Sir Jony Ive is now Dr. Jony Ive, thanks to one of the most prestigious universities in the U.K., which gave Apple’s design guru an honorary doctorate in science.
My biggest gripe with my Apple Watch is not the sluggish hardware, the lack of GPS nor the dependance on my iPhone. These are all problems to be sure. But it is the bad user interface design that often drives me so mad that my force-taps turn into force-thumps of frustration.
With an update to the Apple Watch operating system expected at the Worldwide Developers Conference next month, here’s my top 10 list of interface improvements I’d like to see in the upcoming watchOS 3. These essential changes would spare my wrist from future incidents of wrist rage.
The boring beige computers Apple offered all the way up until the late ’90s would never get Jony Ive’s stamp of approval today. But fortunately for those who love retro, Apple’s latest iMac is now available with a beige paint job (and a bigger price tag).
Jony Ive suggests that Apple is bound to make some missteps as it continues to explore wearable devices, and offers some vague, tantalizing hints about Apple’s plans for the Apple Watch in a new interview.
“Regardless of whether we declare an interest in fashion or not, we are making products that are more and more personal, products that you wear and you wear every day,” he told Business of Fashion ahead of the Apple-sponsored Met Gala. “We’ve not done that before and we’ve got a lot to learn.”
HP’s newest laptop, the 10.4-mm-thin Spectre 13.3, is the company’s attempt at building a MacBook beater — complete with slimmer profile, larger screen and more horsepower.
Over the past 40 years, Apple has been many things to many people. Innovative or imitative, premium or overpriced, saintly or evil — everybody’s got their own take on what Cupertino and its revolutionary products mean.
While Apple was founded on April Fools’ Day in 1976, the company and the profound impact that its shiny devices have made on our lives is truly not a joke. Here’s what Cult of Mac staffers said when asked to describe what the company means to them in a single word.
Whether it’s adding tree-lined avenues or high-tech display tables for showing off the Apple Watch or iPhone, the design of the Apple Store is constantly changing.
The latest innovation is a giant floor-to-ceiling television display, which can be seen at Apple’s new Saddle Creek Store in Germantown, Tennessee.
And you thought the 12.9-inch iPad Pro had a big screen!
The iPhone may finally ditch its metal casing in 2017 in favor of a new curved glass body similar to the one on Samsung’s Galaxy S7 edge.
Apple’s next big redesign of the iPhone is slated for next year, reports KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who claims in his latest note to investors that Apple will pair the new case design with a 5.8-inch AMOLED display.
A joke in Zoolander 2 pokes fun at the ’90s craze for tiny cellphones, something which today seems as retro as flannel shirts and Pulp Fiction posters in your dorm room.
With the upcoming iPhone 7, Apple is apparently showing us the next iteration of that ideal by bringing us a smartphone so thin — just 6.1 mm thick — that even Victoria’s Secret models would advise it to eat a sandwich.
But are super-slim iPhones what users really want, or have Jony Ive and Apple’s design team taken things too far?
These days, Apple is known for its impeccable design sensibilities. Less than 20 years ago, though, that wasn’t the case. Case in point? These awesomely retro, fluorescently hideous in-store demos made to help sell the Macintosh in 1997.
This feature is adapted from my book, Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products. It offers a rare look inside one of Apple’s most secretive institutions: the Industrial Design studio.
Where do Apple’s great products come from?
For the last 18 years — since Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1997 — most of them have come out of Apple’s Industrial Design studio, a small and secretive group of creatives headed up by celebrated British designer Sir Jony Ive.
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Apple today published an intriguing patent application with a unique method for waterproofing future devices — by covering ports, like those for USB or headphones, with self-healing seals.
Described as an, “electronic device with hidden connector,” the invention describes how self-healing elastomeric material could seal each of the ports, which would then be opened by puncturing them with external connectors, such as power or audio feeds, in the event that they needed to be used.
The consensus view of Apple’s newly launched hunchback iPhone battery case is that it should ideally be hidden from human view, spending its life in isolation ringing bells in Notre Dame.
Immediately upon release, the Internet filled with loud, angry protesters saying this kind of thing would never have happened in Steve Jobs’ day (and accusing Jony Ive of snoozing on the job). While I’m definitely no fan of Apple’s $99 Smart Battery Case, this isn’t the first time the company has released a less-than-stellar piece of design work amidst its usually gorgeous offerings.
