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Apple is Really Bad At Design (theoutline.com)
Joshua Topolsky, writing for the Outline: Once upon a time, Apple could do little wrong. As one of the first mainstream computer companies to equally value design and technical simplicity, it upended our expectations about what PCs could be. "Macintosh works the way people work," read one 1992 ad. Rather than requiring downloads and installations and extra memory to get things right (as often required by Windows machines), Apple made it so you could just plug in a mouse or start up a program and it would just... work. Marrying that functionality with the groundbreaking design the company has embodied since the early Macs, it's easy to see how Apple became the darling of designers, artists, and the rest of the creative class. The work was downright elegant; unheard of for an electronics company. [...] But things changed. In 2013 I wrote about the confusing and visually abrasive turn Apple had made with the introduction of iOS 7, the operating system refresh that would set the stage for almost all of Apple's recent design. The product, the first piece of software overseen by Jony Ive, was confusing, amateur, and relatively unfinished upon launch. [...] It's almost as if the company is being buried under the weight of its products. Unable to cut ties with past concepts (for instance, the abomination that is iTunes), unable to choose clear paths forward (USB-C or Lightning guys?), compromising core elements to make room for splashy features, and executing haphazardly to solve long-term issues. [...] Pundits will respond to these arguments by detailing Apple's meteoric and sustained market-value gains. Apple fans will shout justifications for a stylus that must be charged by sticking it into the bottom of an iPad, a "back" button jammed weirdly into the status bar, a system of dongles for connecting oft-used devices, a notch that rudely juts into the display of a $1,000 phone. But the reality is that for all the phones Apple sells and for all the people who buy them, the company is stuck in idea-quicksand, like Microsoft in the early 2000s, or Apple in the 90s.
What's supposed to happen in the comments here, mods? I'll start: Define good.
Sex. Drugs, and Unix.
With the mini driver which are in USB, most stuff has been plug and play for everybody including windows now for a long time, the better part of a decade and a half. The apple from 1992 is not the apple from 2000 onward. Once they got their cash cow with the iPod, iPhone, they more or less started to drop in quality. Why should they bother much ? They will get their money : I know quite a few people at work which wait eagerly for the next iOS or the next iPhone version, while bemoaning the problem with apple products. Go figure.
Burn! Burn the witch!
Smartphones are approaching the same point as laptops a decade ago or screwdrivers a century ago. They are fine and don't need to be changed. There are emerging areas such as VR, voice and machine learning where there are lots of unsolved problems and opportunities for great design. But changing things for the sake of changing things does nobody any good. Apple should stick to their tradition of using technology in meaningful ways when it is ready.
He didn't teach anybody to approach problems the way he did. Apple did poorly when the board kicked him out. That SHOULD have been a warning. Apple's doing poorly again, and this time, unless there is a genuine miracle, Steve ain't coming back.
For all his ability to pitch to the public, Steve Jobs took direct interest in the products his company sold, rather than just focus on managing the company and leaving the decisions to be hashed out by committees developing a consensus several levels below him. The result is what you see now in Apple products - a muddled mess of different ideas that just don't fit together right, and very little actual customer value. The whole "facial recognition as your password" business for example, is certainly not worth the cost to regular consumers, and absolutely not so to people who care about actual security (for several obvious reasons I don't need to remind nerds about).
Like it or not, the world needs Simon Cowell types, who can simply act for the consumer and say "no - not good enough". They may be hard to work for, but without them you get stagnation, as we're seeing here.
I'm typing this on a 2015 MBP, given to me by my employer. It definitely has some things to recommend it, e.g. it's light weight, decent battery life, easy access to *nix tools (via Homebrew), speaker capability and screen brightness. In other respects though, I have to agree with the submitter. Hardware-wise, it's about on par with my 2010 Thinkpad. OS-wise there are a bunch of deficiencies which are not just my opinion about look-and-feel, but actual missing features. I'll just describe one quickly, which I feel is emblematic of Apple's general issues.
On a Mac, you can switch through display elements (windows, dialogs, full screen apps) in two segregated ways. Cmd-tab switches applications, cmd-backtick switches windows within an application. On one level, the segregation is logical, but in practice it leads to some really inelegant behaviors. It's impossible to place one window on top of a fullscreen application, so among other things you can't take notes while watching a fullscreen video. Full screen applications create their own workspaces which are children of the original workspace, and switching back to other workspaces isn't allowed. Actually, you can switch, but it will immediately scroll back to the full screen application.
Windows, on the other hand, simply has alt-tab (or win-tab), which cycles through all display elements without regard for parent application. It naturally allows windows to be displayed above fullscreen applications, and for fullscreen applications to be left in fullscreen mode when switching away or minimizing. It's more simplistic, but also more functional. Again, that's not an opinion, it's a missing feature: on a Windows PC one can take notes on a fullscreen video, and on a Mac one cannot.
It's a basic design choice that seems logical and elegant, but ends up handicapping the window system down the line. Another similar example is the total lack of a hotkey to restore minimized windows. There is Hide (cmd-H), but it only works on entire applications at a time.
.:Semper Absurda:.
And it's always been this way.
Like that time Steve Jobs wanted the PCB layout redone in the original Macintosh to one that looked more pretty, rather than the one that worked.
