To be fair, I’d counter with Jobs picking Jony Ive. Ive made gorgeous, lustworthy art objects that sucked as computers. The nadirs for me were iPhone 6’s bendgate and the 2015 MBP. Damn the functionality, we’ll make these suckers so slim you can shave with them! No one was begging for a MBP so thin it had to have compromised keyboard switches. Also consider the mouse that couldn’t charge while you use it, and the trashcan Mac Pro.
Those devices looked beautiful but they weren’t good at actually being used. Jobs let Ive design for a museum, not for the people using his creations. Cook let that continue for a while but finally reined it in and gave us useful designs again.
Which isn’t to say that Cook hasn’t made or isn’t making mistakes. I just meant that as a reminder that it wasn’t all wine and roses under Jobs.
I'd argue Jobs mostly kept Ive under control. Tim Cook let him go nuts (didn't act as an editor) until it was finally seriously hurting the business (butterfly keyboard era) and went in the complete opposite direction by firing him.
I never met Steve. I met Cook and on a separate occasion Forstall. Cook always struck me as a shy business bean counter. Forstall is an engineer through and through. Such a shame we never got to experience an alternate timeline where Apple was under his leadership.
I think Ive has burn out issue at the time and has clearly thought about departing Apple. ( A book chronicling 20 years of Apple's design in 2015 ) He wanted to design the perfect and final thing and so MBP was rushed. Steve Jobs would have worked him and likely said hey this is good but we must do it incrementally so our user can adopt to changed. How about the Keyboard keys goes to 1.2mm instead of straight to 0.7mm key travel.
It took us 20 years for humans to adopt from the good old 2.5mm keyboard to 1.5mm. And you want to cut in half again in one go?
I think it is best summarised as Steve Job's quote in the movie;
"Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra."
that being said, Ive was important in asking why physical form factors should make sense in human terms. Big computers w/ a lot of ports make sense to comp sci/ee ppl in the lab but people in the real world have priorities more in line with Ive. Without Ive challenging the design, Apple wouldn't have even tried.
> But people in the real world have priorities more in line with Ive.
Funny how the latest Macbook brought back the Magsafe connector, HDMI port, and SD card port. Apparently the people in the real world have rediscovered priorities that Ive's design had made them forget
It is just funny how this hyper lean design philosophy ushered in an era of littering your desk, school, and workplace with random usbc dongles from storied $5 chinese brands like iKLingKing or Daehoo and whatever else. So much for the minimalism in practice. At least they created a great deal of work for these chinese producers on amazon.
I kinda wonder how that design would play nowadays, after the Apple Silicon transition. They were stuck because of Intel's thermals, but their own chips seem to be a lot better in terms of performance/watt...
I remember using consumer grade netbook and normal laptop and those have way fewer ports than a workstation. But all were useful ones. Mainly hdmi, ethernet, sd card reader, and usb.
> Also consider the mouse that couldn’t charge while you use it
I've come around a lot on that design. Well, it's still an awful mouse shape as far as I'm concerned. But putting the port on the bottom gets people to unplug the mouse. I like that as a goal. And it can do a temporary charge pretty fast, so the downside isn't very big.
I've never heard from anyone who likes the Apple Mouse enough to use it, but doesn't like the charging from the bottom. It's frequently cited as a 'flaw' by those who don't use it, this has become a bit of conventional wisdom. In reality it's a non-issue.
I have heard from a whole lot of people who don't like the Apple Mouse. I don't like that mouse. But it isn't because of the charge port. It's an uncomfortable shape for my hand, and I prefer a trackball.
I think it's fine for Apple to have one peripheral which appeals to a minority taste. We're not short of mouse designs and they all work with the operating system. It's not even the main peripheral Apple sells for the purpose, that's the trackpad and everybody likes it. I still prefer a trackball, Tim Cook uses some kind of oddball vertical mouse with a bunch of buttons. It's a big design space.
If they wanted to please the maximum amount of people, they'd need to clone Microsoft's mouse, and that would be boring.
