Apple Doesn't Design For Yesterday

HughPickens.com writes Erik Karjaluoto writes that he recently installed OS X Yosemite and his initial reaction was "This got hit by the ugly stick." But Karjaluoto says that Apple's decision to make a wholesale shift from Lucida to Helvetica defies his expectations and wondered why Apple would make a change that impedes legibility, requires more screen space, and makes the GUI appear fuzzy? The Answer: Tomorrow.

Microsoft's approach with Windows, and backward compatibility in general, is commendable. "Users can install new versions of this OS on old machines, sometimes built on a mishmash of components, and still have it work well. This is a remarkable feat of engineering. It also comes with limitations — as it forces Microsoft to operate in the past." But Apple doesn't share this focus on interoperability or legacy. "They restrict hardware options, so they can build around a smaller number of specs. Old hardware is often left behind (turn on a first-generation iPad, and witness the sluggishness). Meanwhile, dying conventions are proactively euthanized," says Karjaluoto. "When Macs no longer shipped with floppy drives, many felt baffled. This same experience occurred when a disk (CD/DVD) reader no longer came standard." In spite of the grumblings of many, Karjaluoto doesn't recall many such changes that we didn't later look upon as the right choice.

Comments

I don't follow

[dos1]

So what's so "tomorrow" about change from Lucida to Helvetica, which impedes legibility, requires more screen space, and makes the GUI appear fuzzy? Is that the definition of "tomorrow" now?

Re: I don't follow

[bill_mcgonigle]

It's general knowledge in typography that Helvetica is the most legible typeface. Low-resolution devices present challenges that keep that from being true, so adaptations had to be made.

Of course, pretty soon if you want security updates you'll have to accept Helvetica, even on your low-resolution device. But you should stop being such a loser with a three-year-old computer and give Apple some more money.

Maybe they'll have "Mac Mode" ready for the iPhone by then.

Re:I don't follow

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a standard "apologist" tactic. Sort of like an appeal to authority, but one that assumes the authority knows more than you do.

In the future, impeding legibility, requiring more screen space, and making the GUI look fuzzy are just as bad as they are today. However, this author is indicating that eventually such things will become less needed, and we'll learn to live without them, and they fit the same pattern as Apple's abandoment of hardware that was really showing its age.

Except that this is not hardware. Fonts are just as functional as they were two hundred years ago. They haven't outlived their usefulness.

Perhaps high density pixel screens will fix the fuzziness, but it won't fix the footprint (unless Apple's font management is totally pixel based, which would be stupid, and I don't think Apple is stupid). But even then, if Apple released a poorly legible desktop on a high res display, it still would be poorly legible.

So you come back to the main point of this article. "Apple knew better back then"; ahem.... actually everyone knew better back then, floppies were used by about 8% of all the computer users when Apple finally ditched them. "and so Apple will know better now"; ahem... if only we were sure that past performance was a reliable indicator of future performance. "And we should trust Apple because they know more than us"; ahem... ok, so we've gotten to the real argument here.

Re: I don't follow

[Oligonicella]

Pro Litteris, the Swiss copyright society for literature does not agree. Helvetica doesn't even make the top twelve. Most returns on a search of "most legible typeface" that are by professionals boil down to 'whatever you're used to and like'.

Re:I don't follow

[AmiMoJo]

Helvetica is print font, not a screen font. It isn't optimized for pixel displays, and even on fairly high DPI displays does not look a nice as fonts optimized for them. Screen fonts take account of the pixel grid and get hand optimized to look good on them.

Apple is clearly hoping that they have a high end DPI that can overcome these problems, but it doesn't appear they have. The 5k display is only around 200 DPI, and Helvetica tends to look a bit naff below about 600 DPI at small sizes. Of course it's a little more complicated because they have sub pixel rendering, but it only affects horizontal resolution and not vertical resolution. To counter this they have made the fonts a little larger, but of course that means everything takes up more space on screen.

