Jony's ideas about design caused apple to ship the non-functional butterfly keyboards for FOUR YEARS [1], as well as reducing the functionality of laptops by removing most ports and adaptors.
Now that he is gone, we have functional keyboards and ports again.
Designers will tell you that design is not only how something looks, but how it works. Where is the disconnect with the Jony Ive era of Mac hardware? He's a renown master of design, why doesn't it make sense!?
[1] Butterfly keys were offered in Macs between 2015 and 2019 https://www.macrumors.com/guide/butterfly-keyboard-issues/
The design iterations over generations are now fairly static and that's a good thing - because Apple high end bulk customers are mostly developers, not the eccentric designer or the lone musician. It matters to keep thousands of your $2000-wielding developers happy than a handful of $50,000 carrying artists who are finicky about post-modernistic aesthetics. The kinds Jonny Ive felt a natural kinship with. His design ethos were good to make a splash from the moribund vanilla boxes in early 2000s. But keep making those splashes (without Steve Jobs to rein in with criticism & engineering team getting second-classed), you got serious product troubles.
Thinkpads come to mind when I think about MacBooks lineage. Well maintained product line which has kept their hardware UX fairly unchanged - the net result being they are an extremely dependable product in corporate environment.
Edit: I remember talking to a designer who once worked at Apple. I am told Jonny Ive even seriously floated the idea of a smooth slab iPhone/iPad devoid of any power buttons, charging slot or rockers - only featuring touch sensitive edges & speaker grille. Glad engineering team didn't take up on it. Would have been a recovery & update disaster.
