Jony Ive: Apple isn't here to make money. And students shouldn't use computers so much Cupertino design don Jony Ive has claimed that Apple is not out to make money - even though it does happen to be the most valuable company in the world. Speaking at an event at London's Design Museum last night, Ive also said that bad design was "offensive", and criticised design students for using, um, computers. "We've …
Also to the point, they don't have those ideas in a vacuum. New production ideas and capabilities are coming along, the wider design community is having ideas that get pushed around. The world is not really like J Ive and his fellow gurus sitting in an isolated cabin in the woods for eight years and then suddenly launching something radically new.
In fact, if they were it wouldn't work because public expectation is also constantly changing. In eight years the design language of everything from cars to razors evolves, and Apple will be affected by that.
Case in point; a long time ago I was part of a group designing an industrial computer. A company in the Isle of Wight showed us their capability for making membrane keyboards, with the result that our product launched with one shortly after Mr. Sinclair's ZX80. Did we copy his design? Of course not. We just used the same production technique which resulted in a vaguely similar look and feel to our keyboard.
> Up until that point every touchscreen phone used a stylus.
Great revisionism there.
They use stylii up until that point because most displays were resistive and pretty crap.
The iPhone like all touch phones were a design that had come of age due to the state of the technology.
Apple happened to be there at the right time, which is valuable and visionary in itself.
But don't make the mistake of thinking that they were the only ones working on touch screen phones.
Also, the original iPhone (as most people seem to forget) was a shit phone functionally compared to everything else that was around at the time. It did look nice though.
They used resistive to get resolution. The low resolution capacitive existed at least late 1980s. The "holy grail" was handwriting and annotation. Because only BUSINESS users could afford the data.
Apple did deals for cheap data contracts.
They used 1980s gesture ideas from a bought in company (Fingerworks?) married to a cut down OSX to make iOS. The first iPhone was Samsung 6400 series ARM and commodity hardware. 8 years is 8 years WATCHING till they could do a phone by only some GUI development and commodity HW.
Ives then slaps it into a Dieter Rams inspired box that Braun would have done in 1959 if smart phones had existed.
Then MARKETING plus the first attractive for CONSUMER contracts.
The whole Jony Ive story is a fairy tale.
@Mage
> The whole Jony Ive story is a fairy tale.
Is it?
The story is: son of a northern craftsman studies product design, is noted by his tutors for thinking about how products are actually made, doesn't find a British company that sees that good design can further its business, decamps to California, is hired by Apple and eventually noticed by Steve Jobs who wishes to mark a change in company he has returned to.
Ive isn't a genius, and has never claimed to be. It isn't that Apple are 'magical', but that their competitors don't always get the importance of good design. These companies may have some talented designers, but have some ignorant managers who were promoted out of the sales department. Jony Ive's designs would count for little if they had been released at the wrong time, or at the wrong price... instead they worked in concert with Apple's strategy, supply chain, and yeah, business muscle. Had Sony not made a few mis-steps, we might be talking about them here today (they were exploring music download and steaming services plus associated devices and UIs in 1998 and, like a c 2001 Job's 'Digital Hub' keynote speech, were planning to place their VAIO - visual audio input output - PCs to be that hub. Before the iPhone, Sony had the Palm-powered Clie, and some experience of phones... Whatever.)
To follow Dieter Rams' principles of good design does take time and effort - and this doesn't happen when the management just want to ship a box with 'good enough' specs. It also doesn't happen when the consumers are only buying the product with the biggest numbers - witness the nineties PC market (Mhz! MBs!), or the digital camera Mega-pixel race.
If wouldn't if it was true. I wouldn't mind if people said, "oh, I didn't realise it wasn't true, sorry". But to hear the same old BS trotted out time after time is galling. The LG Prada was the first capacitive touchscreen phone. By your logic, are you now willing to admit that Apple copied LG?
I can't think of a single, significant technical innovation which Apple were first with.
