Apple Design on the Decline (Premium)

There’s been a lot of complaining lately about the declining quality of Apple design. For good reason.

To be clear, I am not adding my voice to a chorus of complaints that has suddenly arisen in the past year. In fact, I feel like I initiated this movement as I’ve been raising these issues for years. So welcome aboard the reality train, everyone else. What took so long?

OK, that was rhetorical. A combination of factors has led us to this point. Apple does generally deliver excellent products, and is thus often given a pass on the mistakes. But things have changed in recent years. And virtually everyone, even Apple’s biggest fans, is finally taking notice of the decline.

Some of Apple’s most recent design choices almost read as deliberate pranks, like a drunk Tim Cook and Jony Ive bet each other one night about how far they could go off the rails before their compliant user base finally woke up. But I bet no one is laughing now. And that even the most loyal Apple fan is experiencing what I feel is an overdue WTF moment.

A few examples.

In late 2016, Apple released an overdue new generation of MacBook Pro laptops. As over-priced as ever, these new computers were savaged by Apple’s remaining pro customer base for being completely inappropriate for their needs.

Nit-picky arguments over individual features notwithstanding, many pointed to these devices’ over-reliance on USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 for expansion. But that’s silly. This technology is modern and forward-leaning, and I’ve already explained why the dongle argument is an invention by Luddites and the short-sighted. Instead, we can focus on the very many real issues with these laptops, and with the 2017 models that Apple hurried out to the door to address some of the concerns.

The biggest is the Touch Bar, a child-like and childish user interface that is available, paradoxically, on only the most expensive MacBook Pro models. (Many 13-inch models and all 15-inch models.) This interface is an affront to any professional, and while Apple, and some fans, might point to the benefits of a context-sensitive row of virtual keys, the presentation is ridiculous, embarrassing.

Worst of all, I think, is that you can’t avoid the Touch Bar if you buy a 15-inch MacBook Pro, the most expensive versions. This would drive me nuts if I were in the market for such a device.

Related to the Touch Bar is the MacBook Pro’s gigantic new touchpad, which has grown to ludicrous proportions. Apple has never provided a real reason for the massive growth of this peripheral, but the touchpad is now roughly twice as big as it needs to be. It’s silly, and, like the Touch Bar, there is nothing “pro” about it.

But that’s not really why the Touch Bar and the humongous touchpad are related. Instead, both of these features are cancerous design out-growths of an inane and indefensible Apple policy to not bring its vaunted multi-touch display capabilities to the Mac. Once Apple shut down that possibility, it killed its ability to truly modernize the Mac, as Microsoft and its hardware partners have done with the PC. And as Google and its partners are doing with Chromebook.

To be clear, these design issues are not about how these features look. That is subjective, and while one might enjoy the visual design of a given product, another may despise it. No, in this case, I mean design as in how a thing works. Or, as is the case here, does not work.

The Touch Bar and that silly touchpad do not work as well as a real multi-touch screen would. That Apple had the ability to do this correctly and didn’t is the crime. These self-imposed workarounds are features that would never have happened organically. These are features that only happened because someone at Apple wrongly decided to keep multi-touch screens away from the Mac.

(Apple is rumored to be integrating iOS apps into macOS, so it is possible this will result in a belated reversal of its multi-touch Mac plans.)

We see this same wrong-headed decision-making in the iPhone X, which replaces Apple’s best-in-class fingerprint reader with a lousy Face ID facial recognition system. It sucks.

And when I say “it sucks,” I mean, compared to the Touch ID fingerprint reader that Apple used on previous iPhones. Compared to other facial recognition systems, Face ID is great. It is as fast as, say, the similar feature on the OnePlus 5T. (And is allegedly safer, but not perfect from a security standpoint.)

But it is also more tedious to use because it is slow and you can’t just scan your face and move on. You have to swipe up on the screen, too, a strange extra step that delivers an extra pause every time you want to do something. It is a bad design.

Here’s what good design looks like in this case: Move the Touch ID sensor to the back of the iPhone X, as Android device makers have done on their own flagship phones. Give users the option. If you don’t like the fingerprint reader there, fine, you have Face ID. But for those who like to actually get moving and not let technology get in their way, a fingerprint reader on the back would be superior. I know this because I use it on other devices.

I’ve argued in the recent past that Apple’s “parentalism and paternalism” has gotten out of control because only Steve Jobs had that genius understanding of what Apple’s customers needed most. Today’s more pedestrian leadership at Apple has no such superpowers. And they keep making bad decisions. These are just two of them. And I’ve not even touched on the sad state of Apple’s software. The new iPad Pro multitasking features in iOS 11 are as half-assessed as they can be, and another great example of bad design.

And I’m not alone on this one, folks. This isn’t “that Windows guy” howling endlessly about how terrible Apple is. (I don’t really do that, but Apple’s inner circle is unused to criticism.) Even Apple fanboys at Techcrunch, Fortune, and elsewhere are starting to raise the alarm now. Something is rotten in Cupertino.

Apple still designs great products, of course. And both the MacBook Pro and iPhone X have certain design elements that I think look and work wonderfully. That, of course, is the very definition of good design. It’s just that these design wins are peppered with far more mistakes, more defeats, than ever before. And Apple can only coast on its past successes, and on Steve Jobs’ legacy for so long. The company needs to make some major changes.