Apple's Product Design Team Reportedly Focused More on Costs in Recent Years

CC77 said:
“Thinness at all costs” was never Ive’s design philosophy and is a pretty big misunderstanding of not only the talent that Ive had but also why Apple was such a leader in the product design space. Each product has a clear focus and an intention. Apple’s portables priortized portability, yes, but that wasn’t at all costs and it wasn’t just on a whim. Now the products just exist to fill as many pricing gaps as possible, with the absolute least compelling iPhone and iPad lineup in years, that’s more confusing to customers than ever. It makes shareholders money in the short term, so no one complains, but the soul of the company is dead and consumer trust is eroding.
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I don’t disagree. I know there was more to Ive’s designs that that and I loved the look of the thin MacBooks, but it was a poor design for Intel processors and the keyboard and it was a clear case of form over function.

That doesn’t mean I don’t like Ive’s other designs. And I completely agree about the confusing iPad lineup. The design team needs more coherence.
 
Can we please get some middle ground between Johnny Ive obsessed thinness that makes severe compromises in usability/durability and bean counters that return us to a pre-Jobs Apple that cost engineered products to ****?

Either way adding this to the pile of “Tim Cook is not a effective leader and needs to be replaced”
 
Apple today is more of a chip company first and design second. People buy MacBooks because of their best in class performance per watt and battery life. No one has ever said that the 2021 MacBook Pro‘s are the best looking laptops they’ve ever seen. Most people would say they look utilitarian. It makes perfect sense to me why the design team is dissolving. Apple is a different company now. Tim Cook and Johny Srouji are now running the show.
 
I'm not surprised - Apple's designs has been stagnant as of late. 3 years between the first and second generation AirPods Pro and we've only gotten a slightly redesigned case. The latest Apple TV uses the same plastic design as the second-gen Apple TV from 2010. As designers, I'm sure they are frustrated with not being able to work on new, innovative designs.
 
So the design team is getting Jony Ive'd: thinned out to the point of being very light, small, and svelte but incredibly useless?

Nevertheless (and all kidding about Jony's missteps aside), this happens, and it's generally a cycle: design leadership gets stale, and it's a good time to go separate ways amicably (which Ive and Apple did really well) and like a divorce, some lines get drawn and people align or just fade away and there's a period of stagnancy, retraction, and the like, and generally (not always), great organizations will grow the next leader or visionary from within that team.

The issue, of course, becomes when quarterly reporting cycles and other interests start to cut too much to the bone, but Apple has plenty of cash on hand and the broader market conditions may not actually mean this is as much of a "bad thing" as it sounds. Focusing on reducing product cost in design and in reducing design as a cost center in the business could be timed well with the market's needs for the next 2-3 years (at least?).

I have been less-than-impressed with a lot of the Apple design work as of late (both hardware and software -- cough, Stage Manger, cough, cough...reuse of basic iPhone 4 design with slight tweaks as "new", etc), but at the same time, most of it "just works" and that's what I do expect of Apple at the most basic. I actually don't want to notice most of what they make, because it works and is designed so well (aesthetically and functionally) that it blends into life.
 
This is exactly what I expected to hear. Pathetic.

See this is exactly what happens when unintelligent humans who aren’t visionaries begin to seep into leadership roles. They slowly begin to dismantle all that is great.

They are too short-sighted (unintelligent), to know that design, not cost, is what made Apple the multi-trillion-dollar company it is.

I knew that when the products started going back to square-design it was over, the transition had begun because that is exactly the opposite of Jony Ive’s continued push to better and better design and it was now about making the devices cheaper and cheaper to manufacture.

The epitome of design was when the design team could make the iPhone a rounded-off device that was absolutely amazing to see and feel in the hand.

Pathetic unintelligent humans have been and will continue to kill everything that Apple once was. It will slowly lose value as it transitions to a company that isn’t lead by visionaries, but rather, corporate morons.
 
Spock said:
The iMac G4 was the last time that I was interested in the iMac. I don't think they will ever top that design.
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I have to say with regard to the iMac I disagree. The 24" M1 iMac is *fantastic*. By a wide margin the best Mac I've ever owned, and simultaneously the best looking.

I would still like to see it offered with a Pro CPU and 32 GB option, and they really need to do something with the larger model, but generally I have nothing but great things to say about my current machine.

And frankly I'm pretty enthusiastic about almost all of the hardware coming out of Apple lately.

At the same time, the idea of an increasing focus on costs creeping into the design group is worrying.
 
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You don't say... Anyone who thinks Apple is still about design and end user experience has been ignorant for half a decade. Now that Steve and Jony are both gone, Tim can really shift hard to the purely profits driven approach.

It's extremely evident in the fragmentation of their hardware, with far too manty options that all have a different combination of design languages (newest iPads are an obvious example) and it's also very evident in their software. Tell anyone in 2011 that ios would have ads built into the stock Apple software. Nobody would have believed you.

I simply see Apple as the better of the 2 terrible options at this point. No longer are they this genius design company who just happens to make electronics. Now they're just another mobile phone company with remnants of a great era.
 
Retskrad said:
Apple today is more of a chip company first and design second. People buy MacBooks because of their best in class performance per watt and battery life. No one has ever said that the 2021 MacBook Pro‘s are the best looking laptops they’ve ever seen.
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I have, and so have many others who got the new MBPs. The thin screen is absolutely incredible and why I got the MBP to begin with. Hell that impossibly small screen is helping push other people to switch to the new Macs.

But it's not just the Macbooks. Look at the M1 iMac. That design is amazing and makes me jealous I have no need for a all in one desktop because I'd want one
 
Personally don't see how this is actually affecting the products being put out. The Macs have been the best they've ever been, and while the phones/tablets are in a lull right now reusing designs, Apple has done this in the past.

I do feel they've bloated their line-up immensely in recent years (the iPad line up is a good example of this), so I see a lot of similarities with the early 90s. I'd imagine at some point in the next half decade there'll be a culling of products, trimming the fat and leaving a more clean product listing.
 
neilw said:
This feels very worr

I have to say with regard to the iMac I disagree. The 24" M1 iMac is *fantastic*. By a wide margin the best Mac I've ever owned, and simultaneously the best looking.

I would still like to see it offered with a Pro CPU and 32 GB option, and they really need to do something with the larger model, but generally I have nothing but great things to say about my current machine.

And frankly I'm pretty enthusiastic about almost all of the hardware coming out of Apple lately.

At the same time, the idea of an increasing focus on costs creeping into the design group is worrying.
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I am not saying that the current iMac is a bad machine, just imagine the current iMac display on an almost infinitely adjustable stand.
 
JM said:
Focusing on cost reduction isn’t a bad thing. I enjoy not needing to pay $2000 for an iPhone.
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Hilarious statement which is devoid of the knowledge that YOU aren’t getting the benefits from that. YOU are losing out while Apple takes more of your money by reducing your value.

How you don’t understand that, I have no idea. The entire article is about Apple customers losing value because instead of Apple using money freely to make the designs insanely good, they’re cutting that out to make the designs worse, while they save money……….not you.
 
McWetty said:
This. There has to be balance in all things. Form over function made stuff sexy but not always best performing. I wouldn’t call the new stuff soulless, but there are some cost cutting measures that have me scratching my head (plastic spacer!)
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Rounded edges were ergonomically sound. They felt astronomically better and made far more sense in the hand.

It’s gotten far worse since Ive left.
 
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