We haven’t heard much from Jony ever since his departure from Apple. Sure, he founded LoveFrom with his colleague Marc Newson, but their projects seem fewer and farther between. The legendary designer, however, has surfaced to reveal the ‘Most Perfect Nose in History’, designed for British charity, Comic Relief. The nose in question is the popular red sphere, synonymous with clowns. While most clown noses used to be made from either plastic or foam, Jony Ive’s brought his signature approach to design by recreating the nose with a more universally fitting, foldable design. The new Red Nose looks exactly like the kind of thing Jony would design. It’s sleek, eye-catching, and just borders ever so slightly on being overdesigned to the level where we all wonder why… The new Red Nose will be made available on Comic Relief’s website as a fundraising effort for their work to help tackle social issues such as homelessness, mental health problems, and food poverty. Last year’s Comic Relief raised over $52 million.
The redesigned Red Nose (yes, I’m kinda laughing as I say it) uses a honeycombed paper construction, with plastic arcs on the side and a hinge detail that lets you open and close the nose. When closed, it’s about as small as a hearing aid, but open it out and it fits onto practically any nose, or so Comic Relief and Jony Ive claim. Each nose also comes with its own Airpods-like case, because you can’t wear the nose 24×7, right?!
There’s definitely a little tongue-in-cheek humor with the announcement of the new Red Nose. They call it the ‘Most Perfect Nose in History’, mimicking the kind of hyperbole you’d otherwise get from Apple, and the renders/images make it feel like an Apple product too. The new nose is available for £2.50 (about $3) on Amazon UK and the Comic Relief website, although it’s sold out as of the time of writing this article.
You’d think this was the new HomePod, but it isn’t.
Would you rather design the world’s first diamond ring that’s entirely made out of a single diamond stone? Or would you try to design an 8mm slab of a smartphone that practically looks the same as the 8mm slab of a smartphone you designed last year, because it needs to?
This keynote marks the first of many without Jony Ive lending his suave baritone to the background audio as Tim unveils the new iPhone. Jony Ive left Apple earlier this year, moving on to forming his own design studio LoveFrom along with long-time friend and design collaborator Marc Newson.
There’s no room for Apple to innovate in industrial design, as the company isn’t really set to launch new products anymore. They scrapped AirPower and pulled a disappearing act on the entire ‘smart-car’ project. The last product that Ive could really go wild with was the infamous 2019 Mac Pro, and that design isn’t changing at least for the next 5 years.
I remember a time when Ive allegedly expressed intent to leave Apple (a year after Jobs’ passing), and was made to stay by being promoted to the position of Chief Design Officer. Now at a position that is just second to the CEO, there isn’t much room for Jony to move upwards, and the company’s pivot to services like Apple Pay, Apple TV+, and Apple Arcade means Ive can finally move out of Apple’s structure, extending and experimenting beyond designing notches on 8mm slabs of metal and glass, putting arguably the most disastrous keyboards on their flagship laptops, and over-designing a $1999 display stand for a $5999 cheese-grater-esque computer.
So onto the new iPhone. The iPhone 11 and 11 Pro are, like every iPhone, the greatest iPhones ever made. They showcase design similar to their predecessors, but with major upgrades to the inner hardware and software, including a chip that provides better CPU and GPU capabilities with lesser power consumption, and camera features that are really professional-grade. The merits of the new iPhones aren’t really visual, but rather strictly technological. Remember the visual jump from the iPhone 3G to the 4, from the 5 to the 6, and from the 8 to the X? They were all spaced roughly 2-3 years apart, but the iPhone X is perhaps the last stop for the iPhone’s industrial design journey (I hope to stand corrected). With an aesthetic that’s now sort of in the sweet spot, Apple’s focus is now on making each subsequent phone perform better than the last.
