I find the Magic Mouse such a conflicting product. The touch sensor on it is amazing and really innovated in the mouse space, but ergonomically it's a mess.
The OG Magic Mouse that took AA batteries was a far superior product. Mine still works. They got it right, and then took a step backwards both in convenience and in repairability.
Really? I didn't notice much difference going from the battery one to the chargeable one outside of the obvious need to plug it in when not using it because it's unusable plugged in.
The main difference is that every supermarket and convenience store sells replacement batteries for the original, but when the battery in the Magic Mouse 2 is something you need an iFixit guide and a specialist retailer (and the knowledge of how to avoid chinesium fakes) to replace when it inevitably goes all puffy and fire-hazard-y.
How often did your Apple Mouse die during work? The battery is crazy good on this thing, it’s literally a single charge per month. For me it’s a non-issue
A mouse you can use all the time is simply useful. To be profoundly useful, it must give you longer breaks from time to time to step back and think holistically about your work and do so without the fussiness of a timer you will undoubtedly forget to reset. Think different.
Is that not by design? Apple doesn't want the user to plug in the mouse to charge, forget to unplug it, and use it like a wired mouse. They therefore force the user through its design to literally be unable to use it that way. In my view that's good design, as it follows the goals of the designer. If one contends that design should follow the goals of the user, well, there are always other mice one can use.
I think that's an apologist's view. A practical product should optimize on the user experience & functionality, Magic mouse looks good, but the ergonomic & usability are lacking
Contra some other responses, I do think that was the intended design. However, I think it was a bad design, because it forces the desired behavior, rather than encouraging it.
Stick the charge port on the side, so that it's awkward to use while plugged in, but not impossible. Now you've accomplished the same goal, without completely alienating everyone who has ever had the thing die while using it.
The negativity in these comments is shocking and smug. However you feel about Apple and specific design decisions, Jony Ive is inarguably an exceptionally talented, successful, and influential designer that pushed entire industries out of chintzy, eye-sore, fast-fashion territory. High quality materials and (largely) enjoyable user experiences. Every human values that. The reason companies prioritize that is because of Jony Ive and Steve Jobs, like it or not.
Fair enough but I think there’s still a lot of bad blood among professionals as he pushed Apple products (particularly the laptops) away from premium workhorses towards something like luxury consumer products. A lot of the decisions he made have (thankfully) since been undone in the latest generations.
I don't disagree that they transitioned the industry to higher quality materials but they fully embraced the fashion lifecycle. There's a new iThing released every year immediately making your fully functional prior year iThing obsolete.
They might be using higher quality materials and adhere to aesthetic functionalism or whatever but their products fully embrace the fast-fashion expiration date.
> immediately making your fully functional prior year iThing obsolete.
Obsolete, or just no longer the newest, most coveted thing? I am still using an iPhone 11 and my wife uses an iPhone 8 and neither of us would consider our devices obsolete. Just less shiny and desirable.
I fully expect this to be down-voted into oblivion but here goes...
Obsolete is perhaps not the best choice of words, especially considering the pedantry of some folks.
Like fashion, Apple relies heavily on peer pressure, status, and perception to compel people to upgrade their devices at regular intervals by continually making minor aesthetic changes to the device such that it's apparent to others at a glance the vintage of your kit.
Obviously not everyone cares or can afford to care and, like vegans and crossfitters, they'll let you know who they are.
Apple does similar things with products like iMessage where they purposely call out those people not using their platform. The make interacting with those people less pleasant and nerf functionality down to the lowest common denominator from 15 years (e.g. potato quality photos). So much so that if you're not using an Apple device you'll probably hear mention of blue vs green bubbles on a monthly basis if not more frequently.
Apple has cultivated an upgrade/adoption culture that is part FOMO and part the persistent feeling that someone somewhere is looking down their nose at you. This is very much how the fashion industry operates.
> Apple relies heavily on peer pressure, status, and perception to compel people to upgrade their devices at regular intervals by continually making minor aesthetic changes to the device such that it's apparent to others at a glance the vintage of your kit.
I would argue that what you are describing is actually the relentless March of technological advancement. Look at the quality of the cameras and processors 2-3 generations apart and tell me again with a straight face that Apple is riding on peer pressure to entice people to buy the new generation. It’s bullshit - they keep iterating on dozens and dozens of features and improving generation by generation. The average user doesn’t need to upgrade every year - nor do they! - but doing so every 3-5 years yields massive benefits in terms of technological advancement.
Many of Ive's initial designs of products were fantastic and great examples of Dieter Ram's principles of design.
Unfortunately I think he drank a bit too much of his own kool-aid and "innovated" on the original designs in ways that were user hostile and didn't serve to complement the function of the products.