Everyone else uses screen fonts. Bitstream derived fonts for Linux and Android. Microsoft has Segoe and Meiryo, designed specially for them. Some phones have reached the point where Helvetica will look good, around 450-500 DPI, although the iPhone 6 Plus is only around 400 DPI.

Re: I don't follow

[ChrisMaple]

Helvetica was invented in 1957, so it wasn't created by Apple either. And no sans-serif font can be "most readable".

Re: I don't follow

[NJRoadfan]

Microsoft tossed out Tahoma and forced Segoe UI on everyone back in 2007. I don't recall it being that big of a deal.

Re: I don't follow

[lgw]

Not to disagree in principle, but don't confuse "readable" (ability to read for hours without strain) and "legible" (ability to make out each letter at all).

Serif fonts are readable: great for reducing strain from hours of reading under good conditions. That's why they're used for books (except some crazy tech books that get it wrong), newspaper text, magazine text, and so on. Serif fonts are perhaps over-used in blogs, from a desire to look more like a newspaper, I suspect, for text too small for the screen resolution to really make it work, but for eReaders and such that devote all possible space to the text, allowing for larger fonts, it's the obvious choice.

Sans-serif fonts are good for remaining legible under highly difficult conditions. That's why they're often the choice for billboards, for headlines (designed to attract you close enough to read the text), for advertising text (to make the big text easier to read from across the room, and the small print unappealing to read) unless the advertiser's style trumps other font choice concerns. Sans-serif was the only practical choice in the early days of computing, and so some people still see them as "technology fonts" - ooh, it's high tech, it should be sans-serif. Sigh.

Helvetica is a particularly demanding san-serif font. It's sort of the worst of both worlds for screens - it demands high DPI, but it's still less readable than a proper serif font. In a totally Apple move, choosing style over practicality, they pick the font that's famous for being the most stylish (at least among hipsters) over practical concerns (e.g., one-button mice, you're holding it wrong, bendy-phone - all style over practicality).

Re: I don't follow

[Immerman]

What makes you think professionals are even qualified to make the call? Presumably you're talking typographers, graphic designers, etc - artist types who couldn't construct a proper double-blind study to save their souls.

Re: I don't follow

[the_B0fh]

No no, this could turn out to be an HaterGate. Please do not try to bring facts into it! Let people who don't even use OS X come in and rant about the poor choices Apple consistently makes.

Re: I don't follow

[ShanghaiBill]

artist types who couldn't construct a proper double-blind study to save their souls.

Some studies have been done. However, I found none that even considered Helvetica as one of the options. So far I have seen no data to support the assertion that Helvetica is "most readable" or "most legible".

A Comparison of Popular Online Fonts
What Size and Type of Font Should I Use on My Website?
Another Comparison of Popular Online Fonts

Re: I don't follow

[AthanasiusKircher]

What makes you think professionals are even qualified to make the call? Presumably you're talking typographers, graphic designers, etc - artist types who couldn't construct a proper double-blind study to save their souls.

While that may be true, there have been a LOT of studies on typeface readability and legibility over the past 150 years or so, of varying quality.

After having spent some time reading these studies, I've basically come to the conclusion that we've learned basically nothing beyond three basic facts:

(1) readers don't do well with "weird" typefaces except in ornamental or occasional use -- use something that's close to what reader are used to encountering when they will read more than a few words in the font
(2) bigger fonts make reading easier
(3) unless the font has really unusual features (e.g., some characters that don't look like "standard" letterforms), overall design can usually fix most problems -- i.e., doing things like tweaking size, space between lines, space between words, etc.

The last point is really important. Most discussions of typeface legibility have to do with things like serifs, x-height, size of holes in characters like 'o' or 'p', etc. But as long as the letters actually still have standard shapes, you can usually tweak the size or spacing to make it just as legible.

