And yet Apple is/was the most valuable company in the world, largely due to design.
Saying "design is horseshit" makes about as much sense as saying "engineering is horseshit" or "writing well is horseshit". Read: it makes absolutely no sense.
It's a bit much to say design is goonish and an arms race. I'd argue the reason that Apple is the most valuable company in the world is mostly due to their design expertise.
You can make the same argument about software between companies being an arms race that competitors adapt to to or get left behind (see cloud, mobile, voice, etc.).
That's another but even bigger problem: Apple is so highly regarded by designers (which was even justified in the past when Apple did actual UX research), that they just blindly copy even the bad stuff.
You misread my point about tools. Design has value. Originality doesn't. Nobody is complaining that HP's new product has bad design; in fact, they seem to be complaining that it follows Apple's good design.
So basically you are calling out people for their "design blindness" while at the same time you imply that no competing electronic device has ever been designed as well as anything Apple has ever made.
I like Apple products too, but some of their competitors make awesome products from time to time.
Great title, but the rant itself is fairly incoherent. What's the main beef? That designers mimic Apple? Good shit always get copied and, on occasion, improved upon. That's how it all evolves.
innovation is generally considered to be a process that brings together various novel ideas in a way that they have an impact on society. (https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Innovation)
This pretty much sums up Apple's M.O., which has often been described as taking something that has already been invented (often by someone else), and putting it together in a new way that makes it useful (and usable) to mass market consumers.
Consider Time Machine. Apple didn't invent backup systems, but designing one in such a way that non-technical people could use it, was truly innovative, and Apple deserves a lot of credit for this. Likewise Apple didn't invent the tablet computer, but they came up with the key innovations that made it an attractive product.
So, maybe you didn't mean innovation, but invention, and maybe you don't think Apple deserves much credit, because you think invention is much harder than innovation and design? But if that truly were the case, then why do so few companies do what Apple does?
Good design seems obvious in hindsight, but there is no denying that Apple are often the first to either do something, or the first to make something work. And then everyone copies that thing.
Doesn't mean I like software patents, just saying.
> Apple should focus on competing on the quality of THEIR product.
Isn't the quality of Apple's design part of the quality of their product? If other companies can copy Apple's design, then other companies can just copy a significant part of Apple's quality without putting in any of the effort and cost that Apple put into their design.
Okay, well, let's say for the point of argument is is morally okay for other companies to "borrow" Apple's design, and this is just tough luck for Apple. In that case, why not just let them "borrow" everything about Apple's products? I.e., why not let other companies just make perfect knock-offs down to the circuit board level? And while we're at it, they should just be able to copy Apple's software too?
In that case, companies should compete on nothing other than their ability to manufacture commodities for as cheaply as possible.
Personally, I find the attitude that design should be free, while everything else should be IP, to be highly insulting to design experts and their expertise.
So you think that Apple makes good designs just because they're a large company? I've got news for you: the companies they compete against are much larger. Dell and Microsoft could easily afford more designers than even Apple has. The products they churn out are still comparatively worse.
You'll notice that Gruber mentions the period in the 80s where Jobs was still an employee as a period which saw similar results. This is not something that requires a huge team. Back with the original Macintosh there was a similar effect. I would hope you've seen the computer's initial unveiling - it's on YouTube - because that's a video that inspires me to this day. Younger, tuxedoed Jobs reveals it, begins using it, and the audience begins half-screaming, in a near-frenzied way. They can't believe that they're seeing what they're seeing. And that's the startup Apple, that's the two-man operation. Back when they didn't have as much in terms of resources, they still focused on creating that simple core, because that's what people care about.
You think simplicity and evolution is a bullshit concept? Not that I know anything about you or the stuff you've worked on, so apologies if this sounds ignorant and facetious, but that's at the core of making anything. That's a "secret" that I stumbled upon independently. I know a lot of programmers who came upon that - and I find that I respect their work much more than I respect the work of people who don't "get it".
