Unlike any other consumer electronics company, Apple has been nailing product design for decades. Jony Ive and his incredibly talented team have produced countless iconic gadgets that rivals can only dream of, and it’s the biggest reason why the company is so successful today.
But there are suggestions that Apple’s design prowess is beginning to slip away. Under new leadership, Apple has rolled out a number of products — most recently the butt-ugly Smart Battery Case — that have led some fans to question various design decisions.
Are those fans right to be concerned? Is it downhill from here for Apple’s design team, or is this a whole lot of fuss over nothing?
Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac as we battle it out over those questions and more — and weigh in with your thoughts down in the comments section!
Luke Dormehl (Writer, Cult of Mac): Well, this week’s big news was Apple’s hideous Smart Battery Case: an iPhone accessory so hideous that Tim Cook had to do the tech CEO equivalent of the angry dad coming to school to tell mean kids to stop picking on his son.
Let me get this out the way at first: The fact that this case is the smartphone equivalent of Quasimodo doesn’t mean Apple’s design department is goofing off and the company is six months away from declaring bankruptcy.
But is this piece of frankly shoddy design symptomatic of a worrying trend at Apple? Unfortunately I’d have to say “yes.” And the Smart Battery Case is far from the only illustration we have of this.
Killian Bell (Writer, Cult of Android): Look, I know that case isn’t the prettiest thing Apple has made, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the angry tweets suggest. All battery cases are ugly — that can’t be avoided — but at least Apple’s solves some of the problems you get with the others, like the long and complicated application and removal process, and the interference with cellular signals.
I think it’s a little ludicrous to suggest Apple’s entire design philosophy is going down the pan because of this case. We’ve seen some exceptionally well designed products from Apple this year, including Apple Watch, the new MacBook, iPad Pro, and more. We shouldn’t let an ugly case take anything away from those things.
I will admit that the Smart Battery Case is a rare example of Apple siding with function over form, but I just don’t think that could have been avoided here.
Photo: Apple
Luke: You and I discussed this the day the battery case was released. Taken in isolation, neither of us thought it was quite as massive a deal as some people were making out. But it’s also not an isolated incident. The truth is that a number of small design flaws have been cropping up with Apple products as of late.
How about the Lightning port on the bottom of the Magic Mouse 2, for instance? Or the bulge of the iPad Pro’s keyboard so that the Smart Keyboard cover doesn’t sit flush? Or the way you have to charge the Apple Pencil by precariously plugging it into the giant-sized tablet in a way that hardly looks particularly intuitive — or safe? Or even the un-intuitive UI elements that former respected Apple employees have described as “giving design a bad name?”
People can accuse me of nitpicking, and use the defense that — in cases like the Apple Pencil or Mighty Mouse charging — it won’t take more than a few minutes to carry out, so you can live with the sketchy decision Apple made. Hell, even Cook used that argument about the Smart Battery Case by saying that you’re probably not going to it every day.
But Apple was always about sweating the small details. And now it’s not.
It’s easy to find humor in stories about Steve Jobs taking a crazy amount of time to choose the color for Apple’s original logo, and obsessively insisting that the inside — as well as the outside — of the NeXT Computer be painted black, but it was that kind of attention to detail that made Apple great.
I remember hearing a story about how Van Halen’s David Lee Roth insisted on having it in his contract that backstage at every show there would be a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed. This was the first thing he’d check when he got to a new venue, and he’d go crazy if there was even a single brown M&M in the bowl. At first the story sounds like typical head-in-the-clouds pampered rock star stuff, but the reality is that he was doing it to make sure people read the contracts properly. He wanted to assess whether the stagehands were paying attention, and getting all the technical details right.
It’s not all that different here. Do I care about Apple releasing one ugly iPhone case in a category that’s not exactly known for its aesthetic appeal? No. Do I think this is part of a worrying trend that suggests a lack of Apple’s typically high quality control? Sadly I do. As a long-time unabashed Apple fan, it’s more than a little concerning.
Killian: I’ll admit the Lightning port on the bottom of the Magic Mouse is kind of a silly idea, but it’s not the end of the world. Just charge the damn thing when you’re not using it, and you won’t have to top it up when you are.
And as for the Apple Pencil, how else would you charge it with iPad Pro? Where else could you put the Lightning port to solve the apparent charging problem? If you don’t like charging the Pencil in the iPad itself, just get the adapter and use a regular Lightning cable.
I’m glad you pointed out those ugly user interface elements, because this proves Apple has always had its little design hiccups here and there; not everything it makes is completely perfect. And many of those hiccups happened while Steve Jobs and his incredible attention to detail were still running Apple.
In your recent feature titled “5 Apple accessories as crappy as the iPhone battery case,” you listed the “hockey puck” mouse from the original iMac and the iPod Hi-Fi — both of which were launched while Jobs was Apple CEO.
There are lots of other examples of bad design that we forget, like the headphone jack in the original iPhone that only accepted certain cables, the buttonless iPod shuffle that required headphones with an inline remote, the awful expansion dock for the 20th Anniversary Mac, and of course, the iPhone 4 antennas that didn’t work if you held them too tight.
If Apple has a quality control problem now, then it has always been there and you’re only just noticing it. Apple’s a much bigger company now so these things get a lot more press, but the company has long been introducing products with little flaws that make you think, “who the hell approved this?”
Photo: Apple
Luke: The Hockey Puck mouse was a definite notorious failure, but I don’t think it was entirely the same as what we’re describing here. The iMac came out under a very specific set of conditions, and one of them was Apple redefining how a computer looked and felt. It was drastically new and, while a lot of its innovations worked, that particular piece didn’t. But it didn’t feel lazy — more like a company getting to grips with the right balance of design and functionality, while trying to make a big splash.
There’s definitely something to be said about the number of products Apple is putting out right now, in its efforts to grab a bigger and bigger slice of the pie. A lot of that is market driven, and difficult to avoid given the pressures on Apple to continuously grow, but you know what: I’m an Apple customer, not a shareholder. And as a customer, it feels like certain things are being overlooked right now.
But maybe I’m totally off-base here. Let’s turn it over to readers. Is Apple’s design prowess going downhill in some areas, or are we reading way too much into a few non-essential elements of the company’s recent devices and accessories? Whatever your thoughts, leave them below in the comments section to continue the debate. And have a good weekend.
Friday Night Fights is a series of weekly death matches between two no-mercy brawlers who will fight to the death — or at least agree to disagree — about which is better: Apple or Google, iOS or Android?
