That said, "form" and "function" are inseparable qualities when it comes to mobile devices.
If you're making
tools then function
is form. If not, you're making jewellery (which is maybe what Ive would prefer to do). With a couple of exceptions (...Dalmatian-skin iMac anybody?) most of Apple's designs
have been minimalistic, spartan and functional.
True, one function of a phone is to be thin enough to fit in a pocket - but
other functions include being robust enough to
withstand being carried in a pocket, being big enough to contain an adequate battery or have the connections you need. There's no point making a phone thin enough to carry in a trouser pocket (they've been thin enough for shirt/jacket pockets for years) if it can't survive being sat upon, can't afford to miss a single daily charge or doesn't have the single most common audio connection. There's no function in making the phone so thin that it needs a bulge for the camera lens. There's no function in making a laptop so thin that it can't accommodate the
wonderful low-profile keyboard that you already have, or so thin that it can't be cooled effectively without throttling the expensive high-performance CPU.
Nobody is proposing we go back to the sort of brick in your picture*. If HTC (or whoever) re-made a phone with the same functional spec, it would be smaller than that.
The big step-forward with the iPhone was
not its thickness - thinner phones were going to happen
anyway as technology improved - but its user interface design: It had a single, primary input device - a large capacitative touch screen - with a bare minimum of physical buttons - and an OS and application suite designed from the ground up to have a purely touch-based interface. Prior to that, conventional wisdom was that a smartphone had to have an alphanumeric keyboard and some sort of joystick/trackball - which accounts for about 1/3 of the thickness of the pictured brick.
Likewise, with the iPod before, beyond technology shrinking anyway, the Unique Selling Point was the unique UI and ease of syncing music (and recognising that syncing is important for the many non-tech users
don't know how to copy files - seriously, I've encountered several who could only copy a file by opening it in Word and doing 'Save as...').
In both cases, Jony Ive designed a beautiful case to hold the parts together. I don't think for one moment that it is a trivial job, he is certainly good at it and it undoubtedly contributed to those successes - but he wasn't responsible for the real advance in UI/workflow design that made them more than a flash-in-the-pan. A major reason that he could make the iPhone so thin was because the UI design meant he didn't have to cram in an alphanumeric keyboard.
When Ive took over UI design he totally threw the functional baby out with the skeuomorphic bathwater. The iOS designers
had lost sight of the whole point of skeuomorphism (i.e. to suggest functionality**: if a contacts app looks like a desk diary it should
work like a desk diary - iOS 'Contacts' failed spectacularly at that) but Ive falsely identified skeuomorphism as the problem and produced (arguably) stylish 'flat' designs which looked cool but lacked the old visual cues to functionality - and certainly didn't fix the actual UI design problems.
* I actually had something similar to the pictured brick, and I can tell you that the size was the
least of its problems - it fit in my jacket pocket, a Filofax didn't. However, it had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a mini-joystick, a jog-wheel, call accept/hang-up buttons, camera buttons, a resistive touch screen and toothpick stylus (that you needed because the on-screen buttons were tiny - which is why Jobs derided styli) along with
a user interface based on desktop Windows and optimised for precisely none of those input methods. It was a usability train wreck.
** Also, with skeuomorphism, you have to accept that it will eventually become self-referential: e.g. the floppy disc icon remains the symbol for 'save' long after floppy discs have gone to silicon heaven - but what's the problem as long as everybody recognises the symbols? If you try to "update" skeuomorphism your toolbar becomes a row of black rounded rectangles...