Beyond that, it's basically personal preference and what people are used to. There are studies that seem to show small effects for everything -- serif fonts are better, except when they're not. Justified text is better than ragged right, or the reverse. (Hyphens are bad, or they aren't.) Double-spacing is necessary, or it's not. Larger spaces after periods or punctuation help readability to a small extent, or they don't make a difference.

Frankly, having read a lot in the literature of typography, I think the problem with most of these studies is that overall design matters most, and I'm not talking about the design of the study (though that's important), but rather the typographic design and use case.

Some typefaces will perform better when spacing is tight, others seem better if more space is available. Some typefaces are good for people with various disabilities or vision problems, but readability may be different for those with "normal" vision. Some typefaces look better than others when a smaller size is used, but people express a different preference when text is larger... or when resolution is varied... or....

Typeface is just one of many elements of proper design. And usually reactions like "Oooh, you simply CAN'T use that font on a screen!" or "No, no, no! That works well for newsprint and headlines, but no one would ever like long text blocks with that!" are just based on what people are used to, not what would actually be more legible or readable.

For example, there are situations where people have come to expect serif or sans serif fonts. Expect people to complain if you don't use the standard choice in those situations. That's not to say one or ALWAYS better than the other -- it's just a combination of what's expected and the other design choices.

Re: I don't follow

[AthanasiusKircher]

Serif fonts are readable: great for reducing strain from hours of reading under good conditions. That's why they're used for books (except some crazy tech books that get it wrong), newspaper text, magazine text, and so on.

[snip]

Sans-serif fonts are good for remaining legible under highly difficult conditions. That's why they're often the choice for billboards, for headlines (designed to attract you close enough to read the text), for advertising text

Nope, nope, and nope.

Basically, serif fonts are used where serif fonts are used because they're more familiar where serif fonts are used.

Sans serif are used where they are used because they tend to be used in those cases. Readers are used to seeing them there.

Numerous studies have come up with inconsistent results (for a good summary of what dozens of them on the subject say, see here).

The takeaway message is readers find familiar design choices to be easier to deal with. Most books and long texts tend to be set with serifs, so we've come to expect that -- but well-designed studies have shown little difference (or inconsistent results). Web fonts tend to be sans serif, so we expect that. And I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about when you say that sans serif will remain legible under difficult conditions -- if anything, studies tend to show that serif fonts have a small advantage (probably not significant) there. After all, serifs were inherited from Roman techniques for carving letters into giant stones, not in writing: I doubt Roman sculptors would have added things that seemed to decrease legibility to monuments. (The one "difficult condition" where sans serifs have a claimed advantage is in low resolution electronic situations, but recent studies have shown this advantage to be small or non-existent.)

Re: I don't follow

[AthanasiusKircher]

Sure, sure, 300 years of technology have it all wrong and a few "recent studies"

Did you even look at the link? The guy looked at something like **50 studies** from the past century or so. And there have been at least a dozen more I've seen dealing with readability in a variety of fonts since that article was published in 2008.

show one more way for hipsters to be "smarter" than everyone else.

What do "hipsters" have to do with this?

And by the way, frankly, I prefer serif fonts too for reading -- I think sans serif fonts looks stupid. (Actually I kinda dislike them in general and have been known to change my browser defaults to remedy this situation -- but my personal preference is different from what actual studies show about legibility/readability.)

To mock your most absurd claim further (your last one): you can make sans-serif letterforms distinguishable, barely, with 5x3 pixels to work with.

Yes, to mock you back: this is of course the most common usage case these days with high-res screens. :)

Look, the question is about LEGIBILITY, not ability to render. At small enough sizes, serifs can't even be placed on fonts -- you're correct. But this has nothing to with whether people prefer to read 8-point or 10-point text in serifs versus sans. And basically there some studies I've seen recently which show people to prefer serif fonts for reading at smaller font sizes and sans only at larger sizes.

But it's a small effect, and I don't know if it's actually significant -- point is, if you're dealing with enough pixels to actually display serifs, there doesn't seem to be a strong preference one way or the other. And if you have fewer pixels, serif fonts will essentially look like sans anyway, so again they're about equivalent.

