[HN Gopher] The dissolution of Apple's legacy design team
___________________________________________________________________
The dissolution of Apple's legacy design team
Author : Pulcinella
Score : 294 points
Date : 2022-06-18 16:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fastcompany.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fastcompany.com)
| runjake wrote:
| I respect Ive's design skills but I think that Ive leaving is one
| of the best things to happen to Apple in decades.
|
| They're slowly going from Ive's minimalist artistic designs back
| to useful computing devices and user interfaces.
| duxup wrote:
| I wonder how exactly Steve managed Ive, getting his best out of
| him without ... going full Ive ;)
| grishka wrote:
| From my own observations working at a company with a
| visionary CEO/founder, people with personalities like this
| tend to kinda balance each other out -- so you need more than
| one. The CEO would suggest some batshit crazy idea, but the
| engineering lead would bring it down to earth and make it
| practical before even beginning to discuss it with the rest
| of the team. If there's no contention, no one to keep such a
| person in check, no _other_ visionary person to criticize
| their ideas and ask the right questions, these batshit crazy
| ideas end up getting implemented and shipped as is. Guess how
| I found out.
| rmk wrote:
| Larry Ellison was prescient when he said that Jony Ive would
| run amok without an editor in Steve Jobs, in an interview after
| Jobs' death (Ellison was good friends with Jobs). Perhaps the
| utter lack of design innovation and frankly, new consumer
| products led Jony Ive to obsess over the ring campus, going to
| ridiculous lengths to make things just so. All that money and
| creative energy could have been put into groundbreaking
| product, but with Steve Jobs gone, I doubt there was anyone
| else who could do what he did.
| musicale wrote:
| > and frankly, new consumer products
|
| I already have a half-dozen Apple devices that I use every
| day. I don't really need more of them.
| oreilles wrote:
| I can't tell for iOS, but for macOS the UI has only gone
| downhill since Ive's departure. Broken navigation gestures and
| shortcuts, UI inconsistencies, indistinguishable toolbar icons,
| wasted space everywhere... Since Big Sur I feel like I'm using
| a bad Linux clone of macOS.
| moistly wrote:
| They desperately need someone running the show who is
| obsessive about consistency, will QA the UI obsessively, and
| will terrorize the UI designers into compliance. Jobs'
| biggest role was to demand conformance to his design tastes.
| ksec wrote:
| I felt because current Apple is all about optimising. From
| Hardware Cost, Market Fit, and even Software. Making Software
| that looks and feels the same across iPad, iPhone and macOS
| may save some engineering cost or design cost. But to me,
| that is still a very toaster fridge design.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| Yeah, I've always thought he would sell out on functionality to
| get some meaningless design feature included for the aesthetic.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Another point of the article that's compatible with what you're
| saying but still a concern - anything under Tim's $10b
| potential threshold gets more excluded from cross-team
| collaboration and attention and resources than they did
| previously
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Makes the disappearance of the airport stuff make sense
| ajaimk wrote:
| I agree. Jon Ive was a genius with design when he had to work
| under constrained scenarios. But the moment he had
| unconstrained power, form was able to win over functionality.
| w0mbat wrote:
| Jonathan Ive got rich and started designing luxury products
| for himself. Stuff like gold Apple Watches that were soon
| obsolete or ridiculous luxury bands for them. Even a regular
| leather Apple Watch strap ended costing hundreds of dollars.
| At one point I needed a new leather band for mine and I
| bought a perfectly nice third party band for the same price
| as the sales tax on the equivalent Apple one.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I think part of the reason they sold insanely expensive
| Apple Watches is that they wanted to compete with luxury
| watches. Of course, the functionality is very different;
| the similarity is that both are methods of conspicuous
| consumption.
|
| I'm not an Apple Watch fan myself (still clutching my
| Pebble for dear life), but I can understand why the uber-
| expensive Apple Watches would appeal to a certain audience.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > I can understand why the uber-expensive Apple Watches
| would appeal to a certain audience.
|
| I never could understand why Apple (or anyone else) this
| would be a possibility. Luxury watches are almost
| synonymous with heirloom; there is no way anyone will be
| wearing a functional Gold Apple watch in 2085 with the
| anecdote "This was my dad's watch" - it would be
| hopelessly outdated, and likely non-functional by then.
| This is not the case with other luxury watches. This has
| little to do with branding, but everything to do with
| expected longevity and utility.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I agree that they won't be heirlooms, and old money folks
| would never be fooled into thinking they would.
|
| But a lot of people wear luxury watches simply to show
| off how much disposable income they have. To these
| people, having a watch that is recognizably expensive is
| the only requirement.
| mhh__ wrote:
| I can. It's for an interval including instagram-flexing
| _up to_ heirloom, not actually competing properly with a
| really nice watch. You wouldn 't see a the drivers at a
| Grand Prix wearing an Apple Watch but the influencers
| (grumble) are.
|
| This is somewhat true throughout all of apple's products.
| Release a new Mac or iPhone, you'll notice a lot of
| people (especially musicians) buying them for no
| utilitarian reason other than because it's new and
| because it'll be theirs - and it's expensive. Apple's
| marketing and reputation is so brilliant it's ingrained
| almost like a religion (Certainly socially what religion
| was to a ye olde' peasant)
| foobiekr wrote:
| That heirloom stuff is purely marketing the fantasy of
| rich parents handing down a bauble (instead of, say, a
| business or real assets) aimed entirely at middle class
| and upper middle class people. It's not real.
| sangnoir wrote:
| I may not be understanding your point: are you suggesting
| that 60-year-old still-functional swiss-made "baubles"
| don't get inherited? _Old money_ is almost entirely
| defined by items inherited from forebears.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Old money is not about baubles it's about the means to
| earn a living, connections and the knowledge of how to
| retain wealth.
|
| Passing down a watch or car is an incidental thing and
| the watches real old money passes down are not the ones
| like Patek Phillipe who find it necessary to run ads
| suggesting otherwise to the middle class readers of The
| Economist.
| peyton wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > nonrecurring engineering costs led Apple's business
| division to suspend the iPad [redesign]
|
| That doesn't sound like Ive had unconstrained power?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Imagine a design change costing $1 billion. There are very
| few people with that much power.
| jolux wrote:
| That was after he left.
| hbosch wrote:
| I think Ive was a fantastic and visionary industrial
| designer, but when he debuted as the design czar over
| software as well I think Apple's UX kinda entered a nosedive.
| The actual designers "on the ground" there really pulled iOS
| through those times and I agree with other commenter that
| nowadays Apple is really so much better.
| blackhaz wrote:
| rafram wrote:
| > gay U2 album artwork
|
| ...
|
| (Your car playing music from your phone every time it
| connects is a problem with your car's UX, not your
| phone's.)
| etempleton wrote:
| Yes, it felt like Ive had too much unilateral decision
| making power. Steve loved the push and pull of constructive
| arguments and disagreements and famously lamented that even
| he didn't always get his way if others had compelling
| arguments. Ive is and was a designer. Design and--more
| specifically, his design asthetic--always came first under
| his tenure post Steve.
| alexsereno wrote:
| He needed to have Fadell around to argue with, but Tim
| prefers an office style with less tension. Which has been
| great for shareholders, bad for consumer design tho. It's
| hard to know what is more "right" since more people have
| apple products than ever before, but wow I love my post-
| Ive Mac a lot more, and design across the board has
| focused a bit on function w/ Craig getting a bigger role
| etempleton wrote:
| From what I have read Fadell didn't seem to have a lot of
| internal fans, and there were some major software issues
| under his leadership, but there is no doubt he has clout
| with Jobs and provided a different perspective. Jobs was
| always willing to play the role of tie breaker that I am
| not sure Cook is comfortable in, so it makes sense to
| have a more harmonious leadership team that can come to a
| consensus more often than not without an intermediator.
|
| There does seem to be more collaboration and sensible
| compromises from all internal stakeholders than at any
| time at Apple, at least that is how it feels as an end
| user. Apple products of the last few years have less head
| scratching omissions and/or design/engineering decision.
|
| The MacBook Pro from 2016 to 2021 is the embodiment of
| that weirdness.
| lupire wrote:
| Apple's post-Jobs success has been the snowball effect of
| iPhone capturing more of the market.
|
| Mac suffered a lot under Jobsless Ive (Cook doesn't care
| about product one way or the other), surviving the
| butterfly / touchbar winter because customers were able
| to keep their old Retina laptops, customers groaned and
| beared with lemon laptops for a few years, and desktop
| declined in overall relevance (except gaming where Apple
| never had a presence anyway), and started to recover in
| the post-butterfly/post-touchbar/M1 era.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yes, he's a great _physical product_ designer. But to bring
| that, and apply the same principles into SW just doesn 't
| make sense
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm not so sure he's even that, I think the hockey puck
| iMac mouse was his?
| lupire wrote:
| He's a great physical _aesthetic_ designer. He 's
| terrible at human interfaces, hardware or software.
| azemetre wrote:
| I feel like you can't be a great designer if you neglect
| human interfaces, at that point you're just an artist.
| Nothing wrong with that, but good design it is not.
| tchalla wrote:
| I'm not sure if having some badly designed products
| doesn't make one a great physical product designer. It's
| completely possible to be a great product designer with
| few bad products.