Ideas, as every VC and every entrepreneur knows instinctively, are a dime a dozen. It's the ability to execute on those ideas that matters. In the course of that execution compromises must be made to make the ideas reality.
'The pundits' make a point about Apple's success because it's self evident that consumers, in aggregate, consider Apple's compromises more then acceptable, hence driving Apple's growth.
Oooh. It’s horribles. A notch for sensors at the top of the screen. A black slice at the top of the phone would be so much better. Apple will collapse. Doom! Doom I say.
The post made some good points right up until the bleating about the notch.
First, that form follows function. They've been putting form first, and it shows.
Next, that they're not making post-modern art: they're supposed to be making devices that serve a practical purpose.
With iTunes, for instance, they have been unable to fix the most mind-boggling problem with its core functionality - playing music - that on occasion it stops playing music in the middle of a track and skips to the next one. Screencast evidence.
Attitudes make the difference between Space and Time: we want to MAX our temporal, and MIN our spatial extension.
The “notch” on the new iPhone X is not just strange, interesting, or even odd — it is bad. It is bad design, and as a result, bad for the user experience.
This is the first sentence in this piece. Complaining about a stupid little band thing in the new iphone. It doesn't explain why it's bad, it just states it's bad and says its unnecessary and could've been different. To the same end as this writer, I dub this piece of writing to be bad and unnecessary. It could've been different. Instead it's irritating and annoying. Justification? What the hell is that, I have declared something and once I have done so it is truth written plain! Away with you peasant, you and your "logical reasoning supporting a thesis" and other such notions. I've not the time for such things.
With iTunes, for instance, they have been unable to fix the most mind-boggling problem with its core functionality - playing music - that on occasion it stops playing music in the middle of a track and skips to the next one.
Maybe iTunes just doesn't like your taste in music and it's looking for something better. Wait until iTunes merges with Skynet.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"Macintosh works the way people work," read one 1992 ad... you could just plug in a mouse or start up a program and it would just... work. [...] But things changed.
In my experience, that "just works" stuff was always false advertising. Shit never worked, and the most frustrating of all, was there was no way to troubleshoot it because there were no other options to try. Even worse was when you had server-side logs to see exactly what it's doing wrong, but had no way to change it to the proper setting like in a normal program on a normal computer.
But it does reflect something I've noticed with recent generations of Mac OS, the design is quite beautiful but the usability can be terrible.
There's two main areas of trouble I find. First, Apple has a very specific idea for how you're going to use the system, and they simplify as much as possible by removing things unrelated to the tasks they had in mind. But then the moment you do something slightly different you're pretty much out of luck.
Second, they seem to have a thing for buttons or menu options that don't have any feedback or help available. I've had a number of instances where I've clicked/selected something had absolutely zero feedback for 30 seconds. It's not that the system was lagged or anything, it's just that they apparently thought feedback wouldn't be pretty enough.
It's honestly given me some good lessons about what not to do when I'm designing my own applications.
I stole this Sig
Apple has not changed a damn thing about the way they identify, develop, advertise, and ship new products, in about 15 years. They have, however, moved on to different targets (no more "I'm a mac" ads required these days) and increased in scale massively.
For example, they are now shipping FOUR distinct OSes (macOS, iOS, tvOS, watchOS) each with its own set of development tools and growing legacy of hardware, running entire suites of applications that intercommunicate very deeply with each other across each platform and the internet. The fact that very few pundits even acknowledge this quadrupling of their output is telling. Instead, they get all sarcastic about notches on phones that haven't shipped yet, as though they are now masters of design, and make the usual fashionable declarations about how Apple isn't the same Apple it was three years ago, or five, or eight, or when Big Steve was around, or in the 80's, or whatever.
Some people say Apple is successful only because of their fashionable marketing. You know what's fashionable marketing -- what never gets old? Loudly declaring that Apple is finally on the decline, or has been for years despite absolutely sky-high profits. And letting the ad impressions and the comments roll in, because hey, maybe THIS time, maybe we'll be right. And maybe THIS time congress will repeal Obamacare. And maybe THIS time, when we toss the poodle out the window, it'll fly.
Lol
Never have, never will. The one thing they are good at is effusive marketing, so it's easy to determine that a) they have a product b) it's terribly expensive and c) it generally doesn't do things the way you want it to. ie, easy to reject if you have at least half a brain.
Plenty has been written about the mind-numbing, face-palming, irritating stupidity of the notch. And yet, I canâ(TM)t stop thinking about it. I would love to say that this awful design compromise is an anomaly for Apple. But it would be more accurate to describe it as the norm.
I recall a non-Apple smart phone getting highlighted on Slashdot where it had this "awesome" feature of a "second screen" on top of the phone. It was this small screen on top of the phone next to the camera, a small space on the front for "special context buttons" or some such. How is this different than Apple putting these same small "second screens" with buttons that change with context on either side of a place for a camera, speaker, microphone or whatever?
I know the difference, it that it's from Apple. Apple is "bad" and anything not Apple is "good".
Since Apple did it their way, with a single piece of glass instead of two, this is somehow bad. With the other phone (someone help me out here, who did this?) where it was instead a separate very small screen on top of a larger main display that this is somehow "better".