I actually like the charging port design. It stops normal user from using the mouse plugging in. Which is not what it was designed for. They could have designed the USB-C port in the mouse does not come with Data Pin. But given it is a wireless mouse it would still work plugged in as wireless mouse powered by cable.
In the end I really think it is a non-issue. The shape still sucks though.
But for a small or medium flaw, you'd expect a bunch of people that complain but keep using it. Only a really big flaw would prevent users entirely and find no complaints among the people that keep using the product. I find it hard to believe it's that big of a flaw. It seems much more likely that the people that started off against the charging decided after trying it that they didn't care very much.
Sorry, what's the advantage here? People are going to unplug the mouse anyway when it doesn't need charging because it feels much more natural. _Forcing_ people to stop using the mouse to charge is a braindead decision
The problem is the software. macOS could remind you to charge the night before, but it always ends up needing charging in the morning as you're ready to start working. One engineer could fix the problem in under an hour if anyone at Apple cared about user xperience.
I’ve used one of those for years and there’s never been any impact on the user experience. Every few months, the low battery warning pops up. At that point, it will still work for hours and it only takes a few minutes to charge so even if it popped up first thing in the morning I’d plug it in the next time I got coffee, went to a meeting, walked the dog, etc.
Designing the mouse so it is useless while the charging cable is connected means that if the battery no longer takes a charge the mouse becomes e-waste.
The idea was to prevent non-techy users from using it plugged-in all the time, which would look stupid. They wanted to accentuate the wireless nature and easy connectivity of the mouse. Essentially a marketing decision.
I disagree with this take but it's worth remembering that it's marketing that turned computing from a niche activity to what it is now (which, by the way, is what makes it a viable career to the people here)
This is ugly. User behavior modification as a product goal. The reverse of how you should build products. You need to start with "The user wants to do X." rather than "I want the user to do X." Who is Apple to dictate the "correct" way for me to use a mouse?
Users aren't designers, they don't know what they want and will put up with bad experiences because they don't know it can be better.
If Apple let the mouse be used when plugged in, everyone would do it immediately and never try using it unplugged cause of their battery anxiety from every other device. Then you try it unplugged and you realized you have to plug it in for like an hour every couple months and it's way better than tethering yourself with a cable.
I've used a Magic Mouse daily for work for years and it's literally never been an issue once.
> Users aren't designers, they don't know what they want and will put up with bad experiences because they don't know it can be better.
First, I definitely know what I want from my computer.
Second, flipping my mouse over and being forced to stop using it is an objectively worse experience than plugging it in for charging while using.
I have an MX Master 3 which is also wireless and charges with a cord. While it's charging, I definitely have a degraded experience relative to the wireless one, so I unplug as soon as I can (I sometimes don't even wait for the full charge!) to go back to the better experience. Never once have I considered keeping it connected indefinitely.
> If Apple let the mouse be used when plugged in, everyone would do it immediately and never try using it unplugged
So what? Why should that bother Apple so much? They sold the mouse. Who cares how the user uses it? A user who chooses to use their mouse while plugged in does not in any way affect the mouse's manufacturer. My Apple keyboard lets me use it while it's plugged in, and the world hasn't ended. Why didn't they put the charger on the bottom of the keyboard too? Why don't they make their phones so you can't use them while charging?
> So what? Why should that bother Apple so much? They sold the mouse. Who cares how the user uses it? A user who chooses to use their mouse while plugged in does not in any way affect the mouse's manufacturer.
If the user has a worse experience, that's a lose/lose situation. Of course they should care about things that affect the experience.
> My Apple keyboard lets me use it while it's plugged in, and the world hasn't ended. Why didn't they put the charger on the bottom of the keyboard too?
A cable doesn't impact a keyboard because it's not moving.
> Why don't they make their phones so you can't use them while charging?
The chance of a phone being left plugged in forever is minimal to begin with, and the hassle of not being able to use it while it charges would be much larger.
How is using a peripheral while plugged in a worse experience? It's a better experience: I've had many more problems with wireless peripherals than wired ones. Bluetooth disconnecting randomly, batteries discharging while I'm working. Wireless is a worse experience in almost all ways.
