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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2019-06-27, 17:39

Well, this is quite something.

First, I've never worked there and obviously never been in a design meeting, so it's a bit hard to know from the outside looking in what true role he's played over the years.

I do believe he gave (with help from his team, I'm sure) the company significant cues towards not just one design language, but really two: the brief three-year period of 1998 that saw translucency, color, and pinstripes, as represented in hardware obviously by the iMac but various other products as well, and in software by Aqua.

Then, as a 1.5 if you will, he was probably involved in the Brushed Metal era.

And then starting with the May 2001 white iBook and the October 2001 iPod with iconic white earbuds, the era of white plastic, various shades of aluminum combined with glass, and thin, flat, right-angle shapes.

The first era was funnily brief in retrospect. And perhaps the second era has been so long. If we assume that there is a problem; that there has been tension brewing, I would pinpoint it to that: the only way for this second era to go was even thinner, and even flatter, with even starker colors. Can we do an even purer aluminum? Maybe we can make it darker this time. Maybe throw in a few shades of gold-like color.

(Can we make the iMac thinner on its sides? Why would we do that? Well if we're being honest, we're running out of ways to iterate this design.)

There were outliers to that — the iPod, especially the iPod nano, was available in quite a few colors. There's the iPhone 5c. And now the XR. There's bands for the Watch. But for the most part, the entire line-up is now an dark grey aluminum or steel back, with a thick black bezel around a glass display. Very classy. Also kind of boring, eighteen(!) years in.

The first era, instead, was full of whimsy and variety. It went too far at times; nobody wants a Flower Power iMac. It went not far enough other times.

Maybe it is in fact time for a new era. For aesthetical reasons — people want something new — as well as for practical ones: a good argument can be made that the 2016 MacBook Pros would overall have been a better product if only they had been ever so slightly less thin.

I'm not sure how Ive worked himself into this one-trick pony situation, but if I were to take a rather uneducated guess, the answer would be: because he truly thinks that's a great way to keep reiterating. And now perhaps a critical mass of other managers has started revolting.
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