This. As CEO, one of Steve’s key functions was to serve as chief product officer. Design is an element of great products, and at Apple it has been a key element and key differentiator. As has been oft-noted, Tim is in no way a product person, and so without Steve we have seen design imperatives (thinness) unchecked
I often read these critiques that Steve Jobs was the one keeping Jony Ive in check in a way that Tim Cook can’t, and even if it is true, is there no significant criticism coming from below Ive?
As-in, is there really a full design team that are saying yes to Jony’s demands of an aluminium phone that is painful to hold to the point of requiring only the CEO to step in? Or does criticism from anyone below you not count any more?
Absolute dictatorship, no matter how enlightened, typically fosters a top-down culture that does not tolerate dissent. There is little doubt that Jobs was such a dictator.
There was a period of time while Steve Jobs was still alive and part of the company but had bigger things on his mind prior to his remission.
We saw this with the release of the aluminum unibody MacBook. There was no product differentiation other than the FireWire port. There were probably a few products that were far enough down the pipeline that couldn't be killed when Jobs was back for a brief period of time.
Jobs had plenty of design failures on his conscience, like the G3 cube, the skeuomorphism fad, and the hockey puck mouse. We should not pretend the guy had irreplaceable design sense.
Skeuomorphism wasn’t a failure. The iPhone and the touch interface were new to the market. Making the interface look familiar was important at the time even though it went too far. The iPhone did well from iOS 1 - iOS 6 and I don’t remember too many complaints until iOS 6.
Even today I feel like the new flat UIs are a bit too flat, like how some input fields (like in the Phone app on iOS) are completely invisible so you don't know that they're there.
Exactly. GUIs are supposed to look like things: buttons and displays, because the state of those things is immediately understood. Simple beveling and shadowing on a rectangle can tell you if the button is on or off. No one is calling for it to have a "brushed-metal" finish or dust motes on it.
Ive's (and others') asinine "flat" look tells you nothing. Buttons masquerade as plain text, and colored boxes next to each other are supposed to tell you which one (out of two) is active.
Apple's childish and ridiculous "skeuomorphism" wasn't just over the top and cheesy; it was just plain INCORRECT. They had controls designed to look like the paint on the felt surface of a blackjack table. WTF? You don't interact with the paint on a blackjack table in real life, so why the hell would I expect to do so in a program?
iTunes had a similarly defective UI: The "LCD" panel at the top (which was even depicted as having a sheen over it, to represent a glass cover) had controls in it you could click on. Again, WTF? You can't poke at the sealed LCD display on a tape deck, so... this is laughably stupid.
Yet year after year, very few decry the fallacy of reacting to plain old bad UI with even worse: the failure and design dereliction that is "flat" UI.
This. "Skeuomorphism UI is so bad, OMG" was just a journalistic fad/bandwagon when there was too many years of it and people who just get their opinions from op-eds. It will make its cycle back to fashion in the future.
In the first years, Aqua UI was praised as "lickable" and extremely pretty, and iOS skeuomorphic UIs wowed the world (and and where copied far and wide by competitors) for 5-6 years before any complaints.
Aqua was insanely good. Everyone else rushed to replicate it. Windows Vista/7 were “Redmond does Aqua”. The Linux DEs had craploads of Aqua-like skins. Given a choice, I’d love to get Aqua back. The “material” school of design is brutalist, sterile, and unloving, whereas Aqua was human, sexy, and comforting.
Yes, it became outdated after several years in use (6 on the iPhone?) and perhaps even didn't age well looking back on it. But for the time it was used it was definitely not a failure. Design preferences change, it doesn't mean everything that is replaced is automatically deemed a failure.
And unlike many other design trends that are purely about aesthetics, skeuomorphism also had a practical aspect: people had to "learn" a whole new way of interaction with these devices and using familiar shapes and textures helped. The "Start" button in Windows is called like that because people literally needed to be told where to start with the "futuristic" GUI.
