As we watched Apple unveil iOS7, the 37signals Campfire room quickly turned to awe of what they had achieved. A redesign so shocking and deep bestowed upon a product so popular left many mouths agape. Whether you happened to like the final product wasn’t as relevant as marveling at the vision, drive, and sheer determination to pull it off.
Apple has a way of making people feel like that.
But what followed next is at least as interesting: We all sought to explain just how they did it. Is it all Ive’s eye? Is it that they explore more ideas than anyone else? Is it never accepting “good enough”? Forgoing customer input and trusting their own instinct? Hundreds of triple-A designers and developers?
There were lots of suggestions. But stepping back a meter or two, it was clear that we all simply reached for our own grandest ambitions and rebranded them Apple’s secret sauce. Theorizing why Apple is able to do what it does is an organizational Rorschach.
That doesn’t make it a useless exercise. Au contraire. It just makes it more about you than them. It lets you tease out your goals and aspirations for your own work and process. It’s a kick in the ass to marvel at greatness and think of reasons “why are we not as awesome as that?”.
An organization as rich and storied as Apple has a thousand reasons for why it got to where it is. Pinning it on any one answer is futile, but it’s sure to spark a healthy debate. Indulge.
Clay Hebert
on 13 Jun 13Well said, David…and speaks to the worldviews that we all carry around. Much like “profit per employee” is a more interesting metric than overall revenue, I wonder if measuring “jaw drops per product release” is an interesting way to evaluate Apple against its competitors.
Lucas Arruda
on 13 Jun 13What we probably all can say is that are a lot of mixed feelings about iOS7. Of course it’s a new approach that probably will evolve and get as polished as iOS6. But, aside from the icons and visual polemic, I see some great advances on design and some changes we all wanted but wouldn’t expect Apple to implement. And that, just because they normally would do their way, like with the so obvious network switch buttons.
Akii
on 13 Jun 13Spot on..
Alen
on 13 Jun 13Когда iOS7 выйдет все обдрочатся
Robert M.
on 13 Jun 13“Whether you happened to like the final product …”
I was under the impression that prerelease iOS 7 is still a work in progress, not a final product, and thus subject to (visual and other) changes.
Fred
on 13 Jun 13So I installed the beta. I hated the look at first, but it has grown on me. It feels very un-Apple-like, which I’m not sure is something to be celebrated. But you have to admire the ambition to try and go somewhere completely new.
Mat
on 13 Jun 13My personal theory is that they followed a similar approach to when Forstall went head to head with Tony Fadell on what would ended up being the core of iOS. Ive formed two teams gave them some instructions as to what he was looking for and pitted them against each other. Ive chose the iOS7 version he liked most.
GregT
on 13 Jun 13I can believe that the Apple hardware guys rarely say ‘good enough’, but the software guys I think are more likely to say ‘good enough’, ‘nobody will notice!’, ‘who cares’ ...
Vlad
on 13 Jun 13Totally agree, which is why I get so annoyed when I see the wave of people throwing shit on Apple and Ive over the new designs.
It’s funny how quick people are to give Apple grief about making and delivering a bold vision until it’s accepted into the populous.
People exploded about how the iPad was simply a large iPhone and useless… now no one can live without it.
Mark James
on 14 Jun 13Not to stick a pin the balloon of conversation but I can’t ever remember watching a keynote that shocked, inspired and drew awe less. Forgetting the debatable VD aesthetic, the lack of ceremony that transpired post the release was utterly deflating and instead of making me think (as usual) holy crap, what do I have to do to get a job at Apple, left me realising that even an organisation like Apple is filled with product killing bureaucracy.
I appreciate this is largely subjective but if anything, I’d walk away thinking, “Wow, David and Jason are right. Limited spec, budgets, talent and resource; forcing you to say NO does seem to be the elixir of product design.”
