Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Boston just got past the Patriots’ Day holiday (which, to my genuine surprise, has nothing to do with football). This day, the third Monday of April, is also the day on which the Boston Marathon is run, and as luck would have it, the weather was gorgeous. Needless to say, I had better things to do than stare at a computer screen. So I missed the whole thing about the prototype iPhone 4G that was found in a bar, sold to Gizmodo, and posted to the internet. You can imagine my surprise on Tuesday morning when, checking my usual sites, it became clear that the entire internet had exploded. This is the tech industry’s Eyjafjallajokull. The fallout from the accidental leak is massive, and all other traffic is grounded.

And obviously, shards of volcanic glass have landed in Farhad Manjoo’s brain. How else do you explain this?

I mean really, Farhad. Apple, the most secretive consumer electronics company in the world, loses a prototype of the next iPhone and you choose to write about the buttons? Gizmodo pays thousands of dollars to gain possession of the device, likely giving Apple grounds for a major lawsuit, and you’re talking about the angular, ceramic backing? There’s tons of meat here—trade secrets, shady journalism, possible corporate espionage—and you’re bent over your keyboard going clickity-clickity-clak because you think Apple has hit the industrial design ceiling? This might be forgivable if you didn’t demonstrate an almost willful ignorance of everything that Apple does well. I mean really, Farhad.

Let’s begin:

The first iPhone was a breakthrough because it replaced nearly every physical button with a touch-screen. It didn’t conform to any standard notion of what a phone should look like…

Alright, we’re off to a good start.

…which, of course, is a hallmark of thrilling design. Since then, though, the iPhone’s looks haven’t thrilled. Apple has put out three models since 2007—the original, the 3G, and last year’s 3GS—and each one has looked nearly identical to the last.

Whoops.

One of the most useful lessons I ever learned about writing is that you have to be careful with phrases like “obviously” and “of course.” If it’s obvious, if it’s an “of course” moment, then why are you bothering to point it out? In this case, Manjoo is using “of course” to pull a mind trick on the reader, making it appear as though one of the rules of thrilling design is, as you should of course know, that the design in question should subvert expectation. Nothing could be further from the truth. No one ever said it better than Dieter Rams: “Good design makes a product understandable. Good design is unobtrusive. Good design is honest.” I don’t think any good designer would argue that good design is subversive, tricky, or unexpected. Unexpected in the sense of presenting an unusually elegant solution to a problem, maybe, but not in the sense of being shocking. More to the point, when Manjoo says that “the iPhone’s looks haven’t thrilled,” he’s not talking about design. He’s talking about decoration.

Perplexingly, Manjoo goes on to admit that the existing design is as good as it could be under the iPhone’s physical constraints. Then:

Apple can mess around with the phone’s edges and its back, and it can alter the device’s thickness or weight. These are exactly the kinds of small changes we see in Gizmodo’s pictures.

Okay, but what makes him so sure that this is the final hardware for the new iPhone? This is a prototype, probably made for testing certain features out in the wild. If it were me and I wanted to test a half-functioning prototype, I wouldn’t waste time and money milling out a custom aluminium unibody for it. I’d stick the important hardware in a simpler, cheaper shell. The ceramic backing is intriguing, but the seams don’t make sense. Apple has spent years of manpower and untold sums of money to make the screws, junctions, and seams of its devices vanish. I agree that the prototype has a delightfully Rams-esque look to it, but I think that’s just a happy accident. Nay, it is Apple; they know not seams. But to return to the matter at hand:

Gadgets, of course, aren’t all about looks, and the new iPhone’s same-ish exterior doesn’t tell us much about the gadget’s interior.

Well, maybe there’s hope for this guy yet.

The irony of the iPhone is that by making a device that’s essentially just a screen, Apple has leveled the design playing field. The iPhone’s most dominant design feature, its screen, can be replicated by every one of its rivals.

Damn. I spoke too soon. The iPhone’s capacitive touch-screen defines the state of the art, and in fact, it’s not so easy to replicate. Again, Manjoo is talking about the appearance of the phone, the decorative aspect of that plain, shiny glass. Far from leveling the playing field, the iPhone’s superb touch-screen shows that Apple drives the pinnacle of industrial design, while everyone else is playing catch-up.

Manjoo closes out his article by paying lip service to iPhone OS, as if Apple’s meticulously crafted interaction metaphors don’t count as design. Let me tell you, front-facing cameras don’t do much to excite me, but Slide Screen is the one piece of software that makes me jealous of Android users.

In critiquing Manjoo’s article as inane drivel, I realize that I myself have created inane drivel. Meta-drivel, if you will. But at least I don’t have the gall to ask people to pay me for it.