Apple Designing More Functional Products Since Jony Ive's Departure, Argues Bloomberg Reporter

[SSDGUY]

​

Ive's obsession with minimalism did get a little overboard. Adding the ports and Magsafe — a very welcome reintroduction! (Now can I have the audio jack on my phone again?) I'd argue the opposite on the flat phone edges though, it looks cool but in one's jeans pocket looks bad. Also, without a case, that sharp edge doesn't stay nice for very long.

 

[msp3]

So according to this hack, there's no innovation left since Jobs died and Ive left. Everything is now a recycled old design, old idea, rehashed, and morons in charge who take ****** internet opinions seriously. Just like the iPhone mini...

 

[Sophisticatednut]

MacBook Pro lid is 4mm thick. You can’t stack the camera and the LCD on top of each other in such a small space. Therefore you need the notch if you want the small bezel.

iPad Pro is 7.8mm thick.

1. the ipad bezelis 8mm and completly fine
2. we went from 15" to 14".... so apples expanded sccreen is still 1" smaller than it was before.

 

[Oculus Mentis]

Apple Designing More Functional Products Since Jony Ive's Departure​

like laptops with legs?…

 

[lowkey]

2015 MacBook designers. “I’m having a hard time getting the battery to fit in this case.”… “why don’t we try inventing a multilayer battery compartment”.

2021 MacBook Pro designers. “I’m having a hard time fitting this legacy port in this case”… “just make it a bit thicker, that’s what Dell would do”.

Innovation right there. LOL.

 

[Prof.]

You mean the notch they didn't put on the iPad, iMac, Watch or Display & analysts say will be gone from the iPhone in a few years. The only reason a notch was added the new MacBook Pros was the maximise the available screen area. Specifically adding extra on top to accommodate and laying the the ground work for future FaceID implementation. Once they hide the notch on the phone expect the MacBook to follow suit in an all new model in 3-5 years. The notion that the most known brand on earth needs gimmicks the be recognised is ridiculous.

Wow, I really struck a nerve with ya, didn't I?

 

[philzaleon]

Function should always predominate over form, as form should be designed to enhance function, not vice versa. Elegance of form should always yield to elegance of function... this is Design 101 stuff!

 

[ssl0408]

I’ve been waiting for a new MacBook Pro for 5 years due to the useless touch bar, but geez this new one is so ugly that I’m considering getting a MacBook Air or, dare I say, the MacBook Pro 2020 with Touch Bar. Bring back Ive!

 

[d686546s]

I will not be getting any of the new Pro's because they are simply overkill (and therefore too expensive) for both my professional and personal use case, but I sure hope that we'll get cheaper machines along the same lines.

I don't need the raw performance, but from 9-5 I'm a "Pro" in the literal sense: I get paid to do stuff on my computer. For me that's documents, spreadsheets, presentations and endless meetings on Teams. I need to regularly plug in HDMI monitors and projectors and USB periphery.

What I really want is a new monitor that gives me a higher scaled resolution that the current 1680xsomething of my MacBook and the ports I regularly use.

I know USB-C can be any port I like, but it's still not the one I need without dongles. By the time my employer rolls out USB-C infrastructure Apple under Ive would have moved on, seeing that we're still only now slowly phasing out VGA. In 2021.

 

[sirdir]

Well, that’s what I thought, too. Resp. I hoped we’ll get useful products once again once Ive was out. Thinner isn’t just better.

 

[mrhick01]

SD slot allows non-photogs to add bulk storage for cheap. Adding 1TB of storage for occasionally accessed data for a few hundred bucks is worthwhile. U1 speed is plenty fast for that purpose.

The new spinning rust on a chip?

 

[Pro Apple Silicon]

It’s like saying Apple software has been a little flaky lately, Craig should really pull up his socks

Apple software has been on a steep decline for several years, and it has nothing to do with Craig. It has to do with bean counters and social justice initiatives taking over Apple.

 

[Scoob Redux]

Apple said that Ive was involved with the design of the colorful 24-inch iMac released last April, well over a year after he departed the company.

