Would I buy one? No. But I'm still sick of seeing Apple do more of the same over and over (same old rounded iPhone 6 sides on the "all new design language for the next decade")
I've never understood this trope. What would you rather them do instead? Square? Triangular? Hexagonal? Dodecagonal? Alternate between different shapes every year? Do you have a better idea?
Dieter Rams is an inspiration for many of Apple's designs through the years (and he seems to appreciate it). Check out his
10 rules of good design, listed and explained here:
- Good design is innovative. The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.
- Good design makes a product useful. A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
- Good design is aesthetic. The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
- Good design makes a product understandable. It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.
- Good design is unobtrusive. Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.
- Good design is honest. It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
- Good design is long-lasting. It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.
- Good design is thorough down to the last detail. Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user.
- Good design is environmental-friendly. Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.
- Good design is as little design as possible. Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.
I've bolded three that seem particularly relevant in discussing the iPhone's rounded sides.
The aesthetic aspect is obvious; the rounded sides along with slightly rounded glass edges allow the iPhone to have a smoothly rounded shape no matter what side from which you look at it.
The long-lasting aspect is also obvious—Apple introduced the design in 2014 and has stuck to it (except the iPhone SE) for (at least!) 5 years. I wouldn't be surprised if they continue to stick with it. It's a design that
works. If it didn't work, they wouldn't have sold hundreds of millions of iPhones with these designs.
Now, the thoroughness. Just as an example of the thought that went into the design, at first, the iPhone's mute switch moved along a straight line, even with the rounded designs before the iPhone 4. With the iPhone 4 through iPhone 5s (and SE), the sides were squared off, so this felt natural against the body of the phone. Then, with the iPhone 6 in 2014, they
re-engineered the mute switch to use a rotary mechanism such that it rotates along the rounded side of the phone. That's attention to detail, and yes, they've stuck with it.
So, again, do you have a reason for why the sides should be any different other than being different, a better idea? Because Apple's never updated a product that I can think of to make changes without some justification.
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Just some sobering reality bites.
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That depends on what they're counting as a "crash." The document to which you refer seems to no longer be easily publicly available, so I can't check to confirm. Moreover, is this counting how
often apps crash, or just how many apps have crashed at some point?
I wonder if they're counting instances where iOS kills the app to free memory. If so, that's expected behavior, not a crash. I also wonder if that may have something to do with why their
more recent reports no longer seem to include this data.