Nonsense

[Carewolf]

The distortion is strong in that one. And now he must excuse his earlier brief glimses of reality.

Btw. Helvetica is a classic font that is more narrow and easier to read than Lucida especially on print, on a screen it is best with good hinting, which Apple's fontsystem doesn't do.

Re:Nonsense

[Chelloveck]

The distortion is strong in that one. And now he must excuse his earlier brief glimses of reality.

This. Just the case of a fan trying to justify a questionable decision. UI has become a fashion show. Helvetica is this year's hem length. Flat, primary colors are in, and they're simply FABulous! None of the changes have anything to do with usability. It's all change for the sake of change, nothing more. It's the same reason dresses and cars change their outward appearance from year to year, regardless of any substantive changes. It's done to make you think, wow, this is new, I MUST HAVE.

(Full disclaimer: I'm a sucker for upgrades. I always need to have the latest version of any software, regardless of whether or not it's actually better. Call it an OCD-ish mental disorder. I installed Yosemite yesterday, but unlike the author of the post I don't feel the need to justify Apple's fashion sense.)

Apple's take on Windows 8

[BenJeremy]

Ugh... when Microsoft throws out the old to make with the new, however stupid and ill-advised it really is, they justifiably get lambasted for it.

When Apple does it, they are "designing for tomorrow"

Um, ok, sure. Whatever. Ignoring good user interface design is still bad.

Apple thinks ~100 dpi is the past

[tepples]

Perhaps "tomorrow" means that Apple has done internal tests to show Helvetica as more legible than Lucida on its Retina brand displays. We've come a long way since 1984 when Apple made 72 dpi the standard, and the iMac ships with a Retina display now.

They are all going down the toilet

[jones_supa]

Whatever. Ubuntu Unity seems to be the only cool-looking UI left.

"The Right Choice"?

[QuietLagoon]

... Karjaluoto doesn't recall many such changes that we didn't later look upon as the right choice....

The opinion of whether or not it was the right choice is severely clouded by the fact that in the Apple environment, there is No Choice. The user Has To go along with what Apple decides is The Future.

.
Apple has built the walls so high around its empire, that few dare leave. Therefore, they must rationalize that whatever Apple decides for the future is The Right Choice.

Re:"The Right Choice"?

[AthanasiusKircher]

The opinion of whether or not it was the right choice is severely clouded by the fact that in the Apple environment, there is No Choice. The user Has To go along with what Apple decides is The Future.

Precisely. Even when Apple's decisions are good, they generally end up inconveniencing a bunch of users for quite some time. I built my current desktop last year, and it's the first machine I built with no floppy drive. But I darn well still have a CD/DVD reader/writer, which is useful periodically. Do I use it everyday? No. Could I get along without it? Yeah. But once every few months I have a task where it's still a useful thing to have around.

The main reason I refuse to buy Apple computers is because of lack of choice. I understand that by locking their users into a smaller set of choices, they make it easier to support. But I often want better options for my particular uses. So even if Apple offered a machine that is exactly what I want (probably at a price premium), I still wouldn't buy it -- because I don't want to support that kind of fascist approach to hardware, software, apps, etc. (And yeah, that's a strong word, but I truly believe it's a potentially dangerous development for free use of computers if everyone were to adopt it.)

Apple has built the walls so high around its empire, that few dare leave. Therefore, they must rationalize that whatever Apple decides for the future is The Right Choice.

Yes, all this justifying of "they ultimately saw what was best for the future" sounds like so many big companies' rhetoric. Google is notorious for this too in recent years, breaking their search for power users so it's only useful to people who can't spell or don't actually know the right word for what they're looking for. (Yes, Google -- I did actually ONLY want results with those particular obscure words in them.)