Thus supporting the hypothesis that Ive's designs were crippled by his poor vision of what consumers need, considering the 24" iMac's crippling lack of ports and the cumbersome external power brick required to achieve the thinness with which Ive was obsessed.

 

[Sophisticatednut]

Ergonomically, the Magic Mouse is a disaster. Sure, it looks nice…

I have Logitech MX3. I think it looks nice. You can charge while using, nice. You have to try hard to see the USB port…


Let’s be realistic, no one is going to look at a mouse and comment that the charging port is ugly. It’s a tool, not a fashion item.

who ever looks on the front of a mouse when you use it.
and i have MX2

 

[Onelifenofear]

mediocrityThe Touch Bar was a uniquely Apple thing and they have given in to mediocrity - I used it all the time but I know I am in the minority. I don't think they made it obvious enough how it could be adapted with thirdy party apps or persuaded devs to actually use it.

The lack of design forethought is troubling now Ive has gone, as they could have done so much more. People like the Physical Keys. Fine keep them - put the bar above. Or come up with something new. Make the keyboard OLED. Every key could change depended on the application.

This is not new - https://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/popularis/

The Optimus key board was great but obscenely expensive and I am sure Apple could have developed this idea more rather than return to the F Key from the 1970's... and a very "Windows" thing.

Here's to the Crazy ones indeed.

 

[Macaholic868]

In other news, water is wet. There was a reason a large portion of us turned against Ive in his later years with Apple. He was 100% in to form over function. Thinner, lighter, faster is a great concept until a system is so unrepairable and unupgradeable that you are spending $1,000 to $4,000 on a consumer level system you’ll literally throw away when it’s out of warranty and needs a repair or something simple like a RAM or SSD upgrade.

I get that Apple is only back where it should be in the Mac Pro line but adding ports back in at the expense of some extra weight and thickness plus bringing back MagSafe in the MacBook Pro line is a good sign. I’d rather have something weigh slightly more and be slightly thicker and not have to worry about dongles and accidentally having one of my pets rip the charging cable out of my laptop taking it to the ground when it’s charging on the coffee table than the other way around and it’s not even close.

 

[d686546s]

(...) Thinner, lighter, faster is a great concept until a system is so unrepairable and unupgradeable that you are spending $1,000 to $4,000 on a consumer level system you’ll literally throw away when it’s out of warranty and needs a repair or something simple like a RAM or SSD upgrade. (...)

I hear you. I replaced the two hard drives with SSDs in my wife's Asus Windows machine from the early parts of the previous decade and it took me all of 10 minutes to do the whole job. It was a pleasant shock from another era.

Sadly it's not just Apple and plenty of other manufacturers have made their products pretty unrepairable and unupgradeable as well, but Apple definitely paved the way.

 

[MJaP]

The new MacBook Pro designs are unquestionably a blatant two fingers up to whoever led the design and signed off on the 2016 Pros... and that would have been Ive. It was very amusing hearing them selling the virtues of all their U-turn changes without them actually admitting the 2016 Pros were poorly designed from a functionality perspective.

As a Pro user I couldn't be happier with the new machines (well I could... faceID, the option for a touchscreen, repairability, user upgradability...) but they do so much right now that once was wrong you'd thing you were watching an episode of Quantum Leap... OMG... did Sam Beckett leap into Tim Cook?!

 

[Chrjy]

Well, not that I could have done better than Jony, but look at music players, phones, and laptops before around 2005.

There was a lot of low-hanging fruit that Jony & Steve smartly exploited as far as inserting some industrial design prettiness that made apple products stand out. But more than their looks, they WORKED so much better than the competition. Perfect storm/timing. Even the idea of receiving a product nearly fully charged out of the box was new. Or a laptop without mis-aligned graffiti, I mean stickers, by Intel, IBM, nvidia, etc. near the keyboard.

Our cravings were largely set in the 00’s when Steve & Jony’s teams fixed a lot of easy pickings and Apple products Just Worked while they looked good. They fixed obvious things that should have been obvious to the competition but apparently were not.

Then Jony’s teams started trying too hard to make products look good’er than the prior year to where many leaders were blind to function often taking a hit for the sake of glitzy marketing showing something thinner and lighter than last year.

