Towards Minimalism (or ‘Design is How it Looks’ at Apple these days)

‘’Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like… People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.’’

If you’re at all an Apple aficionado, you don’t need me to tell you that it was Steve Jobs who famously said this, in a New York Times article in 2003.

Recently, I have found myself thinking about the last few years of Apple products. It was spurred by an article Josh Centers over at Tidbits about the Touch Bar, almost a year on.

The Touch Bar is a great example of minimalism for minimalism’s sake. I owned and used a 15-inch MacBook Pro with one for about 8 months. I have recently sold the machine, as it was too much of a compromise for my daily needs.

• It was missing ports I needed on the road every day.
• It had a keyboard that wasn’t as good as the current desktop Apple magic keyboard (and annoyingly also just slightly different — in the past Apple’s notebooks and desktops had matching key travel and spacing but that’s a personal gripe!)
• New features (Touch Bar) that replaced old features without being better — i.e no physical escape key I used ‘blind’ hundreds of times a day.

In the past, when Apple launched a new product or feature to replace an old one, it was usually incredibly well re-thought out, and was such an improvement that after a few months users couldn’t imagine living without it. I would consider ‘Natural’ scrolling on the Mac or MagSafe replacing old power plugs as two great examples of Apple rethinking something fundamental and hitting it out of the park.

In contrast is the Touch Bar, which I do not miss at all. In fact I am glad to have a physical escape key again! I honestly can’t understand how the Touch Bar shipped on a Pro product first. When I first started using the machine, I found it handy for one thing only: finding emoji. But the picker wasn’t universal too all text entry boxes (meaning you had to look away from screen to see if it was there) and it was actually slower than searching in the iMessage popup!

Then I discovered Rocket, which is an app for Slack style typed emoji everywhere on macOS you have a cursor, and now I use that and it’s way faster than the Touch Bar ever was. I’m a Pro user. Keyboard shortcuts are my friend. Typing without having to move hands and eyes from the screen is always faster than tapping the Touch Bar.

It seems that we are losing features from the Mac, sometimes because of iOS continuity (i.e. Photos’ redesign to match an iPad user interface on my Mac Pro’s 30-inch Cinema Display) and other times because Apple it seems is obsessed with minimalism. Why else remove so many very useful ports on a MacBook Pro. You can have a laptop that thin with a few extra ports!

Don’t get me wrong. Minimalism has it’s place. Losing Firewire off MacBooks when acquiring the second Thunderbolt port was a fair trade-off.

I think Steve Jobs nailed it in the quote at the top of this article: ‘good design is how it works’. I love this quote. It is user experience (UX) focused. Apple has always been about user experience. That’s why we continued buying Macs in the 90s! That’s why we buy them now. Because the UX has always been better.

While the Mac UX is still unquestionably better than the opposition, it is starting to feel like Apple has perhaps lost a little of that user focus of late. It feels far more like with Jony Ive replacing Steve Jobs as Apple’s product ‘guru’, now at Apple ‘design is how it looks’.

The new Photos App looks nice on macOS, but hides functionality behind buttons and modes that isn’t required on a 27-inch desktop UI.

The iWork apps are the same. They now look nicer and match the UX on iPads. But we have lost the amazing functionality of the iWork ’09 era apps. Did you know you still can’t do a mail-merge from Pages in 2017, but you could in 2009? (Thankfully, the iWork ’09 binaries still run on 10.12 as long as you avoid the App Store ‘Update’ buttons!)

The Touch Bar looks nice. It’s just not functional for power users (i.e. as Josh Centers says, taking your eyes off the screen and your hands off the keyboard to do something a shortcut key or function key can do results in reduced real productivity).

Having only 4 identical ports on the new MacBook Pro looks nice. It’s just not as functional for power users as having USB-A, HDMI and MagSafe in addition to Thunderbolt 3 would be.

Apple’s recent history is littered with these kinds of examples. The ‘trash can’ Mac Pro looked nice but wasn’t functional until you added back all the things Apple removed to make it look nice.

[Which is the irony of the ‘trash can’ Mac Pro being ‘beautiful’. As an object on the Apple Store table, it’s beautiful. But once you actually set it up for pro use (i.e. once all the things most users need are connected such as a Thunderbolt drive arrays and PCIe card equivalent devices) you end up with a litany of messy cables and external devices with their own power supplies.]

So the question is… have we been gradually moving away from peak function (UX) driven design from Apple, where the Steve Jobs mantra of “design is how it works” was the overriding philosophy? Apple used to design and re-design things to be more productive while also looking good.

In 2017, it feels to me like we are now well into a “design is how it looks” era, led by Jony Ive. Where new products are designed to look good in a design studio (or on an AppleStore table), and compromises to functionality are far more accepted than they ever used to be.

Of course, I don’t think all hope is completely lost. AirPods have shown that Apple can still rethink a ‘solved’ problem and delight users with a new product that greatly improves user experience and productivity while being beautiful. More of this please Apple!

I’m not sure what has caused this change in direction, and I hate coming to the following conclusion, as it sounds so clichéd. But my best guess is that Apple needs a new ‘product guru’ to replace the role always attributed to Steve Jobs. Someone to keep Jony & the team a little more focused on the user’s actual experience and pull back from the obsessive pursuit of minimalism in every product. Not every product needs to be a ‘thin and light’. Some people use a dongle every single time they use their MacBook Pro. How is that progress?

I really hope this era of compromising functionality for design ends soon. I wonder, in 10 years will we look back at this era of Macs as like those of the 90s or rather as more like the Macs from 2005–2015. Macs were awesome in that era. I see the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro as the ultimate Pro-user Apple laptop design to date. A balance of thin & light with the features users actually need to be productive included.

With the turnaround over the new Mac Pro, Apple has shown that it is willing to listen to its Pro customers the way it used to. I hope that the new Mac Pro is a true Pro machine, and that they also release a new additional MacBook Pro model range in the future with the functionality some of us need!

And I really really hope that Jony Ive doesn’t get his hands on the new Mac Pro and try to make it too ‘beautiful’. Design is how it works, after all!