I'm sure I'll be accused of being an Apple "fanboi" for sticking up for Apple. Sure, I've probably acquired more than my share of Apple products over the years. I've also come to a point where I care much less about the tools I use so long as the work is done. When I try something new I try to see how to do it on Windows, Linux, and MacOS. I'm now expected to be proficient in a number of operating systems, programming tools, and so on that I just don't have the luxury to be a snob about the tools I use.
This pervasive Apple hate has got so bad that my brothers, who are certainly not Apple fans, think this has gone beyond the absurd. They'll give me grief about my iPhone, saying how their Droid is better, and then talk about how the news talking about the seemingly poor sales of the iPhone 8 is a bunch of bullshit.
This bashing over the iPhone X "notch" is just over the top. Sure, someone can give some pros and cons on this, but claiming this as an example of Apple not being able to do design worth a damn any more is just a bit too much. Tone it down and I might actually take you seriously on the complaints on where Apple fucked something up.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
What happened to this site? Every other story on here is a shitty troll and a flamebait. Can't the """editors""" (they really should not quit because they're so bad at it) find something interesting or do they think that by posting these BS Buzzfeed-like bait will bring people back to this abandoned hell-hole?
It's so sad that an average story on here gets less than 50 comments nowadays. That's beyond pathetic.
Dear owner of this site, just fucking shut it down and put it out of its misery. Just shut the site down.
And of course it's going to be a massive success, like every iPhone before it.
Buy Apple stock. I know I am going to.
Eat the rich.
"I'm sure I'll be accused of being an Apple "fanboi" for sticking up for Apple"
Well, you could avoid that by providing actual arguments, instead of a wall of brain farts about polarized groups. There's zero intellectual argumentation there about the notch, it just drones on about who's a fan of what. You're an insufferable bore.
Did you read the post which said that the two areas above the screen either side of the notch aren't treated as separate notification areas?
And the Apply guidelines that say "don't" treat the display any differently than a standard rectangular one? i.e. If you do what you're suggesting by thinking of it as a rectangular screen with additional fingers, your app will not be allowed on the App Store?
And the concepts of how the notched screen would handle fullscreen content? It's displayed right to the edge, with the notch very very visible?
Four billion years of evolution politely disagrees with you.
The current gimmicky joke the is called a MacBook Pro illustrates the author's point. I'm hopeful that one day Apple realeases a real MacBook Pro.
I'm not going to accuse you of anything, but on the notch..., yes it's a problem. The difference between your examples of a second screen vs extending the screen around some other element of the phone is one of visual context.
We are accustomed to screens that follow general geometric shapes, specifically rectangular. This dates back to scrawling text on rectangular tablets. The mind sees black in an unexpected place and translates it to something in the way, or worse a faulty screen with some dead pixels. Putting the notch in the status bar further highlights the mental problem. How many icons are there? I mean I KNOW that Apple aren't dumb enough to draw the screen without an exclusion zone, but instinctively I can't help but feel ... is there another notification icon behind that black non working part of the screen?
Their video demonstrations show that quite well too. Rather than bounding the video or images to a rectangular section in the middle of the screen they fill the screen. The rounded screen edges then make you lose the mental connection to the edge of the frame. Are you looking through a hole? Should you be moving closer to the hole so you can see the entire video? Are you missing something in the corner? And what is with the black dot in my field of view?
This isn't an Apple thing. The Essential phone got itself instantly on my no buy list for this reason alone, as will every other phone that is coming out with these trendy notches (Sharp and LG are both producing one too). Even the Galaxy S8 is marginal with it's rounded screen edges, but at least there's a bounding box top and bottom. The S7 edge didn't have this problem.
Interestingly I also notice this is a meh / hate kind of thing. People either completely don't care or outright hate the look of it. I haven't seen too many people being mildly annoyed. Could be an OCD thing too, or maybe a creative vs analytical thing.
Either way, I have trouble processing the fact that the notch isn't a major screen defect worthy of an RMA
Yes, but that won't get you a better iPhone or make Mac usable again, so why bother?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Apple has hit the problem that Windows hit no later than XP: the "good enough" problem. About 10 years ago, their products were "good enough". Their great selling point was the "just works" bit. No Windows-y fiddling with drivers, no futzing around with runtime components that should cooperate but oddly don't in this configuration (and let's not even start about "what kernel module to include" Linux). Plug in and go. Apple had it first (or rather, had it working all the time first).
Problem is: What now? It's as good as it gets and people are satisfied, so where to go from here if you still want to sell something down the line?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Enlightenment for instance has a huge number of different options for window management, including virtual workspace support (makes it easy to CTRL-ALT-LEFT CTRL-ALT-RIGHT different fullscreen apps for instance. Plus compositing allows fullscreen apps and windows to overlap, assuming the application allows it. And in the case that it doesn't, but has a windows port, there is a trick you can use in Wine where you set it to have a virtual desktop set to the size of your real desktop. Since it isn't integrated into the normal window management, you can actually have a fullscreen windows app running on a 'virtual' windows desktop that allows you to ctrl-alt-left/right out or sometimes alt-tab out, even if it normally wouldn't or would minimize. I've used this technique will fullscreen games and other applications to allow instant messaging and web browsing while also doing full screen 'high performance' apps that I need to retain their state, especially videogames which may become unstable if they went through the windows style process switching which may not properly save the game's graphical state.
