One would presume they are making a clear distinction between people who design for design's sake, and those whose design is a result of interviews, research, and testing.
How do you know Apple has not interviewed a broad and representative sample of real users and found that their #1 desire in a laptop is thinner and lighter than what is currently available?
I would bet that is what real users have been asking for, for decades now. They aren't asking for swappable batteries or headphone jacks.
>How do you know Apple has not interviewed a broad and representative sample of real users and found that their #1 desire in a laptop is thinner and lighter than what is currently available?
>I would bet that is what real users have been asking for, for decades now. They aren't asking for swappable batteries or headphone jacks.
Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?
Their actions seem to indicate that they heard this desire loud and clear, and that this caused a single-minded focus that lost the plot on the overall functionality part of the role of design. And then they heard lound and clear from users that "thinner than what came before" was not the end-all-and-be-all. They also rolled back other victims of the "as thin and liught as possible" chase, such as SD cards and HDMI ports.
The claim here is that they could have anticipated that if they weren't driven overly by the aesthetic bragging-rights side of the design team vs the functional side. It's not hard to anticipate everyday reliability causing more blowback than relatively-rare battery-replacement capabilities. They probably had a very good idea of how many replacement batteries were sold, after all. (And for the record: headphone jacks are still there.)
>Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?
Not really. Jony Ive, chief designer at Apple for most of the iphone era, left in 2019. He and Jobs were the primary pushers behind the "thinner, lighter" drive. Once the chief pushers for "form > function" left, it predictably stagnated, and begun to fall in line with industry standards from other companies.
> Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?
Could it be that miniaturization has reached a local maximum of what current technology can support and we simply can't make devices that are thinner and lighter while preserving battery life and computing power?
Or maybe they got thin enough so other factors now outweigh thinness. Notice how laptop batteries used to last 2 hours and now they go 8h and more.
If you can make a device 1cm thinner and keep the same 2 hours of battery life, worth it. But if a 10mm device lasts 2 hours and a 12mm lasts 6 hours, obviously 12mm is the better choice.
Notice that phones continue to get thinner. Except around the camera because better photos outweigh smaller camera.
Taste is overrated. Taste is an excuse for gatekeeping and a tool for exclusivity. Your work won’t fly because it lacks taste, whatever that’s it, defined by whomever.
I appreciate this perspective. Currently reading "On Writing" and would argue that Stephen King's perspective would be pretty similar to what's laid out here: surround yourself with good influences and your work gets better, and dissect why something is good (or bad).
Another point which may apply is to purposefully engage with work you don't like, because if you can figure out why it sucks, it'll help you make work that doesn't suck!
Articles like these are trite bullshit. Loads of great talent across the greater world of art that goes unrecognized. Nobody would call it good taste because hardly anyone can recognize it as such.
Taste doesn’t matter when slop puts food on the table.
Write the article you’d rather write: how to make money. That’s the main slant here of wanting to have differentiation. “Taste” was a marketing tool by Jobs telling people what they wanted to hear. This is why it’s called people management. You calibrate output based on input. If someone is receptive to being complimented, you give them a compliment while taking their money.
Almost universally the worst designs come from designers.
Example: only someone who fetishized design would make a keyboard the didn't work just so it could be a mm thinner.
The best designs come from those who interview, research, and test with a broad and representative sample of real users.
> The best designs come from those who interview, research, and test with a broad and representative sample of real users.
So … designers?
One would presume they are making a clear distinction between people who design for design's sake, and those whose design is a result of interviews, research, and testing.
The difference is between designers who put their name on things vs. designers that serve users.
How do you know Apple has not interviewed a broad and representative sample of real users and found that their #1 desire in a laptop is thinner and lighter than what is currently available?
I would bet that is what real users have been asking for, for decades now. They aren't asking for swappable batteries or headphone jacks.
>How do you know Apple has not interviewed a broad and representative sample of real users and found that their #1 desire in a laptop is thinner and lighter than what is currently available?
>I would bet that is what real users have been asking for, for decades now. They aren't asking for swappable batteries or headphone jacks.
Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?
Their actions seem to indicate that they heard this desire loud and clear, and that this caused a single-minded focus that lost the plot on the overall functionality part of the role of design. And then they heard lound and clear from users that "thinner than what came before" was not the end-all-and-be-all. They also rolled back other victims of the "as thin and liught as possible" chase, such as SD cards and HDMI ports.
The claim here is that they could have anticipated that if they weren't driven overly by the aesthetic bragging-rights side of the design team vs the functional side. It's not hard to anticipate everyday reliability causing more blowback than relatively-rare battery-replacement capabilities. They probably had a very good idea of how many replacement batteries were sold, after all. (And for the record: headphone jacks are still there.)
>Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?
Not really. Jony Ive, chief designer at Apple for most of the iphone era, left in 2019. He and Jobs were the primary pushers behind the "thinner, lighter" drive. Once the chief pushers for "form > function" left, it predictably stagnated, and begun to fall in line with industry standards from other companies.
> Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?
Could it be that miniaturization has reached a local maximum of what current technology can support and we simply can't make devices that are thinner and lighter while preserving battery life and computing power?
Or maybe they got thin enough so other factors now outweigh thinness. Notice how laptop batteries used to last 2 hours and now they go 8h and more.
If you can make a device 1cm thinner and keep the same 2 hours of battery life, worth it. But if a 10mm device lasts 2 hours and a 12mm lasts 6 hours, obviously 12mm is the better choice.
Notice that phones continue to get thinner. Except around the camera because better photos outweigh smaller camera.
You’re using a straw man of a bad designer
yeah but the best designs also come from designers
Taste is overrated. Taste is an excuse for gatekeeping and a tool for exclusivity. Your work won’t fly because it lacks taste, whatever that’s it, defined by whomever.
I've always been a fan of Paul Graham's essay, "Taste for Makers". It's arguably more relevant today than when he wrote it in 2002.
https://paulgraham.com/taste.html
I appreciate this perspective. Currently reading "On Writing" and would argue that Stephen King's perspective would be pretty similar to what's laid out here: surround yourself with good influences and your work gets better, and dissect why something is good (or bad).
Another point which may apply is to purposefully engage with work you don't like, because if you can figure out why it sucks, it'll help you make work that doesn't suck!
all the enterprise was missing, all along, was taste
Articles like these are trite bullshit. Loads of great talent across the greater world of art that goes unrecognized. Nobody would call it good taste because hardly anyone can recognize it as such.
Taste doesn’t matter when slop puts food on the table.
Write the article you’d rather write: how to make money. That’s the main slant here of wanting to have differentiation. “Taste” was a marketing tool by Jobs telling people what they wanted to hear. This is why it’s called people management. You calibrate output based on input. If someone is receptive to being complimented, you give them a compliment while taking their money.
Don’t beat around the bush.
Would you agree that there's poor taste?
As much as there is good taste, with similar degrees of subjectivity.
Rough hewn "unfinished" fittings (tables, chairs, cabinets, etc) are the kinds of objects that bounce about the taste spectrum
people say taste is the differentiator but I hate that because taste is personal, whereas culture is communal
taste without curation for the community, with an eye to what is culturally edifying, is just consumerism