Those examples are not the really bad aspects of skeuomorphic -- which is about not taking advantage of the unique digital opportunities for UI controls, and instead e.g. copying a DVD hardware interface or some other physical mechanism verbatim.
At worst, they're tacky. You can do equally tacky things in non skeuomorphic UIs.
But even that is just taste. All kinds of imitation materials are still used all around UIs and design, and still considered beautiful (e.g. frosted glass -- there's actually no glass. UI lights with diffusion, there's no real material to diffuse their light. Etc.).
Ipaq had touch 3-4 years before iPhone came out. Obviously not as slick. People seem to always forget that the iPhone was just an evolution not some kind of magically unexpected or unanticipated device.
As someone that was a daily iPAQ user with it Bluetooth tethered to my phone, they aren't even comparable.
The browser on the iPhone was actually good for the time. Touch actually worked, the display was responsive, they OSK was quite fast, and the lack of copy/paste was just dumb.
I ditched the iPAQ as soon as I held the iPhone and used it for five minutes.
I remember CRT touchscreens being used as cash registers in the late 90s. It's true, touch was nothing new. What was new was the combination of capacitive touch and a slick responsive UI. Previous systems had unresponsive GUIs or inferior touchscreen technology like resistive, IR or lightpen.
Getting both right at the same time was the big first for the iphone, not the bare concept of touchscreens as input devices.
What both you and grandparent are missing is the biggest iPhone touch innovation of all: multitouch. Multitouch was invented largely by a one-person startup that Apple purchased, and the iPhone became the first device to mass-produce it. The book The One Device covers its development well: https://amzn.to/2lrbKA7
IMHO multi-touch is really overrated in significance. The only multi finger gesture I use is pinch zoom and it’s like once a week. If that was a widget or triple tapping or something, I wouldnt notice.
The improvements to touch that made it magical was the super responsive typing and momentum scrolling and it’s all just one fingered.
Super responsive typing actually does depend on multitouch, because if you type fast then you will have multiple fingers touching different keys at the same time.
It's a stretch to call that multi-touch. The key press events are still a serialised stream of single finger touches. When people have spoken about multi-touch features and patents they have invariably been referring to chords and gestures.
I owned a fingerworks keyboard in 2003. The multi touch and gestures were amazing. And it was physically painful to type on. Try touch typing on a solid surface for any length of time. Fingertip bruises are no fun. The company mysteriously vanished shortly after announcing an after market multitouch keyboard for the iBook...
Touch interfaces were not widely used on much of anything prior to the mid 2000's. Yes there were exceptions, but it wasn't really used for general computing.
Seeing that I was programming ruggedized Windows CE based devices before the iPhone came out, I didn’t forget anything. But, the generally consumer market didn’t use Windows CE devices and Windows CE wasn’t exactly the definition of user friendly mobile design.
This is just like the initial reaction to the iPod on Slashdot back in 2001. “less space than the Nomad. No wireless. Lame” and why computer geeks don’t get the general consumer.
I strongly disagree on skeuomorphism. My parents learned how to use most of those skeuomorphism apps on first sight. It was absolutely brilliant, it may not look beautiful from UI perspective, but it was the easiest way to learn how to use it. Skeuomorphism isn't just about the looks, it is about how it relate to real world object that is instantly recognisable.
-----------------------
I still remember I was struck hard when I could not teach my parents how to do double click on mouse, and when to use right click on windows in the early 90s. For years computing were merely a typing machine with a Screen in front of them. And serving the web as well as email has some sort of pain involves in the process. It was bearable for them, but it certainly wasn't fun.
I thought my parents were dump, but then later I realise majority of people not grown up in age of computing have similar problems. It wasn't until iPhone before everything was obvious. It was stupidly simple that you could leave it to them and they would discover how to use within minutes. Minutes, when you think back after years of using computer, from time to time they still ask when to use double click and when to use right click. Scrolling somehow become natural, something they fail to learn when using Scroll Wheels.