To reiterate, the new iPhones aren’t really NEW LOOKING iPhones. They’re old iPhones with new tricks. There’s no way in hell that Apple’s teasing a folding iPhone yet, or a 5G iPhone before the infrastructure is ready… or even a bezel-less iPhone because that would need a sliding camera module which would make the iPhone thicker, a cardinal sin in Jony’s design playbook. In fact, the iPhone can’t even get much thinner than it already has, thanks to the limitations of Moore’s Law.
Tim’s pivot to services is probably his lasting legacy as CEO, and it doesn’t have much room in it for radical industrial design. Ive stuck around to help complete Jobs’ vision of releasing the best consumer products, but if anything, those products are now Apple’s undoing. iPhone sales have gradually seen a steady decline, in part because it isn’t worth spending over a grand on new phones each year, but also because Apple’s gadgets stand the test of time, with people on an average using their phones for over 3-4 years before finally making the switch (my flatmate still uses a 6S; pretty happily, if I might add). The bendgate debacle was perhaps a blip in Apple’s otherwise long-standing record of making products that last longer than the competition (they’ll last even longer now, ever since Apple’s begun advocating for the Right To Repair Act that allows third-parties to officially fix broken Apple gadgets). Couple that with the fact that each flagship iPhone now costs more than a grand, and you’ve got a product line that’s losing its annual hype.
So, I ask again… would you willingly choose to play second fiddle to engineers, strategists, UI/UX designers, and service designers, condemned to a lifetime of minutely redesigning old products? Probably not for long, right? The new iPhone is remarkable in many ways, but it also marks the perfect departure for Apple’s design legend who deserves to be able to do MUCH more.
Apple’s product lineup under Jobs was radically different from its lineup under Cook. Cook’s vision for Apple and the iPhone is to take the existing and make it better. Take the earpods and turn them into wireless Airpods, take the iPad and turn it into an iPad Pro, and now with the iPhone, take the world’s most popular smartphone, and turn it into a serious instrument for content creation.
The iPhone 11 Pro is, just like every iPhone, the best damn iPhone ever made, but without Jony Ive, the keynote seemed to evoke a lot of déjà vu. Nothing much has changed as far as the design goes, for starters. There’s a third lens, an A13 bionic chip, and a new color, Midnight Green. Other than that, the iPhone 11 isn’t a dramatic visual upgrade, like the iPhone X was, or the iPhone 6 was. Apple’s innovation, for the most part, has been fueled by cutting-edge hardware and software developments. The new phone has a Super Retina XDR display with industry-leading brightness, vividness, and contrast ratios, while at the same time consuming lesser power. Three lenses give the iPhone 11 Pro superior camera props, allowing you to shoot telephoto, wide, and ultra-wide from the same vantage point, with incredible detail, and also the presence of a low-light night-mode. The cameras on the front are a dramatic improvement too, with a wide lens giving you wide-angle selfies, and a portrait feature on both sides allowing you to calibrate the depth-of-field. The iPhone 11 Pro shines in the video department, with stunning 4K video recording, and tools that allow you to edit video in powerful new ways. The iPhone 11 Pro, as its name suggests, is the consumer-favorite iPhone, but tweaked to suit the demands of a professional. Oh, did I mention, it comes with a free 1 year subscription to Apple TV+ too? That’s just Tim’s way of reminding us that Apple isn’t an industrial-design-driven company anymore, it’s a service-design-driven company now.
With Sir Jonathan Ive’s exit from Apple just days ago, it’s finally the end of an era that Steve Jobs envisioned back in the 90s. Ive left his design agency Tangerine to formally Apple in 1992, recruited by Jon Rubinstein at the time. It wasn’t until 1996, when Steve Jobs made a return to Apple (an almost-bankrupt company at the time), when Jonathan Ive’s career really took off. Along with Ive’s eye for design, and Jobs’ attention to need, detail, and usability, the two formed one of the most successful creative alliances in recent history, taking the company to a valuation of $665 billion in 2011, around the time of Jobs’ demise, and finally to the trillion dollar mark in 2018.
