The Disappointing Design of Apple’s New Gadgets

Alex Washburn/WIRED

The leader in technology design just introduced three very good products that should have been great.

As ever, Apple’s software environment is innovative and clearly superior in cohesion and experience, but its industrial design is what we were all watching for this week at the launch of the iPhone 6, 6 Plus and Apple Watch. The centrality of Apple’s industrial design is Steve Jobs’ legacy; it is what dictates Apple’s brand dominance, its marketing storyline and its strong effect on every one of us.

And it is here where Apple went slightly wrong.

First, the iPhones

The two iPhones are more troubling than the Watch, as they deal with a known set of problems Apple has answered better before. These ‘6’ twins are large devices with much softer styling than the ‘5’ and ‘4’ predecessors. Consider the styling lineage of the iPhone family: first soft lines, then sharp, and now softer again… what is going on? What is the guiding principle?

Great brands seek to instill a sense of clear direction and progression in their design evolution. For example, good car companies use show-models to communicate purposeful orchestration of their evolving roster of products. With this flip-flop, Apple’s choices begin to look arbitrary.

Yet styling is the least of the issues with the large iPhones. A fundamental problem of usability affects people every moment they physically experience either object, namely, the conflict between a barely graspable object and the size of the human hand. Similarly, “pocketability” is already a known problem in devices of this size, especially for women. Now, Apple was exceptionally positioned to modify the UI to fit larger phones. The company was also singular in its ability to optimize the form-factor around the screen, minimizing access thickness, width or length. Yet none of that happened: the iPhone 6 twins are plain and seemingly technical, even tactical, in their design approach.

Is Apple leading from behind, or refusing to lead? Samsung or LG are trying hard to bend and morph screens to fit humans, and Sharp developed a truly zero-border screen with the Aquos Crystal… why won’t Apple?

THE IPHONE 6 AND 6 PLUS DEAL WITH A KNOWN SET OF PROBLEMS APPLE HAS ANSWERED BETTER BEFORE.

A Watch for Everyone and No One

Apple’s watch is a very hard object to design. The Apple Watch must appeal to many people with many tastes, wrist sizes, and personal preferences regarding interaction, usage, and daily routine. It is also aimed at a market that is young and yet to coalesce around a clear culture of use (which means there’s a huge opportunity if it’s done right). It would admittedly be nearly impossible to answer such a broad spectrum of design issues with a single design. However, Apple made a strategic choice to try.

What Apple ended up with is an elegant, crafted and refined object in a limited color range with essentially a single form. It has an original and intriguing interaction paradigm. And it has an exciting user interface. The Watch is also familiar in an instant. But therein lies the first problem: Who is this elegant fashion object for?

When it comes to fashion, people seek to clearly announce their persona—whether it be subdued or overt. The Apple Watch is somewhere in the middle of an Apple–esque style universe, many miles away from either cutting-edge fashionistas or the middle of America. It’s possibly too feminine for some men and too masculine for some women.

As a rectangle rather than the classic circle—or the alternative square—the Watch is not exactly a watch. It is a micro-terminal on your wrist. Yet you already carry another terminal in your pocket—so what exactly is the task division between your phone and your “smart” watch? Apple could have answered this dilemma emphatically and set itself apart from the Android competition with a standalone device. It did not do that, opting for the same ambiguous dependency between the watch and the phone.

I’ll assume someone opted to keep the big questions open for mass-culture to decide, but then why not then excite us with some digital wizardry? Say, unique screen size or form, a curved screen, a wrap-around screen, no screen, gesture controls, wireless charging? Many of these ideas filled the blogosphere with renderings and rumors circulating constantly.

After all the expectations many had for true greatness, Apple delivered merely a very polished smartwatch. Yet, a watch among a pack of other smart watches is not what many—me included—had hoped for. Though the two iPhones and Watch are better than the competition, the trio is late, years after large phones became dominant and smart watches became the hottest trend in “wearables.” While each of these new devices presents us with superior craftsmanship and dexterous attention detail, none is exceptional, groundbreaking or outstanding in its approach to design.

Apple Made a Perfect Watch, But Needs to Decide What It’s Good For

The Apple Watch shows the same thoughtful UI thinking the company’s long been known for Apple

The Apple Watch has the hallmarks of a great Apple product. The hardware is striking. The software is simple. It has all sorts of smart new functionality, like monitoring your heart rate during workouts and letting you effortlessly pay for stuff without reaching for your wallet.But perhaps the most interesting thing about the watch, when you compare it to Apple’s past products, is its user interface. There isn’t just one way of using it. There are several. You can operate the watch by spinning a dial on its side, or touching its screen, or simply talking to the thing. One of the big challenges with a smartwatch is figuring out how to make it useful in all sorts of different situations. Apple’s solution? Give people all sorts of different ways of using it.The medley of interactions that power Apple’s new watch are undeniably impressive. But what’s still unclear is what it all amounts to. By designing a watch that does it all, Apple avoids answering the single toughest question surrounding this intriguing new type of device: What are these things truly good for?