The design 'language' of cars seems to me to have been largely static for a long time now.
The only big differences between new cars now and, say, fifteen years ago, are the shape of the hybrids to fit the giant batteries, and the absence of slightly charming products like Nissan's several retro designs at the time, though I gather they were not for export.
I still feel minor elation when I see one.
The New Way (rampant greed) got rid of such whimsy in short order.
I'm guessing you don't work in a creative industry?
The pictures of the original Android prototype show a Blackberry type device, small screen, qwerty keyboard. Then all of a sudden it becomes a touchscreen device.
Same with Samsung's phones:
http://leadingstrategicinitiatives.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/samsung-smart-phones.png
"Then all of a sudden it becomes a touchscreen device."
Perhaps that was because someone (LG, Sharp, Samsung itself) came along and said: "We will be mass-producing these new screens with touch capabilities in a few months....Want to make a new device with them?" Of course one would abandon the old Blackberry look when touchscreens became viable. Apple didn't move to touchscreens because they were ludicrously expensive and they were willing to take a hit just wanted to help humanity....
>Yeah, and they [phones] were far more usable back then, with the stylus, than they are now.
Comparing multiple fingers to a single stylus is akin to comparing oranges to a single banana. The stylus gives you more point accuracy and perhaps pressure readings, but the use of multiple fingers gives modifiers. Horses for courses: a drawing app will be better with a stylus, whereas an app that simulates an audio mixer may work better with fingers. Sometimes you use a mouse, sometimes you use a joystick.
It is clear to anyone with a stopwatch that the act of removing a stylus from a phone (or from your pocket, or from behind your ear) incurs a time penalty... looking for the damned thing when you've dropped it even more so. In product design, this is known as an 'offline' issue - an aspect of a product's design that affects the user when they are not actively using it.
Now, some older phones are more efficient for some tasks - one could literally navigate an old Nokia blindfold, because the menus were numbered, so [Menu] [6] [2]* would bring up the voice recorder before you'd brought the phone to your lips.
* These are made up numbers, so don't blame me if you accidentally set your old Nokia to Japanese.
It's amazing that so much wrongness can fit in one post.
Woz built blue boxes for phone freaking, Apple didn't try to sell them.
Xerox didn't invent the GUI, and Apple licenced what they had done (and then added a shedload of stuff to make it into the modern GUI that you'd be familiar with).
Apple didn't claim to invent the touch screen phone (I remember using HTC units branded as XDAs here in the UK years before the iPhone), what they did was to invent a GUI that worked on a multitouch capacative screen, on a small, compact, easy to use phone. There's a big difference between pre and post iphone smart phones, and even the Android development team admitted that.
> Xerox didn't invent the GUI, and Apple licenced what they had done (and then added a shedload of stuff to make it into the modern GUI that you'd be familiar with).
Bullshit.
Do you perchance work at Apple? If so, you guys need to hire a better PR firm. The one you're using right now sucks.
Here's a link to a video showing Steve Jobs' take on the facts. The video is from a while ago, so Jobs wasn't as prone as believing his own mythology back then:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpMeFh37mCE
About on-screen keyboards:
http://homepage3.nifty.com/tsato/xvkbd/
See, some of us were born before 1991, we studied CompSci in college and we learned C and X. The notion that Apple invented the on-screen keyboard is just another steaming pile of Apple Bullshit.
> http://obamapacman.com/2010/03/myth-copyright-theft-apple-stole-gui-from-xerox-parc-alto/
Wowser.
Some Obama/Steve Jobs/Celebrity/Apple Fanboi site. The apex of credibility.
What's Kim Kardashian take on this? Would you happen to have a link to her site? I can't wait to read it.
Is there any other - and hopefully better - Horseshit you can entertain us with?
That was at the Stanford Research Institute, Demo given in 1968.