Ive’s journey at Apple can be distinctly broken down into these phases, that roughly fall into the decades too. We’re here to look at the work of Jobs through the lens of time, as he went from product to product and strength to strength with each passing decade. The video above provides a very rare look into Ive’s and Apple’s elusive design process, while the products below aim to codify and categorize Ive’s 27-year-long design journey with one of the most innovative companies on earth. Here’s a look at Jonathan Ive’s 27 years at Apple, in products.
1992-96 Jonathan Ive leaves Tangerine for Apple. Steve Jobs hasn’t made his comeback yet.
There honestly isn’t much to look at here. This was pre-Jobs comeback, when Apple was facing financial difficulties. Ive made his way from Tangerine to Apple, only to realize that most of the design team was being let go of. Rumor has it, he almost tried to quit around the same time, but was pep-talked into staying by Jon Rubinstein. Ive, under Apple, designed a few not-so-successful products at the time… like the Newton MessagePad, shown above. However, his experimentation with transparency (top right) led to a few breakthroughs later when Steve made a comeback.
1997-2011 Apple’s renaissance period under Jobs and Ive. Apple Design follows Dieter Rams.
Design flourished when Steve Jobs made a comeback in 1996. The iMac G3 and the iBook explored curves, and the use of transparency and translucency. Jobs was adamant that the insides of the computers be beautiful enough to showcase to the world, rather than make more white boxes. Ive’s design efforts went into making ‘computers sexy again’.
Ive’s obsession with transparency evolved further, while products that were previously curved, started taking on a more slick appearance. Shown above are the Apple Cinema Display, the iMac G4, and a rare non-Apple product, Harman Kardon’s Soundsticks that were designed by Ive!
Nothing put Apple more on the map than the iPod. It revolutionized everything, and truly made Jobs stand out as a visionary, and cemented Ive’s role in the company. The iPod also owed a big debt of gratitude to Dieter Rams, who’s design language at Braun truly began influencing Ive’s work. The circular jogdial, the no-nonsense design, the philosophy of “Form Following Function”, and the liberal use of white, all were owed to Dieter Rams. While naysayers saw this as Apple ‘not being original enough’, iPods flew off the shelves, and Apple finally became a household name.
As iPods grew popular, Ive strived hard to make them sleeker too. As a result, the Nano and the Shuffle were born. With an iPod for everyone, these came in a variety of formats, stored as many as 2000 songs, and now came in color! Another subtle innovation was that Ive discovered the material that would change the consumer tech industry forever… aluminium.
Aluminum allowed Ive to truly explore Apple’s new aesthetic of beautiful, premium, and sleek products. Aluminum was abundant, could be machined to precision, and Ive even devised a way of utilizing spare aluminum parts from the Mac Pro to make the MacBook bodies (discussed in Gary Hustwit’s Objectified). Ive pushed the limits to how beautifully sleek products could be made, and in 2008, Steve Jobs walked out on stage with a Manila envelope, carrying the world’s thinnest laptop within it… the iconic 19.4mm MacBook Air!
One more thing… arguably the three most important words in Apple’s history. The iPhone is considered to be Jobs and Ive’s magnum opus. So much is owed to the birth of the iPhone. Industries, companies, technologies, materials, the iPhone created them all. The first iPhone, introduced in 2007 was the first true smartphone. It came with a touchscreen you could use with your fingers, and boasted of Apple’s iOS and the birth of the app marketplace. Further iterations only grew better. The iPhone 4 came with a glass front and back, but a slick aluminum frame that made it one of the thinnest phones of its time. It was the perfect size (some still believe so even today) and had Siri, Apple’s voice AI. In 2012 came the iPhone 5, a reiteration of its successful predecessor, with a standard-setting aluminum unibody, a revolutionary 16:9 display, and the world’s first fingerprint sensor on a phone. The iPhone 5 was considered to be the last iPhone co-created by Jobs and Ive.