Three Great UI Innovations

As Tim Cook mentioned on stage at the watch’s debut, new products often demand new interfaces, and over the years Apple’s been phenomenally successful at developing them. It brought the graphical user interface to the masses with the Macintosh. It gave us the joys of the iPod scroll wheel. It pioneered the multitouch interface that drives so many of our mobile devices today. When it comes to dictating how we interact with technology, no company has a better record.

The Apple Watch is no exception. It’s built on a number of thoughtful, elegant user interface ideas that pack an astounding amount of functionality into a tiny, attractive package.

The watch’s “digital crown” in action 

First is the digital crown, the small dial that sits on the side of the watch. It handles the bulk of the navigation. Spinning the crown moves you across your home screen, scrolls through lists and menus, and zooms around maps—all, crucially, without forcing you to obscure the watch’s display with your fingers.

Though the Apple Watch screen is touch sensitive, the presentation made it clear that Apple sees the digital crown as device’s most innovative input solution. And it is a brilliant approach, taking a timepiece mechanism we’re all familiar with and imbuing it with new functionality. Its simplicity is reminiscent of the iPod’s scroll wheel, and it’s no surprise that Kevin Lynch, the former Adobe VP who headed the development of the Apple Watch software, reportedly worked with a group of iPod engineers on the project.

In addition to the digital crown, the watch has a touch screen. But the screen contains an interesting innovation of its own. It’s force sensitive, meaning it can distinguish between different types of presses. Tapping a song title in your music app, for example, might let you play that song as usual. But pressing and holding could summon a menu of other options, perhaps allowing you to control music on another device, or beam your watch’s playlist wirelessly to other speakers. The force-sensitive screen effectively doubles the device’s real estate, hiding a context-aware menu beneath the visible UI without resorting to any added buttons or navigational chrome.

The Apple Watch’s third big user interface development isn’t visible at all. It’s the so-called Taptic Engine that drives the watch’s haptic feedback. Think of it like the “vibrate” function on your phone, just tuned for a watch. Calls and texts won’t announce themselves by shaking your wrist like mad. Instead, you’ll just feel a gentle buzz, imperceptible to anyone around you. The notification is revealed only when you lift your wrist up to look at the screen.

Haptic feedback means notifications are totally discreet. 

More interesting than any single one of these is the way they all share the burden of interaction on the device. There’s no single way to control the Apple Watch. It’s not just a scroll wheel, it’s not just a touchscreen, it’s not just haptics, it’s not just Siri. The Apple Watch might be the most constrained device the company’s ever had to design for, and somehow it ended up creating its most varied and robust interface yet.

But all of that is just “how it works.” That’s a very separate matter from “what it is.” And it’s there that the Apple Watch starts to lose some focus.

The Bigger Question: What Should It Do?

Part of Apple’s magic, at least in recent years, has come from its discipline. Apple doesn’t make stuff simply to make stuff. It doesn’t add features just to add them. As the company’s explained again and again, its design process isn’t one of addition but rather subtraction. Here’s Jony  discussing the development of the original iPod in the New York Times Magazine in 2003.

Steve…made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content….It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device — which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren’t obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.

In the iPod’s case, the “what it is” was given: It was a music player. The scroll wheel was the brilliant solution to “how it works.”

Apple cleverly re purposed the traditional watch crown for navigation. 

Looking at the watch, the digital crown and force-sensitive touch screen cleverly address the challenge of navigating content much in the way of the iPod’s scroll wheel. But that presupposes that the watch is “about” navigating content in the first place. It assumes a maximalist approach to functionality on the wrist.

Now, surely some of people anticipating Apple’s watch were looking for just what the company delivered—a watch that does more than the other smartphone-connected watches we’ve seen and looks better doing it. But those waiting to see Apple’s discipline brought to bear on a new, uncertain product category—those eager for Apple show us not just what we need but what we don’t need in a smartwatch—were left wanting.

Instead, there was a sense that the watch is a compilation of features in a way that Apple products rarely are. Sure, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world as a hybrid beast itself—it’s an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator all in one!—but each of those was a slam dunk use case. The Apple Watch is a fitness device, convincingly. It is a watch, convincingly. It is also…a way to send tiny disappearing drawings to friends? A thing for looking at next week’s lunar calendar? A beacon for alerting you when you walk by stuff you’ve pinned on Pinterest? The Apple Watch is so many things that Tim Cook didn’t even have time to list them all, though he did blurt out a few more as he was heading off stage: It’s a viewfinder for your iPhone camera. A remote for your Apple TV. A walkie-talkie.