"He is of the generation that believed that design should last and that it shouldn’t be replaced every year,” says Sudjic
I'm still using a 27" 2012 iMac that, to me, looks as good as anything new they've produced. Ten years for a desktop machine sounds like a "win" for for both design and longevity.
His later involvement in the Apple lineup really didn’t paint him in a positive light, if we remember the atrocities with the “trashcan” Mac Pro, the notorious butterfly keyboard, the questionable Touch Bar, etc. They were all highly unpopular changes that were all rolled back once he left the company.
It’s worth remembering that the trash can Mac Pro was an engineering bet on a new ecosystem, specifically external GPUs, which were made possible by the incredibly high speed of the Lightning port/cable.
That ecosystem of accessories did not develop as Apple hoped it would, which essentially stranded the Mac Pro design and made it look (in retrospect) like a stupid design. And Apple kept hoping the ecosystem would develop, so they waited too long to replace it.
Apple has done great with many similar bets (USB, FireWire, removing optical disk drives). This one just didn’t work out.
Wasn’t just external. Remember it shipped with two internal AMD GPUs. The real issue was AND GPUs were close to useless for any GP-GPU work at the time because of CUDAs dominance and Apples lack of commitment to OpenCL at the time.
Apple gets a lot right and a lot of small things horribly wrong. Apple’s mice are a good example but nothing is as bad as the all black Apple TV remote. I’ve never hated a small device with such a passion. One wrong touch and you’re in remote hell.
I don't mind the form factor of the newest remote; however, it is slim and small enough that it regularly gets lost in odd places. An audible FindMy integration would be very welcome.
On the other hand they have the best trackpads, period. I don't even use a mouse when working with an external monitor anymore, I use the external trackpad from Apple instead, and so does most of my coworkers.
I think this is very much a matter of personal preference. To me, the "Magic Mouse" is the best pointing device I have ever used on a computer, and was actually my original reason for switching to Macs. I do understand that many people see it different, of course.
I worked with an engineer who didn't like Macs. I don't prefer the "Magic Mouse" however I bought it when it first came out and showed it to him. Not long after that I saw him using the mouse and he used it for years. He absolutely loved it.
The Mighty Mouse is, imho, one of the best mice made. It feels great in the hand, supports three button operation, has vertical and horizontal scrolling, and side buttons. The wireless version has a nice weight and uses AA batteries (no charger needed).
Unfortunately, the scroll ball eventually gets gummed up and the housing is glued together making regular maintenance impossible.
> Apple hasn’t made a decent mouse for more than twenty years starting with the hockey puck.
I think that's largely fair (although I do think the magic mouse is pretty nice). But in their defense, they make such great trackpads that many people prefer to use those over a mouse.
Even though I don't use a Mac, the touch bar is extremely useful, you can click buttons through it, scroll videos, have per-app shortcuts, text suggestions and much more, it really felt like a magical experience.
I was disappointed when Apple removed the touch bar, they could've just added the function row without removing it.
You accidentally touched it ALL the time leading to random functions being called. I had to turn it off. A capacitive bar right on top of the physical buttons you use all the time was not a fantastic implementation. Apple reverting it is testament to that.
I found it the exact opposite - I very nearly never touched it. My problem with it was you need to look at it to interact with it, which meant you weren’t looking at the screen.
It felt like someone designed it and said “but that won’t be a problem, because you can have the bar show you what you need” without considering it’s impossible to see what’s under your finger.
If they’d somehow put it at the same angle as the screen, so you could interact with it and while focusing on the screen, it could’ve been amazing - for me at least.
I do not recall ever accidentally touching it in the two years I had one. However I did not like it replacing the Fn and Escape keys. Having a section of contextual keys and controls was nice but not to replace the top row.
Happy Touch Bar enjoyer here, however it did not receive much love from 3rd party software developers and only single hardware iteration by Apple. MacBook Pro 13" 2022 still has Touch Bar, so it is still living, but more like a zombie.
Iirc it bumped up the price of the MBP and was something I would definitely decline if it were an option. But it wasn't. So for me it was a ham handed excuse to get a few hundred more out of me.
Didn't hate it, but didn't care for it either. Happy it's gone.
I used a trashcan Mac Pro up until this year when I replaced it with an M1 Pro Macbook. It was a great machine. Fast, silent, just did it's job and looked cool while doing it. It was like I was living my childhood dream of having a Silicon Graphics workstation.
Lol, that’s a weird childhood dream, which I also had. Ever since I saw a flight simulator running on an SGI Indigo, and I started speccing out an “affordable” O2. That was some good 90s industrial design.
I just replaced my 2009 cheese grater Mac Pro with a new machine. That was a timeless design, both inside and out, which I can’t blame Ive alone for abandoning. Apple has long internalized that expandable-monolithic tension between the two Steves.
Yes and it was great. I hope you enjoy your extra ports so I can lug around my heavier more cumbersome devices with me, all day every day.