|
| I'm not arguing that Ive is a great designer. Ok just
| saying that the iMac hockey puck mouse doesn't invalidate
| that claim.
| ben_w wrote:
| Fair. I use it as an example of uncontroversially bad
| design, and his most infamous mistake being ages ago does
| count in his favour (even if the dead cockroach charging
| mechanism of the modern mouse is also his), even though I
| chose that example in part because people argue both ways
| about his more recent design choices. Myself, I do not
| like any design choice I've heard attributed to him, but
| that's not enough by itself either.
| dubswithus wrote:
| > They're slowly going from Ive's minimalist artistic designs
| back to useful computing devices and user interfaces.
|
| Is this a subtle attack on USB-C?
| wmf wrote:
| It's an attack on the butterfly keyboard, removing MagSafe,
| removing HDMI, removing the headphone jack, reducing battery
| capacity, the unreadable iOS 7 UI, the trash can, etc.
| Matthias247 wrote:
| USB-C itself is great. Love the fact that I can plug a single
| cable into my MacBook for all docking purposes (charging,
| display, peripherals).
|
| The annoying thing was the lack of everything else except
| usb-c. Especially in 2017 when it was uncommon and for
| devices featuring only 2 ports. ,,Dongle life" was a serious
| step backwards.
| barkingcat wrote:
| Nothing "subtle" about the attack. The butterfly keyboard is
| a very obvious and outright failure.
|
| This failure resulted in a support program that covered the
| entire output of the Apple MacBook Pro product line for half
| a decade.
|
| Nothing subtle about that at all.
| ratww wrote:
| I wonder if we're being too quick to blame him for the
| Butterfly keyboard. Sure it was his design, but there were
| engineering issue. Was Ive powerful enough to overrule Tim
| Cook and everyone else and keep a faulty keyboard for that
| long? So far I've only seen a lot of speculation from tech
| websites, but maybe someone has some proper source, I might
| be totally wrong.
|
| It could also be a widespread cultural issue where Apple is
| unable to admit fault. Sure, Apple removed the butterfly
| after he left, but they're still quite stubborn about not
| putting USB-C on iPhones, for example.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| usbc is the one good thing about the ive years. everything
| else was a step away from usability for power users.
| gnicholas wrote:
| One thing I wonder about is whether Apple could have ever built
| the current crop of laptops if it hadn't gone through the
| terrible design that over-emphasized minification. That is,
| were there gains in space-saving that were only possible
| because of the single-minded focus on making small laptops,
| which we now enjoy in our more-sensibly sized MBPs?
|
| As an outsider, I have no idea whether this is the case. But I
| could imaging that if they had stayed on a more evolutionary
| design path, their current laptops might not be quite so
| amazing.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| I saw a woman using one of the new Macbook Pros in an airport a
| few weeks ago, and I was confused, because it looked exactly
| like my beloved silver Macbook Pro from 2007. It even had lots
| of ports!
|
| With the speed of the M-series processors, and the fact that I
| can get one with ports and without an idiotic touchbar, I've
| started considering an Apple laptop for the first time in
| years.
|
| I'm sure it's just a matter of time before the pendulum swings
| back again, alas.
| ghaff wrote:
| I have an M1 Pro MacBook Pro and it's quite nice. Wish they
| could have squeezed a USB-A in there for travel but otherwise
| it's pretty perfect. And the recently announced MacBook Air I
| assume is nice if you want something a bit lighter--although
| the MacBook Pro is still a pretty light and svelte laptop by
| historical standards.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| It's only begun to swing towards usefulness.
|
| We got a decade or more to enjoy this time of "doing things
| right"
| sephamorr wrote:
| Maybe by next decade, all the MacBook "pro" models will
| support more than one external display.
| tmh88j wrote:
| What do you mean by that? Multiple monitors without an
| adapter? I have 2017 and 2019 Macbook Pro's and I use 2
| 27" monitors with a thunderbolt -> 2 HDMI out adapter. I
| don't think I'd use it without an adapter even if I
| could, no need to take up extra ports.
| duped wrote:
| AFAUI that setup is not possible with an M1 Mac today.
| You can only use one external display.
| indemnity wrote:
| I must be dreaming then, using my M1 Mac with two
| external 4K displays and the internal display.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Is it a 13" MBP? If not it's not relevant to this
| discussion
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Except all the parent comments of the discussion just
| said "Pro" and/or "M1 Mac", yours is the first that
| specified 13" MBP. So there seems to be some confusion
| and/or disagreement about what is being discussed.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Good point.
|
| To clarify the M1 Macs, not Pro, Max, or Ultra can only
| support one external display. This also seems to be the
| case with the non-Pro/Max/Ultra M2 macs.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I'm not sure most people (including reviewers and
| resellers) assume the phrase "M1 Mac" excludes macs with
| M1 Pro, M1 Max, or M1 Ultra chips (or even know which Mac
| models include which M1 variants), so beware this
| communications confusion may be likely to reoccur.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Agreed
|
| The parent comment: "Maybe by next decade, all the
| MacBook "pro" models will support more than one external
| display."
|
| The 13" M1/M2 MBP is the only one that doesn't support
| more than one external display.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| That is true only of the 13" m1 Pro, and the 13" m1
| macbook air. The 14" m1 mbp, 16" m1 mbp, the m1 mac mini,
| and m1 studio all support more than 1 external display.
| matwood wrote:
| Yeah, the 13" 'pro' is simply a bad name. No idea why
| they kept it around. All the other pros support 2 or more
| monitors depending on model.
| sprite wrote:
| I'm using 2 of the LG 5k monitors with my MacBook Pro
| [16-inch 2021 M1 Max]. Complete game changer compared to
| the past few iterations.
| [deleted]
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Whoa, whoa, don't get ahead of yourself there
| jb1991 wrote:
| The MacBook Pro can support several external displays
| simultaneously:
|
| Up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at
| 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Pro) or up to three
| external displays with up to 6K resolution and one
| external display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz at over
| a billion colors (M1 Max)
| gnicholas wrote:
| The just-updated base MBP still can't do this. But surely
| it will be updated before next decade, as GP suggested
| (perhaps exaggerating). I assume the base model will be
| updated with 2 years, or retired. I can't imagine they'll
| sell many units, considering how the MBAs are less
| expensive, sleeker, and have better camera/IO.
| infinityio wrote:
| The old-chassis pros (incl. the new m2 13") can only do
| one monitor, if I remember correctly?
| moooo99 wrote:
| I think you remember right, this is the same issue as
| with the M1. The continued existence of this specific
| model (M2 13" Pro) is by far the most confusing aspect of
| the current Mac lineup
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| If you know what signs to look for the swing has already
| begun.
| [deleted]
| chevman wrote:
| Pro tip - always wait until the money is in your bank account!
| korginator wrote:
| People can (and often will) be vindictive, specially people with
| the power over you and your career. Call me cynical, but in my
| few decades of work life I've come across more than a few such
| people. Say what you will about how you wish leaders would
| behave, but reality is different.
|
| I've seen ego- and power-tripping at all levels, even in
| situations where the people playing these games had nothing to
| gain or lose from torpedoing the other.
|
| Imran Chaudhri would have been best served by keeping all written
| communications strictly minimal and work related. Something along
| the lines of "I'm leaving in a months' time for other
| opportunities. It was a pleasure working here, thank you for your
| support, wishing you all the best." Nothing would have been
| misinterpreted.
|
| Keep any and all sentiments out of work related communication.
| dougdonohoe wrote:
| Don't quit until the money is in the bank. I mean it. Don't trust
| your boss or HR or anyone. People can be capricious and you don't
| want your hard earned compensation to be subject to this. The HR
| department is not there for you - they are there to protect the
| company.
| thomond wrote:
| Is it me or does the article too end suddenly?
| gumby wrote:
| The cliffhanger is to get you to buy the book. That "article"
| is just an ad.
| psaux wrote:
| There is a lot to digest in this piece. Work environments are
| very dynamic and context and time-in-point is very important. I
| did not see this behavior, but I was not part of that group at
| Apple.
|
| I worked with Jony after we were acquired. The original Siri
| linen background was his idea, the bubbles had to be perfect, the
| padding, the text size, the lists goes on. I inferred this as
| design obsession and did not find it offending, he was right 95%
| of the time.
|
| When I left Apple, I emailed with Jony on a device I had designed
| and pitched internally in 2011 but was shelved. His response has
| stayed with me to this day, "not all ideas make the cut, even the
| best ones".
|
| He could have cut me down or ignored me, but he responded with
| honesty.
|
| I think that void he left when he moved on was too big to be
| filled. Steve and Jony were always together, pretty much every
| day we would see them at lunch.
| davidhariri wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this!
| the_af wrote:
| > _"not all ideas make the cut, even the best ones"_
|
| I'm not sure I understand. If the _best_ ideas don 't make the
| cut, which ones do? Or was Jony acknowledging a flaw in Apple's
| process?
| snambi wrote:
| It could mean there are more than one.
| ksec wrote:
| >"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got
| to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means
| saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You
| have to pick carefully.
|
| -Steve Jobs.
| [deleted]
| the_af wrote:
| But that's "good" ideas. I wouldn't object to that.
| Instead, Jony said the _best_ ideas. By definition, this
| means you 're necessarily choosing a _worse_ idea, because
| there 's nothing better than the _best_ idea. Seems like a
| bad process to me!
