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Comment by anbop | Hacker News Reader

The new headquarters syndrome strikes again. Ive, sidelined, went eyeballs deep into the new headquarters, alongside a decline in physical product quality like the trashcan design miss and keyboard gremlins. Hardware and software teams kept executing but there’s clearly a need for a change in design.

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Apples design has been a big yawner for a few years now. Apple watch and MBPr impressed me. Since then? Seems like the design had actively getting worse since 2015 I.E. MBP with touchbar.

The Mac Pro and Apples new display don't look terrible to me but the cheese grater aesthetics aren't amazing either and it's a bit of a rehash of the Powermac G5. There was also that charger they cancelled.

Maybe apple should consider going back to their playful aesthetic? Aluminum and glass is just so... Yawn

I have been looking at some of the past plastic devices and actually really love the design and feel. Wonder if they should try that again.

I still have my G5 iMac in a corner and its design is just wonderful. The acrylic housing with a white interior holds up just great. It also was possible to open it with a screwdriver or even a penny.

I liked this. It looked like a toy but it had pretty serious internals. Kind of the opposite of how things are now ...

Unpopular view - Jobs kept Ive focussed. Jobs, for all his many faults, had very, very good taste, and also had a user's-eye view of design.

Ives seems to have a designer's eye view on design. Without Jobs to keep him on track he started designing for posterity and for design magazine pictorials - not for customers.

The classic designs - blue iMac, iPod, iPhone, laptops, possibly the initial MacPro sketches - all happened under Jobs when Apple was trying to expand its share of the mass market.

The failures - gradient tint flat UI in iOS 7, butterfly keyboard, disappearing ports, end of MagSafe, HQ glass wall injuries, etc - are all failures of form over function and happened after Jobs died.

There's some overlap - Anglepoise iMac, some of the special editions, puck mouse, that plastic clamshell laptop - but the hit rate under Jobs was far higher.

I agree with this. I think even under Jobs there were plenty of silly things but one of the things he was great at was attracting talent and keeping them busy. So squirt out the odd dud here and there but they're ready and available for coordinated moonshots.

Lmao disappearing ports didn't start after Jobs died. Jobs had a vandetta against ports.

Bullshit. Jobs had no vendetta against ports. Macs and macbook pro back in those days had all the ports.

The man launched the Macbook Air with ONE port. He had to be convinced that it needed 2 ports.

That was the air. It was a concept design.

Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines and sticking to the rules when posting here? This one breaks them pretty badly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I’ve amended, and I am confident that my tone is appropriate to that which I am replying.

The bar is 'appropriate for the forum', though.

Apart from the case eventually degrading, I consider my black plastic MacBook the most beautiful piece of Apple kit I've owned.

I still consider the iPhone 4S to be "the best iPhone". To me it's a design classic. A triumph of balanced form and function. I loved the weight of it, the hardness of it. The cool feel of it in my hand. Nearly indestructible too, unless it fell face first on a tile floor ... if I could still use it as my phone I would.

EDIT in fact 4S + ios 5 was peak iPhone for me. I think, actually that may have been around the time of Steve's passing … RIP "insanely great".

I replaced two screens, a battery, and two home buttons in 4s’s. So everything you said about how they felt and looked, plus they were pretty easy to repair.

Never found myself getting excited about iPhone hardware, I guess partly because with the giant screens you don't really notice it. I've got an 8 Plus now and find it very difficult to go back to the titchy old devices.

I never liked the look of the 4S, the 5 was peak design in my book and I am going to keep using my SE as long as possible.

I consider the current iPad Pro lineup to be a step in the right direction. Those sharp, flat edges remind of the iconic iPhone 4 / 5 / SE design language. The recent roundness of iPhones in contrast feels rather conventional and boring.

Yeah the iPad Pro is the one product stack I like in Apples stack.

Yeh some of the plastic products were really nice, I really liked my ~2003-ish G3 iBook

It’s Steve Jobs’ mausoleum. Probably an important landmark for the next century, even if it’s a distraction now. I’m sure most mausoleums seem pointless when they are built but a good mausoleum can be an important player in future history.

Wow, that's an interesting way to put it.

I’ve seen a lot of people seeing it the other way around, that the Pencil was the last product he was involved with because he chose to focus almost entirely on the headquarters.

There have been misses (as well as obvious hits) all through his career. No one recalls the completely round puck mouse? It’s wishful to think of it as a recent decline. I hope there’s a return to being really functional. Thicker, longer lasting, quality over shiny OR bright plastic

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