That's not so much about "the future," I suppose, but the infamous Gmail redesigns are. I don't know and don't really care whether Google employees only use emails as equivalents to IM chats or whatever. I need to send emails every day that require me to do things like alter recipients, change subject lines, cc or bcc people, etc. -- and now I'm forced to do 2-4 extra clicks just to get what was there before. As someone who joined the Gmail beta via invitation very early, I almost abandoned Gmail completely last year -- until the unauthorized browser plugins came that basically allowed a reversion.

Maybe email will become obsolete or turn into text messages in a decade or so. But that isn't true in most places now, and I don't appreciate the current giant corporation attitude of "we're going to make random changes to 'simplify' our user experience. But if it makes your life a lot harder, too bad." It's not just an Apple thing.

All of that said, I don't really get what the big deal about a TYPEFACE change is. Resolutions are good enough now that legibility will be fine for just about any decent typeface. There's nothing "futuristic" about Helvetica or any other. Frankly, it's just some random change to UI that makes something look "new and improved" to differentiate from old, even if the actual changes "under the hood" are less pronounced.

So on OSX you can't choose the system font?

[Dr. Spork]

I don't often use OSX, but I'm a little mortified that the system font is dictated by the whims of Apple, instead of being selectable by the user. When I install Windows, one of the first things I do is to change the system fonts. In KDE I used to, but now I'm happy with the defaults. But it never occurred to me that there might be a modern OS that doesn't give you this option!

if you think products are consumer driven.

[nimbius]

Apple doesnt design for the past or the future, or even the present. Apple products are designed using focus groups and industrial engineering teams. once the nuts and bolts are completed, apple checks current fashion and design trends as set by the industry (Pantone for example sets your "favourite" color or scheme for the year) and conforms as necessary. Then, the largest marketing firms in the world polls their focus groups and create a multi million dollar campaign rivalling anything seen at even the american political level. The product is advertised on television, internet, billboards, and subtly through product placement in your favourite television shows until it becomes an icon or status symbol. Finally, a handheld computer that costs around $50 to make is sold to the general public for upwards of $300 as dictated by the finance team, with futher successors of the product priced more competitively as deemed necessary.

arguably consumer driven development or manufacturing as its told in the fairytale of the free market has been dead for 50 years or more. Its eulogy was trumpeted by Jimmy carter in his malaise speech as he committed political suicide by telling americans that buying endless amounts of more goods and services was simply contributing to misery. Frankly, you buy what you're told to buy due to a combination of manipuative social psychology and indoctrinative marketing. No one really needs a lexus or the latest iphone.

Helvetica pre-dates the space program

[Solandri]

Both Apple and Microsoft have been using ripoffs of Helvetica for decades as their default font. That was what all the cool kids did back in the 1980s - if you didn't want to pay for a font, you paid some graphics artist to design one which looked a lot like it but was slightly different. Adobe bought licenses for the real fonts, and if you were in the printing industry and needed the real Helvetica you could buy Adobe Type Manager (originally for Mac, later for WIndows).

All this announcement means is that Apple has finally decided to pay whomever has the copyright on Helvetica for the rights to use it as their default system font. The bit about "tomorrow" is just marketing spin to make it sound like some awesome new thing, when the font itself was made in 1957.

And yes Apple abandons old tech and adopts new tech sooner than the rest of the industry meaning they're often at the forefront of tech which later becomes commonplace among PCs. You can cherry pick some of their successes (e.g. 3.5" floppy, abandoning optical drives) to make them seem brilliant. Or you could list some of their failures (e.g. firewire, lightning thus far, SCSI on the desktop, PowerPC which they abandoned for Intel) to make them seem like bumbling idiots. Apple isn't a prognosticator. They're making guesses about the future just like everyone else. For some reason people are less likely to remember their failures than with other companies.

Hockey puck mouse

[Rick Zeman]

Karjaluoto doesn't recall many such changes that we didn't later look upon as the right choice.

He must have never tried to use the hockey puck USB mouse. Truly a case of form over function....

