On Thursday, Apple confirmed that Jony Ive is leaving after nearly 30 years at the company. He's starting his own creative business called LoveFrom, with Apple being his first client. The news reverberated through the tech and business world like a s...
On Thursday, Apple confirmed that Jony Ive is leaving after nearly 30 years at the company. He's starting his own creative business called LoveFrom, with Apple being his first client. The news reverberated through the tech and business world like a s...
In an interview with the Financial Times, Jony Ive announced that after more than two decades of making Apple products look and feel the way they do, he's leaving the company. His new venture is called LoveFrom, and it will have Apple as its first cl...
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.
The first time I stumbled upon an image of the new Mac Pro, I honestly thought it was a photoshopped meme. Touted as Apple’s most professional high-performance offering, the Mac Pro isn’t new to ridicule. Its previous avatar was compared to a trash-can, thanks to its cylindrical shape. This time, the design team went back to a CPU-esque cuboidal form factor, like in the beloved 1st generation of the Mac Pro… but I’ll be honest. Something is definitely amiss.
Here are a few thoughts as a product designer who’s followed Apple’s journey as a fan as well as an industrial designer myself. Apple’s ‘behind-locked-doors’ design team is finally truly feeling the effects of this isolation. Touted as one of the most secretive companies when it comes to product launches, Apple tries hard to escape leaks from manufacturing plants, and from whistleblowers… but most importantly, it has a blatant disregard for public feedback. That disregard saw itself manifesting multiple times… in the release of the dustbin Mac Pro, the removal of the headphone jack from the iPhone, and more recently, in the introduction of the notch (the iPhone was the first to do so, remember?).
The new Mac Pro looks like it functionally fulfills every single one of its needs… and it does. It’s infinitely customizeable, has what Apple calls the world’s most powerful graphics card, and a new fan layout system that is capable of cooling all components swiftly and quietly. The components themselves sit within a steel framework that’s reminiscent of the old 1st generation Mac Pro from 2006, but there’s something about the design that leaves us wanting more. It feels too industrial, with its pipe-based structure, and it comes with an aluminum clad that features what I’d consider one of the most awkward looking grilles that look less “computing behemoth” and more “$5,999 cheese grater”. The grille is virtually purely utilitarian, with its layered circular makeup that’s complex to manufacture, but seems less worth the trouble, from a visual stand-point. Move over to the vault-esque locking mechanism on the top and one must wonder even more, whether the design team at Apple truly can design/create beautiful products in this void of theirs where nothing goes in or comes out.
“Our preoccupation with utility and function defines the design of the Mac Pro”, says Ive. He couldn’t be more right. The Mac Pro has gone from being a powerful, beautiful beast, to an evolved goliath of computing power… but in the process, has lost the beauty we once saw, perhaps a decade ago.
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!
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!
On Thursday, Apple confirmed that Jony Ive is leaving after nearly 30 years at the company. He's starting his own creative business called LoveFrom, with Apple being his first client. The news reverberated through the tech and business world like a s...
In an interview with the Financial Times, Jony Ive announced that after more than two decades of making Apple products look and feel the way they do, he's leaving the company. His new venture is called LoveFrom, and it will have Apple as its first cl...