There is also Ubuntu's unity, other than defaulting the launch pad thing to the left instead of the bottom is a shoe in for the basic MacOS interface.
WindowMaker can give you the old NeXT computer interface, although they have given up on integration with GNUStep (the framework for NEXTStep/OSX objc apis on non-Apple unixes.)
For just plain old Windows-esque desktops there was GNOME 2 and is MATE, Cinnamon, XFCE, LXDE, and a few others all of which emulate the Windows Desktop to more or less detail. KDE can as well, although I haven't been keeping track of what their default desktop looks like anymore, and due to the customization options offered you can do quite a bit more with it depending on your personal preferences (true of most of these desktops, outside of Unity and to a lesser degree Enlightenment due to its desktop shell integration (essentially explorer.exe or the file manager for Windows/OSX))
I still like my iPhone but the new one's are not worthy of a event every time Apple does a refresh. No long lines anymore for any of Apple's stuff. I gave up on Mac's when Apple basically gave up on Mac's. The iPad is great, but again so is every other tablet out there. Some at half the price of a iPad. Of course we know the iPod is dead and Apple has killed off some of its other accessories. Yes, I believe Apple has become stale and predictable like any other technology giant.
troling slashdot
just like apple trolls always done
Perhaps they do, but they know how to do paragraph breaks.
At the bottom of the
It's not just Apple, it's Microsoft and even enterprise system vendors who have been relentlessly tweaking interfaces for the worse. Apple may actually have been one of the least worse offenders in comparison, although I think the intensity of irritation varies quite a bit depending on individual usage patterns.
Microsoft had a highly usable, if boring, user interface in Windows 2000. Windows XP kept it mostly the same, but implemented needless changes in the start menu and with great emphasis on shiny colors. Windows 7 was nearly just an improvement on XP but also brought forth some of its own changes. Windows 8 was an abomination, a total abandonment of its desktop UI standards for a fantasy of a touch screen environment, something almost no one wanted on a desktop computer. Windows 10 was just an attempt to salvage the mess of Windows 8 along with a fairly draconian new level of perpetual control by Microsoft.
Completely bizarrely, Microsoft has been folding in these UI changes to their server OS, too, resulting in a confusing mess that serves no purpose in that environment. Tasks are often split between management applications that remain unchanged since Windows 2000/2003 but were reasonably feature complete and new applications that are not feature complete and require their byzantine command line interface to make comprehensive changes. Which really is another topic -- why didn't Microsoft simply implement a well-known shell and syntax from Unix? Why ignore a broadly understood, tried and tested shell and syntax for a new model, one that lacks some of the basic features and capabilities of the Unix shell?
An example from the enterprise software market. VMware had a very straightforward and useful management application for their hypervisor platform. While it has its technical flaws, it's very usable and straightforward. VMware, and mostly for good reason, wanted to move this to a web client to end a dependency on Windows. But rather than merely port their UI to HTLM5, they changed it dramatically, making it a slow and confusing maze of related screens and requiring browser plugins. They changed it again in 6.5 (obsoleting the Windows application), making it HTML5 driven and somewhat more responsive, but still not nearly as straightforward to use.
Frankly, I think in the last 5 years the entire computer industry has run out of meaningful ideas. UI changes are made to keep development staff busy and generate justifications for increasingly expensive required updates, meanwhile nothing really new is being provided (and in many cases, less is being left to the user's discretion). We've reached a kind of treadmill of technology, pointless iterations to generate incompatibilities and sales.
I'd be surprised if this story brought out any new ideas about how apple has done things, then and now, compared to the rest of the industry.
At the end of the day features need to be dropped so that the ones that stay can be polished. In addition, Engineering/QA needs to be the one that says when something is ready. Not when it will be ready, or any other rush to some other promise or forced due date by any other part of the company. This is how that other guy at Apple did it (sorry to hear he passed away), and it's worked out pretty well for Apple while they were not doing so well.
Now Apple seems to be doing just like the rest of the industry. Release products that "we can patch online later" because that's the current pop-business-model in the industry. Good job Apple, you went from specialty restaurant to handing out fast food like everyone else because there's less risk. I guess the business plan that you had during the first few iphone generations needs someone to actually head it and with no one to do that now, you have to use a standard model. Actually makes sense, but don't be surprised if Apple gets mixed in the salad until you're no longer distinguishable... like last time... oh, someone mentioned that it can't happen because "whatever"? If that "whatever" is something from the past, or something that already exists about Apple then it's worthless. Actually it's all about that "whatever".
It's as usual... no one really knows what out-of-the-box actually looks like because they can't get past the bad haircut.
Once upon a time, Apple could do little wrong
Apple has been on The Verge (remember that, Josh?) of being doomed since 1984.
Welcome to the IT echo-chamber, where the same journalists post the same shit about the same companies and still get to call it "news".
At the time, a single-board computer, one that you could just solder a keyboard onto and plug in a monitor, was a great design.
