We look into Apple’s dedication to minimalism
Apple is world famous for its dedication to minimalism and simplicity – but has it gone too far?
There are few things in life as divisive and polarising as an Apple product
There are few things in life as divisive and polarising as an Apple product. While many people laud the latest iGadgets as revolutionary must-haves that will change your life for good, there is an equal number who condemn them as overpriced walletgougers made to milk the ‘sheeple’ dry.
The focus of this consumer ire is often Apple’s near-obsession with minimalism. Every product refresh seems to see iPhones, MacBooks and more getting thinner and lighter (so much so that the Air range, once the definition of laptop lightness, now looks almost obsolete), and if that means ports and standards have to be ditched, or certain tech has to be foregone – well, so be it, says Apple. Got a peripheral device that uses a legacy connection? There’s an adaptor for that.
Minimalist tendency
Understanding why Apple is so trigger happy when it comes to abandoning connectivity and utility in the name of sleek style goes deeper than mere appearances. It’s at the core of the design philosophy of Jony Ive and, prior to his death, Steve Jobs as well.
Speaking to Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs’ official biographer, Ive put it this way: “Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity… You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.” In other words, simplicity is not just a simple process of throwing away various features in a product, but informs what the product itself is and means. That’s the level of dedication to simplicity among Apple’s designers that we’re talking about here.
For Isaacson himself, “The iPod, and later the iPhone and iPad, were triumphs of Jobs’ original insight in the early 1980s that design simplicity was best accomplished by tightly wedding hardware and software.” That meant that minimalism and simplicity were part of a larger quest to create something that the user could just pick up and intuitively use. That meant no tinkering with a Mac’s insides or licensing the OS to third-party vendors. Everything had to just work out of the box.
With that in mind, it becomes clearer not only why Apple makes products that are locked (both literally, as in the unibody designs, and figuratively, as in the ecosystem), but also why it drops extraneous standards and ports. If a port is no longer part of the company’s idea of design-based simplicity, then it has to go.
Port authority
That’s all well and good, but does this design principle lead Apple to go too far in its search for the perfect essence of minimalism?
A good place to start would be 2015’s
MacBook. It was perhaps the clearest example yet of Apple’s design philosophy in action. It was impossibly thin and light but, for some people at least, infuriatingly limited, coming as it did with only a single port for both peripherals and power (not including the headphone jack).
That was an issue for Wired writer Tim Moynihan, who wrote: “And while we’re accustomed to hermetically sealed, port-barren devices in our pockets and on our coffee tables, a laptop with plenty of connectivity options is part of what makes minimalism possible elsewhere.” The point being that minimalism on a dervice that only comes with one port means you have to carry around a heap of adaptors instead, somewhat undermining the lofty objective that the device’s minimalism was trying to achieve in the first place.
A similar issue was raised with the unveiling of the iPhone 7 sans headphone jack. Among all the outrage, the point was made that you couldn’t connect the iPhone 7 to the latest MacBook Pro without an adaptor, despite the products being announced less than two months apart. In its desire to cull what it deemed to be unnecessary ports from all of its devices, so the narrative went, Apple ended up making the user experience worse for its most dedicated users; that is, those who bought into the ecosystem and purchased more than one product, expecting them to work seamlessly together.
By this understanding, Apple’s penchant for minimalism has become a fetish and has indeed gone too far. But, we would argue, that’s not the whole story.
In ancient times…
When Phil Schiller got onto the stage at the iPhone 7 launch event to explain why Apple was dropping the headphone jack, he made one thing very clear: the port was outdated. It’s “ancient”, he said. It’s “over 100 years old” and has “been with us a really long time”. Its time, he insisted, had passed.
It was perhaps the clearest example of Apple’s design philosophy
But that wasn’t the most important reason for dropping the jack, he argued. Instead, it was this: “When you have a vision of how the audio experience can be, you want to get there as fast you can and make it as great as it can be.” Apple did indeed have a future vision, he explained, and that vision was deeply wedded to wireless audio.
