In what can solely be described as a puff-piece interview with British GQ, Apple design leads Evans Hankey and Kate Bergeron have mentioned the “courage” required to revamp the MacEbook Air.
With the corporate this week reportedly declining to resume its expensive consulting settlement with Sir Jony Ive, it was time for Hankey, who changed Ive because the chief of the economic design group in 2019, to tackle a extra outstanding position. If she might achieve this whereas fielding light questions concerning the new MacEbook Air, a lot the higher.
And GQ is the right foil for this PR train. No questions on gradual SSDs right here: as an alternative the positioning calls the replace “dramatic and delightful” and dutifully describes it as 1.13cm “thin,” utilizing Apple’s most popular terminology. When Ars Technica dares to criticise the four-hour battery lifetime of an earlier Air, GQ calls its evaluation “particularly sniffy.”
“For all of the redesigned Air’s focus on performance and stamina, perhaps the most important marker of its success is the sense of personality it has retained in its transformation,” the positioning gushes. And presumably Apple’s advertising and marketing marketing campaign has the momentum of a runaway freight train.
What will we study from all this? There are some semi-interesting titbits in there, should you sift by way of the fluff. Hankey and ({hardware} engineering VP) Bergeron do acknowledge that the unique Air and significantly the 12-inch MacEbook that adopted have been “polarising for a certain group of folks” due to their limitations. “If you go back,” admits Bergeron, “[the original Air] was world-changing in the sense of shape, but it wasn’t going to be the computer for everybody.” Needless to say, the corporate would love us to imagine that such compromises gained’t be needed on this 12 months’s Air, nevertheless it’s comparatively uncommon to listen to an Apple consultant admit that considered one of its merchandise had downsides.
Despite its limitations, the design group have been additionally conscious of the stakes when redesigning the best-selling Mac. “I think the Air requires a lot of courage, because it’s like, ‘What are you going to keep?’” Hankey says. Abandoning the enduring wedge form can have been a choice Apple didn’t take flippantly.
But essentially the most revealing component of the interview is its timing, and the way in which it reshapes the way in which we view Apple’s design work over the previous three years. “Having taken charge of Apple’s product design following Jony Ive’s departure from the company in 2019,” GQ explains, “Hankey has been responsible for the look and feel of all of its devices since – from the iPhone to the AirPods.”
That “all” is an explosive phrase to drop in so casually. It retrospectively helps the point of view, argued successfully by 9to5Mac yesterday, that Hankey has been working the present since 2019 and sure earlier than, and that retaining a hyperlink with Ive was solely ever a PR fiction supposed to reassure shareholders. The fiction, it could seem, is now over.
Source: www.macworld.com