The iPad debuted in 2010, just a year before Jobs’ demise. Ive designed it to be the sleekest tablet on the market, following the footsteps of the iPhone and the MacBook Air, although the idea for the iPad came to Jobs much before the iPhone. Jony developed a device so iconic that it remained the only strong contender in the tablet market with practically no competition for roughly seven years.
2012-19 Apple finding its post-Jobs identity, & becoming a trillion dollar company.
The 2013 Mac Pro came at a time of uncertainty. Two years since the death of Jobs, Apple was looking for its next great product. The iPhone and the iPad proved to show how great Jobs was at envisioning new products. Apple hoped a redesigned Mac Pro would show people that Apple was still capable of innovation. Jonathan Ive’s redesign didn’t receive much praise, and was often referred to as the trashcan Mac, for its dustbin-shaped appearance. For the people that bought it too, the Mac Pro had quite a few problems, ranging from its heat issues, to the fact that it wasn’t easy to upgrade… a pretty necessary feature considering how much the 2013 Mac Pro cost.
The following year was one of redemption. Apple’s recent recruitments to the design team included designer Mark Newson and CEO of Yves Saunt Laurent, Paul Deneve. These two stalwarts aided Ive in building consumer electronics that were comparable to fashion items, with their sheer sense of style (and even a price tag to match). The Apple Watch was born, kicking off a wearables market. It featured a small screen, a touch-sensitive UI and a rotating crown, all encased in a remarkable aluminum body. The watch came with wireless charging, and featured a built-in heart-rate sensor… a feature that would soon define the Watch’s use-case. As a consumer-friendly medical wearable.
Among other noteworthy design achievements, Apple acquired Beats by Dre., a company that considered Robert Brunner’s Ammunition as their design partners (Brunner was an ex-Apple design lead). Alongside that, Ive’s team even designed the iPhone 6, a smartphone with an incredibly slick design that received mixed reviews, while also being one of the most sold smartphones in the world. Ive’s obsession with slim devices finally led to what became the Bendgate. The iPhone 6 was so thin, it would bend if kept in your back pocket. Apple eventually fixed the problem in the iPhone 6S with a stronger chassis and a harder aluminum alloy. The 6S also gave birth to the era of Rose Gold, a color that Apple debuted in 2015 which became a standard in almost all subsequent iPhones and even in the new MacBook Air.
Later in 2016, Apple announced the iPhone 7, which infamously ditched the headphone jack. The absence of a 3.5mm jack on the phone meant the release of the Airpods, Apple’s incredibly small truly wireless intelligent earbuds. Perhaps not the most consumer-friendly decision, the Airpods were a runaway business success. The Airpods were convenient, incredibly well-paired with the iPhone, and came with touch-sensitive surfaces that let you control playback as well as the iPhone’s core features without taking your phone out. The Airpods were sleek, well-built, and came with their own charging case that you could carry around with you. 2016 was also the year Apple killed ports on the MacBook, leaving just a USB Type-C port and a headphone jack (a strange decision there) on the side. The 2016 MacBook also ended the tradition of having glowing Apple logos on MacBooks.
2017 saw the release of the HomePod, Apple’s foray into the smart-speaker market. Ive pretty much revived the cylindrical design (of the Mac Pro) to create a powerful speaker capable of throwing out high-fidelity sound in all directions with equal intensity. The smart-speaker featured a touch-sensitive upper surface, and could respond to “Hey Siri”. Available in white and black, the HomePod came perhaps too late, with Amazon beating Apple to the smart-speaker market by three whole years.
Towards the end of 2017, Apple announced the AirPower, a tray capable of charging all of Apple’s wireless devices… simultaneously. The announcement was perhaps a little premature, considering two large things. A. The Airpods didn’t charge wirelessly, and B. The technology wasn’t perfected yet. Ive’s design showed how easy it was to lay your products on the AirPower mat and have them charge, but Apple’s engineering team couldn’t get it to work without heating up tremendously. The AirPower was finally shelved in 2019.