Look at NewMogul. Do you think that if that site was started by Paul Graham it would be as small as it is right now? No, not because Paul Graham necessarily has a publicity advantage, but because if he were making it he'd most likely go about making it tied in with Hacker News. HN is his simple core model, and NewMogul could be seen as an expansion of that initial concept. As a concept of its own, it's failing - if you wanted to make a huge site for business-interested people, cloning Hacker News is not a smart idea. So the failure comes down not to the design, because the design is quite pretty, but to the concept, which is not simplistic enough to work.
"Design is copyable. But the Cook side of things — Apple’s economy of scale advantage — cannot be copied by any company with a complex product lineup."
What nonsense is this? If a company copied Apple's economy of scale, it would no longer have a complex product lineup.
It's like saying "Design cannot be copied by any company with ugly products".
This is akin to that "everything that can be invented, has been invented" quote, and equally lacking in foresight.
The reason many competitor products look similar or worse than apple products, is because we have unimaginative industrial designers that think like this blogger.
The next generation of apple tablets will find a way to distinguish themselves from their competitors, despite having already created 'the perfect design'.
If design is so irrelevant to profits, how come Apple’s phones capture almost all of the profits in the mobile industry? Surely if your company has at great expense developed a legally protected advantage in the market that gains you the majority of the profit share, someone else copying your legally protected advantage and churning out products using all the same design features you spent years on must be pretty sickening?
Especially when it turns out your rival produced a 132 page design analysis detailing exactly how to copy your product design and UI, with photos, comparing it to their product and specifying “directions for improvement”[1]. Not all 132 pages are about rounded corners.
Maybe you should reread the post. You've actually just restated his supposedly "misguided" point that Apple succeeds due to its excellent execution of existing product concepts, not by inventing those concepts.
This kind of comment, on a forum full of engineers, is so ridiculously insulting to all the Apple people who worked their asses off to make the products a succes.
Giving 1 person 100% credit for such a range of great inventions is just, well, off the mark.
Engineers don't often build great products on their own. You also need great industrial design, great user interface design etc. In some ways I can relate to your view - as a software engineer myself I often fall into the trap of thinking everything I do is 'obvious' and that any other right thinking engineer would have probably made the same decisions. For any one decision this might even be true, but for large, complex systems it certainly isn't. Everything is obvious with hindsight, as they say.
Your certainty that the innovations brought to the table by the original iPhone were inevitable needs to be justified I'm afraid. Of course it's true that there are many hardware components in all modern smartphones for which the development of which had nothing to do with Apple. However as with the original Mac, to dismiss Apple's contribution is rather to miss the point.
This note is very clever. A lot of "fact" are just wrong but they are written in a very convincing manner so that nobody will check them.
"sending a loud and clear message that stealing isn’t right"
Well Steve Jobs liked to quote something like this: "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." Jobs was clearly spreading the message that Apple liked to steal mastering the "borrowed" product making it into a product of their own. Apple made no secret about stealing design from Braun and Sony. Jobs had great respect for those companies.
And I think the same applies to Samsung. They have great respect to Apple (although today that may have changed) and mastered the iPhone into an even greater product than the iPhone.
"We value originality and innovation and pour our lives into making the best products on earth."
Well they may be the best looking products on earth for some, but they are absolutely not the best products. Apple mouses look great and are great to obtain RSI. MacOs is looking great but I can't get as productive with it as with Windows or Linux. The Mac Mini is looking great but I can buy twice the power for the same price. Most Apple products are looking great but why not supply a standard connector? Well we know the reason for that one. And now they are called the most valuable company of today.
Yes Samsung did look very closely to Apple's products but so did Apple to other products.
We all copy!
-edit1- Brown -> Braun ;) thanks.
-edit2- I also was thinking about a tablet I once bought. This was a complete copy of the iPad. Even the box had the same white design. But Apple didn't go after that company. Why? Because it was a peace of crap. You had to break the tablet before the screen became responsive and the battery didn't last 10 minutes.
Saying "design is horseshit" makes about as much sense as saying "engineering is horseshit" or "writing well is horseshit". Read: it makes absolutely no sense.
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