| culpable_pickle wrote:
| Quantifying best is very difficult. Is it the best
| technically but market conditions makes it less
| appealing? Or is it the best fit for the market but it's
| a nightmare to build and so they can't pump enough of
| them out to be reasonable.
|
| The products that launch end up being good enough in all
| areas but rarely/never the best in all areas.
|
| It's the sign of a healthy business IMHO
| the_af wrote:
| If quantifying "best" is so difficult, then maybe Ive
| should have worded his words of consolation better,
| maybe? Otherwise it's just an empty platitude.
| kergonath wrote:
| Not all the best ones do, it is quite straightforward. Some
| bad ones also do occasionally make the cut, but it tells more
| about the nature of ideas than Apple's process at this point.
| the_af wrote:
| If that was Ive's meaning, that humans sometimes choose a
| worse idea than the best one, then it's both a truism and
| an empty platitude...
| bradknowles wrote:
| In Re: Betamax vs. VHS, what does "best" mean?
| throw0101a wrote:
| There is Product Category A, Product Category B, and Product
| Category C. In each of those categories there is a "best"
| product.
|
| But a company may not have the bandwidth to release in all
| three categories. So it may choose to focus on Product
| Category B, and the best implementation for B, and leave A
| and C (for now). Even though there are "best"
| implementations/ideas available for A and C.
|
| Sometimes it is _not_ possible for a company to walk and chew
| gum at the same time.
| simonh wrote:
| They are discussing design ideas. There might be many, many
| reasons why a product with an absolutely killer design could
| get cancelled anyway.
| the_af wrote:
| This means a better design idea won. So the idea that got
| cut wasn't the best!
| synu wrote:
| I read it as "even (some of) the best ones" based on the "not
| all ideas" start.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Could also be speaking with hindsight
| sumedh wrote:
| > If the best ideas don't make the cut, which ones do?
|
| The best idea might be too expensive for the market so you go
| with the next best one?
| the_af wrote:
| If it was too expensive, then it wasn't the best.
|
| Whichever way you put it, it's either a flawed process or a
| weird turn of phrase by Ive.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Carful to remember the "some of"... but the best ideas might
| be too risky, not as practical, timed poorly, too
| controversial, etc.
| the_af wrote:
| Then they are not the best...
| mouzogu wrote:
| Yeah like having a standard USB port on a laptop in 2020. At
| least they fixed it now.
| jefftk wrote:
| You mean a USB A port? They brought back MagSafe, HDMI, and
| the SD card slot, but for USB it's still only USB C.
| relaxing wrote:
| Wow, I somehow also had the misconception that USB A was
| back. I wonder how this shared delusion spread.
| [deleted]
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| That bit about the firing of the designer who used the river
| metaphor in that email is such a good lesson for anyone:
|
| Never ever ever ever announce moves like this if there is still
| money on the table that can still be taken away from you.
|
| No matter how awesome your company is, how great the team,
| product or how wonderful the atmosphere is. This guy thought he
| wrote a heartfelt goodbye to his beloved team and was instead
| brutally punished for it.
|
| That made me lose a whole lot of respect for Ive.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| This and what Elon Musk did keep getting me struck by how
| little protection workers in the US have. Fired on a whim. But
| so do remember when working at American companies all the
| horror stories we heard about how our colleagues working in
| America got treated.
|
| It became these "did you hear the latest crazy thing they did
| in the US office?"
|
| I am not saying this to dump on America but hopefully to get
| people to demand better. If this is how people want their work
| life that is fine, but I hope people realize it doesn't have to
| be like this.
|
| What is actually pretty bad corporate culture has been
| normalized IMHO.
| refurb wrote:
| If you publicly trash your company (externally or just
| broadly internally) in other countries you're saying you
| won't be fired? Or face some discipline?
|
| That hasn't been my experience at all.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| There's a lot of nuance as usual. Firing you over provably
| true statements or things you said strictly as a private
| individual can have harsher consequences for the company
| (you can be let go but they'd need to pay a pretty heavy
| severance)
|
| I am not a lawyer, but I'd expect you'd need to be
| revealing company secrets, or have a public speaking
| position in the first place (e.g. you work for PR) and your
| declarations make you unfit for the job, or leave proofs
| that your goal was to damage the company, to be in a
| position as weak as in the US.
|
| imagine otherwise how tough it would be to do political or
| ideological activism on your private time.
| refurb wrote:
| Use the example in the article. You basically write a
| letter to your fellow employees saying (I'll paraphrase)
| "im outta here because the talents and ideas that made
| this place successful are gone".
|
| Can you do that in Europe and face no consequences?
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| More precisely, in Europe firing someone has consequences
| for _the company_. So they would need rather more
| motivation to do that than an artfully worded leaving
| email.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I really enjoy that it's basically impossible for my company
| to fire me on a whim (at least it'll be a multi month process
| that you can see coming months away).
|
| I can be openly critical to my boss, or leadership, or mess
| up in general and recover my good graces without constantly
| worrying that my job and life depend on it.
|
| That said, we have to work with one another, so it's in all
| our interests to keep a good relationship.
| capableweb wrote:
| > That made me lose a whole lot of respect for Ive.
|
| You mean you lost respect for Alan Dye? Seems to have been the
| one who fired Imran Chaudhri.
|
| > Shortly after the email, Dye fired Chaudhri.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| No, they mean Ive.
|
| > The email alarmed Ive and Dye. They feared that the message
| Chaudhri sent could be interpreted to mean that Apple's best
| days had passed.
|
| It's clear from the article that both Ive and Dye were
| directly involved in the firing.
| capableweb wrote:
| > It's clear from the article that both Ive and Dye were
| directly involved in the firing.
|
| It's really not. The part you quoted doesn't say that Ive
| was "directly involved" in the firing, it says he felt
| something about the message Chaudhri sent. The article
| states Dye was directly involved in the firing, and
| mentions nothing about if Ive was involved or not, so we
| should presume he wasn't. Otherwise the article would say
| so.
| smugma wrote:
| It's hearsay, as even the article says it was Dye who did
| the firing.
|
| I've read many articles/interviews where Jony talks about
| being "hurt" by something. As in, he puts everything he has
| into these creations and certain things he takes very
| personally, as if someone is trying to stomp on a rose in
| his garden.
|
| Chaudhri is known to have a big personality himself and
| went to start a company that has hired a lot from Apple
| (not exclusively but sometimes browsing LinkedIn it looks
| that way). So he sends an email while resting and vesting
| (and also planning his next big thing), and they decide to
| cut ties, as he's now seen as a potential liability. It
| doesn't need to be petty or vindictive, but a decision
| based on bad vibes they got. Chaudhri could have given his
| notice two months in advance and cruised and sent the email
| on his last day, but he didn't.
| kumarmanket wrote:
| ballenf wrote:
| I just don't buy that the river metaphor wasn't about Apple. It
| just doesn't make sense unless he was retiring or leaving
| design entirely. Otherwise the lack of water is clearly related
| to Apple.
|
| If it really was solely about himself it's a really poor
| metaphor. So the river is moving to a new mountain? And the
| river's lack of water has nothing to do with the current one?
| Or, the mountain (Apple) has plenty of water but somehow this
| river (employee) can't receive any of it?
|
| The non-critical-of-Apple reading is convoluted and tortured,
| imo.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| It looked like a a description of personal journey to me
| immediately. It makes no sense for a person to say such a
| thing about the company. To simple assume that I find a bit
| sad. Like to people really think so low of their fellow man?
|
| I think our society has gotten to much cynicism. Maybe we
| need more nativity, compassion and empathy.
| zarzavat wrote:
| " When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving
| in you, a joy. Sadly rivers run dry.."
|
| It seems obvious that he is talking about his personal joy
| running out. Because that's what he said.
| [deleted]
| ballenf wrote:
| I see that take on it.
|
| Maybe the lesson is that for employees who happen to
| believe that Apple's river had run dry, the message would
| be hard to interpret as personal to the author.
|
| Or that the river running dry personally is potentially
| contagious.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| That's the other lesson - don't use poetry or metaphors
| to express your self because they will inevitably be
| twisted to suit the corporate interests and not yours.
| kzrdude wrote:
| It's not so far from that to, "don't show your human side
| to the soulless corporation." And why even work for them,
| then?
| geraldwhen wrote:
| To get paid. Work is not your family. Family doesn't fire
| you for sending an email.
| kzrdude wrote:
| If you're a valuable worker, go find a place that does
| more to you than pay :)
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Don't really see how it could have been interpreted any
| other way.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| This whole story highlights how top-of-mind this fear
| that the "river" of innovation at Apple might be running
| dry really was for the leadership of this design team.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| Well, it's not his own poetry - it's some Persian classic
| he's quoting so you could probably look into it and find a
| whole well-spring of deep knowledge explaining _exactly_ what
| he meant by it.
|
| In the letter he talks about his own soul, and the experience
| of deep work being like that of a river. So it's pretty clear
| he's talking about what's on his interior spiritually. From a
| designer "I am barren and in a creative rut" pretty much
| means "I can't come up with good stuff and I'm of no use to
| all of you here".