Skeuomorphism along with Touch Screen UI brings Computing to the rest of the world. And call me old fashion, I would much like a modern take of it than the current trend of Super Flat everything UI.
It's not that Jobs had irreplaceable design sense that makes Job's very hard to replace, but his ability to check egos and call out a bad design when he spotted it.
Everything I read makes it seem like Jony Ive is full of himself. Jobs was the only one that could tell him that.
I would add two more the iTunes music store and physical apple stores.
The iTunes Music Store not only helped sell the iPod, it was the reason they were able to stand up the App Store so fast. They already had the infrastructure and millions of credit cards on file.
The Apple Stores gave them a direct relationship with customers that meant they weren’t completely beholden to retailers and ttet didn’t have to compete for shelf space. Everyone at the Apple Store knew Apple products.
The misses are noteworthy for their relative rarity.
The G3 cube was a good idea but was overpriced, as it was inferior to the regular G4 in every aspect other than size. It was priced to be a 2000’s-era executive desk ornament, a relatively tiny market segment. A few years later a substantially similar product was released to massive success—the Mac mini.
The puck mouse was stupid, but it wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be. It was eminently useable once you got used to it.
Jobs’ biggest design failure has always been his refusal to acknowledge the importance of cable strain relief.
The follow-up to the puck mouse sucked just as much, because its entire body was the button... meaning you couldn't pick the mouse up while holding the button, to continue a long drag operation. Then the asinine "Magic Mouse," which somehow expected you to hold the mouse in position and then swipe across its surface horizontally with several fingers...
Not to mention media-centric phones without headphone jacks. Remember how services like Apple Music are supposed to be the company's future? Hey, let's make it HARDER for users to consume those services, by removing the audio output and battery life! COURAGE!
I'd go further and say Apple hasn't made a single good mouse this millennium. But their trackpad is the best in the entire industry. I've switched to the Magic Trackpad on my desktop and it's been brilliant. Not missing the grip-and-push mouse at all. The Razer Deathadder is back in the drawer and I'm very happy.
As for the headphone jack, if you think it was a stupid idea to remove it, you should save your vitriol for the "idiots" who copied Apple. Surely it's worse to take what you'd class as an obviously stupid idea and blindly copy it like a brain-dead zombie. At least what Apple did showed actual courage. And yes, I'm using that word entirely un-ironically. I personally think it was courage and they've been proven correct by the rest of the industry.
(Personally I'm glad they got rid of the headphone jack because it prompted me to get a pair of Bose QC35 headphones. Absolutely brilliant. Best headphones I've ever owned, and I've owned some high end ones. Meh. I'll leave the "good sound" at home thanks—when I'm out and about I care far more about blocking out the distractions than maximal audiophool wankery.)
I'm sure plenty of devices would fail if you block their entire cooling channel. Yes, it was a flawed design in many ways, but it wasn't far off the mark. The Mac mini proved that.
Alas the speakers that came with it have a custom USB wiring, so they can't be used on any other computer.
Otherwise it was an excellent machine - just a bit under powered. But really easy to upgrade - just lift it out
of the enclosure via the click-out handle and the whole machine was available to upgrade RAM and install a wireless card (when that was a novel thing...). Design was nice, fits on a desktop and was mostly silent except for the HD.
It was a 'fad', not a failure. It's also not even clear what Ive had to do with that, seeing as Software Design was under Forstall and it wasn't until the iOS 7 redesign that software design came under Ive's control.
At some point even Steve Jobs may have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of products, and we don't expect the CEO to be able to provide every product with love.
At some point the responsibility must fall on the design team and Jony Ives, because what is design if not the tasteful balance of factors resulting in a vision of experience, as opposed to the tunnel vision pursuit of maximizing on a metric?
> what is design if not the tasteful balance of factors resulting in a vision of experience
Determining the essential functional qualities of a product, and balancing these with aesthetics. When you throw in the industrial factor as in industrial design you're also considering cost at scale.