From the Wiki artice:
"As the seventies started, much of Engelbart's team departed ARC and went their own ways, with many of them ending up at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC)"
So Xerox didn't invent the GUI, but a lot of the team who did, ended up working there.
Lord. Even Wikipedia knows the history of the GUI better than the people posting in this thread.
1963: Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad. A CAD GUI. This was a GUI application, and not a general-purpose OS, but was clearly a graphical user interface.
1968: The Mother of All Demos. Doug Engelbart introduces the mouse (Sketchpad used a lightpen as the pointing device), multiple application windows, etc. But Engelbart & Co's NLS was not entirely a GUI shell in modern terms; for example it mostly used text windows, with some embedded graphics.
1972: The Alto at Xerox PARC. While not a commercial machine, the Alto is the first graphical workstation produced in significant quantities and running a GUI OS. It's the first thing that would be generally recognizable today as a general-purpose GUI machine. There are numerous contributors, such as Alan Kay.
The Star came 9 years later, in '81; it was the first commercial GUI system. Two years later, GUIs appeared for Apple and IBM PCs (the Lisa and Visi On, respectively), as did SunView. Then the Macintosh and X Window System in '84 and Microsoft Windows in '85. (And who could forget Presentation Manager in '88?1)
So roughly speaking, the GUI was invented at Sutherland at MIT, Engelbart and his team at SRI, and Xerox PARC, from '63 to '72. Major innovations leading to the dominant GUIs of today (iOS, Windows, Android, X) date from the mid-80s onward.
1You did, didn't you. You forgot Presentation Manager.
If Xerox "Xerox didn't invent the GUI", then they were the first ones to put it onto actual working hardware. I used the Xerox Star and it worked a lot like an Apple product of the time (except it wasn't slowed down by an underpowered processor with too little RAM*)
And if you listen to Apple now, it sounds an awful lot like they are claiming they did invent the smartphone.
* and it cost a shed-load more.
LG's touchscreen phone?!?
Apple Newton, development started in 1987 and the product was released in 1993. It has many of the features of a modern smartphone and was released a year before the first smartphone (IBM Simon).
To develop the Newton Apple needed a low power mobile CPU and helped fund the development of it with ARM.
So the whole modern ARM smartphone world is thanks to ARM and Apple.
Apple isn't here to make money. Apple is here to *take* money. Plus lock out competition. Plus claim 'ownership' of ideas built on the work of others or even obvious ones like: "let's polish this and round the corners".
The richest company in the world is not out to make money. If only I could accidentally accumulate 50 billion bucks.
er... Jony Ive uses many things other than computers, so therefore we can assume he uses many things that aren't made by Apple. Toothbrushes, cars, shoes, ovens, pencils, knives, whatever.
Shit, when he started at Apple, he didn't even use an Apple-branded computer for his design work because that kind of CAD software wasn't available for Mac OS (it may well have been still on the mainframe).
I don't own any Apple kit, and I'm still offended by bad design - in hardware or in software. Sometimes when using using a product you just get the sense that the designer doesn't use this thing themselves - because if they did, they wouldn't have made it so annoying to use.
Bad design is the standard British light switch - a 100mm x 100mm square of plastic, and the only useful bit is 12mm x 25mm, of which only a 12mm x 10mm will actually do anything and even then it has sharp uncomfortable edges and requires some force to actuate. The French have switches where the entire 100mm x 100mm surface is a switch, so the lights can be turned on with your elbow as you enter a room whilst carrying a tea tray.
The UK 13A plug is as big as it is because it is fused, and it needs to dissipate the heat. In the early days it was mainly being used with electric fires which could drawn nearly 13A, so this was important.
Nowadays there are many purpose built power supplies integrated into plugs, so the size of the UK plug is no real disadvantage - it is big enough to dissipate the switching losses in a 2A mobile phone charger without becoming hot. I particularly like the BlackBerry and Apple phone chargers which fit entirely into the envelope of a traditional 13A plug, much neater than the version needed for the US 110V supply.