Perhaps Apple ought to read a few tricks form the 37signals playbook :)
Wilman
on 14 Jun 13Great post! I know about this game and take it as is. Every time Apple introduces something new people start criticizing about it. Lots of detractors and followers but in the end Apple makes headway and we end up embracing their trends. By the way David, I really like the way you write and how you carefully choose the best words to convey your ideas. It is outstanding and not often seen in the digital world we are living in.
Scott Semple
on 14 Jun 13My own “organizational Rorschach” was, “Hunh, that’s a beautiful presentation of a lot of Android functionality.”
LoWang
on 14 Jun 13See Scott Semple’s comment above. Bingo, couldn’t agree more.
Jared CC
on 14 Jun 13+1 Scott Semple’s comment.
Satirization can be enjoyed here: http://www.esarcasm.com/24294/apple-sues-google-for-stealing-stuff-it-just-invented/
Anono
on 15 Jun 13Looks more like android or windows os, but marketed much better
Sebhelyesfarku
on 16 Jun 13Yeah the redesign so shocking, looks like the Zune music player from 2009. HelveticaNeue UltraLight? Brilliant for outdoor reading. LOL
R
on 16 Jun 13I dunno. There are some distinctly Apple-ish things I think were legitimately crucial to their success—they maintained a lot of control over the third-party iOS ecosystem, and folks like Jobs and Forstall had a lot of leeway to push their own vision regardless of what anyone else internally or externally thought. Still, I wouldn’t aspire to those things if I were somehow tech-king of the world (big believer in chaos and a thousand flowers blooming) and I’m not sure they were even consistently positive for Apple (as best anyone can tell, Forstall and Jobs were advocates of the blingy, sometimes distracting, design style they’re moving away from under Ive).
You could say the same about Google’s tech-can-solve-anything idealism and occasional indifference to whether a unit is profitable (or otherwise successful), or Facebook’s love of moving fast and breaking things and disregard for privacy. The world’s a more interesting place if you can see the weaknesses of folks it’s tempting to treat as idols and the strengths of folks it’s tempting to dismiss.
Devan
on 17 Jun 13I’d like to get some UI experts to analyse this from the opposite angle – that of the user. I downloaded the Beta last week and installed on my iPhone 5. Initial reaction was ‘Ugh’, but after a couple of days of using it, I found myself liking the new UI more and more.
Now when I look at the older iOS, I think ‘Ugh’. I am amazed at the retraining and evolving thought processes in my brain that slowly, slowly metamorphosed my thinking and habits to come around to seeing the simple beauty in the new interface.
Makes me wonder how they managed to get it past the first round of QA? Someone must have been driving very hard at Apple to push these changes past the negative filters of the test team and management team.
Anonymous Coward
on 17 Jun 13jhjhjhj
Anonymous Coward
on 17 Jun 13oops, sorry
Andreas L
on 17 Jun 13Been running the IOS 7 beta since it became available. My biggest concern is that what felt natural with IOS 1-6, is now very hard to get used to with IOS 7. It’s not that it’s different – more like it’s not behaving as I think. That’s the biggest problem. Hard to use, and you make the wrong choices all the time, like accidently getting that stupid Search up.
The look and icons is just something I expect to change. Not because of how they look, but because they are more often than not very hard to read, sometimes impossible and you’ll have to guess.
bigsplat
on 18 Jun 13current iOS 6 is still revolutionary to those who have not used it, but for most users it is very familiar, and it is important to sometimes rearrange your furniture in a room if you can, it can bring a new perspective and that is what Apple is doing to protect itself from an OS that no matter how great, may feel, well..old hat, to some users. I really appreciate the forwarding thinking about what an OS needs to be look like, eschewing shackles of the past, embracing retina display and crystal clear typography and once again, making the machine fade away and the human (and the human’s work) be the focus. When creating, typing, whatever, I like a system that gets out of my way and lets my ideas take the forefront. Apple is on the right track, again, and the track will continue to change as tech becomes more advanced and displays like Retina-level resolution displays grow in use. Bravo Apple and Bravo DHH!!
This discussion is closed.