I think they've made a huge mistake in catering to the nerds rather than pushing the envelope for the average consumer. Never heard a civilian complain about the ports on their mac.
The removal of Target Display Mode from the iMac was a huge mistake, and has probably created a huge quantity of e-waste. But I bet it sold a lot of iMacs that otherwise would have been Mac Minis, so Apple don't care.
I’m not sure I personally like it as much as the aluminum displays that followed it, but it is such a head turner that’s almost like an art piece in addition to its function.
There is one design directions that I am really salty about which Ive (reluctantly) innovated: protruding phone cameras lenses.
I read somewhere that he was not happy about that but had to go with it. But since the iPhone 6, the bumps have grown bigger and bigger and are almost like status symbols now. The worst are protruding lenses on iPads which cannot lay flat on the table.
That and magic mouse charging port if course but luckily this did not catch on with other vendors.
Given the camera is one of the more important functions of a smartphone for me, I'll pretty much take anything within reason that improves camera performance. (I'm less convinced of bumps for iPads although presumably some percentage of users value the rear camera on an iPad as well. Certainly the latest Pro ones are played up by Apple for video.)
I kinda interpreted that as tacit admission that you were supposed to put a case on your phone. It does seem to fit pretty naturally with cases now, which have an open portion over the camera lens.
Except that even adding a case isn't sufficient any more. The camera bump on the iPhone 14 Pro is so tall that it still extends beyond the standard Apple cases.
Totally agree about the camera lenses. That's actually the first time I've read someone saying it here.
OTOH, I went into an Apple store recently and the industrial design has absolutely tanked since Ive left. I know nerds are happy about the extra ports etc., but the phones and macbooks are thicker and heavier and that is a step backwards for me. As for the iMac designs... yuck. I presume these are all designed without Ive, so stark is the contrast. The worst display I've seen in an Apple store, ever.
I only have a couple of sore devices (phone, appletv, Apple Watch) but I think things are better now without Ives… I saw a MacBook Pro 14” at the store for the first time 2 weeks ago. I now want one. I haven’t wanted an apple computer since the first retina. My wife instantly fell in love with the iMac and wants one. She said it’s so pretty.
Hate the “well everyone uses cases” argument to the lens creep. I’ve never used a phone case, never smashed a screen, also I don’t see the point in the fetishization of materials if it’s just gonna be covered in a case anyway, may as well be plastic from that logic.
I reluctantly bought an official Apple case to use with my iPhone 13 mini, due to the giant camera lenses. Guess what? The case itself isn't flat! The lenses are so large that the case itself has guard bumps around the camera opening. This is the world we live in now.
“Language is so powerful,” says Ive, who often begins a new project with conversation or writing, not sketches. “If [I say] I’m going to design a chair, think how dangerous that is. Because you’ve just said ‘chair,’ you’ve said no to a thousand ideas.”
The older I get the more I believe this to be the most difficult aspect of making decisions. Saying 'no' to thousands of potentialities seems scary because it's a memento mori of the finiteness of individual lives.
For anyone who didn't read the article yet, it tells basically nothing of Ive's "Life After Apple" - except that he's working at his LoveForm agency, something he announced right at the resignation.
What’s new to me is the fact that they hired a full-time writer early on. At my current gig I write acceptance criteria for a living so the following excerpt really spoke to me:
«One surprising thing about Ive’s approach is that conversation, rather than sketches, is how he often begins a project. Thinking—and then speaking about that thinking—is the raw material he works with. “Language is so powerful,” Ive says. “If [I say] I’m going to design a chair, think how dangerous that is. Because you’ve just said chair, you’ve just said no to a thousand ideas.»
The experience that I’m having is that there’s a fine line between a description being either too broad or overly narrow. The latter excludes lots of solutions that might be better than the obvious one at the time of writing. The former has everybody scratching their heads. :D
“Le Corbusier remains a controversial figure. Some of his urban planning ideas have been criticized for their indifference to pre-existing cultural sites, societal expression and equality, and his alleged ties with fascism, antisemitism, and eugenics, and the dictator Benito Mussolini have resulted in some continuing contention.”
With such a public record on Corbusier, my first thought is that you need to qualify your analogy. You write that you did not mean it as a compliment. What exactly makes Ive the Corbusier of industrial design?
To be clear, I don't know anything about Ive's political or philosophical beliefs, so that is not what I'm talking about. I'm making an analogy based on the fact that both were very influential in their respective fields, on the similarities they had in their styles, and their willingness to put style over function.
Also let me say this explicitly, this is not an invitation to debate the merits of Ive, Ive's work, or any associated topics like Apple hardware more generally. I mean, you can have the debate, I can't stop you, but I also won't be participating.
Looks down on the apples magic mouse which needs to be flipped to charge, practical indeed