Clickbait title? Hmm go on then...

"The 'notch' on the new iPhone..."

Ugh, close tab.

I don't care.

Not a fan of the notch but asserting Apple is "really bad at design" due to a few missteps is ridiculous to say the least. However, they do seem to be heading in the wrong direction, having lost their obsession with simplicity since Jobs died.

Is the title click-bait? Yes. Does the article make a reasoned argument and some valid points? Yes.

Only the blindest of the Apple loyal (I'm an Apple fan FYI), could deny that most of the points raised by Topolsky are on the money. This isn't just clickbait, it's something worth discussing, surrounding the most influential design company of our lifetimes.

What i am missing on this post is why Apple is doing something like that? Its just an article where somebody is simply whining about that apple design is no more.

Why the notch??? This is really simple if you think about it. Everybody is doing this frameless screendesigns of apps in a "futuristic phone" and is showing them around different platforms. You all know them, they are all frameless.

So there we are in the marketing department of Apple, they sitting there and thinking about how the iPhone 10 will look like. So they say: "Hey our research department find that on dribbble/behance this "futuristic smartphone" with a frameless screen. We should do that.

Couple of months later, at the hardware development department of Apple. Jony Ive shows how the design should look like. No Notch, totally frameless, a piece of art.

The hardware developers work hard to integrate all the camera sensors behind the "Super Retina Display". They can't do it. Fingerprint sensor behind the screen, they can't do it.

The Idea of the Notch is born.

The question is, would it be better to wait and finish the product, no everybody knows that every year there will be a new innovative smartphone.

"Apple Design" is not driven to find the best solution or to create the best and fitting design of something, anymore. No, Apple is now, again, Marketing driven...

You see it in different versions of there main products, Small Phone, Big Phone, Small Tablet, Big Tablet. iMac, iMac Pro, Mac Pro, Macbook Pro, Macbook.

Thats why we find more and more flaws in design. They do not focus on that one product, they focus on what people wants...

I recently bought an iPad and after many years of just using Android I have to say that that back button on the status bar really bugged my mind. It still does...

EDIT: Just wondering, how does that status bar back button looks on the iPhone X?

Articles like this annoy me. They make it sound like bad design is new to Apple, that's Apple has lost it's way lately. And worse, they make it sound like bad design at Apple is a post-Steve Jobs things.

It's not.

Antennagate was a major hardware design flaw championed by Steve "It's the way you're holding it" Jobs.

The removal of colour - one of the major design elements - from the OS X interface was well under way under Jobs' watch.

That's just but two. I'm sure plenty of other people will have their own design peeves from the Steve Jobs era.

Bad design is not new to Apple. It began at least 10 years ago.

I find arguments like this fall apart when I'm walking around seeing thousands of people happily using all this "badly designed" stuff without much issue.

Sure the iPhone X isn't out yet, but do you really think THIS time will be the one where the predictions of Apple's design and innovation failures come true? I doubt it.

I mean is it really that big of a difference to have the notch versus having a black bar fully across the top? REALLY? Sure the white bars on websites are ugly, but I bet before the year is over the vast majority have added the background color attribute that makes it look better.

I'm getting tired of this outrage at Apple that never seems to manifest functionally.

nice article! I was literally thinking of it when just before I came to Designernews. Theres an article on Theverge about their new dongle that allows you to charge and use a headphone jack at the same time; it's a messy solution!

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/1/16393078/apple-belkin-rockstar-iphone-adapter-headphone-lightning

I wouldn’t say that Apple is bad at Design but they appear to be losing whatever is left of their design chops.

The new iOS, is a clusterfuck of inconsistency! Example toggling "wifi-off" in the control center (?) doesn't actually turn it off. This is supposedly a feature!

https://hackernoon.com/dive-into-the-details-of-ios-11-is-apple-still-detail-oriented-fe70af065a7d

AirPods, ApplePay, and the poor ecosystem support of the S8 are why Apple is actually still pretty much the leader. They know how to release features that make a splash, and have an opinion that you discuss them.

That's a pretty hard thing to design in to a product launch, yet they do it every year.

I tried a Samsung phone 2 years ago, and a Windows Surface Studio last year when the new Macbooks failed to impress — both machines were nice until you tried to power use them across the ecosystem. Forced upgrades (with driver issues), clunky beta technology, and poor performing 3rd party services.

I don't hate that notch as much as everyone seems to. But the amount of Notch chatter on this very board shows how Apple and the launch of these new phones were a resounding success.

Off topic but, The Outline is really bad at design. It’s like they took all of the trend lists posted here from past few years and mushed them together with the tone/voice of an annoying millennial. They really did try to create something that constantly shouts at you visually about how hip they are. It’s distracting.

Apple design isn't perfect and you could even argue that they've lost their edge in some fields but this writer simplifies the issue a bit too much. Apple is still a business and needs to meet its sales targets and goals and may ship a 'lesser' product to do so. Apple is also limited by the hardware available on the market and with battery technology still not improving there's not much phone makers can do outside of adding better camera's and screens. In that scenario adding a different sensor (at some sacrifice) makes a ton of sense.

Also innovative products aren't the most complicated. Take the most innovative piece of hardware of the past 2 years (IMO) the Nintendo Switch. The Switch is basically a tablet with attached controllers. Literally anyone could've made it, but only Nintendo was crazy enough to do so and succeed. But in order for the Switch to be created they needed to fail and learn lessons from the Wii U. You could also argue that if the Wii U hadn't failed we would've seen more Switch-like 'gaming tablets' a lot sooner.

The same will happen with Apple. If the iPhone X is not as successful as they expect than the iPhone XI will improve on those issues. But who knows, maybe there's more to its product design than an 'ugly' black notch at the top and they've actually done some research that showed that people don't care about these things as much as we think they do.

Well reasoned article, but the animated quote border squiggles are way too distracting.

Man that was harsh but it's kind of on point. I have the same feeling about the notch when looking at it and it's weird that they try to keep it visible as much as possible in software. They probably don't want to get people to hide it so it's becoming an iconic thing for Apple.

I am not surprised at all. All the elves have left middle-earth. The legendary UI/UX designers at Apple are now part of more modern, looking foward companies like Facebook, Tesla, Google. Apple started to die when Jobs kicked out people on iOS 6 launch. It all started there.

Edgy.

AirPods are amazing though...