Since ~2013 Apple designers have been throwing over board lots of conventions the company had been itself establishing for decades.
I remember user interface design class at my university ca. 2005 where 20 out of the 30 best practice interaction design patterns originated at Apple!
Steve Jobs for the most part really cared and you could feel those priorities clearly: "it's how it works, not how it looks!"
Aside from some natural missteps, the "form over function" critique at the time was predominantly false. Apple is slowly getting there though, joining "ignorant web" as correctly called out here by Nikita.
The thing is that none of this is a joke or could be taken however lightly. It's 2024 and by now we've fundamentally realized the "Software is Eating the World" prophecy; living in a digitally permeated world.
Bad design is a moral issue, in worst case scenarios it has been killing people before and will increasingly kill or harm even more going forward. It always starts with the little things, especially so in design / engineering.
I desperately hope that Zoomers at least will start to realize that Millenials really fucked it up in that regard. I know, I know it also were the bosses pushing for this but we clearly should have said "no" much more often as the professionals (?) implementing this stuff.
There is much satisfaction waiting in learning; a full-grown craft with deep history.
Zoomers: Alan Cooper's "About Face" is a great start, probably super cheap these days as seemingly no one cares anymore.
Dad must know better, surely! It's absolutely impossible that almighty Apple is now full of subpar UX wannabes.
Apple design has been on a downright trajectory for a long time now, basically since Ive was promoted to the very top (yes he left now, but the damage was done). The Peter Principle doesn't make exceptions.
Awesome video and complete validation of my theory that Ive is trying to eliminate design from user interfaces and make it so that anyone can do it even with MS Word.
Lowering the barrier to app creation is all this flat, modern crap is about. The end user's experience is of no consideration at all because they can be easily convinced _anything_ is cool. I can't wait for the backlash.
Everyone at apple with taste is either being forced out or quitting so when that backlash comes apple will be left holding an empty bag.
The narrative that Apple is the bastion of good UX has sailed quite a while ago given their regressions with MacOS 10.14-10.15 bugs, iOS 13 bugs requiring major reOrgs, iPhone Battery-oriented CPU throttling with no user affordance, etc.
Also their web design has been accessibility-hostile often enough with the landing pages of Trashcan Mac Pro, iPhone 12 etc all taking over your scroll…
Apple has never cared what their users wanted and they've never listened to them. Design, like shit, flows downhill. The difference between then and now that is Steve Jobs isn't around to tell them that the shit landing on their heads is really gold. As a result, they're not afraid to offend Steve and they're starting to develop opinions of their own.
“That’s probably enough about Apple. They forgot about good design a long time ago”
A few years ago it was anathema to say this, even as a designer yourself — how could you even think of beginning to criticize Apple?! But now people and the press are coming to terms with reality.
I honestly don't understand how they can fail so badly with the bazillion dollars at their disposal (MacBook keyboards, phone notches and bumps, mouse charging port underneath, the power pack for phones... etc., etc., not to mention software issues). It's mind-numbing and such a disappointment that they greenlight blatant mistakes and proceed on to selling them for an embarrassing premium.
Apple made a huge ton of cash since <insert major event>, coasting on their hard-won reputation's inertia; but there's a reckoning coming if they don't sort their internal mess. Virtually any major tech is miles and leaps beyond in almost every respect, except profitability. For how long, though?
The announcements today were interesting because Apple seems to have backtracked on a couple of their philosophies, one of them quite long-standing. The release of a low power, very small new version of the macbook air (basically a netbook, given the old processor, low memory and harddrive space, last generation graphics) is not that much of a surprise. Apple has a history of denigrating product categories it doesn't happen to be in, and then coming in and saying, "well, it turns out the category didn't suck, just our competitors sucked at it, but here's how it should be done." But the repurposing of the "zoom" button as a full screen button may come as a bit of a shock to some mac purists.
For years (decades?) now, the zoom button has been an annoyance to many people that come from Windows, and has had to be explained and defended by Mac purists, who explain the concept behind it and the ergonomics of its use and how it's superior to the Windows maximize button. Of course, it's never a good sign when a user interface concept, no matter how smart it may seem, has to be explained to users- the whole goal of good interface design is for the user to never have to think about it. But this could partly be explained as a result of a predilection for the maximize function caused by previous experience and not an innate confusion.
Perhaps the more significant cause for the zoom button's death is that developers were just so bad at implementing it. A large number of developers themselves never seemed to get what the zoom button was about, and Apple was seemingly unable to force them to get it, or explain it sufficiently. As a result, it's implementation across the platform was so inconsistent as to be exasperating even for the segment of users that understood what it was for. Basically, you had to remember what it did in which apps, and when pushing it was going to do something useful, and when pushing it would do something unexpected. The end result was, most people, including myself, just stayed away from it all together, except in one or two select apps (Safari and iTunes, in my case).