|
| However, regardless of what he actually said, he was on his
| way out from a tight-knit and emotionally connected team in
| which expressing your feelings and being sensitive is sort of
| expected, only the guys running that team were so paranoid
| that they decided to burn him and smear shit all over his
| beautiful farewell letter. That's a dark thing to do to
| someone's career/reputation etc.
|
| Getting that glimpse, I do wonder to what extent Ive and his
| buddies have other ugly deeds on their accounts. Perhaps Ive
| running that separate company of his is really only a way of
| gracefully pushing this kind of toxicity away from the house
| just in case.
| Nathanba wrote:
| If the team was truly so tight knit then you wouldn't need
| to write an email to convey that you are leaving. I'm
| personally always flabbergasted by people who write company
| wide farewell messages. It's a net negative for the company
| to hear about people leaving. It doesn't matter what the
| reason for leaving is except if it's that the person won
| the lottery. Any other reason: Why not stay here? What's so
| unsustainable about working here?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Messages in advance of a departure help transfer
| responsibilities during the transition period.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I'm the opposite. My company has this thing where people
| that leave send an email they're leaving literally the
| afternoon they disappear, and sometimes nothing at all.
|
| It feels like they're sneaking out under the cover of
| night, and it makes everyone I need to work with feel
| very fungible. Getting attached to any given person is a
| dangerous excercise, since one day they might suddenly be
| gone, and you wouldn't know it.
| smaudet wrote:
| "The non-critical-of-Apple reading is convoluted and
| tortured, imo."
|
| Perhaps you are also reading things with a certain context -
| "poor", "convoluted", "tortured", "lack", "can't" - all
| negative words used in this comment. People often see things
| through lenses, - if management is negative, thin skinned,
| looking at a statement like that as anything but an
| indictment of the company would be wondrous.
|
| As others pointed out, the context of the letter speaks very
| differently. Whether it is "Apples" river or the river of
| inspiration of the employee, is hardly worth arguing over,
| inspiration comes from without and is experienced by the
| employee, there is nothing innately inspiration about a
| company, ever, only about its employees...who make up said
| company.
|
| I suppose you might want to argue that employees can inspire
| other employees - perhaps, but only to the limited degree
| which some employees have different experiences than others.
| As a senior employee, you are somewhat expected to be that
| source of inspiration, saying rivers dry up, e.g. yours, is
| not saying that Apple the company, can never be a place
| employees will experience inspiration, just that you aren't
| experiencing it anymore, and that's perfectly fine.
|
| What's also perfectly fine is that management reacted this,
| way, which, ironically, foreshadows the absolutely lack-
| luster dumpster fire which was Apple in the past decade. It
| illustrates perhaps why there was not inspiration, because
| leadership failed to provide it.
| franga2000 wrote:
| I read it as there not being anything else at Apple left to
| inspire _him_ , which is a reflection on his story at Apple,
| not Apple itself. If you work at one place for well over a
| decade, it makes sense to me that you would eventually run
| out of things you want to do there and have to move on.
|
| But regardless of the interpretation, firing the dude was
| completely unacceptable.
| preseinger wrote:
| It reads to me as obviously about the author, and the
| critical-of-Apple reading the convoluted and tortured
| version, only making sense if your model of humans is
| fundamentally... I dunno, manipulative, or Machiavellian.
| (shrug)
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| Well put, my thoughts as well. It just makes me sad on
| behalf of humanity that we turn out having such bleak and
| cynical perspective on other people. Benefit of the doubt?
| Guilty until proven otherwise? Are such ideals just
| unfashionable today or something?
|
| People should put more faith in each other. Look for the
| positive instead of just the flaws and shortcomings.
| ajross wrote:
| > If it really was solely about himself it's a really poor
| metaphor.
|
| The point of the story was that he was fired for what very
| well might have been a poor metaphor. I mean, even taking
| your point as a prior and _assuming_ that the guy was clearly
| saying that Apple 's design primacy was fading as he
| announced his retirement... why is that a termination-worthy
| act?
|
| I mean, yeah, he was firing some mildly poetic shots at his
| employer. Who among us, as it were. That quote was a little
| bit of passive aggression. Firing him was an act of
| deliberate malice.
| protastus wrote:
| Anyone in a leadership position has a responsibility to measure
| their words carefully, especially in a farewell email.
|
| "Sadly, rivers dry out, and when they do, you look for a new
| one." broadcasts extreme negativity to the people who remain.
| It almost reads like a cautionary warning followed by advice.
|
| One can write a heartfelt goodbye without ambiguity. Assuming
| the ambiguity was unintentional, the author was careless and
| paid the price. He could've gotten away with it in other places
| (large companies are generally too bureaucratic to fire someone
| who's already leaving) but obviously not in this case.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I really don't know how you can signal more negativity about
| the outlook of either company or position than by leaving.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| Sounds like you demand that people walk on eggshells around
| some thin skinned psychopath. It is human to make some
| mistakes or miscommunicate. The normal thing would be to have
| a talk and clear things up. Management must react when an
| employee keeps screwing up despite feedback. Here was a one
| strike rule. Even the California prison system is more easy
| going than that ;-)
| protastus wrote:
| Indeed, life is not easy going when someone is senior
| enough to work with a CxO at a giant company, and writes
| emails with thoughts that influence entire organizations.
| justin66 wrote:
| > Sounds like you demand that people walk on eggshells
| around some thin skinned psychopath.
|
| If you're almost vested and planning on leaving very soon,
| that is not a terrible approach to take, even if the
| parties involved are not psychopaths.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| How do you know they didn't have a talk and the email
| writer refused to send a clarification email in apology?
|
| We are only getting one side of the story after all.
| peterkelly wrote:
| I think honesty is a better approach.
|
| A team or an organisation that cannot look at itself
| critically and recognise its problems is unable to remedy
| them.
|
| When people are afraid to speak about problems, those
| problems are more likely to remain. That's not a healthy
| culture.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Your point is valid, but in my experience it can be hard to
| get concensus on what the problems are, much less what the
| solutions are. And I work in a tiny company - I can't
| imagine what it's like for Apple.
|
| Part of the problem is that everyone sees everything from
| their point of view, and not always from a holistic point
| of view.
|
| Someone working on homepod sees the potential there and
| gets frustrated that its not equivalent to an iPhone or
| ipad. Someone else, in the siri division has his own list
| of priorities and demands (perhaps from the iPhone team).
|
| Management isn't trying to fix every problem, or make
| everyone happy, they're trying to triage as best they can.
|
| In my personal context we get all kinds of feedback from
| employees, but ultimately we have more ideas, and
| suggestions, than money. For some problems everyone has a
| proposed solution, half of which conflict with the other
| half. Sometimes suggestions fix some of a problem, but are
| short term, we may be holding out for a long term approach.
|
| I guarantee that wherever you work you won't be happy with
| all decisions and directions - and I'm sure that includes
| people making those decisions and directions.
|
| I've had people leave. Some on good terms, some on bad.
| Some are positive on the way out, but we stomp on negative.
| There's a place for negative feedback, and that's up the
| pipeline (where we always take it seriously) but whining to
| co-workers who have no authority to effect change,
| especially after resigning, is not a good look, and is not
| constructive.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| >broadcasts extreme negativity to the people who remain
|
| ...which was immediately proven right by execs who fired him.
| laserlight wrote:
| Firing is almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. It
| signaled that misinterpretation is the right
| interpretation.
| arrrg wrote:
| I also don't quite get it. Firing that designer would not
| increase my trust in the design leadership.
|
| It would seem thin skinned, skittish, cruel, deeply immoral and
| evil, leading me to lose a lot of trust, feeling as though
| creating a culture of fear is the goal. That behavior seems
| completely incomprehensible to me, especially since you need to
| have an extremely tortured reading of that e-mail to read it as
| an attack on Apple. It's simply so extremely weird and wrong to
| do that. It also seems completely ineffective. What's the
| intended effect here?
|
| I'm not sure what the general vibe here's on that, but it seems
| abhorrent to treat people that way.
| lupire wrote:
| Artists are a petty and vindictive culture, since value is
| subjective and there's no profit for being pretty good but
| not the annointed winner.
| arrrg wrote:
| All the designers I know are awesome at being open and
| responding to outside inputs.
|
| I work as a user researcher and in general designers tend
| to be the very best, both at showing a real interest and
| investing themselves into the research and also at
| incorporating the results.
|
| Designers tend to have a real interest in improving their
| designs and getting clarity on things they themselves may
| be uncertain about.
|
| However, I'm not working in the context those people talked
| about there work in. (Also, UI design, not hardware design.
| So not very comparable.)
| mikeryan wrote:
| Art may be subjective but product design is not. We have a
| whole host of ways to measure success at it.
|
| I feel it's a mistake to conflate art with design. While
| related they are separate disciplines.
| andrepd wrote:
| Maybe that is the reason why design sucks so much
| nowadays (in nearly every domain of technology). Design
| is much more objective and measurable, while personal
| aesthetics aren't.
| dbspin wrote:
| Genuine question, do you know any artists? This isn't the
| case generally; certainly amongst ordinary working visual
| artists - who are demonstrably open minded, centred, and
| interpersonally engaged. I can't speak to Damien Hirst
| level centimillionaires, who represent an invisibly small
| fraction of working artists.
| [deleted]
| chongli wrote:
| Apologies for nitpicking but the prefix you're looking
| for is hecto-. The prefix centi- means 1/100 [1],
| implying that Damien Hirst has only $10,000 to his name,
| starving artist level wealth!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_S
| I_prefi...
| kerlgos wrote:
| https://www.merriam-
| webster.com/dictionary/centimillionaire
| lynguist wrote:
| It's really funny because centi- means both hundredth and
| hundred. And it's a doublet of hecto!