And Woz did great work refactoring the spare gates on the TTL chips, using locic simplification to pare the design down to the least number of chips.
Since then they've done a few other clever things that weren't just the application of zen to marketing.
With everything that belongs in a "salad", what is the dressing doing anyways?
most people don't care about upgrading single components. To them, a computer is as much a monolithic black box as a stove, microwave or TV.
As a simple metaphor : how many people will upgrade the magnetron on a microwave ? /.
Sure there's going to be a few people proudly screaming "me!" on
But in your family ? Normal people around you ?
The most probable answer is going to be "What a magnetron ?"
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that approach (well, provided you don't mind the trash), most people don't care about upgrading single components.
But some region of the world are going more conscious about all the electronic waste.
European countries have putting effort to bring the "Repair instead of throw away" idea into the public radar.
Upgrading RAM and SSD is a good way to insuflate a few more years into a laptop and avoid the whole thing going to a landfill.
So even if grandma has the slightest idea what an "SSD" is and thinks that "RAM" is a male sheep, it's still good for the environment if her old laptop can be upgraded/refurbished instead of thrown to trash.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Windows, on the other hand, simply has alt-tab (or win-tab), which cycles through all display elements without regard for parent application. It naturally allows windows to be displayed above fullscreen applications, and for fullscreen applications to be left in fullscreen mode when switching away or minimizing. It's more simplistic, but also more functional.
Perhaps it's simply me, but I found that people with "Unix-y way of thinking" tend to have multiple non-maximized windows open that are overlapping. Other folks though tend to full-screen applications.
Perhaps its just the circles I move in (IT / sysadmin), but many folks with OS X and Linux systems (especially with (SSH) terminals open) tend to not full screen things. Doing the same thing in Windows seems to be more difficult (even going back to the XP / NT days).
Unethical incompetent selfish greedy jerks hire their friends and family, over pay themselves, raise prices to unaffordable levels and underpay second world factory workers! What did you expect would happen?
Cue that remark about people using computers that are x years old. X!!
today's captcha stirrup as in What does flamebait mean? It's an article meant to stirrup some rather active discussion, or trouble.
o Mac pros prior to the trashcan: (more than) good enough.
o Mac pros since the trashcan: (not even) good enough.
And they know it, too. The question is, will they go back to what actually worked best, or will they continue to screw up?
Apple's problem, IMHO, is that in their quest to think different, they have thought so differently that the systems they are selling are breaking paradigms that the entire market for all PCs has validated as good in favor of paradigms that are outright poorly functional.
The trashcan is the peak expression of this - its flexibility and upgradability are compromised. Its desktop footprint when expanded includes security problems and desk warts. It's not easy to rack efficiently. Even they can't upgrade it because the "too clever" design is thermally limited. Basically, compared to almost any reasonable tower design that preceded it, it's an outright fail.
Ive's "contribution" to OS design took a lovely 3d sensibility that included actual visual hints as to WTF things did, and turned it flat as a nun's imagination, ugly, and bereft of the cues that had made operating a complex device just a bit easier. (Even more sadly, other manufacturers copied this, and now my Android phone looks just as bad as my SO's iPhone. Goddammit.)
Pulling the headphone jack from the iPhone rudely obsoleted most people's listening hardware, raised the price for audio with every subsequent USB-c dongle the user had to buy / replace, broke the device's ability to charge while actually doing what the user wanted, and was just generally a profoundly stupid move.
It's not too late in terms of customer base for Apple to come back from all this. And at least with the Mac Pro, there's an indication they know they have screwed up. But Apple strikes me as a proud company. Admitting that they've been engaging in "think dull" in a parody of trying to "think different" instead of "think of the customer" isn't something I really expect from them, even though it seems broadly obvious to me.
There are opportunities aplenty for them to come roaring back: the sadly downgraded Mini. The trashcan. Even the iMac, really the staple of their computer line, could use some serious love in terms of I/O and upgradability. A gaping hole in the product line remains where a midline, reasonably priced tower does not exist. Certainly the OS could use a good bit of attention that wasn't aimed at making it look bad. The iPhone could really be improved with the restoration of the headphone jack, the ability to slap a memory card in there, a user-replacable / upgradable battery, additional sensors and ports, etc. The minimalist approach has left them far behind others in terms of feature count and usability across a wider spectrum of tasks, so they could, if they were minded to, take advantage of that.
Someone also needs to tell them "okay, okay, thin enough."
My home used to be an Apple stronghold. But I now own an S7 phone, and there's a brand new Windows PC in my office next to my 2009-vintage Mac Pro. Our last mini was retired a year ago in favor of far more powerful small machines from other market sectors; the new minis are too anemic to bother. My SO is outright jealous of my S7, and she swears (often) that her iPhone is going to be replaced with an Android phone next time around. We're almost certainly outliers, because we're high end users and developers with more needs than just being notified of the next twaddle or faceberk post. So we're probably not an indication of a current trend. OTOH, we're definitely not the only ones. The question is, do we matter to Apple? It appears that we do not. The replacement Mac Pro design will tell the most important part of the tale for me, anyway.