>highly standardised for flexibility - a concept alien to Apple.
Actually, it seems to be a familiar concept for Apple:
If I walk into any supermarket or electronics retailer, I will find a wide choice of 3rd-party headphones designed to work with Apple devices. Not good for me, because I have an Android phone. Likewise phone cases and speaker docks... This is the case because whilst Apple headset sockets aren't an industry standard, nor are their 13 or 9 pin connectors, they command a large enough market share to be an ersatz standard.
Annoyingly, not all Android TRRS 3.5mm connectors the same... I have seen some Sennheiser headsets sold as being for Samsung Galaxy S4/5 phones, and I know that Sony have used some different resistor values across their range... Grr! I sometimes wish Google had exerted some influence to bring about a standard wired Android headset spec, and a standard Android docking solution.
>>as big as it is to take a UK 13 amp plug.
I much prefer British 13 Amp plus to the French ones, and I believe they are safer, too.
However, whilst I know the reasons why British light switches are mounted in a large mounting plate, nobody has answered why we don't put lovely big switches on them!
And another thing: Why aren't all newly built houses fitted with some Cat6 cable between rooms? It would cost eff-all to do before the walls are plastered. It is just a lack of thinking, a lack of care.
I don't own any Apple kit, and I'm still offended by bad design - in hardware or in software
I'm annoyed by bad design, but my idea of "good design" is clearly very different from Ive's, since I haven't liked an Apple product since the //gs. I think he (and most designers) rather drastically underestimates the subjective aspect of his "good design". It's not a Platonic essence.
If my designs were [bjust copied[/b] then I'd be peeved.
If my designs were copied and improved then I'd probably say 'well done'.
See the difference?
The same goes for my source code.
Copy it and leave my name on it. Good
Copy it, add nothing, remove my name BAD, very BAD.
Copy it and improve on it [leaving my name on it and adding yours...] Good.
>"We can only conclude from this that Jonny Ive is cunt of the first order"
Er? So, your logic:
Ive is offended by badly designed objects. On the basis that there are far, far worse things in this world, this makes him a "cunt of the first order" according to you. Um... so what order of cunt do you consider the people who are committing the murders and torturing etc, since the very idea of downgrading their offensiveness offends you?
Confused.
1) Apple kit is slick and 'well designed' , but so it should be with 100% control.
2)The more I hear of Ives the less I like him. He obviously believes that he can sit on his ivory cloud drinking skinny unicorn milk decaffe lattes dreaming up concepts that no one else can. Once dreamt he will hand his thoughts down to the morlocks in the unterverse who will toil alway to meet their masters demand whilst lauding the creators genius..
Bollocks..
I would draw the similarity between Architects and civil engineers. Clothes designers and tailors, Car designers and production engineers. In all cases the former has the freedom to think without the constraint of what's possible or practical The latter professions then go. How the fuck do we build this.. and at that price, by next wednesday.
I would love to see an example of Ives code that he personally wrote to implement any of his ideas or even the API calls he specified; or is he just a sketch book fairy that has lived in the shadow of a well renowned control freak and corporate bully?
>"I would draw the similarity between Architects and civil engineers. Clothes designers and tailors, Car designers and production engineers. In all cases the former has the freedom to think without the constraint of what's possible or practical The latter professions then go. How the fuck do we build this.. and at that price, by next wednesday."
I think you've just identified the difference between an Industrial Designer and a Product Designer - Ive is of the latter camp.
Here's an example: The designer of the first Sony Playstation insisted on a vent design that required the injection mold tooling to pull away in two directions when the case was being formed, even though the engineers had wanted just a simpler, cheaper perf pattern. The designer, a Mr Teiyu Goto, knew things that the engineers didn't - he knew where Sony where aiming to pitch the product in the market against the incumbents Sega and Nintendo (Sony had been working with Nintendo on a 'Playstation' in 1990, but Nintendo pulled out). The strategy extended to the marketing of the Playstation, as well as the games commissioned for it (such as the clubber-friendly WipEout) - creating its image as a console for young adults, not just children. The Playstation hardware and software accounted for nearly 25% Sony's profits for 1997, so Mr Goto was vindicated. He went on to design the first VAIO desktop and laptop.
