That Apple was ever good at design was probably the relative side effect of other software and hardware developers being abysmally bad at it (probably due to monopolistic inefficiencies). And now that the competition is heating up and challenging Apple on the design front, the flaws that earlier would have been swept under the carpet by ardent fans, including me, are becoming difficult to disregard.
Uh, no. It's because they valued design highly, made it an indispensable part of their company, hired great designers, and gave designers like Jony Ive extraordinary power to shape products.
BTW, what flaws, precisely, have now magically become "difficult to disregard", but were entirely invisible before? Just a couple examples will do.
Re:How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
by digi_owl on Saturday November 14, 2015 @12:25PM
(#10566420)
Nah, Jobs didn't know much about hardware or software but he was a stickler for appearance.
Re:How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
by drumdance on Saturday November 14, 2015 @09:28AM
(#10565772)
Yeah I remember being confused by the drag-to-trash metaphor too, except in my case we were still using floppy disks and I thought "are you sure this won't erase my term paper?"
Floppy drives had a mechanical eject push-button and there was no unix-style "mount" afaik.
Re:How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
by afandian on Saturday November 14, 2015 @10:05AM
(#10565885)
I don't know which floppy drives you used, but the ones I did had no push-button. It was software only. I skimmed through the models in Wikipedia and couldn't see any with manual ejects.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Macintos...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Macintos...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Macintos...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Macintos...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Power_Ma...
Re:How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
by digi_owl on Saturday November 14, 2015 @12:17PM
(#10566379)
I don't think he was thinking about Mac.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Floppy_D...
Re:How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
by drumdance on Saturday November 14, 2015 @10:38AM
(#10565976)
To my knowledge the Mac has never had an (easily usable) eject button. I remember it being really annoying because a couple times I had to get the disk out and the computer wasn't working, so I had to push one end of a paper clip into a tiny hole next to the drive.
Re:How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
by Drdrdrq on Saturday November 14, 2015 @09:58AM
(#10565859)
On unix at least (linux and aix) there was mount / umount of a floppy, which should always be done before removing it from the slot. Linux couldn't force you though, but it was good practice.
Re:How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
by digi_owl on Saturday November 14, 2015 @12:23PM
(#10566412)
Depends, you could mount it with the sync option. This would make all writes happen right away. Not recommended on FAT formated flash devices btw, as it will cause massive amounts of writes to the table.
I remember the first time I used an iMac: I spent about half an hour trying to figure out how to eject a CD. A context menu might not look very elegant but it's insanely useful and powerful and very easy to get the hang of. In the end I had to be told/taught that the way to eject the CD on a mac was to move the CD icon on the desktop to the trash (in the days of CD-RW drives, you'd think this would erase the CD).
That, to me, is the sheer definition of an un-discoverable feature.
The iPhone's lack of back button (and the fact that apps are very inconsistent in their back button placements) has brought me similar pains in getting simple things done.