The elephant in the room is Apple's continuing profitability. That particular carrot is likely to continue to lead them to continue on their stampede towards dysfunctional blah for quite some time yet. Fortunately, Windows has come a long way. That's the path that beckons outside of Apple's domain.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Wishing for a 17" or more fully decked out laptop with every type of drive and connector included.
Or if you simply won't build any good laptops ever again, Apple , then I'll take care of the hardware if you'll just make your OS available for other hardware platforms, please.
Make more money than the federal deserve, then build a moronic hdq temple to the faithful idoits that support the gross markup of medicore "phones". what could go wrong?
Yeah, another Apple Fanboy posting here. All creative types (snicker) using PC hardware, using PC programs, yeah, Apple is soooo much better than PC.
STFU.
....is "shake to undo." Whoever came up with that unintuitive, hard to reproduce abomination should be forced to use Android 1.5.
I recall a non-Apple smart phone getting highlighted on Slashdot where it had this "awesome" feature of a "second screen" on top of the phone. It was this small screen on top of the phone next to the camera, a small space on the front for "special context buttons" or some such. How is this different than Apple putting these same small "second screens" with buttons that change with context on either side of a place for a camera, speaker, microphone or whatever?
I know the difference, it that it's from Apple. Apple is "bad" and anything not Apple is "good".
I'm guessing you mean the Essential Phone, an Android phone which came out about six months before the iPhone X and had a similar camera notch. More likely the thought process went like this.
1. Upon seeing a product with a new and different feature: "Wow, this feature is new and different! Neato! Accolades for creativity! Etc..."
2. Upon actually using said product: "Eh, this feature not so good."
3. Upon Apple releasing a product with the same feature: "Eh, this feature not so good."
Amazing how "experience" and "bias" can seem like the same thing. :)
The it just works can mostly be attributed to suckers buying overpriced Apple peripherals. Plus remember how Apple used to require special RAM or graphics cards? Or changing advanced wifi router settings so Apple devices could connect when every other device connects? I guess it just 'it just works' only counted situations where you pay the Apple vig.
That's pretty much easy if you have full control over both the hardware and sofftware design. You can see the same pattern with the Commodore Amiga or other standard pre-fab home computers, where everything has a specific standard to follow, and everything had a specific design.
It was only an advantage in the short-term versus the PC, which was much less standardized in what could be included or developed for it, and had a baseline that only required a keyboard+monitor (mouse required a driver). Once devices started to support plug and play and the tech matured over a few years, PCs wouldn't be as hobbled by configuration problems. .
"What now?" is what Steve Jobs was particularly good at.
I hare to agree, but I do. Apple is pretty much just another generic appliance company at this point. Great for the bottom line, not so good for their products.
This is silly. Just because you disagree with small things doesnâ(TM)t mean the entire company is bad at design.
Apple has thought long and hard about Lighting and USB-C. Lightning is smaller so they use that on their phones and headphones case etc.
I mean, come on.
So in other words, a notch can be good (as evidenced by other phones doing it well) but Apple has (as usual) taken an otherwise good feature, and broken it.
As for "full screen content" on other phones it's not an issue, because phones are now 2:1 instead of 16:9 meaning that you have black bars beside your "full screen" content anyway (for video) so you don't see the notch, and for other applications they can find innovative ways of using the new extra real estate (the "fingers").
(As for why phones are now 2:1 instead of 16:9... that's a whole different marketing rant... look at us, we now have a 6" screen! (never mind that it's smaller than the previous 5.7" screen))
Building anything of complexity in a profit-driven, timing-sensitive marketplace requires concessions—some really desirable stuff isn't going to make the cut, and other stuff is going to have to be simplified. This is the result of balancing what is technically possible against practical constraints on labor, cost, supply chain, and so on.
When something has to go, do you keep A or B in the product? And when C has to be simplified, do you simplify it using method C1 or C2?
These are the things that Jobs tended to get right, often with counterintuitive decisions. People often say that Apple is all about ease of use, but this can encompass a lot of different things:
- Intuitive use for those with no prior knowledge ...and so on.
- Use that requires the fewest number of steps or user-initiated actions
- Use that requires the fewest number of adjustments relative to existing expectations and habits
- Use that maximally shortens the absolute time until results arrive
- Use that has the highest possible correlation between inputs and desired, complete results
And these things are often at odds, and they're often the kids of decisions that line up with the aforementioned A/B/C1/C2/etc. decisions in multiple, complex ways. Steve Jobs had a knack for balancing these in such a way that:
- Those with no prior knowledge were not alienated or intimated, even if they had to learn
- The number of steps or actions was not onerous
- Existing expectations and habits were managed in a way that minimized cognitive load
- Results were accomplished reasonably quickly
- Correlation between inputs and desired results was relatively high
I say that his decisions were often counterintuitive because he often thought outside the box of mere feature delivery. For example, if it was proving tough to design for existing expectations and habits, the choice might be instead to change things more, rather than less—so that the new feature was taken *out* of the realm of existing expectations, even if in some design alternatives there could be a minimum overlap. Most companies would go for "we'll meet existing expectations and habits as well as we can, and 15% overlap is better than a 10% overlap if that's what we can bring to market effectively."
