This is before the influence of Steve Jobs who would have insisted on a 1:1 ratio can anyways and run up the manufacturing costs, raise consumer demand for them, and other manufacturers would be forced to copy suite.
Tesla is a chief offender at this. Automakers have known for decades that touch screens and center gauges are usability nightmares. But then Tesla made it cool and now everyone has to do it. Or the over-engineered nightmare that is the gull-wing doors.
> Steve Jobs’ mythologized demands were in service of the consumer, while shouldering the manufacturing burden inherent in them
I think a citation is needed for this - my opinion is that in most cases Apple's design choices focused on doing things differently, whether that was an upgrade, sidegrade or downgrade. They tried to make sure their design choices were positive but there are enough examples of Apple changing things for seemingly no reason because they weren't broken. And a lot of other manufacturers followed suit because Apple remains a trend setter and consumers then started to demand the feature. It's less like leading a horse to water and more like leading a horse to a craps table and then assuming that because the horse likes you they'll consider that playing craps in the middle of the desert is a natural state.
All that said, being different and being innovators was Apple's brand, so failing to deliver strange design decisions actually would fail to meet consumer expectations... the consumer didn't demand hockey puck mice, but they demanded something different from regular mice and delighted in the new shape (for a while, until the ergonomics of the mouse became clear - but for quite some time people really celebrated those mice, at least where I grew up)
In >my< opinion, it sounds kinda like you didn't read the Letter from the Carnation Company, or at least didn't quite grasp the point prior to rushing out your simplistic take and weird analogy about horses.
Apple has surely never engaged in change-for-change's-sake as you are asserting. If you step back and consider all the factors in the changes they make - developing high quality materials, reducing size and weight, optimizing yields, durability, integration of technical advances like bus speeds, resolution and energy density, thermal characteristics... on and on, there are probably a thousands more factors that inform the changes they make to any given product.
Not whatever hand-wavey dismissal you are asserting here. Sometimes their industrial design misses the mark, such as with the hockey puck mouse, or the charge port on the current mouse, but these are fairly rare when contrasted against the full spectrum of their ever evolving products.
And that's the whole point of that letter from Carnation. There is a lot more going on behind the scenes that drive these engineering decisions. Simply writing them off with a simple take totally misses the mark.
Or "Maybe you're holding it wrong"? Or firing the antenna guy after?
Or trying to eliminate cursor arrow keys so users would have to always use the mouse?
The mouse charge port that makes it unusable while charging is far from an isolated example. Apple changing something to actually benefit the customer at the expense of Apple is almost unheard of.
He was quite often, wrong. People seem to forget that. I’ve never counted, but I’ll bet he had more failures, than successes; It’s just that his successes were big successes.
He had absolute power, so he was able to create fairly “pure” renditions of his vision; for good or ill.
For a company coming out of serious trouble in the 90's, it seems like it was a good idea even if it was a bad ergonomic design. How many other computer mice do you talk about for a quarter of a century?
That mouse was an indelible part of the feeling of "this is new and fun" that Steve and Jonny were trying to create with the original iMac.
Of course they could have used a different shape from a hockey puck. The most important thing was that the mouse be new and fun-looking, to match the novel case design.
The iMac's design was important because it declared that Apple was on a new trajectory (no more boring beige boxes), and thus promised more new and wonderful things were on the way.
Has anyone actually copied the gull-wing doors? I think they are super cool and would buy a Model X specifically because it has those doors.
Same with the touch screen, I do think old-school buttons are pretty good but they were already on their way out before Tesla showed up. With a few exceptions, most car companies had already started pushing more and more things into a shitty touch-screen interface well before Tesla's implementation. I'd say that Tesla's implementation is significantly higher quality than any competitors by a long shot.
I guess I don't have any evidence here, but that chronology seems way, way, way off to me. I remember cars having awful touch screen UIs long before Tesla got off the ground.
Tesla is a chief offender at this. Automakers have known for decades that touch screens and center gauges are usability nightmares. But then Tesla made it cool and now everyone has to do it. Or the over-engineered nightmare that is the gull-wing doors.