A Product Designer will understand the production techniques, and will be able to make an informed decision on whether a design decision is worth the extra production cost - or other costs, such as battery life vs weight. The engineers won't have all the information to make these decisions - they won't know, for example, projections of many units will be manufactured over the next 12 months. The key points here are teamwork and communication between experts in different fields, and for that to work the designer (or as Dieter Rams calls it, the 'Form Engineer') needs at least enough knowledge to converse with these experts. He needs to understand their input, and to communicate his/her views to them.
An Industrial Designer just makes a pretty case to stick over the box that the engineers have already made. As William Gibson will tell you, the first Industrial Designers were recruited from Broadway, as they were theatre set dressers.
- Digital Dreams - The Work of the Sony Desaign Centre 1999 ISBN 9780789302625
"The engineers won't have all the information to make these decisions - they won't know, for example, projections of many units will be manufactured over the next 12 months."
Downvoted because this is obviously wrong - how can you even start to select the type of tooling if you don't have forecast production volumes? How could I ever have presented an engineering capex without cashflow projections?
>Downvoted because this is obviously wrong - how can you even start to select the type of tooling if you don't have forecast production volumes?
Because the Product Designer works with the Manufacturing Engineers in selecting the tooling, taking their advice, learning from them, but ultimately taking the decision on which process to use. Before then, the Product Designer liaises with other parts of the company - which is where the volume forecast comes from in the first place.
Everything is inter-related - you can't design it until you know how you will make it. You don't know how you will make it until you know how many you will sell. You don't know how many you will sell until you have appraised how much you will sell it for. You don't know much you will sell it for until you have selected a process... and so on. Hence the importance of communication and working together.
Again, this is the difference between Industrial Design and Product Design.
According to you AC, you have have the engineers talking directly to the marketing and finance departments- and that is a recipe for someone getting hit by a spanner.
I'm assuming he talks about the exterior design. Of course you can argue about beauty. To me it's just a slab, but some people might find that appealing.
However it does have some serious industrial design issues.
The most obvious is that the display glass extends over the whole surface of the device. That makes it very likely to break when it falls down.
Less obvious is the lack of a keyboard causing you to have to resort to soft keyboard. Those don't have any tactile feedback making it hard to type without looking... and they obscure part of your screen.
To me that seems to be design that cares for a shape, but does not care for the user. It's just like Philippe Starck’s lemon squeezer.
>I'm assuming he talks about the exterior design.
He's talking about the whole phone. The design work might be divided into teams, but ultimately the user will use the phone as a single undivided object, so the design process should bear that in mind. At a very simple level, the software should work with the hardware human input devices.
>However it does have some serious industrial design issues.
He's not an industrial designer, he's a product designer.
>Less obvious is the lack of a keyboard causing you to have to resort to soft keyboard.
Resort to a soft keyboard... any number of hard Bluetooth keyboards from the tiny to the full size, so you can choose one that suits you.
You might even wish to support the young lad who used an Arduino to make a 'chorded typing' key case for phones.
>The most obvious is that the display glass extends over the whole surface of the device. That makes it very likely to break when it falls down
This is true of many touch-screen phones. Again, it credits the user with enough wit to customise it to their specific situation.
Then why don't you fix your own products? I live in the country (so no passing iPhone is going to scan my AP), my iPad is WiFi only. So why over successive versions of iOS is Location Services fundamentally broken? I cannot instruct iOS as to my location, the WiFi AP is not "known", and several discussions with so-called support failed to come up with any sort of resolution. It seems impossible for me (or Apple support staff) to associate an AP with a location. It needs an iOS device with GPS.
