Lest We Forget, Apple’s Jony Ive Has Changed Our Lives
The Particle Debris article of the week comes from the Smithsonian Magazine.
Sometimes we forget. Every Apple product we use has been through the design process of Chief Design Officer Sir Jonathan Ive. That design process dictates how the our iPhone feels in our hands, how the MacBook Pro looks (and feels), and, for example, how we interact with our devices, even Siri.
The Ring at Apple Park.
We’ve become accustomed to this. It’s easy to take for granted how we use Apple products. That is, until we accidentally use a product from another company. (Oh, that Mr. Ive would mercifully get involved with TVs and audio/video receivers. Alas, Apple doesn’t go there.)
The Smithsonian suggests that great design work is facilitated when the offices themselves sparkle with the same design motifs.
One of the Ive creations that Apple launched this fall is the company’s vast new headquarters in Cupertino, California. The Ring, as Apple employees call the main building on the new campus, is an enormous glass circle that wraps around a landscape of meadows and imported California hardwood trees. Ive spent more than five years working closely with the British architect Norman Foster on virtually every detail, from the 900 curved, 45-foot-long glass panels that serve as walls, to the elevator buttons, which are subtly concave (like the home button on an old iPhone) and made of brushed aluminum (like a MacBook).
Then, of course, there’s the inspirational view. If one has to work in a building, one should, at least, feel connected with the beauty of one’s home planet. In 2017, some companies still fail to recognize that.
The path to the visitor center is no less inspiring.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the design studio commands the very best views, from the fourth floor of the Ring, near the offices of the top executives. The studio is huge, and Ive is as excited about its possibilities as a kid finally given a chance to tinker in his dad’s workshop.
And that’s one of the lessons here. Great products come from people who have the time to sit back, ponder, engage in creative play and interact with inspiring colleagues.
It’s a truism in tech design that it takes a great deal of work to make something easy to use, and no company has proven the principle more spectacularly than Apple. It came straight from Jobs, who pushed his engineers and designers to remember that it wasn’t the device that customers wanted—it was the experience…
The iPhone X exemplifies that process. Smithsonian author Rick Tetzeli tells a personal story.
Ive places his space-gray iPhone X on the coffee table next to my iPhone 7-plus, whose white bezel frames its rectangle of glass display. Mine is only a year old, but it looks clunky in comparison. Ive picks up my iPhone and gives a pointed appraisal of his own earlier handiwork: ‘It now seems to me a rather disconnected component housed in an enclosure.’
The evolution at work is breathtaking.
As our technology becomes more sophisticated, perhaps more invasive, it’s good to know that Jony Ive is supervising our Apple experiences. It’s something to remember when we run across articles that celebrate the technical brutality of competing products that we might use with mild dismay and, sometimes, outright alarm.
Next Page: The News Debris For The Week of November 27th. Apple’s mistake of the century.
Page 2 – News Debris For The Week of November 27th
Apple’s Mistake of the Century
On the heels of Apple’s horrendous “iamroot” security debacle, the fix entailed a problem with some Macs accessing file servers. The Macalope called out Apple with the best combination of maturity and harsh scolding of a major screw up. Then, OSXDaily pointed out that a second, automatic update fixed the associated file sharing issue. Make sure you’re fully updated to macOS High Sierra 10.13.1 version 17B1003.
Apple UNIX logo. The luster has been tarnished.
As a long-time UNIX nutcase and professional user of UNIX systems during my career, I’ll confess that I’m apoplectic about this security snafu. With regret, I’ve noticed that Apple has de-emphasized the UNIX foundation of its OSes, but notably macOS, in the past few years. Technical professionals no doubt notice things like that because it smacks of a lack of internal attention to and celebration of the Mac. Now we’ve seen the results.
Apple might consider hiring an accomplished UNIX graybeard, a “VP of UNIX Integrity and Security.” And give him/her veto authority over any macOS/iOS/tvOS/watchOS release until it’s been properly audited, QA’d and blessed. Clearly, something has gone wrong at Apple, and mild public statements need to be replaced by firm executive action that’s both public and makes sense. (Apple has already apologized.)
Apple has fixed the problem and is, I imagine, suitably sobered. We will move on but never forget.
More Debris
• Every product has a set of hardware features and a user interface design philosophy. But where products really shine is when you learn how to make them operate, within a technical environment, to achieve personal goals. Here’s a great example of that process. “How to cut the cord with Apple TV 4K.”
Related
• ElcomSoft made a fuss this week about changes in iOS 11 security that, they claim, weakens its security. Then Rene Ritchie at iMore really dug in and explained what’s going on. Here’s Author Ritchie’s excellent response: “iOS 11 security isn’t a ‘horror story’, it’s a balancing act for your protection.” If you read only one of these links, read author Ritchie’s.
• Is it a good idea to personalize our (AI) voice assistants? Does the act of giving Amazon’s voice assistant a friendly female name, “Alexa” somehow, insidiously tie us into a Big Brother entity that permeates and controls our lives? At Slate, author Will Oremus writes: “OK, ‘Computer’ – The case for renaming—and dehumanizing—Alexa, Siri, Google, and Cortana.”
It’s not an accident that tech companies have (mostly) given their voice bots human-sounding names, voices, and even distinct personalities. As I wrote in 2016, their anthropomorphic qualities subtly encourage people to trust them and build relationships with them. That benefits the companies who make them, because it gives them not only more data on us, but ever-greater influence over our choices.
If Siri is sometimes obtuse, just remember that the opposite of a mildly obtuse AI is a creepy one. Especially one that’s recording your voice and selling you stuff.
The missing label: “Caution. Use with care.”
• You may have previously read that the physics and mathematics of quantum encryption makes it un-hackable. That’s true, and here’s an update from infosecurity magazine. “Researchers Demonstrate ‘Un-Hackable’ Quantum Encryption.”
I can’t wait.
Particle Debris is a generally a mix of John Martellaro’s observations and opinions about a standout event or article of the week (preamble on page one) followed on page two by a discussion of articles that didn’t make the TMO headlines, the technical news debris. The column is published most every Friday except for holiday weekends.
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