2017 also marked a full decade since the launch of Apple’s greatest product ever, the iPhone. Alongside the iPhone 8 (which was due at the time), Ive designed the anniversary iPhone, titled the iPhone X. With a stellar dual-lens camera capable of clicking portrait images with computational blurring, the iPhone X actually sold more than the 8, even with its $999 price tag… and its notch! The notch became a standard detail for almost all other smartphones to follow, as Ive’s vision for a truly bezel-less smartphone became more and more possible. It also meant saying goodbye to the good old TouchID and hello to Apple’s new FaceID, its revolutionary facial recognition system. The new iPhone was also a departure of sorts from Ive’s love for aluminium, since the metal wouldn’t support wireless charging.
The 2018 iPad Pro was the tablet every creative professional needed. With an incredibly powerful processor (as powerful as the Xbox One), a great camera, a redesigned stylus (that charged wirelessly), and virtually no bezels, the iPad Pro became a standard for the creative industry. It also came with a Type-C port, showing users exactly how versatile the tablet was designed to be, as it could be connected to pretty much any other device, and not be inhibited by Apple’s lightning charger.
As Apple’s hardware sales slowed down (nobody wanted to buy a new iPhone every year), the company finally made a pivot to services. The Apple Card was one of them. Machined out of titanium, the card was an exercise in sheer minimalism, thanks to Ive and the design team. it came with a machined Apple logo, and an etched name on the card… that’s it!
Ive’s last product at Apple, the Mac Pro sent quite a few mixed messages. At the time of his death, Jobs made it clear that Ive’s work was not to be interfered with, and he was answerable to no one. The Mac Pro 2019 was proof of Ive’s free reign. It came with a dual-machined airway system that gave the Mac Pro an appearance of a glorified cheese-grater, with an incredibly hefty price-tag. Apple’s trillion-dollar valuation, and Ive’s ability to design without any constraints resulted in one of the most talked about designs of the year so far… that’s until Ive finally put in his resignation along with Marc Newson to form LoveFrom, an independent design outfit that considered Apple as one of its top clients. Let’s see what the 2019 Apple October event has in store for us!
You could smell the hysteria as the news was announced. Where will Apple, a company famous for its commitment to design, and its famous designer, go from here? Sir Jonathan Ive's departure, however, may be less of a catastrophe than some think. What...
You’ve got to admit, whether you like or dislike the Mac Pro 2019, there’s no ignoring it. Especially if you’re from the design community. As a designer (turned writer) myself, here’s a couple of things I’ve learnt the hard way. There’s a general air of designers “knowing what they’re doing”. I’m just as complicit, when I defend my design to a client, or to a marketing team. Sometimes criticism, even if its constructive, can often deliver a slight blow to our ego, which comes from the philosophy that designers make the world a better place. Another very strong behavior that I’ve tried hard to unlearn is the fact that designers tend to look at everything through the lens of a designer… which means everything is a potential redesign project. With my negative feedback of the Mac Pro’s “disgusting” grille, I, for a second, became that person. I still think that Jony could do better (or different), but hey, he operates in a world of unlimited potential, zero constraints, and zero answerability (a part of me is jealous too, yes). My appreciation (or the lack of appreciation) has zero bearing on Ive’s strangely secretive design process. That being said, feedback for the Mac Pro has been extremely divisive, and Hasan Kaymak’s put together a design that he believes captures everything good about the Mac Pro’s 2006 and 2013 editions.
