It's a balance between form and function, not prioritizing one over the other.

It seems that Apple finally understood that prioritizing function over form isn't always the best idea to create products that just work.

The best products, the ones that just work, and look great, are the ones on which the designers understood how to balance the form and the function to make the product that works great and looks awesome. Putting to much emphasis on either the form, or the function, is the recipe for creating the kind of products that will fail big time.

If you put to much attention to form, you'll get a product that won't work at least at well as people needs it to work. At wort, you'll get something completely unusable, since many of the items that need to be there for the product to work as the user needs it to won't be there.

On the other hand, if you go only by function you'll get products people won't use because they are uncomfortable to use, there is no easy way to figure out how to use it, or simple people won't pick it up simple because they don't like it. In some occasions is a combination of those three things.

This is why striking the right balance of form and functions is something that must be considered a priority when designing any product. People don't buy things based just on form or function, but on how these two are balanced. Though there are exceptions, the vast majority of the thing we use on daily basis strike the right balance of form and function we seek. We use things because they look how we like them to look, and also work in a way that gives us the results we are looking for.

In a way, we get those things that appeal to our sense of taste while they do the things in a way we expect them to work. The products we love, are those that do what they say they will while looking good doing so.

While some people may say they prefer form over function, or the other way around, the truth is that people ends up using what strikes the right balance of the two. It must be said that form is not just making things look pretty, but make them so people use them easily, and comfortably, for the intended purpose of each product.

As with everything else in life, form and function need to live in balance to achieve the best possible product.