There’s no fundamental problem with gadgets doing many things. Our smartphones would be useful if they were just phones, music players, and internet communicators, but it’s all the other stuff that makes them truly indispensable.

But what’s missing amidst the Apple Watch’s litany of features is any sense of the restraint that has guided Apple’s products in the past. There’s no suggestion that Apple has cracked what these weird watch things are really all about. The watch seemed like a perfect opportunity to do less. Instead, Apple seemingly just threw up their hands and did it all.

The approach raises some serious questions. Looking at a tiny map on your watch might be incrementally more convenient than doing so on your phone, but is that utility enough to warrant the watch’s power-hungry screen, which necessitates charging the device every night instead of every week? Using the crown to scroll through content is smart, but at a point where we’re all straining to keep up with the daily tidal wave of content as it is, do we really want to be doing any more scrolling in the first place? Do we honestly need a watch with a home screen full of apps, even if they take the form of a cool bubbly cluster instead of a boring grid?

All along, there’s been the vague promise that these new wearable devices would free us from fiddling with our phones. It’s possible that the Apple Watch, with its smart, multifaceted user interface, could do that. But watching Tim Cook and friends introduce their new toy to the world, showing off its animated solar system clock and its customizable emoji, one was forced to acknowledge another, more ignominious fate for the Apple Watch. It could end up just being another thing to fiddle with.

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Tesla delivers its first Model S electric cars to customers in Japan

Tesla Motors is making inroads in Japan after handing over its first electric-powered Model S cars to customers in the region. Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and the spaceflight company SpaceX, did the honors of handing over the first set of keys earlier today:

Tesla has been present in Japan before now, however. The company operates a store in the Aoyama district of Tokyo, as well as two service centers: one in Naka Ikegami, Tokyo and another in Yokohama. The latter offers four superchargers, while Tokyo is covered by two stalls at the Grand Hyatt hotel.

Of course, until Tesla was able to fulfil Model S orders in Japan, these facilities were largely dormant. While customers could probably obtain a vehicle through importing, today’s milestone represents its first real push in the country.

A spokesperson for Tesla says the company plans to build a larger Supercharger network in Japan. That’ll be critical if the company is to make its electric vehicles a viable alternative to the current swathe of gas-guzzling road warriors.

Unsurprisingly, the bulk of Tesla’s Supercharger network currently rests in North America. Today 111 stations are active in the region, while 61 are set up in Europe and 13 are open in parts of Asia – specifically China and Hong Kong.

iPhone 6 ‘Welcome to 2012’ Nexus 4 Comparison

On Tuesday Apple decided to launch their ‘new’ flagship device, the iPhone 6 along with a glossy launch event which included U2 playing a live song from their new album. However, even before the show got underway social networks began to see activity mocking Apple and the iPhone 6. This first began with Samsung who very early in the morning tweeted they would giveaway a free pear for every tweet about an apple. This was very quickly followed byHTC tweeting an image of the iPhone 6 side by side with the HTC One M8 and a message which essentially read welcome to the big league. To add further insult ASUS also joined the party by posting a Facebook page advising readers they could buy six ASUS ZenFones for the price of one iPhone 6. If this was not enough Samsung again threw some more punches by releasing 6 videosmocking the new iPhone.

You may be thinking what’s with all the big Android companies picking on little ole Apple. However, it seems it weren’t only the big boys who were not impressed by Apple’s latest creation. An image created by Ron Amadeo (Reviews Editor for ARS Technica) mocking the lack of current iPhone features seems to have gone viral. While the likes of HTC and OnePlus have sent out various images comparing the iPhone 6 to their latest flagship devices, Amadeo compared the iPhone 6 to the Nexus 4 (circa 2012) with the title “Dear iPhone 6 users: Welcome to 2012”. With the two devices side by side and although two years apart the similarities are remarkable. Both devices offer a 4.7”screen, NFC payments, notification actions, widgets, 3rd part keyboards and cross-app communications. More interestingly the resolution of the Nexus 4 is slightly greater with a 760p resolution compared to the iPhone 6 (750p resolution).

However, probably the funniest element of the image is down the bottom where Amadeo mocks the future of iPhone “In 2016, you guys will love: Wireless Charging, water resistance, multi-user support, split screen apps and virtual buttons”. Amadeo even pushes the joke a little further by advising iPhone users if they need any help with their new features to ask an Android user “We’ve had this stuff for years”. To make it worse for Apple the joke has not been lost on the public with the original tweeted image by Amadeo already being retweeted almost 17,000 (and favorited over 7500) times in the last two days. On Google+the image has also been liked over 4000 times and reshared nearly 4000 times (just from Amadeo’s account alone). Of course, it’s not all bad for Apple users. Afterall, the iPhone 6 does have some features which the Nexus 4 does not have, but either way the similarities between the 2014 iOS device and the 2012 Android device cannot be ignored.