Hasan’s Mac Pro 2020 doesn’t deviate from the silhouette of the 2019 Mac Pro. In fact it embraces it, and comes in the 2013 Mac Pro’s black color, giving us the best of both worlds. The most noticeable change is the absence of the dual-side CNC machined grille detail, which Hasan replaced with a much more traditional slot and mesh. While the revised design detail isn’t particularly eye-catching, it plays it safe… and considering the grille never really faces the user, a relatively normal design detail seems like a fairly logical way to go. Besides, playing it safe would also bring down the relative cost of the Mac Pro by a couple of hundred bucks (given that you don’t have to have a complex CNC machining task), making it slightly less of a pocket pincher. On the opposite side of the grille, Hasan’s added 8 USB-C ports, for connecting all sorts of devices, from hubs, to the iPad Pro, to any other compatible devices you may have. Two audio jacks also sit right above the ports for good measure.
Another design detail change is the vault-lock mechanism on the top of the Mac Pro, which seems absent in Hasan’s concept. Rather than corrupting a clean surface with a fairly large clamp and handle, Hasan goes for something much more discreet, allowing you to simply remove the upper body by pressing down on the stainless steel rods on the top.
The redesign touches upon a common public sentiment, that the Mac Pro doesn’t need to be outright revolutionary. Unlike the iMac or any of the laptops, Mac Pros usually either sit behind monitors, or under tables, or even in render farms. As a device, the Mac Pro has always aimed to look beautiful, but its intent has always been to be functional first… especially given that people are shelling out large sums of money not for looks, but for raw computing power. It doesn’t need to be made using a complex, thick, two-way machined aluminum grille. But hey, who am I to express distaste? I’m just a guy who uses WordPress on a Windows laptop.
Imagine getting to be an industrial designer at Apple! The company has been such an indomitable force over the past decades that it has arguably created, shattered, and evolved industries, technologies, categories, trends, and even boundaries! The one company that everyone looks to for design inspiration, Apple is clearly at the epicenter of consumer design and tech. With an incredibly revolutionary and secretive design team led by Sir Jonathan Ive and Marc Newson, Apple has been able to go from strength to strength, becoming the world’s first company to be valued at a trillion dollars, and also create some incredibly memorable products along the way. Now, you could be a part of that highly coveted and respected team of designers too. Apple is looking for industrial designers to join its team in Cupertino, California.
THE OPPORTUNITY
The Apple Industrial Design Group continues its ongoing call for portfolios. We invite curious, passionate, and collaborative industrial designers to apply. We are especially interested in applications from highly motivated, determined problem-solvers with rigorous attention to detail. We are always seeking design talent and will accept work from all levels.
REQUIREMENTS
Candidates must have: • A body of work that has been produced or the understanding of how it can be produced. For students, works in progress are accepted. • Passion for materials and material exploration. • A healthy obsession with how things are made and how they work. • Experience in hands-on prototyping, without relying solely on virtual design tools. • Deep appreciation for aesthetics. • Radical creativity. • Basic 3D software skills. • Excellent communication skills. English proficiency required. • Industrial Design Degree required.
HOW TO APPLY
To apply, please direct a CV and concise PDF portfolio to: idportfolios@apple.com When sending work, please focus on physical projects. Include prototyping process and sketches. Omit ethnographic research, user scenarios and marketing material. At any time, you may also submit your portfolio at apple.com/jobs
You know Jonathan Ive and Marc Newson right? Just the most prolific designers of their age, working as design heads in the most profitable company in the world, Apple. Ive and Newson have altered how we treat consumer electronics, making us revere them as objects of fashion, and their latest design project may be less electronics and more fashion, but it echoes a sensibility and sensitivity that has for long been a culture within Apple.
Apple has been an integral part of RED (a nonprofit organization that partners with the iconic brands to raise money to fight HIV / AIDS in Africa through the Global Fund), designing special products for RED that contribute to RED’s fight against HIV and AIDS. You may remember the special RED edition iPhones from the past, or the special-edition Leica M that Ive and Newson designed which sold for a cool $1.8 million at RED’s auction.
