> Without guidance from Jobs he proved to be comically bad.

I mean, he did basically design the Apple Watch which has been an absolute runaway success, the most successful new entire product category since the iPhone.

So not exactly sure how that's comically bad.

> I mean, he did basically design the Apple Watch

Not sure about that.

I was impressed by how Apple-y the Apple Watch was, especially before the first software update. I am convinced this is due to Steve Jobs' influence [1]. As soon as the first software update was released I noticed a marked decline, much like the decline we saw in iOS 7.

[1] https://www.cultofmac.com/427636/steve-jobs-may-have-influen...

Runaway success is exaggerated - those watches were not the coolest thing in the world when they came out (and they looked the same as the current models). They gained more traction as the health features got buffed up and Apple stopped marketing the watch as primarily a notification device.

I don't think that any of this is due to the design either.

There are a million ways to eff up design. The Apple Watch and its OS are elegant and do a great job. It's basically a masterclass in design. Remember, the best design is largely invisible, when things just feel obvious and intuitive. Which describes the Apple Watch to a T.

Finding product-market fit for health is a separate issue -- that's not the design department's job.

Ive's job was to design a brand-new smartwatch from scratch and he and his team knocked it out of the park.

You've just described the Apple business model, perfectly.

I noticed in the early 2000s, and it has held true ever since: don't bother getting the first three iterations of a new Apple product unless you're well and truly enthusiastic about it. They always iterate, it always gets better, and the fourth go around is generally when I'll be happy with it.

One which I thought was too cool to pass up was AirPods, and yeah the first generation were really special and I'm glad I got them. The wireless case in the second generation was a nice bump, and the AirPods Pro (gen 3) are a clear improvement in every way. I did get a pair from the bad batch which started having problems with noice cancellation, but the replacement process was pretty smooth: so I conclude that if I wasn't in a hurry, the next generation, the fourth, would be "insanely great" and the right time to buy.

I'm sure I read somewhere that Ive actually really wanted to push the Watch as a high ticket device for rich people, and it was him being ousted that lead to Apple taking the more health-focused direction they're taking now.

Apple has recovered. It made me buy my first MacBook Pro in my life, M1 was just too good to pass on even with the disadvantages that I was used to Windows and I'm still not sure about the differences between control, option and command keys.

I have good/bad news: the command key thing, and most related macOS shortcuts, are so good that once you get used to them you'll be really annoyed when you use anything else, and left wondering how it's been this long and no-one's copied their exact physical keyboard arrangement, en-us keyboard layout, and shortcuts.

Windows and Linux (desktop and server) user for ~15 years before getting my first Mac (at work) around 2011 (DOS user even earlier). Other keyboard+OS combos are so frustrating now. Not in the "this is unfamiliar" way macOS was initially, but in a "I know this and the Apple way now, and this is worse, why the hell do you keep doing this, and not either just copy Apple or come up with something even better?" way.

Point is: you'll get used to it, and probably like it. But you might permanently be slightly irritated when using anything else, afterward.

(Try Spectacle, or something similar, if you want somewhat better window layout management from the keyboard. It's in Homebrew. It's pretty much the only OS-behavior-modifying thing I install on Mac—my other tweaks are just in the settings GUI, mostly just making CAPS lock an extra ctrl. The default spectacle shortcuts are a bit wild, but 95% of what I use is just split-half-screen left, split-half-screen right, and fullscreen, and it'd be worth using if you never used any others)

After two years of working on Macs, I realised working on Linux gave me pinky fatigue from having to press control too much. Now I rebind ctrl to super wherever possible.

That's definitely one part of it: thumb-scrunching-to-cmd requires less wrist movement, for me at least, than ctrl+[anything]. Re-mapping caps lock as an extra ctrl helps a ton, but cmd is a much better default than the ordinary ctrl, for very common system-wide keyboard shortcuts.

In fact, I just checked out of curiosity, and I move 2 fingers very slightly to cmd+c, while doing (standard) ctrl+c I move every joint up my arm, including my shoulder, and all my fingers (as I reposition my whole hand, so the fingers all flex, flattening so my pinky can hit the ctrl)

Again, caps-as-control makes it much better, but I can still feel more strain than the very natural almost-pinching motion of cmd+c. I don't know how much of this was intentional when the Apple keyboard was designed and shortcuts chosen, but it's a real effect regardless.

Command is (mostly) control under Window (CMD+C/V/X for copy/paste/cut, CMD+P for printing, CMD+Z for undo, and so on). It's also used for alt-tab.