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/centi-
| cfcfcf wrote:
| Right, like bimonthly and biweekly.
| jonsen wrote:
| Millionaire is not an SI unit, so centi- is not an SI
| prefix here.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Vindictive? Artists? BS. You're clearly extrapolating on an
| unfounded assumption. I'm an adult art student getting a
| BFA as part of a career change and have known hundreds of
| artists and designers over the years. Firstly, there is no
| unifying culture among even large subsets of artists, let
| alone artists in general. Secondly, claiming that artists
| in general are vindictive is flat-out absurd.
| cornel_io wrote:
| At a certain type of design-centric company the culture
| shifts, and divas are both created and elevated to a
| degree that you don't see elsewhere. Most companies don't
| tolerate that sort of artist/designer because they're
| obnoxious and generally horrible people (and they don't
| work well with others so unless the culture is one that
| prioritizes them over everyone else they tend to flail
| and fail pretty quickly) but here and there you'll find
| pockets where they thrive.
|
| I think you're absolutely right that in general artists
| are not like that. It's a few bad apples, and for the
| most part they don't ever have much opportunity to do
| damage because it takes an exceptionally weird company to
| enable them.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Well aware of the conspicuous minority that comprise that
| (stereo)type, but you can levy similar charges against
| any knowledge job from engineering to academia to the
| priesthood and I highly doubt those sorts of people are
| more highly represented in art than most other
| professions.
| illwrks wrote:
| I took it to mean artists/designers in a corporate
| setting where it's a bit more cutthroat.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Beyond never having heard anyone conflate the terms
| 'artist' and 'corporate designer,' the sentiment would
| still be wrong. I've worked in corporate software
| projects as a developer, designer, support person,
| project manager, QA engineer, and even IT/Ops guy and
| would rank designers, on a whole, somewhere near last in
| terms of likeliness to be vindictive. Sales? Management?
| Even support? Sure.
|
| You can have vindictive jerks in any job, but considering
| that design's fundamental purpose is to empathize with
| people and manifest that it some medium, vindictive
| people tend to filter themselves out.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| More likely to be the corporate setting than the
| designers.
|
| I had no idea the originator of the Bondi Blue iMac was
| Danny Coster. I'd always assumed it wss Ive.
|
| Interesting he managed to take all of the credit for it.
| azinman2 wrote:
| From the media you'd think he and Steve Jobs were the
| only two employees and responsible for 100% of any
| success.
|
| It's much easier to personify a monolith under a specific
| individual. Tesla is only Musk. Gas prices and inflation
| are only because of Biden. The list goes on.
| PraetorianGourd wrote:
| I think you really captured the somewhat unspoken reality
| of it.. When you are a leader, things that go right are
| credited to you (Jobs, Musk) but when things go wrong,
| you get the blame (Biden).
|
| Of course the world is more nuanced than that but the
| power of narrative combined with the romance of
| "leadership" and you end up playing a high-risk, high-
| reward game
| hackernewds wrote:
| well said
| ascar wrote:
| Can someone explain to me how you can fire someone that already
| declared to leave and do financial damage to the employee with
| that?
|
| I guess it's some clause of a vesting schedule that gets
| triggered when being fired and he already declared his
| resignation before his shares were vested, but they would've
| been after his last day?
|
| I find it so weird that he already quit the job but the company
| could actually save money by firing him. Shouldn't something
| except fear of a bad reputation prevent this kind of move to do
| actual damage?
| aenis wrote:
| I dont think the management cared about the money the company
| saved; top level management rarely preoccupies itself with
| such pedestrian matters. It was about sending a message and
| reasserting authority. Management 101 in large, deep pocketed
| orgs.
|
| Btw, disciplinary firing of employees on leave is of course
| pretty rare but happens - also in those countries that make
| it difficult to fire salaried staff. People do stupid things,
| like steal, download thousands of documents, or write stupid
| emails.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| I read the book, and it says a few things that contradict other
| stories I've read about Apple, by people who were there. After
| a while I started taking things with a grain of salt.
|
| Considering how awful the story is, I think it's likely that
| there was more to the guy who got fired than the book let on.
| They were worried about an exodus so they treated a guy like
| shit? And why did he announce his departure before his benefits
| were locked in? The whole story is sus.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > And why did he announce his departure before his benefits
| were locked in?
|
| This happens when people trust their team and managers. Which
| is why I consider it the worst sort of betrayal to fire
| people over it.
| jonas21 wrote:
| > _That made me lose a whole lot of respect for Ive._
|
| I dunno... It sounds like they let him rest and vest for a few
| months as a courtesy even though he was already checked out.
|
| And then, during that time, he sent an email to the entire team
| that implied (either intentionally or through carelessness)
| that Apple's river of ideas had run dry.
|
| It seems pretty reasonable to ask him to leave immediately
| after doing that.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah - that was my read. They were helping him out and he
| wrote a stupid email, so they said fuck this you're fired.
|
| Maybe part misunderstanding, but it was a dumb thing for him
| to do.
|
| That's also taking this article at face value - I'd guess
| there's probably more to it as there usually is.
| mathattack wrote:
| Wait until the check clears if that much is at stake,
| especially if you don't plan on showing up for work the last
| bit.
| antipaul wrote:
| We really have no idea why they decided to fire him.
|
| From the story, it looks like a benign email with an apropos
| quote.
|
| But while that could've indeed been the email, maybe he was
| also going around saying Apple is done, come join me in my new
| gig, Ive is dumb, etc.
|
| And team members then complained it hurt their morale.
|
| So Dye and Ive put their door down.
|
| I'm not saying this is what happened. But do we really know the
| full story?
| iancmceachern wrote:
| People are great until they aren't.
| coldtea wrote:
| I prefer the current balance of Ive-inspired-designs WITHOUT
| Ive's obsessions.
|
| But something also not frequently said: Apple had amazing designs
| (compared to the rest of the industry), for 2 decades before Ive
| started his thing. Heck, NeXT too.
|
| Also, if I had to suffer yet another cookie-cutter Ive post-
| release video about a product, I'd kill myself...
| mickelsen wrote:
| Oh man, those trailers with him speaking are the stuff I MISS
| the most, it was the last reminder of that old Apple now that
| keynotes and product launch commercials are so bland and boring
| I don't even bother to watch them anymore.
| thoms_a wrote:
| As a counterpoint, I bought my first iPhone (first ever Apple
| product) this week, and it was specifically because it seems
| like Apple is finally designing products with usability and
| functionality as their top priority.
|
| Ive was great, but he was way too much of an artist to
| understand that computers are mostly tools. Ive was more
| interested in folding katanas and the process of creation
| than the mundane design of a productivity tool.
|
| As an example, I remember being utterly bemused by the
| relentless port-pruning on the Macbook Pro. It just didn't
| make sense to me to remove ports on a machine designed
| primarily for productivity. But Ive didn't like ports,
| because katanas don't have ports. So the MBP didn't have
| ports.
| SllX wrote:
| I think he understood perfectly that computers were tools.
|
| The PowerBook/MacBook Pro designs up through 2016, the
| MacBook Air from 2010 onwards, the Power Macs G3-G5/Macs
| Pro through 2013 and the 2019 Mac Pro, the iBook/MacBook
| line through 2011, and the entirety of the iMac's history
| all reflect a recognition that computers are fundamentally
| tools. They just held the conceit that tools can also be
| beautiful.
|
| But yes, sometime between Job's death and 2017, the wheels
| just completely fell off when they introduced new Mac
| designs, and they spent the better part of the last 5 years
| putting them back on after Ive was promoted into the sky
| and left the company.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| IDK. Doggedly sticking to a single button mouse. Putting
| charging port on the bottom of a mouse because designers
| know best. Calculators that produce wrong answers if one
| types before the beautiful animations finish. Keyboards
| so thin and heavily integrated dust can break them, and
| cannot be repaired without accessing main board.
|
| Evidence suggests to me that Apple's record on utility is
| mixed.
| urthor wrote:
| They'll fix that in a few years.
|
| I suspect Ive was fired because he created the craziness
| of 2012-2017 post Jobs era.
|
| Trashcan, no ports, touch bar, mouse charging etc etc.
|
| These days I have moderate confidence Apple will fix its
| issues. Eventually.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Yup, firing Ive was the first step in the right
| direction.
|
| Of course, we didn't see the effects until now because a
| trillion dollar ship takes a while to turn around.
| urthor wrote:
| Not even about the money.
|
| Hardware involves making things, the turnaround time is
| nonzero.
| SllX wrote:
| Let's be fair: Apple has had sufficient time to revise
| all of these post-Jobs Ive-era designs. Ive himself was
| still in charge when the trash can hit the bin, and
| they've more or less fixed the port situation on most of
| their models (I still have disagreements with some of
| their choices but we can at least say they're debatable
| now).
|
| But they just released a revision of the 13" MacBook Pro
| with the touchbar. And while I know they have a hard time
| course-correcting bad design choices on their biggest
| product lines, there's no excuse for not having revised
| the Magic Mouse 2 by this point.
|
| Also while this discussion has been mostly focused on
| hardware, let's not forget that Apple is selling 6K
| displays while displaying all the signs and symptoms of
| an organization absolutely allergic to on-screen chrome
| in every release of Mac OS X for the past few years as
| well as the next major revision they just announced.
|
| I'll put a lot at Ive's feet, but only for the time he
| was actually there and in charge of design.
