Apple is perhaps the continuator of Diet Rams philosophie of design.
Jonathan Ive was totally a fan of the German designer Rams.
You can really feel it in the simplicity of Apple products.
I am a big fan also even if less gifted.
I am a big fan also even if less gifted.
He threw away the german functionalism that Dieter is so well known for, and adopted the hollow aesthetics of his work. Jony was obsessed with how a thing looks more than how a think works (besides the fact that Apple mouse is horrendous to use, it at one point had a charging port under the mouse). He ignored and still to this day ignores ergonomics, transparency, affordances, feedback and many aspects of design that are fundamental to designing a product that interfaces with humans. Instead of looking up to the challenge to make products more usable whilst keeping a consistent coherent aesthetics, he prefers to hide things or flat out omit important features so that the design is clean. He almost had an authoritarian role at Apple - engineering had to bow down to him.
About the only thing Jony Ive did with Dieter Rams was adopted minimalism for the sake of aesthetic goals. Dieter would never design a clock that had a transparent face, made legibility poor and had white numerals on clear glass (which does not guarantee contrast): https://watchesbysjx.com/2013/10/jaeger-lecoultre-newson-atm...
Jony Ive IMO is one of the worst designers in modern history despite of his success.
I've read that the motivation for this decision was to ensure that the customer would use the device wirelessly as intended. I guess it could be beneficial for the battery as well.
In any case, it proves your point further.
In both cases (Apple and Logitech), a “charge only” label would have been nice.
Apple's approach is, all too often, to avoid intrinsic complexity and optimize for a surface simplicity which actually shoves away all the hard problems by either forbidding them or relegating them to the CLI or 'power user' tools or makes it the devs' problem. This makes for products which look great sitting in the Apple Store, but then as you try to do anything complex or hard... You run straight into Tog's "third-user" critique: https://asktog.com/atc/the-third-user/ Apple's products are far more shiny than empowering or deep solutions. (Who would ever dare compare an iPad with a Smalltalk or Lisp Machine?)
So you get inordinate attention to making the perfect squircled corner, but meanwhile, you have to grip your iPhone right for the antenna to work, or your keyboard breaks at the dust from the drop of a hat, and as always, the web browser lags half a decade behind and can't play basic audio file formats like OGG Vorbis, and Mac OS X ships with breaking bugs; this isn't even reaching the standards of basic competence, much less truly fulfilling Rams's 10 principles and creating user-empowering interfaces and violins of the mind.
Johnny Ive's design philosophy i have always felt is very much "form over function" and has resulted in horrific abominations like skeuomorphism and mobile radios that don't have enough signal and touch bar.
Even with Johnny Ive partly out of the picture I to this day find it inefficient and difficult to meaningfully use my daughter's iPad.