Apple in its heyday would say, "A 15% overlap is poor; let's revamp this so that it doesn't bring to mind any expectations or habits. We could design with some familiarity, sure, but if it's only 15% match, some familiarity is actually worse than 0% familiarity, since in the second case we don't fool the user into thinking they know more than they already do, and they understand from the start that it is something new that they will need to learn [even if it wasn't actually new at all, as people here would often point out]."
Similar counterintuitive decisions for the other bullet points. Maybe the right thing isn't to deliver something that produces results "as quickly as we can made it do so," but in fact not to deliver it at all if the net result is frustration because it's still just too slow or the correlation between inputs and desired results was too low. The traditional strategy would be to make it "as good as we can make it" and release it.
Jobs' famous "knowing when to say no" thing is really a subset of this larger sphere of judgment. Not just knowing when to say "no" but also knowing when to reshape it as an entirely new feature (from the UX perspective) without reference to previous similars, even if there were many; knowing which framings of new things intimate new users vs. excite new users (even if in both cases the net effect is that new learning is required), and so on.
This is the sort of thing where user research is often misleading. Most users will say "I prefer that one, at least it's a little bit familar" when in fact the familiarity, combined with the ultimate variation of the totality of the product from their expectations, might ultimately lead to less use or suboptimal use
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Good points.
Adobe's DC Acrobat software is another example. What a huge WTF re-design of the application's interface!
I use the software at work daily all day long, and I still spend time every day Googling how to do the most basic things. Replacing menus with dumbed down ribbons and tiles is information-reducing and an insane design choice for a desktop application.
This article reached deep into Apple's offerings and history to find the juiciest targets. There may be some learnings available and I'll continue to study the article. Yet, I think an important takeaway is two principles of evaluating other peoples' work:
Don't knock it until you tried it. The notch is probably not going to really cause any problems once its in the hand. None of this guy's photos contained hands. Yet, you control the iPhone with your hands (and face of course).
Observing someone else's design, you will notice weaknesses, but you might not appreciate the compromises that were necessary to prevent disaster. If you can't come up with something better, your critique is weak.
I'm not saying that all of his critiques are wrong. Yes, products like iTunes have major weaknesses that are frustrating and longstanding. The company's dev resources are clearly constrained at times while biting off huge initiatives like Apple Pay and Siri. However, critiquing the iOS 7 interface seems pretty wack. Was it shocking at the time? Did it cause some confusion and annoyance? Yes. But, could we have gotten where we are as a culture without going through that period? I don't think his piece addresses this well enough. And, when you're delivering on the scale that Apple does, to an audience in the hundreds of millions, you have to deliver a combination of interfaces that are very subtle and interfaces that are very not subtle.
Imac pro seems to be this with no easy way to change the ram or storage.
And they are like to change $700-$800+ to go from 32 to 64 GB ram. When for about $800 you get can an DDR4 64GB ECC REG ram kit.
same with the storage and will the over 1TB systems ship in raid 0 mode??
It's what poor people think rich people design look like.
apple doesnt have a start button and trump is...for the legal us citizen.
That's like saying Navy SEALS are bad at underwater demolition.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
My company has embarked on the idea that all engineers are interchangeable cogs. We now hire people based on identity and cultural origination as opposed to talent. My company would reject an Einstein or a Steve Jobs for lacking the educational and cultural prerequisites. Productivity and creativity have plummeted. A single header file is debated in weekly meetings as "engineers" debate the order of variables. Historical, proven engineering practices are thrown out the window as management shakes things up every 6 months in a desperate bid to fix engineering. The company's only recourse is to buy other companies. The only problem is those companies are destroyed as they are integrated into my company. Not one has survived intact.
Apple is suffering the same fate. Instead of engineering, Apple now throws bodies at the problem. I know a guy whose entire scope of responsibility was the Apple about box. And for some reason, this person "walks on water" for having maintained this. Give me a break.
1. Founding Apple Computer Co.
2. Returning to Apple after founding Next
So he did two good things
1. Found Next Co
2. Go to heaven
Hmm... OP-Joshua, I smell sour grapes...
The OP is someone's opinion. Other's would disagree. In fact, MILLIONS of other people disagree with Jason as witnessed by Apple's sales figures.
You sound bitter, starfish tits.
I'm guessing you mean the Essential Phone, an Android phone which came out about six months before the iPhone X and had a similar camera notch.
No, that's not it. The phone I'm thinking of had an obviously separate screen off to the left with the camera shifted to the right. Maybe it was the other way around. Anyway, the screen was not notched out, there was a separate "touch bar" kind of screen where the virtual buttons shifted with context.
Amazing how "experience" and "bias" can seem like the same thing. :)
Perhaps. If the reviewer learned that this kind of notch in a phone screen was "bad" from previous experience then would not the complaint be that Apple had not learned the same lesson?