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| Sorry, what do you mean by "on-screen chrome"? I've tried
| googling a bunch of variations on the phrase but I can't
| seem to find anything relevant.
| SllX wrote:
| Window or user interface chrome, which incidentally is
| where Google Chrome gets its name (as the "chrome" for
| the web) which is probably infesting your results. Going
| to Wikipedia's "Chrome" disambiguation would get you a
| one-line description too but the page-link would just
| direct you to graphical user interfaces.
|
| Chrome is all the stuff that's not the content area in a
| GUI. So the user-agent you're reading this in has a
| content area loading the page this thread is on (most
| likely a web browser but maybe you're using an HN-
| specific app), and then a toolbar where the location bar
| lives, maybe a favorites bar and the window controls like
| close and minimize unless you're on a phone. Basically
| chrome is all the overhead GUI like menus, toolbars,
| sidebars, pop-overs and controls around the stuff you're
| focused in on.
| gls2ro wrote:
| I personally like the single button mouse. It is the only
| mouse I got so far that on MacOS let me scroll webpages
| up and down, left and right without any effort.
|
| I really like that the almost the whole surface is active
| and have gestures.
|
| I agree that for video games not having dedicated buttons
| is not ok. I dont play those so for me this is the
| perfect mouse.
|
| Being using them from the first generation I think
| 2010-2011 and it is hard for me to go back to normal
| mouse.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Loads and loads of mice can do horizontal scrolling while
| having two mice buttons, e.g. Logitech MX Master, Razer
| Naga, etc. It's not uncommon for high end mice to have a
| mouse wheel you can tilt left or right to scroll left or
| right or some other system.
|
| The Magic and Mighty mice support horizontal scrolling in
| spite of being one button mice and not because they are
| one button mice. Apple laptops kept with the whole one
| button thing even into 2000s where it was pretty painful
| as there was no scroll mechanism at all, no right click
| mechanism at all besides a key combo.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I on the other hand am happy to have the last of the
| laptops without extra dust-collecting holes (a hub has more
| than a laptop could ever offer) and with touchbar (I'd hate
| having to switch to adjusting sound volume/screen
| brightness the old way).
| brian_herman wrote:
| I'm excited to see stuff coming back like MagSafe and Claris
| The dogcow. The presentations might not be as great but the
| content is what's important.
| roflyear wrote:
| Apple keynotes we're such an amazing thing that every 6-12
| months to this day I remember how much I enjoyed them almost
| two decades ago.
| moralestapia wrote:
| It was unreal. I wish I could feel the same excitement
| about a product now as I did back then with the Jobs
| keynotes.
| ksec wrote:
| >Apple's operations team determined that making the iPad would
| require building several new features from scratch. The first-
| time costs of new machinery, a new logic board, and other
| components would amount to billions of dollars, an investment
| that would take years to recoup. Those so-called nonrecurring
| engineering costs led Apple's business division to suspend the
| iPad.
|
| I think this sums up pretty much everything that is wrong with
| Modern Apple. And as someone who used to scrutinise everything
| Apple, from their quarterly report to Supply Chains. This is
| sadly the case. You only need to look at Apple Retail to see how
| it went from a Marketing, Services and User experiences goal to
| some financial checkbox.
|
| I would imagine Steve would have authorise the few billions just
| to build a better iPad.
|
| It is also clear Johny have a some sort of burnout at Apple,
| Software UX should never have been under his decision making.
| After the departure of Forstall, Jony went all in and teared
| everything apart in iOS7 within a year. Spend most of this time
| on Apple Retail redesign and Apple Park. And clearly trying to
| make the ultimate product he long dreamed off, the Macbook and
| MacBook Pro Touch Bar before the tech was ready. And somehow had
| an Apple Design Book by the end of 2016, which I thought was
| basically a tribute dedicated to Johny.
| ballenf wrote:
| At work, the new MacBooks with HDMI are trickling in and I've
| never seen so much excitement around a laptop. People (mostly
| Product people) just giddy they don't need a dongle to connect to
| screens.
|
| I didn't realize how much people hate dongles.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I just wish MacBooks had something like HPs half height
| expanding Ethernet jacks.
| grishka wrote:
| Apple would never do this, this can't possibly be made to
| look "clean" enough for them to even consider
| scarface74 wrote:
| This is the port.
|
| https://images.app.goo.gl/n3TFrbnZ8JbjzVyp9
|
| It expands to support a standard Ethernet jack
| floydnoel wrote:
| That would be fantastic. I'll never use HDMI, but I would
| love to have an Ethernet port!
| chrisseaton wrote:
| The old laptops had mini display port - you didn't need a
| dongle to connect to a screen.
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| Because every TV in every space in your office has a mini
| display port cable hanging out of it for you to plug into?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| We use WiFi to stream the signal, which is far more
| convenient. But yeah, all the monitors have display port as
| well if you want to plug in.
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| That's great. We have lots of large TVs for sharing in
| meeting spaces but these tend to have an HDMI cable
| hanging off them (you don't want to try to plug your own
| cable in as it can be tricky to reach) so being able to
| plug that cable into your laptop is good. I carry an
| adapter.
|
| Having said that, most of our spaces now have a box that
| lets you share via Teams meeting, which generally works
| fine too.
|
| No cables is the holy grail!
|
| All our monitors on desks have a USB-C cable so that's
| nice and easy to get connected with these days.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| I actually like that I can connect everything - keyboard,
| mouse, two monitors, headphones, power, ethernet via one
| thunderbolt cable.
|
| What I'd hate is the fact that I'd have to unplug everything
| and take this dock with me if I wanted to connect in the
| conference room.
| burnished wrote:
| Wait what? How are you doing that? I want this thing so my
| laptop can be more easily unplugged and stop being a stylish
| desktop pc
| eastbound wrote:
| The legendary dongle! The one that serves as a docking
| station! I've heard of this one, a major company here has
| it. Even for them, they had their IT team to research it,
| and it's valued $300 on the internal resale forum.
|
| So, the magic dongle that delivers the USB-C dream is ultra
| expensive and rare and only worth finding if you have 6000
| employees to provide.
| expensive_news wrote:
| No, I bought a dongle on Amazon that I use for my M1 Air
| for $60. It takes up both USB-C ports, but it handles
| power, can do 4K@60Hz HDMI (only for 1 display though),
| has an SD card reader, a few USB-A ports, and maybe
| another USB-C port. More ports than I've ever had to use.
| The read/write speeds aren't best in class, but it was
| only $60.
|
| It's nice to only have to unplug one thing to be able to
| take my laptop somewhere, and I like the 2 port design
| more than I thought I would.
| duskwuff wrote:
| What you want is a Thunderbolt dock.
|
| Be warned that they aren't cheap. Most of the good ones
| cost $300 - $400; I'd recommend looking at options from
| Caldigit and Anker.
| jen20 wrote:
| You can still do that with the newer MacBook Pro with extra
| ports.
| wincy wrote:
| I mean, I buy a dongle and maybe it'll support 1080p, maybe
| 1440p, maybe 4K? Who knows! The Amazon review certainly won't
| tell you, the company selling it to you will lie through their
| teeth. You won't find out until you're plugging it in (probably
| during a presentation) It's just so much fun playing dongle
| roulette.
| grecy wrote:
| Buy the dongle from Apple and it will be expensive, but it
| will work perfectly.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Well that depends. The old Apple HDMI to USB C dongle
| doesn't do 4K 60Hz so if you buy used or the shop you're at
| has old stock...
|
| The other adapters like the VGA one they make also don't
| support more than 60W PD passthrough and they don't really
| make this clear on the store page or packaging either.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Please add a trigger warning to your post. /s
| topicseed wrote:
| This made me laugh too much. It's true on so many levels with
| anything I bought recently on Amazon.
| SllX wrote:
| Kind of makes me wonder if Ive's late Apple designs would
| stand up better in a world where Amazon was better and you
| could reliably receive what you ordered. Does anyone else
| remember that gentleman who worked at Google with one of
| their USB-C charging Chromebooks that would test various
| USB-C cables to see if they met spec until one fried his
| Chromebook?
|
| But dongles would still suck so probably the answer is
| "technically yes, but not in a meaningful way".
| HillRat wrote:
| It's a good example of the difference between product and
| service design --- the product designer wants to prune ports to
| make the hardware smaller, lighter, and sleeker, while the
| service designer wants the user to not have to spend an hour
| browsing paid Amazon reviews to find the one dongle that will
| work, won't catch on fire, and can get delivered before they
| have to get on a flight for a client presentation.
| majjam wrote:
| The list of trackers on that website is the largest Ive ever seen
| Sebb767 wrote:
| On mobile, you also get that stupid video on the middle of the
| page attached at the top once scrolling by. _And you can 't tap
| it away_. Just, why?