Option is Alt. Used to modify some keyboard shortcuts like the above, sometimes on its own, and often used to type in alternate characters than standard on your keyboard (Option+e e gives you an accented e).

Control is honestly something I use often outside the terminal on macOS. I think Control+<left/right arrow key> gets you linear navigation with multiple full screen windows or multiple desktops. It probably does more, I don't know.

I wish Apple opted for an Apple key that does window management (similar to Windows), so that those shortcuts are separated from application shortcuts, but I love at least how configurable they are.

I'd like to see what a 'recovered' Apple can do when a 'not recovered' version has just sold almost $90bn of products in a quarter.

It's not helpful to point to revenue when a scenario in business like this plays out and says, "Look, clearly they know better than you."

If you notice people complaining about something in numbers, there's a reason for it.

There were people who held out for years because MacBook Pro designs were anti-consumer and people held out for compromise. I know I did. Everyone I know did. It wasn't some niche. There's an entire professional class that relies on good tooling.

Sorry Apple != MacBook Pro Keyboard however bad that latter may be and upset you may be about it.

The idea that Ive has somehow fundamentally damaged Apple's business in a way that they've yet to recover from when they've just had an almost $90bn quarter is .... just wrong.

(And anyway they've fixed the keyboard and Mac sales are up hugely).

You're focused on the horrendous MacBookPro Keyboard, and forgetting the trashcan MacPro. That thing was so bad, they had to make a Pro version of the iMac!

The trash can Mac Pro was a bet on the power of Thunderbolt, which for the first time was a peripheral bus fast enough to connect things like SSDs and GPUs without loss of performance. The idea was to make upgrading even easier than the previous Mac Pro... as easy as plugging in a Thunderbolt cable.

It didn’t work out that way. High performance Thunderbolt peripherals like eGPUs were slow to develop, for reasons outside of Apple’s control. They thought you’d soon be able to buy the latest GPUs in external enclosures as well as internal cards, the way you can hard drives. Didn’t happen.

It’s a good example of a big bet from Apple that didn’t move the whole computer industry. Eventually Apple threw in the towel and went back to the traditional big box case for a pro machine.

I never mentioned anything about their keyboards.

> If you notice people complaining about something in numbers, there's a reason for it.

MacBook Pro keyboard.

>For example, copying Flat-UI from Windows Phone. Apple hasn't recovered yet.

Huh? If anything, everybody and their dog were yelling at Apple against the non-flat "skeuomorphic" UI at the time they made the switch.

And while the first version was undercooked, the current (and 2-3 years) iteration of the flat UI is just fine...

The point of the original skeuomorphic UI was to make the phone look small, like an iPod, and not like a computer, because they didn't think people wanted to look like they were carrying a tablet around.

It turns out everyone did want to do that, and in fact iPhones weren't big enough, so the flat UI was designed to take the same device and make it look bigger and brighter.

>The point of the original skeuomorphic UI was to make the phone look small

Huh?

Don't huh me, go ask Jony Ive if you don't like it.

Let me offer a rephrasing: your claim that the original iPhone's skeuomorphic design was "to make the phone look small" and that the later, flatter UI design was "to make the same device look bigger" requires more of an explanation than your implicit "this is clearly obvious to even the most casual of observers." I don't recall anyone at Apple ever explaining that their original UI choices were about "making the phone look small," nor have I ever learned in UI design -- which I have studied -- that smallness is some inherent property of skeuomorphism.

So maybe you could enlighten us without being, you know, a jerk about it.

I am quoting him directly and I decline to reveal my sources.

Of course you do. LOL.

As the grantparent said, noone at Apple ever claimed so.

The device was small anyway in actual life (no need to "make it look small"), skeuomorphic vs flat has nothing to do with making a device appear smaller or bigger, iPad and even OS X also used skeuomorphism (so it wasn't a size concern), and Ive never said anything to that effect. The whole idea doesn't even make sense.

As for what Ive actually said, citing real-life metaphors and familiarity as the reasons (for the skeuomorphic design):

“When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn’t need physical buttons, they understood the benefits,” says Ive. “So there was an incredible liberty in not having to reference the physical world so literally. We were trying to create an environment that was less specific. It got design out of the way.”

And Scott Forstall said the same:

"If you look at the designs we did at Apple, we talked about photo illustrative designs, metaphorical designs. And those were infused into the design sense of Apple by Steve Jobs since the original Mac if not earlier. The original Mac had a desktop and folders that looked very much like the desktop on which that Mac sat. And so we used these design philosophies".