Much if the article is a bunch of the same old arguments rehashed. USB-C vs. Lightning? Lightning came first, predates it by about 2 years. Apple chose to make a new connector when it did, they could not have known about USB-C at the time, they're kind of stuck with it now. Dongles? Oh please, this again? No computer is going to have the "right" kind of ports for everyone. People complained about Apple removing the floppy drive and then the optical drive. Does anyone complain about that any more? It's quite possible that Apple removed too many ports too soon, they'll learn that lesson or suffer the drop in sales. You just bought a device that cost you a kilobuck or two, shut up about the need for a $20 dongle and realize that Apple just saved you from carrying around the volume and weight of ports you'll never use and gave you the choice to buy exactly those ports you need. The complaint about plugging the Apple Pencil into the bottom of an iPad to charge is just nonsense. No one is required to do this if this is inconvenient or impractical, it's an option for a quick charge to keep working. Charging an Apple Pencil looks a lot like charging competing devices. Is it complicated by using a Lightning connector instead of some kind of USB? Perhaps, but then Apple Pencil can get a quick charge from the iPad if it must while others cannot.
That last paragraph was a longer rant than I intended but I'll keep it anyway. My point is that instead of thinking about why Apple and other companies made the design choices that they did people leap to the conclusion that they don't know what they are doing. If you don't like the choices then don't buy it, maybe even write up an article on why you made that choice. What I don't understand is the people claiming that a successful company, like Apple, is full of idiots and that they'd have made a better choice. If so then why aren't you making these "better" products instead of writing a rant on the internet.
Yes, I understand the potential for irony on writing a rant about others writing a rant.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Why ignore a broadly understood, tried and tested shell and syntax for a new model, one that lacks some of the basic features and capabilities of the Unix shell?
Microsoft, it least historically, has major issues with NIH syndrome. Which is made ever more frustrating by the fact they clearly have a lot of smart people working for them when looked at from a certain narrow point of view, their solutions almost seem to make sense... and then you take a step back and realize the closed-source Microsoft ecosystem isn't the only thing in the world and someone else has already solved the problem better. They are making noise about being more accepting of open-source and making things more cross-platform, but they don't seem to yet quite have developed the internal culture of actually understanding what that means.
You should make a Liszt of the features you're interested in, and see if Apple's Mac design team can Handel them.
As long as they stop Haydn the scroll bars.
Careful picking that cherry; it's so far up on the tree that your ladder might snap!
And what makes Joshua Topolsky qualified to judge design? Aside from being a wanna-be fashion-conscious hipster techno-twit?
"What NeXT?" I think you mean.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Hammmmburger... menu.
Apple's success has been due to a lot more than just great design. They keep getting the little things right that get them a 2% advantage:
They've done a great job in distribution. You can get a MPB anywhere, anytime, and no waiting for builds or anything. I ended up making the switch to Apple in 2011 or 2012 when I could not get a Dell XPS 13 Linux Edition. Dell kept delaying shipping. Eventually, I had to travel and ended up grabbing a MBP at the local Best Buy 2 hours before flying out.
Apple's longer availability for a specific MBP model is actually a huge feature. If you support more than about three computers, having them all be pretty much identical is a huge cost saver for IT. Honestly, most Apple hardware works pretty much the same way - so there's little in the way of driver and config weirdness to support an Air vs Macbook vs MBP. Apple has delivered a fantastic answer for standardization. Other manufacturers charge a premium for their "business class" laptops... and still can't match Apple on consistency.
No one makes a better built laptop. MBPs are built like a tank.
The big frustration is that when Apple changes, it is a big change and it often affects many. USB C, the touch bar, removing the DVD drive, changing power connectors all seem to really anger specific users. Right now a friend who is a DJ is upset because most pro audio devices are not built for USB C. Another friend hates the new keyboard. Still another who like to dual boot and game hates that most MBPs are Intel GPU powered. In the end, all of us still end up on MBPs because the other alternative either doesn't exist or isn't available to buy when you want to buy it.
-- $G
He's confusing and visually abrasive, amateur, and relatively unfinished upon publication. His understanding of product design and business economics is an abomination, which rudely juts into the pages of the inter webs. The reality is that Topolsky is stuck in hate-quicksand, like, well, like nobody on earth.
As someone who's had to repair a couple Macs in my day I always thought that Macs we're poorly designed was one of those things that went without saying. Like water is wet or the sky is blue. Most Mac products focus more on being difficult to take apart rather than well designed and the places they cut corners are just ridiculous. Remember when they first released the aluminum body MacBooks and figured they didn't need to have a heatsync so just diffused the heat out of the bottom or the laptop. Who does that?
The one that comes to mind for me is trying to print, anywhere, other than your Apply printer.
I realise that's down to the vendor drivers, but that's exactly where most of Microsoft's issues are too, with other people's crap code.
Q: So ... what's in common between Apple in the 90s and now?
A: No Steve Jobs.
Steve had an outstanding insight into what was good and what was crap. For the first time since the 90s, I am unsure of the future of Apple.
I'm annoyed with the constant dick sucking by technical journalists with limited technical knowledge. See also Elon Musk.
The Apple Model has always been you can do what you want as long as it is on an Apple approved platform with Apple approved software. Dropping any hint of versatility at all for a one size fits all attitude served them well for their niche market for many decades.
Apple remains a good choice for a computing illiterate aging aunt who does email and the occasional streaming video. There are excellent graphics packages written for Apple and it became the default for people who know art but are clueless with computers.
But, if you need a custom box for a custom purpose; it isn't an Apple box you go to.
NRRPT/RCT
...Linux Destop is Really Good At Design