| drakonka wrote:
| There is a tiny, barely visible close button above it on the
| right.
| dubswithus wrote:
| 44 trackers and ads blocked by Brave.
| pronoiac wrote:
| Huh, Mobile Safari reported 54.
| can16358p wrote:
| For a few seconds I interpreted "Ive" as Jony Ive and tried to
| make sense of it.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Hmm, I think top 10 US banks easily beat those.
| naet wrote:
| Banks obviously have a lot of financial data at their
| disposal to use how they see fit. But out of curiosity I
| checked my bank website which falls under this category and
| there were only 2-3 trackers picked up by my browser and
| extensions.
| [deleted]
| caycep wrote:
| The one thing about all this press from "After Steve" - the
| author is one of those reporters who tend to make speculative
| guesses about Apple that have not borne out. Granted, perhaps he
| took extra effort to get sources/research material for the book
| but I'd take it with a grain of salt.
| mdmglr wrote:
| Today, none of Apple's products spark my excitement and joy like
| they did from 1999-2011. Everything today is predictable, safe
| and iterative. I look forward to reading this book. Maybe it can
| provide some insight. I hope Apple's design team can recover.
| roflyear wrote:
| I agree, but I think much of this was the excitement of
| watching Jobs. The feeling you got was something else.
| deergomoo wrote:
| Putting software design under the hardware design folks after
| Forstall was outed was and remains disastrous IMO.
|
| Dye and his team continue to make beautiful hardware but fuck me
| hiding every function of a program behind a hover state or
| overflow menu absolutely kills usability. Productivity is being
| sacrificed for some weird notion of "cleanliness". We're all
| running displays with millions of pixels, we can afford buttons
| for stuff.
| urthor wrote:
| This, absolutely this.
|
| The hardware is getting better. The software is getting worse.
|
| They're hiding usability.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I also find software _quality_ to be getting worse (more
| glitches and bugs, which can be very distracting), but I
| actually like having the main UI as free of distraction as
| possible. Though I 'll agree they've overshot their goal a
| little/are focusing on the wrong things in places (I always use
| the search to crop things in preview).
| ksec wrote:
| This, and iOS7. I know I am in the extreme minority but I do
| miss Forstall. I just dont like Craig Federighi much.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| After reading that, Ive is a piece of shit. That guy went out of
| His way to be cool. Instead of clarifying the misunderstanding,
| they just nuked him from orbit.
| [deleted]
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Getting fired for that river analogy...that must've stung holy
| cow
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Unfortunately, the design team isn't the only thing afflicting
| Apple's products. macOS crashes, previously extremely rare are no
| a weekly event for me. On Apple gear. My iPhone 8 Plus only
| intermittently generates notifications from colleagues while at
| work. Flaky Wi-Fi. Autocorrect has learned too much and instead
| of correcting typos natural to an onscreen keyboard, now
| materially changes sentences on the fly, respelling correctly-
| spelled words, apparently based upon some engineer's idea of ML
| Nirvana and contextual language processing. Hey MF I don't write
| _your_ way. Lock Screen appears abruptly during use and is
| unlockable, requiring a reboot. It's almost like the "the new
| windows will fix all the crashes" (3.1/95/98bXP) guys have set up
| shop at Apple and are perpetrating Jobs' feared "Bozo Explosion".
| Ironically, Windows on my aging MBP is my most stable compute
| experience on the daily now. Well, except for the Linux servers
| and their mult-year uptimes.
| can16358p wrote:
| I really loved the design of the Touch Bar/Butterfly keyboard
| visually.
|
| It would have been great if:
|
| - They kept the butterfly but completely solved the failure
| problem.
|
| - Supported Touch Bar with actual haptic feedback that could
| really be used "professionally" as in a Pro device. It could at
| best become a gimmick, but if played right, had great potential.
|
| - Had a simplified thin chassis with less ports. I really don't
| wanna pay for an HDMI port, SD reader, and a headphone jack that
| I'll never use in my entire life. I still believe after all the
| years, unification of everything to a single port (USB-C) was
| right. The industry should have forward to, say, support HDMI
| over USB-C on ubiqutiously, and really should have adopted a
| single card type: now we practically have 3: SD, microSD, and CF.
| My camera has a CF card, my drone has a microSD, and ironically
| regular SD is the only one that don't use so I still carry a
| dongle anyway (microSD adapter in this sense can be considered a
| passive dongle). Instead of the headphone jack it could stream
| raw audio over USB-C and offload DAC to the connected device. I
| also get that without a single standard, Apple also couldn't make
| everyone happy at the same time, but if there was a single
| standard port, or even a wireless standard that provided Gigabit
| speeds in around less than a meter, that would have been a great
| device with much less ports.
|
| Of course, this is not reality, and I of course also get why
| Apple added all those back, and I love my M1 MacBook Pro
| regardless. I just wanted to share a vision.
| rubatuga wrote:
| > I really don't wanna pay for an HDMI port, SD reader, and a
| headphone jack tha
|
| You don't want to pay for $20 worth of components? Like what
| another comment stated, you're getting components that have
| been tested by Apple and will have documented specifications.
| can16358p wrote:
| Forgot to add: also about aesthetics. I'm a minimalist guy
| who loved simplicity (hence loved Ive'd designs). Less ports
| and possible slightly thinner chassis as a result of it is
| something I'd have preferred even if there was no price
| difference.
| lupire wrote:
| > loved the design of the [product] visually [but it was a
| functional failure]
|
| Is Ive's trademark.
| grishka wrote:
| Way too many of today's UIs are like that, too. Especially
| desktop ones. And it's not just Apple, it's endemic in the
| entire industry.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I used the old Touch Bar in my profession daily - used it for
| debugging command shortcuts.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I miss the typing suggestions. Used them all the time because
| my spelling is terrible.
|
| I know you can hit F5 for suggestions but it isn't the same.
| can16358p wrote:
| I used it too especially in Vscode to move forward/back in
| views of code locations when debugging/coding.
|
| That was the first thing I missed, along with the custom
| controls for DND/Focus which was one tap away on Touch Bar.
|
| Though it was a lot of hit or miss to use Touch Bar while
| looking at the screen, as there wasn't a physical feedback of
| pressing, and no indication of button bounds by touching.
|
| The first thing I did when I got on M1 without Touch Bar was
| to open up Karabiner and map right Cmd and right Option keys
| to navigating back and forward in Vscode. After getting used
| to it in a few days, it was much smoother than using the
| Touch Bar as I was using a physical key.
| deanCommie wrote:
| > Stringer found the HomePod dissatisfying because Apple treated
| it as a hobby, depriving it of the cross-division focus it
| lavished on core products, such as the iPhone and iPad.
|
| I mean...yeah? iPod, iPhone and iPad are Apple's whole 21st
| century legacy. And most recently, arguably Apple Watch and
| EarPods.
|
| They all have the same thing in common - they're wearables that
| you see on the person on the street.
|
| Apple is a trillion dollar company (and not a skeleton in a
| graveyard of companies crushed by Microsoft in the 1990's that it
| almost was) because of iPhone and iPad.
|
| Every other Apple product is a "hobby" by comparison, and that
| includes iMacs, and Macbook Pros.
|
| You have to have your eyes open about the product you work on,
| and where it sits in the company hierarchy. Not everything is a
| core product, but that doesn't mean it's not important.
| ghaff wrote:
| I partly agree. But what makes the iPhone so sticky is
| ecosystem--and that includes a bunch of other products that
| might be a lot less interesting in isolation.
| ejj28 wrote:
| Indeed. I'm a staunch Android user, but I seriously envy
| iPhone users for the Apple Watch. Nobody else has put the
| same level of care and resources into their smartwatch and if
| it wasn't for a myriad of personal dealbreakers I have with
| Apple products, I'd be tempted to switch to iPhone to be able
| to have an Apple Watch.
| kccqzy wrote:
| This hobby attitude is exactly why Google kills so many
| products. Google Reader is a hobby; leadership can't ever
| imagine it being a billion-dollar business so it doesn't
| justify any more maintenance effort. HomePod is certainly going
| down that path.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| In my opinion, the work Ive did at Apple is greatly over rated.
|
| Yes it is clean and minimalist, and some devices like the iPhone
| 4 were truly innovative, bold and impressive designs.
|
| But overall, this is mostly bland, generic, boring.
|
| In the same minimalist style, I prefer the work of Dieter Rams.
|
| Some Sony products have really good design, including devices
| that were released a few years before the iPhone, but that were
| unfortunately built around a weak and already dying software
| stack (PalmOS). The Sony Clie are, in my opinion, less boring and
| better designed than most Apple products.
|
| IBM comes also to mind, the ThinkPad was a stylish and sturdy
| computer.
|
| There is a world outside of Apple headquarter, and I feel that
| they reached a dead-end, design wise.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Citing IBM as good at design makes this read like a parody.
|
| Everything IBM does is so hilariously ugly in the least
| imaginative, boring, industrial way that they've gone through
| "boxy" into some other universe where it's almost -- but not
| quite -- good style.
|
| For crying out loud, everything they make is _black_.
|
| There are famous Apple ads deriding the bland corporate look of
| IBM!