Check out the list below for five of the worst pieces of design to come out of Cupertino since … well, yesterday, actually.
Yes, Apple launched a new battery case for iPhone 6s today, and yes, it’s butt-ugly.
All battery cases are, but because this one has an Apple logo on it, the Internet is getting all bent out of shape over just how ugly it is. There’s one thing nobody is mentioning, though: You don’t have to buy one if you don’t like it — and no one really cares what you think.
What will the iPhone 7 look like? Even Apple doesn’t know. According to a new rumor out of China, Apple is currently experimenting with at least five distinct iPhone 7 models, each with a totally different combination of hardware, including a possible AMOLED screen, a USB Type-C connector instead of Lightning, and a fingerprint reader built into the display.
The enormous iPad Pro has an appropriately huge graphics processor.
A teardown analysis by electronics firm Chipworks has revealed details of the new A9X processor that powers the Apple’s plus-size tablet, including the 12-cluster GPU that’s twice as powerful as the A9 processor found in the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus.
Here’s a closer look at the chip:
Apple gets a lot of kudos for its design chops, but there’s one product everyone thinks Cupertino can improve: iTunes. The bloated Swiss army knife app for managing everything from your music library to the apps on your iPhone has been begging for a rethink for years. Yet for whatever reason, Apple has yet to deliver a true design overhaul of iTunes.
The situation has gotten so bad, iTunes is now being assigned to college students as a design problem. Students at German college Fachochschule Potsdam were assigned the task of splitting iTunes up into 16 different apps. And the results look pretty good!
The case has clearly been made that a stylus should never be a device’s main method of input. Fingers prevail for everyday uses, especially revolving around content consumption. But isn’t it possible that in some cases an iPad stylus might enhance the experience?
Jony Ive seemed embarrassed when Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter started their interview by calling Ive the “greatest industrial designer in the world right now.”
The Apple design guru closed his eyes, rubbed his head, and then provided a soft-spoken but enlightening 25-minute peek inside his head during 2014’s Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit. Wonder what he’ll say this year?
It’s an open secret that Apple is poised to take on the auto industry with its rumored electric car project, and according to Apple design guru Marc Newson, the automotive industry is stalled.
In a new interview, the Apple designer touches on a number of topics, ranging from his love of fountain pens to his current design pet peeve: boring cars.
Can’t Apple’s design guru catch a break? After Jony Ive received a well-deserved promotion to become Apple’s chief design officer, some pundits misinterpreted the happy news as a bad omen.
Our own Leander Kahney reads the tea leaves completely differently: Ive’s promotion is nothing but good news for Apple.
This is Richard Howarth, Apple’s newly appointed vice president of industrial design, and the man who has to fill Jony Ive’s (calf-leather) shoes.
Ive has been promoted to chief design officer to do more “blue sky thinking,” leaving Howarth to run the legendary Industrial Design studio that has been Apple’s ideas factory and product foundry for more than two decades.
Howarth is no stranger to the studio. He’s worked there for 20 years, heading up the design of the iPod, iPhone and a string of MacBooks, among many other products. He’s African-born, London-educated and has been Ive’s second-in-command for some time, earning a reputation among colleagues as a “badass.”
Apple’s influence on the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens extends far beyond Kylo Ren’s ugly crossguard lightsaber.
The Force Awakens costume designer Michael Kaplan has designed costumes on movies like Blade Runner and Fight Club, but when it came time to redesign the new stormtrooper armor for director J.J. Abrams, Kaplan said he looked to Apple as his biggest inspiration on how to perfect the stormtrooper’s white, plastic-y armor.
With its small screen and 0.46-inch thickness, the original iPhone from 2007 looks like an antique these days. Put it next to the Apple Watch, however, and it’s remarkable how similar the two devices look in terms of their design language.
At 0.45 inches, the Apple Watch is ever so slightly thinner, but its rounded edges, color and overall aesthetic certainly appear reminiscent of the first-generation Apple handset, don’t you think?
With its roly-poly looks and infectious personality, new droid BB-8 looks primed to be a real scene-stealer when Star Wars: The Force Awakens hits theaters at the end of the year.
And now we know what the ballsy little bot would look like if Jony Ive replaced its orange-and-white color scheme with something a little more subtle.
