Apple has long placed design at the heart of its product development policy. Steve Jobs famously used to obsess about details that nobody would ever see, such as the look of Apple’s factories and the internals of products… this trend was taken to its logical extreme with the launch of the translucent plastic iMac in 1998.
Apple wins the medal, but do simplicity and beauty still trump a bigger screen?
When the iPhone was launched in 2007, its all-touchscreen and single-button front was distinctive and simple. Apple has honed the design over the years with glass casing and then unibody aluminum, but fundamentally it remains unchanged. The iPad takes the same design cues and it gets ever lighter and thinner. Apple’s aluminum MacBooks and iMacs are widely considered to be the most beautiful, slick and minimal.
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| Apple Still Leader in Designs of iMAC's, iPhone - True Aluminum Body |
Sir Jony Ive, Senior Vice President of Design, keeps the Jobs design obsession alive at Apple. His biographer Leander Kahney recently called him the “soul” of Apple, adding, “Ive has a mad, total, one-hundred-and-ten-percent commitment to making the best products humanly possible.” Jony once flew to Japan to watch a sword-maker forge a katana, in his quest to make the MacBook Air even thinner. His remit has now been expanded to software as well as hardware, leading to the flatter, cartoon-like and generally well-received iOS 7 iPhone software update rolled out in September.
However, now that nearly all smartphones have an all-touchscreen front, the differences between them are less striking. Samsung’s current flagship the Galaxy S4 in some aspects has a less polished look than the iPhone 5s, with a polycarbonate plastic backing. However, it has a singular design feature: big, beautiful, highest-definition screens, that dwarf the iPhone and its “Retina” display. The design is “good enough” for consumers who are more focused on features, price and a bigger screen canvas.
Overall it feels that Apple still has the design edge.
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