Jony Ive's iOS 7 Influence Will Be More Than Skin Deep

scott forstall was great at this already. skeuomorphism brought out a lot of emotion from iphone users.

I'm getting more and more excited to see what is going to be announced at WWDC...Ive has a really good eye at design. Hopefully his visions can be interpreted correctly by the iOS engineers.

Some one at apple should pick up a samsung device. I bet they would be surprised not its not built out of aircraft quality aluminum nor does it have old tech resold as new. But the damn things let you do what you want with them. I am an apple fanboy at heart, with that being said if apple continues to lag behind the competition im going else where with my $. Hats of to Ive if he can change my mind.

*SIGH*

Let me back your quote up a few decades, and put it in that context... "Someone at Apple should pick up a Dell computer. I bet they would be surprised its not molded out of a single slab of aircraft quality aluminum. But the damn thing can be opened up and you can put whatever components you want to inside, and it runs Windows and lets you do what you want with it. I'm an apple fanboy at heart, but if Apple continues to lag behind the competition (Dell, Acer, Gateway, HP), I'm going elsewhere with my $. Hats off to Jobs if he can change my mind."

Know what? Jobs didn't give a crap then, and I seriously doubt that Ives does now.

You do realize, don't you, that for decades now PC owners have been saying the same thing about Macs? Too expensive. Too many high-end materials. Too proprietary. Too restrictive and not "open" enough. All of which means that they're "lagging behind the competition"... Look - this is what Apple does. It's what they are. Here's the thing you need to hammer into your skull: They aren't nearly as concerned with "lagging behind" as they are with realizing the products they envision. That's what makes them unique and special.

I doubt that you're really "an apple fanboy at heart". If you were, you'd know that this has always been Apple's MO with all of their products. They control hardware and software for an end-to-end user experience that THEY define according to their own set of values. They design with high quality materials, and spend lots of cash and time on the look and feel itself. They try to make their products optimally usable and productive, without allowing so much user-customization ("letting the damn thing do whatever you want it to") that it degrades performance and stability. The opposite model is what the PC camp (vs the Mac camp) has always stood for. Many disparate manufacturers instead of a proprietary system, cheaper materials and designs for lower cost systems, user customizable to appeal to a larger market, etc..., etc... This is what has always distinguished PCs from Macs. iPods from myriad other MP3 players. Now, iPhones from Android phones. Those other camps are more about prioritizing sales and broader markets over actual products.

Apple doesn't do that. They leave it to the other model - in this case the Android model. Apple is more about the product itself first, and they're willing and prepared to accept a smaller market share in order to guarantee the product they want to produce. Save for when they got off track under John Scully (without Jobs), it's always been that way, and hopefully it always will be. The minute they change, use cheaper materials and designs, stop being proprietary, and let users decide how things work, they become the next Dell and HP. They are trying to preserve the Steve Jobs mantra - "People don't know what they want until we show it to them."

That said, lots of people value having control over their fonts and interfaces over the build-quality, etc... They like the PC/Android model over the Mac/iPhone model. That's fine. They have many products to choose from. They just shouldn't expect Apple to change their foundational model to become like all the rest.

This entire post says a whole lot about nothing.



Unimpressive. Quit talking and get back to moving some product forward.

You would fit in well at Microsoft or RIM/Blackberry. No so much at Apple.

It's that space that you and other people such as Steve Ballmer refer to as "nothing" that seems to be running circles around the competition. It's that nothingness that has been referred to as the magic in the devices that gets people in lines waiting to get their hands on a new iDevice.

I believe you though. There is nothing here for you.

This entire post says a whole lot about nothing.

But there are a lot of product attributes that don't have those sorts of measures. Product attributes that are more emotive and less tangible. But they're really important. There's a lot of stuff that's really important that you can't distill down to a number. And I think one of the things with design is that when you look at an object you make many many decisions about it, not consciously, and I think one of the jobs of a designer is that you're very sensitive to trying to understand what goes on between seeing something and filling out your perception of it. You know we all can look at the same object, but we will all perceive it in a very unique way. It means something different to each of us. Part of the job of a designer is to try to understand what happens between physically seeing something and interpreting it.

Unimpressive. Quit talking and get back to moving some product forward.

I wonder how many autocorrect "I've"s had to be retyped as "Ive" in these comments ...

I trust Ive and I'm really excited about anything he does. The first thing you can definitely say about almost all Apple products is that they look, feel and work in a very pleasant way. There's of course what he says about what's beyond numbers and what you can describe with words. The iPhone is a flat rectangle with rounded corners, and so is the Samsung Galaxy S4. But for some reason - which one cannot describe in an ad and can't really explain in a simple way - the Samsung just seems like a boring machine while the iPhone has "something about it" that's just positive. It's not one thing, it's the way all the things work together and create that effect. It's THAT effect that most companies simply don't get (and Samsung never got). Some companies/people have it, some don't.

This seems like just speculation from someone who doesn't know any more about iOS7 than you or I do. The title of this article is very misleading.

The features of iOS7 were probably largely in stone by the time the transition from Scott Forstall was made, so there is a limit as to how much influence Jonny will be able to have on iOS7. I suspect that Jonny will have a bigger influence on iOS8.

scott forstall was great at this already. skeuomorphism brought out a lot of emotion from iphone users.

By "a lot of emotion" did you mean "I cry everytime I look at the awful iPad contacts app"?

scott forstall was great at this already. skeuomorphism brought out a lot of emotion from iphone users.

The problem with the skeuomorphism is that it works great when you've used the traditional non-electronic forms that are being emulated. You have entire generations though that have never used these analog counterparts, and to them these UIs make no sense. Reel to reel in the Podcast app being a great example. Those haven't been used for 30 years so a HUGE portion of the user base isn't making that connection. It was a cute thing back in the 80s and 90s to make an analog connection to the digital world, but the need for that passed a long time ago. It's time to just make a killer UI and I'm glad to see Apple moving in that direction.