If you make a wireless peripheral and everyone keeps using it while plugged in, the solution is not to force them to use it wirelessly. The solution is to make the wireless experience actually better so the user voluntarily chooses to use it.
This is about charging, not how it sends data. And the batteries last a long time for this particular device, so there's minimal downside to unplugging. The downside to staying plugged in is there's a cable dragging around that makes the experience of moving the mouse a little bit worse all the time.
A user has to be thinking about something to make a choice. Depending on the user to think about all these little aspects degrades the experience all by itself.
I guess we have to agree to disagree. To me, it's not about charging at all. It's about wireless vs. wired, and wireless is a buggy, defective user experience. I want to use my mouse full time while plugged in due to poor reliability when unplugged, and only Apple's devices say no--for reasons that don't make sense.
I've never been bothered by a cable sticking out of my mouse.
>I want to use my mouse full time while plugged in due to poor reliability when unplugged, and only Apple's devices say no--for reasons that don't make sense.
The reliability would not be affected since it moves data wirelessly. The data will never go over the charging cable so your reasons for keeping it plugged in don't make sense.
If I turn off bluetooth and plug my "wireless" Apple keyboard into USB, it works fine, sending data over USB. There's no reason why they couldn't make the mouse the same way.
I don't know how much users "want" to have a cord dangling off the mouse and doing nothing.
If your starting premise is "the user wants to use the mouse and have a good experience", you can see how a designer can get from there to a feature that causes/encourages an unplug. Even if you disagree, they're not going backwards.
No, it's utility that turned computing from a niche activity to what it's now. Apple is a fashion statement and it's okay for them to market to that effect, but don't credit the growth of computing to Apple's aesthetic but oft-ill-designed stuff.
> don't credit the growth of computing to Apple's aesthetic but oft-ill-designed stuff.
I'm not; I'm crediting the activity of marketing.
It's an engineering blind spot to think utility = adoption. Emacs is more powerful than MS Word; which one has more users? Which one has an organization dedicated to going around and pointing out how and where it is useful?
It's when you have utility + marketing that you get something like the computer revolution.
I'm sorry no amount of mental gymnastics can convince me that location is user friendly.
Reminds me of Zoolander haha. Either that or what you describe is Stockholm syndrome.
A port on the side is harmless. In an alternate world, it would have become the design zeitgeist and a port under would've seemed just as preposterous as it actually is.
Ouch, yeah. I loved the idea of it. I mean, I have a Stream Deck sitting on my desk as I type this, and that's basically a large, freestanding Touch Bar.
But whoever decided to replace physical keys instead of augmenting them with an additional control was out of their mind. And an undifferentiated escape key? On a pro laptop with lots of programmers? The mind boggles.
The real problem with the Touch Bar was that they never made an external keyboard with it. So I could never actually build it into my habits, since it was only actually available to me half the time.
(I'm demonstrably willing to spend money on fancy Apple external peripherals! I have the touchID keyboard, and think the convenience of it was worth the kinda silly price. I'd absolutely have wound up getting an external Touch Bar keyboard...)
There were so many problems with the Touch Bar to pick any one as the ‘real’ problem. As a software developer, I’m used to resting my finger on the F5 key when I’m thinking or in the few seconds before a build finishes. Can’t do that with the Touch Bar.
Also, it reflected the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling in a way that normal keys don’t.
There are plenty more complaints of course, but I never heard anyone say they found a ‘must-have’ use case for it. In a nutshell - all kinds of problems, no significantly better solutions.
So every other iPhone, the iPad, the MacBook Air, AirPods and the Watch were not useful because of one bendy phone and a bad keyboard? What great feat of design did Tim Cook bring us?
With all this talk about reining Ive under control, I can’t help but be reminded of that CollegeHumour skit implying Ive is a HAL9000-esq robot holding Tim Cook hostage[0]
Those devices looked beautiful but they weren’t good at actually being used. Jobs let Ive design for a museum, not for the people using his creations. Cook let that continue for a while but finally reined it in and gave us useful designs again.
Which isn’t to say that Cook hasn’t made or isn’t making mistakes. I just meant that as a reminder that it wasn’t all wine and roses under Jobs.