Apple Don't Design for Yestserday, but for Fanboys

[peppepz]

This has to be the biggest piece of Apple adulation that I've ever seen. A practice of flattery over everything Apple do is always superabundant in most of the output of the American tech press: we're used, for instance, to the reviewers' pirouettes when they first dismiss some bad choice by Apple as irrelevant, and then they have to praise the reversal of that choice as the best thing after sliced bread in some later version of an Apple product.

But in this case, well, Apple does something wrong (not even remotely comparable to the trainwreck that Microsoft did with Metro, I'll concede) that devalues the largest part of its already expensive product line, with the exception of the most expensive products, and without adding any value to those either, but Apple fan are happy nonetheless because... it's good to be shown how Apple does not care about who doesn't spend the most?

What is this, an exercise of asceticism in the path of the true Apple worship?

Headline Tweak

[ancarett]

Apple Changes System Font, Degrading Onscreen Readability

There, fixed that wonky headline for you. I suspect you were posting with the new OS X Yosemite and just couldn't read what you were typing?

Never mind the new font, the new font looks fine

[Jeremi]

What really causes my eyes to bleed is the new "flat" buttons that don't really look like buttons; they look like text labels. The top of every window now looks like someone gave a junior high student a screenshot of a Mavericks window and told him to reproduce it using construction paper, scissors and glue.

And the frosted-glass semi-transparency effects are just a pointless and unnecessary in Yosemite as they were in Windows. I get the feeling that the Apple UI team has run out of useful work to do, and now they are just changing things because they're bored. The next OS/X release will no doubt change them back, and then add in some other dubious changes that be reverted in the release after that.

Bauhaus

[sphealey]

Highly accomplished designers tend to fall in love with and become obsessed by Bauhaus style in its various cyclical incarnations. The remaining 99.999% of the human race finds Bauhaus objects and systems very pretty to look and impossible to use for more than a few days, as documented by Jane Jacobs, William White, Tom Wolf, and many others. The designers believe the rest of the critics are blind and the human race is just using their wonderful Bauhaus stuff wrong.

sPh

Re:Most Macs don't have Retina displays

[BronsCon]

This is just another sight that I was correct when I said that Apple computers are poised to become accessories for Apple's iOS devices, rather than the other way around. Apple, clearly, now caters to two groups: iOS device users (who will also be the biggest spenders on apps and media) and creatives. I don't see a problem with this, from a business standpoint it, as it makes perfect sense; I do see a problem from it from the standpoint of software developer and Apple user who loves his 17" MacBook Pro and wishes they'd once again target his demographic.

Creatives will naturally gravitate to the best available displays, which means either the retina-class iMac or MBP, or the Mac Pro and whatever their display of choice happens to be, and Apple definitely has them covered. Helvetica looks just fine on retina displays (honestly, I think it looks just fine @ 1200p on a 17" display, too), so these users won't be likely to complain.

They sell the most expensive hardware to the group least likely to buy a lot of apps and media from Apple, and I agree, that's the way to go. Users of iOS devices have voiced that they want the look and feel of their iPhone, iPod, and iPad everywhere they can possibly get it. Well, those use Helvetica, they also use flat neutrals, transparency, and blur. Apple catered to those users, who are likely to buy the cheaper computer and spend more on apps and media, without a second thought.

If you're not in those two categories or, at least, don't follow either of those spending patterns, I won't say Apple doesn't care about you at all; they certainly care about anyone who wants to give them money, just just don't care enough to give a shit what you want.

Again, I fully agree with this from a business perspective. Unfortunately, I have my own business, which comes with its own perspective, and if that's the view Apple wants to take, it's sadly incompatible with reality for a lot of professional users. It really saddens me, as they were making strides toward developing a huge presence in professional fields before Jobs passed; that has not only slowed, but reversed, since then. It doesn't seem to be hurting their sales, yet, but I imagine it will when they start making more obviously negative changes to OSX's UI. They'll still sell to iOS users and creatives, and they'll probably remain the college student's PC of choice; but, by crapifying the interface (observation of others in this thread, which I've already stated I don't necessarily agree with -- but, me vs them, they're the majority, so I'm using their opinion for my point) on lower-end-but-still-current hardware, which the mass market is more likely to be able to afford when they choose to buy Apple, they're removing much of the allure of their platform. This can't be a good thing.

