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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.
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.
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.
If you hit UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A all the USB-C ports morph into USB-A ports, the touch bar turns into actual buttons, and the notch on the iPhone X flips up to reveal a headphone jack.
Dutch Gun observed:
It's the epitome of a first world problem, of course, but to me, it's similar to the hump on the back of the last iPhone case. That is, I'm wondering why someone near the top didn't take a look at that and say "Damn, that's kind of ugly. Apple isn't supposed to release ugly products - especially not flagship products. Let's back up and figure out something else here." Apple has always been known for a company that, whatever else they do, has always been known for its strong sense of aesthetics. It's just surprising to see that slipping a bit, at least in my view.
When Steve Jobs was in charge, he WAS Apple's "strong sense of aesthetics". He was an abusive asshole, but he was an asshole with vision, and he had the power to ensure that no Apple product was released until he, personally, was satisfied with its design. So he did. And, despite his tantrums and vicious criticism of their work, the people he hired to turn his ideas into products that met his standards worshipped the guy - because, in the end, he drove them to craft things that were both functional and beautiful ... and that, in a number of cases, actually introduced and created markets for whole new categories of high-tech products. (Think iPod and iPhone here.)
The guy who's in charge now is a supply-chain manager - basically a glorified bean counter. He has all the vision and sense of aesthetics you'd expect from an accountant, but he was at least self-aware enough to recognize his own shortcomings in that regard, and hand the product design task over to Jony Ivie, who's an actual design professional.
In business there's a thing called a "key man problem". Apple had it in spades. Now that key man is gone, and Jony Ivie, for all his undeniable talent, is neither aesthetic visionary enough, nor implacable tyrant enough to replace him ...
Check out my novel.
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.
Actually, yes. Jobs was a rare combination of someone who knows a bit of IT and someone who knows what people who have no clue of IT need. I saw it first hand numerous times how people who just couldn't "get" computers had few problems dealing with Apple products and actually started to like trying things where they were earlier afraid to.
I'm no fan of Apple. Far from it. I can't stomach their, in my opinion, completely unusable interface, but it seems that computer illiterates can deal with them better than with interfaces written by IT people for IT people.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.