Ive and Newson’s contribution to RED this year is a diamond ring, made in collaboration with Diamond Foundry®. Designed by the duo, the ring is different from most diamond rings, in the sense that it is 100% diamond. The ring is made from the diamond gemstone itself and doesn’t feature any metal or other gemstones. “Consistent with their mutual obsession with transforming raw material into objects of value, Ive & Newson’s design is singular, clear and un-compromised by the traditional metal settings and bands that have previously been required to create ‘diamond rings’. Theirs will be created by removing material rather than adding – an ambition made possible by the extraordinary scale of the stone which will enable the ring to be completely made of this material.” said auction house Sotheby’s.
“Creating a ring-shaped diamond is no small feat; the diamond block will be faceted with several thousand facets, some of which are as small as several hundred micrometers. The interior ring will be cylindrically cut out for the desired smoothness using a micrometer thick water jet inside which a laser beam is cast. The finished ring will have between 2000-3000 facets which has never been seen before on a single piece.”
The ring, which will be crafted by Diamon Foundry will be sold at the RED auction in Miami on the 5th of December (with a price range of $150-250K) and will be made to the size specifications of the buyer. Pretty unique, no? The ring doesn’t have a gemstone. The ring IS the gemstone!
If you were entering the Keynote expecting that Apple, as a trillion dollar company, or as a company that just crossed a ‘decade since launching its biggest product’ would showcase something remarkably different and obviously innovative, you, like me, realized you were wrong.
While other companies, in a bid to outdo the beast, push for curved screens, folding phones, in-screen fingerprint sensors, or even bezel-less designs, Apple’s proved before that its vision of the smartphone aesthetic is probably at its current peak (reinforced as brands very brazenly copy the notch) and isn’t going to change any time soon unless the change somehow makes the iPhone perform better. (So no transparent or bending iPhones any time soon, or even front-facing cameras under the screen until the company can ensure that there’s not a single trade-off anywhere)
The iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR (yeah, there are three of them), instead focus on reinforcing last year’s popular design (the anniversary iPhone was the most popular phone in the world last and this year, and reported a staggering 98% customer satisfaction), and more importantly, focus on making the best iPhone better.
The new iPhone now comes in three variants, including a budget iPhone XR that was made to broaden the company’s reach, because as the most valuable company in the world, Apple isn’t particularly concerned with profits anymore rather than spreading its gospel. The two other iPhones are touted as the best iPhones in the world, with Apple’s signature splash of hyperbole. They feature better screens, better battery life, a much more advanced A12 Bionic processor that’s a staggering 7-nanometers with over 6.9 billion transistors distributed between a 4-core GPU, 6-core CPU, and a Neural Engine that can collectively process 5 trillion operations per second. There’s ARKit 2, better waterproofing, staggering 512gb of storage, and a harder, stronger construction (with more impact-resistant glass on the front and back and a stainless steel band around the sides).
There’s no reason for Apple to build a phone that looks dramatically new, but rather a strong reason to build a phone that outperforms its predecessor. The new iPhone has a better camera and the A12 chip allows for some incredible image processing, as well as an industry first with a camera that can click now and focus later. The iPhone, at the very peak of computational photography, literally allows you to increase and decrease the focal length in a picture AFTER you’ve clicked it, giving you MUCH more control over the kind of images you take… and oh. Apple finally built an iPhone that boasts of a dual-sim feature!
The new flagship iPhones come in two sizes, screens that are much bigger and immersive than the iPhone 8 and 8 plus relatively. The budget iPhone XR features a world-first LCD Retina display and a single camera system on the back that still manages to give the user immense control and incredible quality, while coming in a variety of colors like the age-old iPhone 5C… all iPhones feature the pretty-much-iconic-now notch that houses FaceID, Apple’s facial-recognition-based-security feature.
My heart does go out to Jonathan Ive, who seemingly has less and less to do with the industrial design and aesthetic of the iPhone, as his perceived role gets reduced to merely being the voice behind the hypnotic videos (some joke that his official title is actually Chief Keynote Narrator). Somewhere down the line, the industrial designer in me hopes to see more visual upgrades, or even the reintroduction of features like TouchID (into the screen or on the back), but there’s a larger role for technology-driven-design to play in the progression of an iPhone.
