A More Harmonious Gadget
The iPhone 5C is noteworthy for another reason: reconnecting the design language of Apple’s mobile hardware and software. The disconnect between the soul and body of the iPhone, up until this new, cheaper one, has been profound. Game Center’s ham-handed skeuomorphism was silly enough on its own, but viewed in the context of its space-age aluminum container, it was positively jarring. The iPhone 5C and iOS 7, on the other hand, are a perfect match. As Ive says in the product video, the new iPhone “dramatically blurs the boundary” between the hardware and the software. The phones even come pre-loaded with wallpaper matching the color of the device itself.
What it amounts to is the most harmonious marriage between Apple software and Apple hardware since the Bondi Blue iMac and the lickable baubles of OS X. And that’s totally by design–though it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Whereas before we had Jony Ive taking us to the moon and Scott Forstall taking us to the craps table, now Ive’s responsible for the user experience through and through. Apple’s always had a leg up on competitors thanks to the fact that they’ve made their hardware and software. The iPhone 5C is the first time in a while it’s actually looked like it.
This is the hallmark of the original MacIntosh. Built famously around XeroxPARC's GUI (graphical User Interface) with the novel WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get), it combined 'intutive' icons and their invoked actions, along with the 'amazing' ability to print just what you saw on screen.
It took Microsoft -- the leading SW company of its day, a mere six years to copy this, poorly. And in the process, eventually we've all come to expect such behavior from our machines.
As Vanhemert points out, until Jove 'got control' of the SW and HW 'integration' this was not happening in the iPhone world. Pity. Thank goodness it is now addressed
No comments:
Post a Comment