From the beautifully laid out CNET interview:
“Doing something that’s different is actually relatively easy and relatively fast, and that’s tempting,” says the man who’s had a hand in every major Apple product design — from the colorful iMac and iBook to the iPod, iPad, iPhone and Apple Watch.
“We don’t limit ourselves in how we will push — if it’s to a better place. What we won’t do is just do something different that’s no better,” Ive said in an interview earlier this week to explain the design of the MacBook Pro, a major reboot of Apple’s most powerful laptop line.
And:
Our starting point, from the design team’s point of view, was recognizing the value with both input methodologies. But also there are so many inputs from a traditional keyboard that are buried a couple of layers in. We have that ability to accommodate complex inputs, mainly out of habit and familiarity.
So our point of departure was to see if there was a way of designing a new input that really could be the best of both of those different worlds. To be able to have something that was contextually specific and adaptable, and also something that was mechanical and fixed, because there’s truly value in also having a predictable and complete set of fixed input mechanisms.
Read the interview. Some great insights into the birth of Touch Bar and Jony’s way of thinking. Kudos to the CNET team that pulled this together.
Jony Ive is full of shit.
Jony Ive is being relied upon by Apple to be the computer interface leader as well as the industrial design leader. Let’s hope he’s as smart and versatile as Cook thinks he is. What we know of the history of the iPhone and recent Macs is that sometimes, he knows how to get out of the engineers’ way, and other times, he has won over the engineers at the detriment of the product.
Good interview. I like hearing about his team’s decision-making process, to the degree that Ive feels he can describe it publicly.
And I believe that last question was already answered publicly by Cook. They feel a full touchscreen on a Mac would be a clumsy add-on to an OS that isn’t designed to work that way. Like putting a mouse cursor on iOS.
“From the beautifully laid out CNET interview” Perhaps. If you have a high speed net access. Took 3 minutes to load on my desktop via Safari. And I think it’s an annoying mess design wise.