Apple, You’re Designing It Wrong (Premium)

The notch at the top of the iPhone X has been universally rejected by nearly everyone. A company with Apple’s design prowess should have—and could have—done better.

What’s interesting about this is that almost anyone could have come up with a better design, given Apple’s desires for this device and the sizing and placement requirements of the components it contains. I’m reminded, in a weird way of “The Lost World,” author Michael Crichton’s sequel to the blockbuster “Jurassic Park.” It’s a terrible book, which hurts because I’m a huge fan of Crichton. But my commentary at the time was that anyone, given the source material, could have come up with a better story. That the originator of that source material created such a stink bomb was disappointing.

Anyway, Apple.

The appeal of any design is subjective, to be sure. And, to be fair, there probably is some well-meaning soul out there who believes that the iPhone X design isn’t just OK, it’s perfect. There’s no accounting for taste. But that person, imaginary, I hope, is wrong.

Criticism can be cheap. After all, I’ve never designed a smartphone. Who am I to complain about what the geniuses in Cupertino have come up with?

The problem is that other companies have already solved this problem. And they did so well before Apple announced the iPhone X. Samsung pioneered the near bezel-less smartphone design with its Galaxy S8/S8+ by emulating how PC makers handle the same issue: The bezels on the sides are nearly non-existent, but you leave a bit more room at the top, especially for the camera and related componentry.

There are even examples of notches on smartphone displays that are otherwise near bezel-less that are—yes, subjectively—much less offensive than that of the iPhone X. Andy Rubin’s Essential announced its first smartphone, the Phone PH-1, back in May, and it features a small notch—which I called a “dimple”—at the very top of the display.

“This is a great design, because the camera neatly bisects the Android status bar, which has icons and other information on the top left and top right of the screen, so it’s not wasting any space,” I wrote at the time. “This is, suddenly, clearly the best way to do this.”

It’s what Apple might have done, had they not taken up so much space. Or they might have simply pulled a Samsung and not taken up any space at all, which I think is the best approach.

We’ll never know why they didn’t. Apple, like many companies, is very secretive, and particularly so about its mistakes. What we do know is that we’re stuck with it. Apple, again like many companies, also tends to stick with its designs, reusing them for years on end. It will try to turn this mistake into an asset. Perhaps even meld iOS to the invented requirements of this hardware design. It’s not far-fetched.

This reminds me, of course, of Microsoft’s Surface Book, which suffers from a similarly self-imposed design mistake: This detachable laptop cannot be closed fully because of its unique hinge. And rather than admit to the obvious truth—yes, it would prefer for it to close fully and lay flat—Microsoft instead touts the mistake as a benefit. Look! If you flip the screen around and put it on backward and then close the screen, there’s a slight angle which is perfect for handwriting. One can only imagine the high-fiving that occurred when that little side-benefit was discovered.

As noted, I’m not the only one criticizing the iPhone X design. But Apple and complaints go hand-in-hand, you might think. The company is divisive.

Fair, but this time we’re starting to see some of Apple’s biggest fans finally waking up to the fact that, just because Apple is shoveling it down your throat, it doesn’t mean that what the company is doing is right. That divisiveness has spread to its fan base.

John Gruber, a hate monger to whom I will not link, has described the iPhone X notch as “ungainly and unnatural,” adding that it “offends.” And Joshua Topolsky has delivered what is perhaps the best tear-down of the iPhone X’s design mistakes, noting that the notch on the iPhone X isn’t just “bad,” “it’s bad design” and “a visually disgusting.”

With friends like those, well. You know the drill.

The thing is, the iPhone X design is really just the latest in a long line of tone-deaf design mistakes from a company that is clearly far too used to thinking it got it right. This is what happens when your fan base is too compliant, too eager to please. In the face of near-universal praise, you just start to believe your own bullshit. Apple doesn’t have a Paul Thurrott. All they have are bloggers who basically love everything they do.

Of course, what they also don’t have is Steve Jobs. It’s easy to wonder how his absence might be the root cause of the lackluster updates Apple has shipped since he passed. I buy into this viewpoint in part. As Jobs himself noted, saying no is as important as saying yes, and it’s clear that no one has been saying no to Jony Ives recently.

But Apple has been making design compromises for years, and dating back to the Jobs era. It’s just it’s usually gotten away with it.

One might argue, for example, that the iPhone 4 is an iconic design. I’ve done so myself. But I’ll also point out for the record that Steve Jobs explicitly compared it to a classic Leica camera design during the product’s introduction, undercutting that claim nicely, since a copy of something iconic isn’t itself iconic. It’s just boorish.

Worse, Apple kept the design it preferred even though its own engineers warned Jobs and designer Jony Ive that it would lead to attenuation, a loss of cellular signal when held normally. The result? Antennagate. But the iPhone 4 design—which lived on with the iPhone 4S, 5, 5S, and SE—wasn’t just bad because of attenuation, a problem that was fixed through iterative hardware updates. It was also sharp-edged and painful to hold. Good design isn’t just about looking good, a gospel Apple preaches, it’s about working well too. And that is something Apple either forgot or willfully ignored because it was too caught up in the iPhone 4’s good looks.

I’ve written and talked a lot about products that seem to transcend their market category because of good design. I referred to the Xbox One S, for example as “the perfect thing” a year ago, noting how rare it is to be so blown away by the wholeness of a product—not just how it looks, but how it works—over time. My car, a 10-year old Mercedes C280 is, to me at least, similarly timeless despite its lack of anything resembling modern electronics. (Oddly, the Surface Book, despite that weird hinge opening, comes pretty damn close to achieving this same level of perfection. So close.)

The iPhone X is not the perfect thing.

Instead, it is a compromise, a flawed peek at the future, shown through an Apple lens. This is the type of thing—taking something others had done first and perfecting it—that Apple usually does quite well. But today, there are far too many examples of smartphones with similar design goals that just look and work better.

Fortunately, for Apple, iPhone X is probably to sell very well. There are already stories—well, rumors, really—that this is already happening. One of the benefits of that largely still-compliant user base. So the short-term impact is not necessarily too damaging.

But I feel like we’ve turned a corner with Apple. Thanks to recent uprisings against the out-of-date MacPro, compromised the MacBook Pro, the lackluster iPhone 8, and now the design-challenged iPhone X, Apple’s no longer quite so obvious a choice for many people. And unless the company sets things right—maybe starts actually listening to customers and critics for a change—this is only going to snowball.

So we’ll see what happens. But Apple will walk away from this design. It’s only a matter of time.