Future *purchases*

[msobkow]

Apple does not design "for the future". They design for future purchases.

They drop support for older hardware to force you to upgrade, not because there is a technical problem mandating it.

I'm running Debian on a 12 year old box. It's had a CPU upgrade (to a whopping 3.8 GHz single core) and some extra RAM installed (4G total.) It's perfectly usable, and fully patched.

Had I bought a Mac, I'd have an unsupported paperweight years ago.

Oh yeah. :)

[fyngyrz]

Most clickable things on the web don't have boxes to make them look like physical buttons.

Those are hyperlinks. That's the generally accepted, even traditional, look for a hyperlink. You do know what a hyperlink is, do you not? When I click a hyperlink, I expect to arrive on a web page forthwith. That's what they mean. But that's not what these mean. These mean... random stuff. Normal words... are words. Underlined and/or blue-colored words are hyperlinks. Buttons, despite Ive's insane, drooling jihad against skeuomorphism, should look like you are expected to reach over and press them. This leverages the user's familiarity with the real world (something I admit I don't think I can assume you have) and creates a natural understanding of an implied action just by existing. An action, I might add, that is not hyperlinking. Because we use, you know, highlighted words for that. How would you react to a stereo that had no buttons, just words on its face? Is that intuitive? Of bloody course it isn't. You press a button, it depresses, it looks different, it clicks, you know to expect the action to occur. If it's a toggled state, the button stays in. Natural. Normal. Expected. But a word? Where's the premise for touching a word? Where indeed? Hyperlinks, you say? YES! BLOODY HYPERLINKS!

Ives is probably the worlds foremost product designer

Ah. Ah ha. Ha. Ha Ha Ha. Oh, that is priceless. Just priceless. Ive's work is at best, a mixed bag, and he surely isn't the world's foremost designer. I can think of any number of designers that make him look like the pretentious hack he is. Starting with any number of supercar designers, wandering off into audio equipment and musical instrument design, heck, there are even refrigerators that are designed better than Ive's work product. Also, Scott Forstall's ideas were far better in terms of design than Ives. He just wasn't minimalist -- but minimalist is not a synonym for "good", and in fact, very seldom is that the case.

Also, look at the new Mac Pro. What a dysfunctional failure-storm. Can't install drives in it, doesn't fit in with other equipment well, requires desk warts to be even reasonably functional... expansion is a plug-addled nightmare... even the plugs themselves can be pulled right out, no security (physical or data) whatsoever. Oh yeah, Ives. I wouldn't let that guy "design" my kitchen. He'd probably take out all the plugs, knobs and buttons, color everything silver, and not allow silverware dividers in the drawers or pots on the stove. But you'd get a microwave with only one setting, and son, you'd be expected to like it. And you... well, you probably would. Lacking any kind of taste as you do. ;)

You're one of these people that will always be a reactionary against change.

Yes, absolutely, that's why I praise Mavericks so highly after years of buggy OS's left unfixed. That's why I thought "awesome" when the fully expandable Mac Pro came out, and why I bought right in. That's why I changed from Windows to the Mac. That's why I generally have the latest in home theater gear. That's why I have a Tesla on order. That's why I cohabit instead of marry. That's why I'm atheist and not theist. That's why I just took in a severely injured kitten. That's why I get such a kick out of messing with a Raspberry Pi, cobbling up little RPi projects we can use around the house. That's why my favorite literary genre is hard science fiction. That's why I have moved to SDRs, away from conventional radios. In fact, that's why I write SDR software.

Yeah, I'm just terrified of change, you bet. You crack me up. Any other "insights" you might care to share while you're making things up out of the clear blue? I think Fox News is holding a place for you, better get right over there.

Let me at