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The 140 character mishap: Nobody rejects bad design at Apple post Steve Jobs

The 140 character mishap: Nobody rejects bad design at Apple post Steve Jobs

By Gaurav Shukla | Updated: 5 June 2012 16:44 IST

Highlights

How a tweet from former Apple employee fuelled stories of the demise of company's design principles.

It all started on a quiet Friday night, when former Apple employee Michael Margolis tweeted that Steve Jobs didn't like the grid design, which was pushed out in the recent Apple TV update, leading to a huge buzz across blogosphere. According to him, now that Jobs was no longer at Cupertino, there is nobody to say no to the bad design.

There was suddenly a flood of stories from tech press talking about the demise of Apple's design principles in the post-Steve Jobs world and how a design that was thrown out by Jobs five years ago, was being used in the new Apple TV update by the UX team.

Another tweet from Margolis suggesting that there was only one designer in the consumer apps team, added fuel to the whole episode. On the other hand, the reports going around were far from reality and, as it turned out, all this was just a 140 character mishap.

Margolis, who had no idea that his tweets would turn out to be the source of biggest story of the day, woke up the next morning to hundreds of new Twitter followers and was surprised to see his tweets creating such furore. He then had to clarify his statements.

According to his comment on The Next Web and his statement to TechCrunch, it was true that Steve Jobs did not actually like the original grid based design but then it was all before iPhone's huge success and debut of iPad. Now that Apple was trying to unify the product UI design around iOS looks, it made sense to make new Apple TV UI to look like iPad. He also clarified that it wasn't odd for Jobs to throw out ideas at first and then like the tweaked or changed versions. Jobs even went to actively push or champion ideas he had once rejected.

He further stated that the whole episode around his other tweet that there is only one designer in consumer apps team, is also false and he just wanted to say that one designer from the consumer apps team was largely responsible for the Apple TV visual design, not Jonathan Ive.

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Further reading: apple, appletv, design, stevejobs

The 140 character mishap: Nobody rejects bad design at Apple post Steve Jobs

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