In fact, Apple sees the future as being nearly entirely wireless. When you think about it, you see this vision playing out in a lot of other Apple products. Why drop the Ethernet port from MacBooks? Because you can connect over Wi-Fi instead. Why get rid of the DVD drive in iMacs? Because you can download and transfer files just as easily using the cloud.
A pragmatic approach
The same is true for the headphone jack. Apple believes that, in a few years’ time, everyone will be using wireless headphones, and that the jack will be viewed in the same way as FireWire and other legacy technology: as a relic of the past that we were wrong to cling on to. It is placing a bet on the future direction of the industry, and is confident enough to plough full steam ahead. And if that future happens to make Apple products a bit more minimalist, then that can only be a good thing in Apple’s eyes.
Yes, this is partly influenced by Apple’s love of simplicity. Why use a fiddly, tangleprone cable when you can simply connect your headphones wirelessly instead? But it’s just as much a decision borne out of pragmatism as it is out of inflexible, hardnosed principles.
Here’s another thing that Schiller said at the iPhone 7 launch: “Our smartphones are packed with technologies and we all want more. We want bigger, brighter displays. We want larger batteries, we want faster processors, we want stereo speakers, we want Taptic Engines, we want all of that and it’s all fighting for space within that same enclosure. And maintaining an ancient single purpose analogue, big connector doesn’t make sense because that space is at a premium.”
Apple had to drop the headphone jack in order to make space for everything else it wanted to do with the iPhone 7. Think about how thin Apple’s MacBooks are, and how svelte the all-in-one iMac is. To fit everything into such confined spaces requires incredible feats of engineering. To make beautiful Macs, Apple acts on both its design philosophy and its pragmatic need to save space. It’s both an art and a science.
Losing useful ports on your iDevices is undoubtedly an inconvenience, at least in the short term before we’ve all adapted to the new way of doing things. But this isn’t merely the result of an out-of-control minimalism bender
Apple is placing a bet on the future direction of the industry
from Apple. There are plenty of practical considerations too. In fact, there’s also a third reason on top of those two: timing.
Predicting the future
Apple has never been shy to drag people, kicking and screaming, into what it says is the future. Remember when it ditched the floppy drive, despite its widespread use? That was painful, but it didn’t matter to Steve Jobs, who insisted there was no need for the drive when you could just move files over the internet instead. Jobs saw which way the wind was blowing, and charged ahead in that direction.
Back then, technology was reaching a new paradigm where the internet was taking over many functions previously managed by physical media. The same is true when it comes to removing ports today. Right now, Apple feels that wireless technology is at a tipping point, and that now is the time to fully embrace it, at least in terms of wireless audio, on its mobile platform.
It’s unfortunate that removing a port has, at the very least, caused minor irritation for every iPhone owner around the world. But it’s likely that Apple felt it had to make the move sooner or later.
That’s true for other Apple devices too. Look at the new MacBook Pro, where the only data ports are Thunderbolt 3. Apple has always been bullish on Thunderbolt (it helped create it, after all), and it’s certainly incredibly powerful tech. Apple wants to ‘force’ it on the world and make it a success – that’s what motivated Apple to drop every other port on the MacBook. These aren’t cases of Apple’s minimalistic tendencies going into overdrive and nothing else; rather, Apple feels that it is moving into the future.
In terms of everything else – well, it’s a mix of those three things we mentioned earlier. Apple is undoubtedly spurred on by its craving for simplicity, and it’s possible that at times this has got the better of it. But that’s not its only concern; save-spacing practicalities and adopting new standards also play their part. Minimalism is important, but it’s not the only thing prompting Apple to do away with ports and cables.
“Apple’s message is clear: You don’t need all those cables,” says Moynihan. It believes that “It’s better to carry something that feels almost weightless, something elegant and slim and gold than have some pörtgåsbord weighing you down.”
Apple thinks it knows best. And it knows that internet and wireless technology will trump ports and cables. That’s the thing about closed ecosystems: you have to hope the manufacturer is right. And when it comes to predicting the future, Apple has a good track record.
Apple is undoubtedly spurred on by its craving for simplicity