Anyway, whatever the reasons, it seems Apple has given up on the zoom idea many OS's after its introduction, and repurposed the zoom button as a full screen button- much closer to the maximize function of Windows- although I'm sure us Mac purist will think of key reasons why it is not an imitation, but a completely different, better, idea. :D
I dunno, their designs for the last decade or so, before the most recent years, have been entirely unimpressive. Yeah, they're supposed to be known for it, but IMHO their outputs were pretty ordinary and caused a lot of usability issues. Disposable trash-can desktops? Pro laptops with no ports? iPads that bend every which way? iPhones that didn't have working antennas? Whoever was responsible for those, whether it's Ive or anyone else... I just hope Apple is using this separation to turn a new leaf.
So much of design is subjective, but my particular problem with them is that they emphasized form over function so much that their products were unusable in the end. I remember needing a new laptop for a few years, and kept looking at the Mac ones year after year but unable to type on them.
Then, whatever happened in the last 2-3 years has been AMAZING. I thought Ive had already left in some capacity and that was why. Finally, usable pro machines again (still wish they had a USB-A port). I look forward to what they will produce without being under a bad design dictator anymore.
It seems like Apple aren't actually practicing design any more
instead we have the superficial appearance of design - thinner, lighter, but less useful
same with innovation - what is the TouchBar except a desperate attempt to innovate, achieving only the superficial appearance of innovation while actually producing something of no value
Once upon a time Apple products were terrific. I was a big fan. They were solidly made. Their UI/UX was the best in the business by a wide margin.
Then Apple made a conscious decision to emphasize form over function. The result was products that fail often (e.g. the butterfly keyboard), cannot be easily repaired (if they can be repaired at all), and have a terrible UI/UX. Discoverability, configurability, and reliability are things of the past. Every software update (which are no longer optional, BTW) is a crap shoot (no pun intended) with regards to whether it will introduce more problems than it fixes.
> we get 5-6 years out of each one we buy
Then you're talking about products that were built before this trend really took hold. The butterfly keyboard was only introduced 5 years ago. The UI/UX horribleness began with Yosemite, which only came out 6 years ago, and didn't get really bad until Catalina, which is barely two years old.
Apple made a hard U-turn from form-over-function to the current state which was much needed
The design iterations over generations are now fairly static and that's a good thing - because Apple high end bulk customers are mostly developers, not the eccentric designer or the lone musician. It matters to keep thousands of your $2000-wielding developers happy than a handful of $50,000 carrying artists who are finicky about post-modernistic aesthetics. The kinds Jonny Ive felt a natural kinship with. His design ethos were good to make a splash from the moribund vanilla boxes in early 2000s. But keep making those splashes (without Steve Jobs to rein in with criticism & engineering team getting second-classed), you got serious product troubles.
Thinkpads come to mind when I think about MacBooks lineage. Well maintained product line which has kept their hardware UX fairly unchanged - the net result being they are an extremely dependable product in corporate environment.
Edit: I remember talking to a designer who once worked at Apple. I am told Jonny Ive even seriously floated the idea of a smooth slab iPhone/iPad devoid of any power buttons, charging slot or rockers - only featuring touch sensitive edges & speaker grille. Glad engineering team didn't take up on it. Would have been a recovery & update disaster.
I know plenty of apple ecosystem centric people who used an apple mouse and hated that design. So much so they gave up and got another one eventually. It’s clearly a bad design because there is an obvious alternative with no downsides.
A better example though might be the mess that is the design, or rather lack thereof, of the notification system and haphazard gesture meanings in iOS. I use both a Pixel Android and an iPhone, but mainly the iPhone these days and it’s clear that Apple don’t get everything right.
I'm sad that we're losing a lot of great designers from a company like Apple.
I feel like with Ive's exit and the exodus of many members of his team there, Apple has been too scared to evolve its industrial design language.
- The iPad Pro has looked the same since 2018, and now all iPads look just like it.
- The iPhone hasn't had a meaningful design change since the iPhone 11 in 2019.
- The MacBook Air now just looks like a skinny MacBook Pro.
I'm sure having the COO with no design knowledge heading the design team isn't doing them any favors. They're probably just sticking to what's worked to squeeze out any juice left in Ive's designs.
I was hoping they'd build a new design "era" of sorts with the release of the M1 iMac, but it feels like they've effectively given up on it. And now it stands out like a sore thumb among all these aging designs.
I remember user interface design class at my university ca. 2005 where 20 out of the 30 best practice interaction design patterns originated at Apple!
Steve Jobs for the most part really cared and you could feel those priorities clearly: "it's how it works, not how it looks!"
Aside from some natural missteps, the "form over function" critique at the time was predominantly false. Apple is slowly getting there though, joining "ignorant web" as correctly called out here by Nikita.
The thing is that none of this is a joke or could be taken however lightly. It's 2024 and by now we've fundamentally realized the "Software is Eating the World" prophecy; living in a digitally permeated world.
Bad design is a moral issue, in worst case scenarios it has been killing people before and will increasingly kill or harm even more going forward. It always starts with the little things, especially so in design / engineering.
I desperately hope that Zoomers at least will start to realize that Millenials really fucked it up in that regard. I know, I know it also were the bosses pushing for this but we clearly should have said "no" much more often as the professionals (?) implementing this stuff.
There is much satisfaction waiting in learning; a full-grown craft with deep history.
Zoomers: Alan Cooper's "About Face" is a great start, probably super cheap these days as seemingly no one cares anymore.
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