So maybe it’ll take a while before that promised transparent iPhone or the flexible iPhone, and there possibly will be another company to beat Apple to the finish line there, but Apple knows well how to lose battles but win the war. It does so by creating phones that may not look exceedingly different, but they’ll perform monumentally better than any smartphone out there!
If you were entering the Keynote expecting that Apple, as a trillion dollar company, or as a company that just crossed a ‘decade since launching its biggest product’ would showcase something remarkably different and obviously innovative, you, like me, realized you were wrong.
While other companies, in a bid to outdo the beast, push for curved screens, folding phones, in-screen fingerprint sensors, or even bezel-less designs, Apple’s proved before that its vision of the smartphone aesthetic is probably at its current peak (reinforced as brands very brazenly copy the notch) and isn’t going to change any time soon unless the change somehow makes the iPhone perform better. (So no transparent or bending iPhones any time soon, or even front-facing cameras under the screen until the company can ensure that there’s not a single trade-off anywhere)
The iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR (yeah, there are three of them), instead focus on reinforcing last year’s popular design (the anniversary iPhone was the most popular phone in the world last and this year, and reported a staggering 98% customer satisfaction), and more importantly, focus on making the best iPhone better.
The new iPhone now comes in three variants, including a budget iPhone XR that was made to broaden the company’s reach, because as the most valuable company in the world, Apple isn’t particularly concerned with profits anymore rather than spreading its gospel. The two other iPhones are touted as the best iPhones in the world, with Apple’s signature splash of hyperbole. They feature better screens, better battery life, a much more advanced A12 Bionic processor that’s a staggering 7-nanometers with over 6.9 billion transistors distributed between a 4-core GPU, 6-core CPU, and a Neural Engine that can collectively process 5 trillion operations per second. There’s ARKit 2, better waterproofing, staggering 512gb of storage, and a harder, stronger construction (with more impact-resistant glass on the front and back and a stainless steel band around the sides).
There’s no reason for Apple to build a phone that looks dramatically new, but rather a strong reason to build a phone that outperforms its predecessor. The new iPhone has a better camera and the A12 chip allows for some incredible image processing, as well as an industry first with a camera that can click now and focus later. The iPhone, at the very peak of computational photography, literally allows you to increase and decrease the focal length in a picture AFTER you’ve clicked it, giving you MUCH more control over the kind of images you take… and oh. Apple finally built an iPhone that boasts of a dual-sim feature!
The new flagship iPhones come in two sizes, screens that are much bigger and immersive than the iPhone 8 and 8 plus relatively. The budget iPhone XR features a world-first LCD Retina display and a single camera system on the back that still manages to give the user immense control and incredible quality, while coming in a variety of colors like the age-old iPhone 5C… all iPhones feature the pretty-much-iconic-now notch that houses FaceID, Apple’s facial-recognition-based-security feature.
My heart does go out to Jonathan Ive, who seemingly has less and less to do with the industrial design and aesthetic of the iPhone, as his perceived role gets reduced to merely being the voice behind the hypnotic videos (some joke that his official title is actually Chief Keynote Narrator). Somewhere down the line, the industrial designer in me hopes to see more visual upgrades, or even the reintroduction of features like TouchID (into the screen or on the back), but there’s a larger role for technology-driven-design to play in the progression of an iPhone.
So maybe it’ll take a while before that promised transparent iPhone or the flexible iPhone, and there possibly will be another company to beat Apple to the finish line there, but Apple knows well how to lose battles but win the war. It does so by creating phones that may not look exceedingly different, but they’ll perform monumentally better than any smartphone out there!
You could smell the hysteria as the news was announced. Where will Apple, a company famous for its commitment to design, and its famous designer, go from here? Sir Jonathan Ive's departure, however, may be less of a catastrophe than some think. What...