There are other flaws, but that is the one that really bugs me. Bad design, pure and simple.
I'd call it a result of the engineering and material science not catching up with green legislation.
It happens in the automotive industry too - emissions have to be ever lower, so engine designs aren't slowly refined over successive generations to be more reliable - instead they have to play catch up with the latest emission laws.
""If you expect me to buy something where all I can sense is carelessness, actually I think that is personally offensive," he continued. "It's offensive culturally, because it shows a disregard for our fellow human."
Dear Jony.
Please give me a help system that doesn't flake out 90% of the time with the advice to "try later".
Once is unfortunate. Nine times out of ten is carelessness.
When it comes to design, there is nothing truly original, which is why it's so easy to classify architectural and design periods through history - because they tend to trend. Say "Georgian" to someone in the UK and they'll immediately think of tall, elegant frontages, palisters, porticos, delicate sash windows with a dozen or so little panes and panelled doors. Say Victorian and they'll think stovepipe hats, dowdy black dresses, iron frameworks and lots of tall collars.
Design trends.
Ive thinks he led one. He just happened to be prominent and bring together several elements of something that was already occurring, as can be seen by other similar design ideas that accompanied or even preceded his work in various fields.
I remember wandering around there a few years ago, for some bizarre reason we were dragged along as part of some course I was doing, totally design unrelated.
The only thing I remember was that it was full of crap. Can't remember any one item I saw, not one. Surely good design should stick in your memory?
Oh well Mr Ive, you better get back into your design house and start drawing round your pencil case, there's a new iPhone 7 that needs designing.
>Surely good design should stick in your memory?
Not necessarily. A traditional 'double diamond' bicycle frame is a piece of good design, but it isn't memorable.
Often the best pieces of design are those that we don't notice, because they haven't annoyed us.
We notice some impenetrable plastic blister packaging because it annoys us. Doubly so if the product it contains is a pair of scissors.
We notice a piece of furniture with sharp corners because we have just bashed our shin on it.
We notice a car stereo because it has, for some stupid reason, two buttons to change the volume instead of a simple knob.
If you are going to notice a well designed object, the best thing you can think of it is "Ah, that's simple - why didn't I think of it?", or "Why aren't they all like that?". I had a scroll-wheel music player before the iPod was introduced - a Sharp MD722 MiniDisc player. I then had an iRiver H320 - technologically superior to its rival, the 3rd gen. iPod, in every way - but it would have been much nicer to use if it had a scroll-wheel to navigate long lists of albums.
In the early nineties, I visited Czechoslovakia as it was then. Nearly everywhere had single-handled mixer taps (up/down = on/off, left/right = hot/cold) which we hadn't yet seen in the UK. The advantage was clear - easy to use with soapy hands, or even with your wrist if your hands were covered in the very much you wished to wash off. The advantages easily outweighed the extra costs associated with what must be a more complicated mechanism than a tradition tap. We were left with the thought "Why are these everywhere here, but unknown in the UK?"
Steve Jobs was always clear that Apple's goal was to make great products that people want to buy. Making money is a consequence of that.
If your number one goal is to make money, that's when you start doing stupid stuff like cutting R&D, using cheap materials, and cutting other corners, and not paying attention to what customers want but expecting them to buy it because that's how you make money. Look at Detroit in the 70s for the all time example of this.
Maybe. At least it gives you some tactile feedback so you don't obscure the lens with your finger when you take a picture. True, it does protrude, and therefore might cause an issue when putting it your pocket. Perhaps.
You could say exactly the same of a phone with big raised volume buttons - "Great!" you think, if you live in cold climes and regularly wear gloves. "Nasty!" you think, as the phone's buttons snag on the pockets of your linen trousers on the way to the beach.
Product Design, like Engineering, is often about making decisions - compromise is inevitable.
