[nostrademons]

I'm curious - where do you draw the line between a technological advance and a design advance?

Apple, for example, is usually held up as an example of awesome design. But behind Apple's design is some pretty impressive technology. Why is this different than Maps or GMail or Websearch? Is it solely due to reputation, because Apple hides many of the technical details of its products behind this cloud of secrecy, while Google is openly proud of having advanced technology?

[moopark]

Actually, (and as a former Apple engineer) I'd say Apple is barely acceptable with most technology but absolutely fantastic leveraging that technology to produce amazing product designs.

What Apple technology in specific do you think is so advanced?

[nostrademons]

My impression (as someone not an Apple engineer) is that much of the iPhone hardware is pretty impressive, their visual skin layer is awesome and does some truly impressive computer graphics to get high performance on battery-constrained devices, and a lot of the MacOS underlying tech is pretty solid.

I'm really quite curious as to where you put the dividing line - my impression (as a Google engineer who works frequently in UI) is that there're a lot of really subtle design decisions in both Search and Maps that are nothing more than HTML/CSS, but really improve the usability of the product.