David Smith blogs about his Apple-inspired ideals for development and design:
If you are always striving towards improving quality you will eventually end up with a surplus of user expectation. In my experience this surplus is incredibly precarious because once you are better than your competitors there will always be a temptation to let up on this pursuit and instead spend some of that surplus on things which don’t improve the user’s experience. It is so easy at this point to do the thing which worsens the user experience but helps the bottom line, with the justification that you’ll still be the best.
Which is why the second part of this maxim is that you have to not only strive to be the best, but then once you get ahead keep working on the marginal gains to relentlessly improve.
He doesn’t relate to many of the complaints that Apple has lost its way, instead describing the company as a ship that has “become a bit unbalanced”. I like the analogy, but I think some aspects of the company are more than off course. They are sunk to the bottom of the ocean.
I just spent a month trying to get my app Inkwell through the App Store review process. That will always be at the top of my frustrations with the company. But I was thinking yesterday while watching the device prototypes from Microsoft Build that there’s a deeper problem with Apple: they rarely build anything now except the most obvious products.
Perhaps Apple’s success has crippled their creativity, putting too much pressure on the company to only release hits. I miss the quirky products, the whimsy, the think different. AI is a perfect opportunity to build something completely new and they’ve got essentially nothing, only playing catch-up for the last two years.
Apple is still great at the kind of design refinement David describes. You want to wear goggles on your face? Apple is going to design the heck out of it. But it feels like a refinement of someone else’s idea. I’d like to see more experimentation. Getting to truly great often means doing something no one else is doing.
