past, Apple doesn't try to make every peice of the pie either. Apple doesn't try to do stuff like make video cards, NIC's, or FUBAR SmartRAID cards. They leave that to other folks. My G4 has a Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet chipset, a normal Geforce2MX, and some outsourced sound chipset. It takes normal PC133 DIMM's, etc. They've learned to outsource & standardize a lot more since Jobs has come aboard. Sun does now too more, but they still manage some of the items on their own (Sun GigE 2.0).
Apple just makes sure that everything works together nicely. From the case, to the chipset, to the BIOS, and to the OS level. They do a beautiful job at it too.
P.S.: I've got a Compaq Proliant 4xPPRO 200 at home. Guess what it's used for? A TV stand (it's covered by a black sheet). I hate those machines with a passion.
That simply is not true. We are obsessed with quantification, as Ive points out. You trust doctors to explain and cure illnesses, and you don't know the science behind it. You probably believe that the colors of your dwelling can have an effect on your emotional disposition
.. sometimes you must carry them, or tilt them, or upgrade them, etc) of tools have an effect on their interaction with them is one of the best illustrations of the complete lack of faith that North Americans exhibit in the importance of design. You may not be able to count your 'happy points', but to suggest that the look of your computer has absolutely no effect on you is rediculous. Just because you can't point the 'HowMuchMoneyDidItMakeMe-o-meter' or the 'HowHappyAmI-o-meter' at the box doesn't mean that the asthetics of a tool do not effect your efficiency, levels of stress, or usage endurance. To listen to designers and architechs proudly explain how the design of a physical environment or tool affected the behaviour of the users and dewellers of their creations is to understand that the less you think about design, and simply place your faith in 'the experts', the more successful it tends to be.
That people do not believe that the asthetics (nevermind that the physical representation, ie, design of a computer does not exist in a vacuum
The speed at which you dismiss design vs. function suggests to me that you've never really given thought or faith to design, and thus never really experienced the benifits of proper industrial design. There is no clear line between function and asthetic, as you put it; a painting is a tool to stimulate parts of your brain that you want to stimulate, where as a tool is no good unless you can stand to look at it, use it, and spend time with it. Given the increase in stress of the average office worker, and the number of hours he or she spends with the tool known as the computer, it is a shame that people seem so quick to dismiss evironmental factors as having an effect on their emotional disposition.
To take it a step furthur, your bedroom is nothing but a tool to get some sleep in, so why not paint it completely black?
"Old man yells at systemd"
You are quoting a Microsoft software designer on software design. Wow, that has to redefine either "guts" or "insanity".
Every machine is the creation of a human. Some of those creations have a beauty and functionality surpassing that of others. Part of that can be unquanitifiable, and it is that that is a machine's "soul" - the very essence of what makes it different that cannot be summed up in numbers. Not every human has a mystical bent, but the vast majority do, even in this cynical time. This is why most people buy tables, instead of putting plywood on a bunch of cinderblocks.
Obviously, because you've never used either, and from this and your other comments have no idea what constitutes worth.
Cocoa, meaning the frameworks and objective C language in this case, is the best object oriented programming environment I've ever seen. Perhaps the problem is that it is not difficult enough for you to use? Perhaps you couldn't get enough "cool points" by accomplishing something easily, when there is a harder way to do it?
And "not where the money is"??? OK, it's true you can make more money if you use VB than if you program in Cocoa. I'm not aware of any decent programs written in VB, or any decent programmers who use VB, but whatever floats your boat, I guess.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits