[Detrus]

Dieter Rams as any other designer would do lots of iteration before coming up with a design to meet the 10 principles. At some point with hardware you have to settle on something for the long haul. Somehow people managed in that A/B testing free world.

And would users say that the constant UI rearrangements in modern apps are good design? Absolutely not. The UI paradigm of putting buttons in set places on screen doesn't jive with constantly changing their positions, because you memorize the UI by those positions. This is particularly annoying with rarely used features because every time you use them it's a totally different UI.

Depending on constant iteration is not good design. It is a crutch permitted you by software. You can still come up with long lasting solutions if you give them some thought.