“Even as eye candy has been added to the Mac interface, basic functionality critical to data integrity and reliable operation have been subtracted,” Robin Harris writes for ZDNet. “Is this Apple’s design chief Jony Ive’s fault?”
“I used to hang with industrial designers, and I appreciate the creativity and deep knowledge of industrial technology that the best of them have,” Harris writes. “But they aren’t software engineers.”
“In the last 10 years disk capacities have grown 100x and many users have 10s of thousands of multi-megabyte image, music and video files,” Harris writes. “For example, Mac OS X is still relying on the much-patched 1980s file system technology of HFS+ – something they planned to replace years ago.”
Harris writes, “Apple has plenty of money and expertise to fix these problems, but it will take sustained effort and attention from top management – including Mr. Ive – to fix these problems on the OS X and iOS. Mr. Ive is particularly important because he’s been given significant software responsibility by Tim Cook.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Jony Ive is providing leadership and direction for Human Interface (HI) across Apple Inc. in addition to his role as the leader of Industrial Design. Apple’s software engineers are responsible for the underlying technologies (file systems, etc.), not Mr. Ive.