He kind of sounds like a jerk, claiming they don't do it for the money, when Apple charges the highest margins in the industry, and the most valuable company in the world. If they weren't in it to make money, they could run at a break-even like Craigslist etc. Not that I suggest really doing that, I'm just saying.
Also... the saying is that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. if they aren't in it for the money, what do they care if there are some imitators out there? Complaining about copying while saying they aren't in it for the money makes him sound like a jerk. Improperly referring to copying as theft makes him sound like a jerk.
And, even bringing this up makes him sound like a jerk; for example, if you look at the Samsung phone Apple showed at trial as an example of Samsung copying IPhone design, *Samsung's phone shipped first*. Due to a procedural error on Samsung's part, Samsung was not permitted to submit this information at the trial.
Apple fanbois (including employees I think) like to be all revisionist, and pretend they invented the first portable music player (they didn't), invented the first smartphone (nope), among other things. They didn't even come up with the first *good* smartphone; revisionists like to think it was all candybar and flip phones up to the second the IPhone came out, but it simply isn't true; better, thinner phones had been coming out for several years already at that point.
It's easy to say you're not there to make money when you're rolling in it.
Saying students shouldn't use computers so much is like saying (back in my day) that kids shouldn't watch so much television. Both are ubiquitous because they are fun. The prissiness of the Ives of the world won't win any battles.
>Saying students shouldn't use computers so much is like saying (back in my day) that kids shouldn't watch so much television.
When he spoken about this before, Ive's point was that was that it was usually better for the designer to shape a piece of clay or foam by hand than it was to use CAD and a 3D printer. By spending time working with the shape and holding in their hand, the designer can get a better feel for the object.
There is a lot to be said for being able to sketch well by hand - still a very fluent way to get 'hard copy' out of your head. CAD is absolutely essential to bringing a mass-produced product to market, but not at all stages of the design process. CAD is designed to be easy to use. CAD is designed to hold your hand through established manufacturing processes.
There are analogies to other fields; Keith Richards saying that he always judges a new song on an acoustic guitar before plugging in, or those authors who still use a typewriter... spell checkers, squiggly green lines and talking-feckin-paper-clips are not essential.
As a child, my piano teacher had a Yamaha DX-7. I had more fun exploring the funny noises it made than actually learning how to express music though my fingers. As an adult, some more musical ability would bring me more joy than a grasp FM synthesis.
"We ^wanted^ it to stick out about 1mm from the back of the otherwise flawlessly lined shape of the phone. You know, cuz we think different."
(I still cringe every time I set mine down and hope, probably beyond realistic expectation, that the sapphire lens cover truly is indestructible.)
It's not indestructible, but the only time you really need to worry about setting it down on a surface is if you are in a workshop or a building which is having work done - dust from diamond cutting disks can damage it.
That's how I've put two very light scratches on the face of my watch. By contrast, the stainless steel bezel that surrounds it is covered in little scratches from over a decade of carelessness on the part of its owner.
I've also heard of diamond jewellery damaging sapphire-faced watches, if you or your SO are into bling.
Design has always gone in "fads, where a given style becomes predominant for a while.
After some time a new design fad takes over and the cycle begins again.
The truly masterful designers are the ones who manage to spot the next fad several times, not just once.
If you didn't want your design "copied" and you are so passionate about it then why didn't you insist that Apple go and lodge design patents all over the world to protect your valuable "time" spent on designing iJunk?
I guess they were arogant enough to think that no one would dare copy their designs....pffft.
Apple, as one of the most valuable companies on the stock market MUST make money or Tim Cook et al will be looking for new jobs. It's a simple fact, if you know how to do the sums, that Apple's valuation is based on future earnings and growth as much as it is on present performance. The board of Apple is there to deliver that value to shareholders. Jony Ive, wonderful chap as he is, may not have money as his top priority (Having made enough of it) but Apple most certainly does, just like every other quoted company. It's irritating that he should bother to say such tosh when we actually value his design ideas. At least we know why Jony isn't CEO!
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