| derefr wrote:
| > Everything IBM does is so hilariously ugly in the least
| imaginative, boring, industrial way
|
| Their mainframes and HPC clusters have a sort of "intentional
| brutalism", almost skewing into a "dystopian, corpocratic
| sci-fi evil-idol the protagonist blows up at the end of the
| movie" look, that's actually kind of appealing/fitting for
| what those clusters are/do. It's the "Hugo Boss SS uniform"
| of computing.
| likeclockwork wrote:
| Black is the appropriate color for electronics.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| From my point of view, the beige boxes era was ugly, but
| there have been many interesting and innovative designs over
| the years.
|
| In my opinion, there should be enough space for multiple
| design schools and trends.
|
| https://archive.curbed.com/2016/8/31/12700054/richard-
| sapper...
| unsafecast wrote:
| This is an IBM mainframe from the early 60s:
|
| https://static.righto.com/images/1401-boot/1401.jpg
|
| I don't know about you but this is beautiful.
| sportslife wrote:
| Maybe that was past-tense good: The first all black computer
| I got to use was the most beautiful, amazing machine I had
| ever seen. It looked fast! Unlike the plodding old beige
| Macintoshes I had been using. But that was a long, long time
| ago.
|
| Design is funny: what was new and amazing eventually becomes
| old and dated, and then sometimes, later still, beloved.
| Aloha wrote:
| The ThinkPad is and was it's own world of design, it was well
| thought of at the time of its introduction - because it
| looked different than other laptops.
| sundvor wrote:
| And they designed it with channels to egress a water spill
| into the keyboard _past_ critical components, thus
| providing a very reasonable chance of laptop survival.
|
| Unlike Apple who put the high power display powerline
| immediately next to the CPU one. One drop, and the CPU is
| gone. (IIRC from Rossman's repair videos).
| goosedragons wrote:
| IBM has made lots of not black things. Were any of their
| typewriters black? The IBM PC sure wasn't and many models
| after that weren't. I think the ThinkPad was their first
| black computer at the very least. IMO ThinkPads look great
| and they've done some really cool things like the butterfly
| keyboard.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > Were any of their typewriters black?
|
| Yeah, both in their electric and Selectric lineup.
| karaterobot wrote:
| You're mixing up design and style. The Thinkpad was very well
| designed, in that it solved a problem well given a set of
| requirements and constraints. It was a workhorse laptop meant
| for business travelers, not a consumer device like the
| iPhone. Both were well designed, but for different purposes.
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| I'd strongly recommend checking out the work of Richard
| Sapper. he's like an Ive from a mirror universe. His design
| is really excellent, delightful, and absolutely user-
| focused. I wish Sapper's vision had won.
| [deleted]
| newsclues wrote:
| Sony worked with apple on early PowerBooks
| stevebmark wrote:
| From the outside, it seems like the poison of flat design only
| flourished when Jobs died. The beautiful, thoughtful, intuitive,
| accessible skeuomorphism was replaced with flat design only after
| Jobs wasn't there. Was Jony only able to wrench away the beauty
| then? It seems like it. Humans live in a 3D world and take visual
| cues from things like lighting, gradients, shadows, materials and
| textures. Flat design strips that all away.
| [deleted]
| bogwog wrote:
| I agree, I love skeuomorphic designs even though the common
| consensus seems to be that it's obsolete/outdated. I guess it's
| a consequence of the unusually high influence Apple has on the
| design world. It seems like no matter what Apple decides to do,
| every single designer will blindly follow them.
| timeon wrote:
| > It seems like no matter what Apple decides to do, every
| single designer will blindly follow them.
|
| While iOS was still skeuomorphic - first app I had that was
| flat was made by Microsoft. (Photosynth app)
| goosedragons wrote:
| Yeah I think this flat trend was more started by MS with
| the Zune HD, Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8. Apple was late
| to the flat game with iOS 7.
| bluk wrote:
| I don't know if most people consider skeuomorphic designs
| obsolete/outdated, but the costs would be far greater today
| compared to when iOS was only for a handful of different
| resolutions for the iPhone and iPad. Not only do you have to
| consider the physical screen size differences with possibly
| different PPI, but all of the sidebar/split-screen/multi-
| window modes would require additional work.
|
| It's kind of like when most websites started to switch to
| responsive designs where image heavy layouts and other fun
| animations kinda dropped off. It was just too costly to make
| things work well.
| musesum wrote:
| > when most websites started to switch to responsive
| designs where image heavy layouts and other fun animations
| kinda dropped off
|
| Yep, things got harder with AutoRotate on the iPad.
|
| It took a while to get used to SwiftUI. But the pay off is
| immediate when switching from Portrait to Landscape mode.
| Now, everything flows perfectly.
|
| Imagine designing for every single kind of device: be it
| watch, phone, pad, desktop, and TV. It kinda forces you to
| think differently.
| ben_w wrote:
| I think it depends on the level of skeumorphism -- a
| button doesn't need to be a bitmap a-la Bryce or Kai's
| Power Tools or Poser to be skeumorphic, it can be a
| bevelled rounded rectangle like MacOS 8 or a more complex
| but still procedurally generated 3D effect of the Aqua
| UI.
| musesum wrote:
| > it can be a bevelled rounded rectangle
|
| ok, yeah. Was thinking of the original Notepad, where the
| frayed yellow tear-off sheet border drove me nuts!
| Anything tied to the "desktop metaphor" - bits are not
| atoms
| DRW_ wrote:
| I tend to prefer some of the more 'flat' modern designs in many
| ways, but I do think people are too binary about the
| skeuomorphic stuff. They could have modernised the design and
| still kept some of the useful skeuomorphic cues.
|
| I think what pushed people away from the skeuomorphic stuff is
| that it feels like the aesthetics can become to feel dated
| quicker? But I don't think that necessarily needs to be the
| case.
|
| Like skeuomorphic design in itself isn't 'dated', but the
| aesthetics chosen can be.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think if you went back and looked at some of the OS X and,
| especially, iOS design elements of a decade or so ago you'd
| probably find some of them pretty dated.
|
| Another thing worth observing is that Apple exists as part of
| essentially the fashion industry which is design. And I don't
| necessarily wholly blame Apple for all the thin, grey,
| minimalist design that we see everywhere these days.
| DRW_ wrote:
| > I think if you went back and looked at some of the OS X
| and, especially, iOS design elements of a decade or so ago
| you'd probably find some of them pretty dated.
|
| I mean that's kinda what I was saying in that the
| aesthetics are dated, but I think the aesthetics chosen are
| distinct from the concept of 'skeuomorphism', the
| aesthetics of a particular implementation can be dated, but
| the idea of skeuomorphic design might not be.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Nonsense given we are still in flat design territory (a several
| years refined version of it) unless you really consider the
| current state remains poison
| robocat wrote:
| My mother struggles with her iPad. I presume Apple does
| usability and discoverability studies with seniors, but clearly
| they ignore the results. Usability was a sacred goal back in
| the HIG golden days, but now is sacrificed.
|
| If they had a geriatric mode that concentrated on functional UI
| over form, I would probably use it myself. Here are the most
| obvious issues (some are Safari specific):
|
| * Lack of scroll indicators. If you don't know you have to
| scroll, then you are screwed. It doesn't have to be scrollbars,
| but there must be some visible indication and/or control so
| that the need for scrolling up or down in particular is obvious
| and discoverable.
|
| * iPad multiple windows. The usability of this is completely
| broken. I would also love to disable it for myself, because I
| don't use multi-tasking and the UI only ever frustrates me.
| Horrific UX.
|
| * Keyboard focus indication. Watching your mum type into a
| field, scroll, and not realise the keyboard focus is not where
| she expects is hella frustrating. Should a field outside the
| viewport even retain keyboard focus?
|
| * <input type=number> completely broken. I have watched my
| mother type in a number using a comma (because other numbers on
| the page were displayed with commas) and the UI silently fails.
| Same with $. I've experienced this as a developer - it is just
| sooooo broken because the field accepts invalid characters but
| _input.value == ""_ which is fucked.
|
| * auto-hiding the tab bar in Safari. Mum opens a hundred tabs.
| And doesn't know about the rest of the Safari toolbar. Just
| leave the chrome visible please.
|
| * Hard to Undo. I remember how fucking magical undo was, and
| still is. Undo is not accessible (although admittedly far far
| worse on Android). Implicit save is fantastic for most things,
| but frightening for some settings. System confirmation modals
| as a workaround are seriously fucking nasty.
|
| * The top-right swipe system menu is difficult to learn.
| Especially for system modal changes (rotation lock, wifi,
| bluetooth).
|
| There are so many complicated things on the iPad that I need to
| teach my mother, just like Windows of yore. Some of those
| issues can easily be fixed, if the UI were to be more obvious
| and less "pretty".
|
| Maybe they could call it "beginners" mode. Like the opposite of
| a "pro" model or something.
|
| While I am being a whinging Englishman, they could fix some
| bugs too. 4 major iPadOS versions, and I still run into the
| same fucking bugs every day. I mean, the hardware is great, but
| why do the same bugs persist forever? Obvious bugs, with many
| appearing to be very shallow. Maybe hire some devs to fix bugs
| as their only job?
| [deleted]
| fortran77 wrote:
| The full title of the book this is excerpted from is:
|
| > After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and
| Lost Its Soul
|
| Having worked for Apple during the Steve days, I'm not sure there
| was a soul to be lost.
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