Apple Designer Honoured By British Crown

metalcup writes "The vice-president for design at Apple, the man behind the iPod and iMac, has been inducted into the Order of the British Empire as a Commander (a CBE honour)." From the BBC story: "Mr Ive started working for Apple in 1992 but exerted a big influence on its products only in 1997 when Steve Jobs returned to the company he co-founded. Mr Ive's first design for Apple, the iMac, was hugely influential and has been followed by a series of other widely admired gadgets ... Since the launch of the iMac in 1998, Mr Ive has driven the design of almost every piece of Apple hardware. Landmarks include the original iMac, iBook, Power Mac, PowerBook, Mac Mini and iPod."

Comments

Durability

[Marlor]

Now, if only Jonathan Ive could design products that were as durable as they are beautiful. We have all heard about iPods scratching, but other Apple products are just as bad. The top of my Mac mini was scratched within hours of buying it, due to resting a keyboard on it. It really is amazingly scratch-prone. I have heard that iBooks suffer from the same problem (although not as severely).

Jonathan Ive is known for being hands-on in selecting the materials which the Apple devices are made from, but the plastics used in Apple products seem amazingly scratch-prone.

Add that to the hoops that must be jumped through in order to open entry-level Apple products, and you have products that look great out of the box, but are terrible after long-term use.

Re:Durability

[baryon351]

Even if you are right, durability is not the work of the designer, but of the engineers, who have to chose the right materials for the right usage

That would be true for an average designer but an industrial designer is as much engineer as they are designer. They're hands on throughout the whole process, working with their team experienced in ergonomics, acoustics, heating, cooling and materials. Jonathan Ive would have as much responsibility for the scratchiness or non scratchiness of anything he'd designed as he does for its shape.

Re:Durability

[pelorus]

It's a fair point. Apple and other manufacturers should revert to making their products out of the polycarbonate compounds of the past like the iMac.

Of course, I did meet one person who DROPPED their iMac and complained about how the cracked polycarbonate housing obviously wasn't very durable. I can't think of many 38 lb gadgets that would survive a fall like that, but this iMac did...

Suffice to say, the Mac mini wasn't designed to be the "shelf upon which you place the detritus of your life". I have a scratch on the top of mine but that comes from a month of shoving it in the same bag as it's power supply and other bits and pieces.

Re:Durability

[droleary]

We have all heard about iPods scratching, but other Apple products are just as bad.

As bad as what? The only reason people bitch about their Apple pretty getting beat up is because it is pretty. Nobody gives a rat's ass about scratches they get on their crap Dell box or some junk MP3 players. It's not that other products are more durable, it's that nobody cares half as much for those other products as they seem to care about Apple stuff. People who moan about a scratched nano always sound like they'd be shocked by the very concept of keying a car or getting a ding from someone else's door. Certainly a $20,000 product should be more durable than that!

Times have changed.

[Phariom]

That's part of the magic behind Apple's product line. "Back in the day," computers were ugly, huge, clunky, off-white boxes that people generally kept out of sight of guests, perhaps in a spare room somewhere along with their model rockets and comic books--as per a good friend of mine at the time. And this was fine; computers were not mainstream in the individual citizens' world. As computers became more and more integrated in our lives, form became just as important as functionality.

The average non-l33t users of today consider the computer to be just another piece of furniture or just another appliance in their homes--and in many cases, they are correct. Computers are no longer just toys; they are important tools.

Apple's decision to make their products just as appealing outside as inside is a major part of why I am one of their many fans. When people see my Mac sitting on my desk they never ask me how fast it is, how big of a hard drive I have, or if I use high-speed or dial-up; they compliment me on a fine looking machine.

1705-2005

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly three hundred years after the man who got bonked in the head by an apple.

What do you expect?

[tentimestwenty]

You were resting your keyboard on your Mini? Why? I don't understand. You don't mistreat beautiful things. Do you wash your new car with an old dirty rag? Would you prefer that the mini or ipod was made out the standard beige durable plastic? Hell, even if it was made of steel you'd still dent it and scrape it. Don't blame Apple because you're expecting a gorgeous under $500 consumer product to be impervious to wear.

Quit whining

[snowwrestler]

Every piece of plastic I've ever owned has gotten scratched. My Sony Walkman had scratches on it. My Sony Discman had scratches on it. My cell phone has scratches on it. My damn swiss army knife and my sunglasses have scratches on them. Heck my VCR and TV have scratches on their cases just from being moved a couple of times.

Plastic scratches easily--get over it. I've had 4 laptops over the past 6 years and every one of them has developed scratches on the lid and bottom. But they were not noticed by most people because a) the plastic was matte not polished, and b) the plastic was grey or black.

I now own an iBook and 2 iPods. They don't scratch any more or less easily than my Kyocera cell phone or my swiss army knife or my other laptops. But more people seem to notice the scratches, because more people want to look closely at my iBook and iPod than at my cell phone. Apple products are seen as objects of "high design" and so people look more closely and maybe have higher expectations.

The whole idea of caring so deeply about a few scratches is kind of pathetic I think. If you want your possessions to be flawless things for you to admire, buy them and put them into a case. I want mine to do stuff, and I'll take precautions to protect their function but not their looks (I protect the screens but not the cases). I was brought up to view "babying" products as effete and pointless. Things should be useful first and if they're pretty that's a nice bonus...but keeping them flawlessly pristine is for collectors and people who don't do anything.