Making devices with square corners, however, was. He wasn't forced to put square-cornered displays into devices with rounded corners.
Sure. But whenever possible, Ive and his team made sure that the masking either looked like that (like, say, in the old first-gen polycarbonate Cinema Displays) or at least had its curve radius centre match the display corners (like, say, in all of the unibody iMacs, the G4 iBooks and PowerBooks, the polycarbonate MacBooks and the “fat”, non-retina unibody MacBook Pros).
It’s not as pretty and elaborate, but it’s consistent with this design. And before you bash on him for putting form before function, as ugly as the off-centre original 15’’ and 17’’ MacBook Pro were, you have to give them credit for giving priority to the integrated iSight camera.
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Concentricity is not the issue here. Geometric perfection does not always look beautiful to the human eye. That’s why fonts are kerned (ie, perfect equidistant spacing between letters is deliberately made unequal because it looks better that way). It’s also why architects use entasis (i.e., geometrically straight lines are deliberately curved so that they’ll look straight to the human eye)
The issue with the iPad is where the center of the circle was placed and the overall thickness of the black border. That’s what doesn’t look right. That’s what a designer must work hard at to get right: Subjective stuff.
Engineers look after the objective stuff.
Amen! Type design practitioner and teacher here. I haven’t thought about doing that kerning analogy, and it’s perfectly apt.
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Without Steve Jobs he completely lost his way. Jony's obsession with minimalism and thinness is truly detrimental to Apple's product line. From the terrible butterfly keyboard to the idiotic removal of the headphone jack, this guy keeps on making poor design decisions year after year. It's time for him to retire from Apple.
Well, consider these two strategic and functional factors: on one hand, Apple wants to push people into their own-brand and Beats wireless headphones and speakers; on the other hand, that humongous camera bump is a dead giveaway that the internal LCD is still quite thick, and the fact that it goes all the way to the edges of the casing means it would also interfere with the rather deep 3.5 mm headphone jack. The only way Apple could have both an edge-to-edge screen on both axes (and get rid of the camera bump in the process) would be to make the iPad unreasonably thick, because introducing a “3.5 mm headphone jack bump” would look ugly as hell and be sheer insanity.
Having a USB-C port, on the other hand, is definitely the way to go, as that will inevitably become a standard of sorts for headphones once all the industry moves to it (except, quite ironically, Apple itself; though as of now we can’t write off the demise of Lightning quite so easily, as we probably reached peak thinness and Apple will likely still be able to fit USB-C ports in their iPhones if they so choose).
As for all the wannabe-DJs crying foul about the omission of that ancient audio jack, I’ll just remind you people that most serious (digital-based) DJs I know of (because I do know some who still only play vinyl) use USB audio interfaces and mixtables already, so… I fail to see what the big issue is. And those who don’t want to use one can always buy the $9 dongle; it’s not like it’s that much of an inconvenience for someone who already has to buy a 3.5 mm to RCA jack cable, which is only touched twice each a session anyway (when setting up your stuff and when packing it up again at the end, in case it wasn’t obvious enough)… Heck, that’s even a great business opportunity right there, as new DJs might rather buy a potentially cheaper third-party USB-C to RCA cable (as I’m guessing such a device would be standards-based and wouldn’t exactly have to be MFi-certified, but please do correct me if I’m wrong) and skip Apple’s dongle altogether.
You can argue all you want about Apple’s obsession with thinness when it comes to a small device that fits both the palm of your hand and your pocket regardless, or a gigantic computer that you slap on your desk, but when it comes to the iPad, every millimeter and milligram counts (if you don’t own one, I dare you to go to a store and try to hold one – especially one of the old 12’’ Pro models, if you can still find one – with one hand for any extended period of time).