I appreciate what you're getting at but to state is was easy pickings is so simple to state in hindsight. There were plenty of opportunities for tech companies beyond Apple to do the same thing many years previously but they didn't. It needed visionaries back then. It's a lot harder these days to do what Apple did because they rewrote the rule book and so everyone knows the secret.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

What’s the size of the gap between the iPad Pro screen and the physical edge of the tablet? How does that compare to the MacBook Pro’s?

(Reads like those questions at the end of a chapter to “test your knowledge” LOL)

And here’s the answer (from the appendix)

iPad Pro bezel… 8.9mm
MacBook Pro bezel… 3.5mm

 

[Wokis]

Ok in that case I want Jony back so my next phone gets rounded edges, please. Much nicer to hold when the phone sizes have gotten so big.

 

[Sophisticatednut]

And here’s the answer (from the appendix)

iPad Pro bezel… 8.9mm
MacBook Pro bezel… 3.5mm

youn understand that the 15" macbook pro they replaced had more screen for you to use right? Apple just made a bate and switch. we made the screen bezel smaller so our 14" dosent feel as small as it actualy is

 

[theluggage]

They could do without it. But if you assume: (1) the camera takes some vertical space, and (2) it is possible to use the vertical space on either side of the camera for something productive, then why not do so?

Because it adds complexity without really adding much value - all it really does is take the menu bar off the main screen - if you desperately wanted that space back there’s already an “auto hide menu bar” function (or you could work in full screen mode). Then, in light mode, you have a distracting black bite out of the middle of the menu bar - and we’ll have to wait for hands-on reviews to see what happens in Apps where the menu headings occupy more than half the bar - esp. if you want to run the screen in one of the “larger text” scaled modes. It looks like they’ve had to make the menu bar thicker to completely fill the “ears” and that’s going to be especially obvious in scaled modes with smaller text.

...and in full screen mode, those “ears“ do nothing... apparently, compatible apps will be able to use them for status indicators - but the consequence of that is that the user interface of Apps will change depending on which hardware they are on... Yup, run the same app on your 24” iMac - or even on the Pro XDR display propped up on bricks next to your new MacBook Pro - and those extra icons have no notch to live in. So developers can’t use the ear space for anything really useful because they can’t count on it being there for all users.... (I think that might have been part of the reason that the Touch Bar never really caught people’s imagination...)

I think the best you can say is that at least the Notch doesn’t take anything away (unlike the Touch Bar which took away the function keys). I‘m sure there will be a third-party hack that permanently hides it...

 

[hasanahmad]

I posted this in the other thread but the point stands

Here is how I see it . Steve Jobs wanted function and form to be at equilibrium so he always controlled ive from going overboard . after jobs died Ive’s idea of form over function took over and macs got thinner and thinner and performance of these devices suffered. Mind you the Ive probably hatred the iPhone camera bump but Apple had no choice , stay behind the competition in cameras or just be a beautiful device

now that federighi has more control the ports are back .

Now that Ive is completely out,

1. Keyboard is fixed
2. Cameras are getting fatter
3. Phones are getting thicker
4. Phones are getting heavier
5. MacBooks are getting ports and feet
6. Adoption of USB-C more than more

tldr: Jonny Ive without Jobs is an issue for Apple. the best thing Apple can do and has done with MacBook Pros here is go back to an equilibrium between function and form

 

[bousozoku]

Butterfly keyboard, Touchbar, ventilation issues and overheating screen components that resulted at least partly from the obsession on thinness, lack of ports… Sure, Ive was not responsible for all of those issues, but he was hardly an innocent bystander either.

I'm sure that Steve Jobs' obsession with thin products brought Mr. Ive to Apple. How many would say that the IIfx or any of the Performa series were more than utilitarian? They were quite wonderful inside the case, but outside, they weren't exactly something for the Museum of Art.

The Touchbar was one of those components I really thought could change the world, as I thought with similar products for 30+ years that showed up elsewhere.

Apple should have designed a gaming laptop computer but the 1 inch mandate made that impossible until recently.