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Comment by skeeter2020 | Hacker News Reader

skeeter2020

The guys at Pontiac who had this power with the Aztek probably thought they had taste; who defines this?

Jobs never cared about the type of non-functional quality that we typically do in the software world; there are plenty of cases where he picked design aesthetics over performance, reliability, and everything else.

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In full fairness, the Aztek was actually a great car with really decisive styling that wasnt a hit. The same designer actually penned the Corvette C7 and Camaro as well, obvious hits. Taste is defined by society and by those who push to create a wave with their splashes in the pond. It's really a 'You know it when you see it" kind of thing. I think that many in the software world also get lost on how to make good things by getting lost in the tools and insider baseball. For every one of his "silly" omitted functional design elements...there were actually brilliant chopped concepts that made way for the future. The iMac's lack of a floppy drive and Apple I/O, the iPhone's lack of a keyboard, the Macbook Air's lack of a Disk drive. All of these are the type of thing a more feature and function-focused product would not remove but in removing them the product was freed to be a better product. Not that all of his choices were good, but generally he really hit the nail on the head. Functionally the MacBook Air in 2008 with the optional SSD is the template for the modern thin laptop today and differs very little internally from say, a Surface laptop 4.

Most modern CUVs have a similar side profile to the Aztek. One of the reasons they look less awkward is that bigger wheels are more popular. There's a few other awkward design quibbles with the Aztek, but for the most part similar cars sell like hot cakes now.

Are there really any such examples? Steve Jobs wanted excellent products and they didn't always work out. That was often because the tech wasn't quite there so either the functionality didn't quite work or the effort required to make it work resulted in a product which was just a bit too expensive. Reliability is really tricky to get right and most Apple products even now get rushed to market and then not iterated on in a big way, or at least nothing like the honing that goes into a Toyota product by contrast. There isn't really a balance of features that puts aesthetics in competition with other aspects.

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