Hysterical people seem to think that these people never leave the office. Turns out most of the modern apple devices you know were likely designed while Ive was working from his private studio.
I'd argue that this is actually better to have him working on non-apple projects, as it's going to give him a bit more breadth to his work. Which in turn could mean that we'll start seeing more interesting or experimental designs again, rather than just the old design minus a few millimetres.
When one thinks back to when Ive was relatively new to Apple and was still being influenced by a wider audience of products, we saw designs like the iPod, the G3 iMac and so on, these are designs which were inspired by other works (Early Braun, B&O, etc.). Living a design-life where he only lives and breathes apple actually blunts his skills.
Ive has helped bring some excellent products to Apple and still might bring more. This however brings an opportunity to Apple new blood and new ideas might bring the next big thing.
Cook really dropped the ball not having a succession plan in place. It’s nuts having this group now report to Williams. Nuts. Ive was there for 25 years and your telling us he did not groom a successor for arguably the most important function within Apple? This is a breakdown in corporate responsibility
Almost as bad as having the head of HR run Retail
Ive has evidently been checked out for years. Why did Cook not get better ahead of this?
How do you know Cook didn't have a succession plan? We are not privy to the inner workings at Apple. Jony Ive has been stating for years in public that he'd like to move back to the UK. As was said in the article "Apple as an institution probably knew when it promoted Ive to Chief Design Officer in 2015." After 30 years with the same company, I'd imagine there are other things that Apple doesn't make that he'd like to work on. This was not unexpected, and it's naïve to imagine that one of the most successful companies in the world does not have a succession plan. This was well known for quite a while within Apple, and they waited until the "right" time to publicly announce it. All the gloom and doom is unfounded.
When did Jony Ive ever say he wanted to move back to the UK? Do you have a quote from him?
> “He's forming his own design firm, and Tim Cook is very clear on how he'll be contributing to Apple going forward. ‘Apple will continue to benefit from Jony's talents by working directly with him on exclusive projects, and through the ongoing work of the brilliant and passionate design team he has built’”
2013: "Scott Forstall will be leaving Apple and will serve as an advisor to CEO Tim Cook in the interim.”
Do you think Scott got more than a birthday card from Cook since leaving the company?
I'm not saying there's bad blood, but this is just corporate-speak. Ive is out.
Except when Forstall left he barely got a mention by Cook and was not quoted in Apple’s press release at all. Ive was plus gave an interview to discuss it. Of course that doesn’t mean this isn’t just an exit strategy. But the announcement is very different to what happened with Forstall.
Well I would argue/speculate the difference is Forstall was fired, and Ives is just bored out of his mind and amicably departed.
Anyway I hope you're right. I'm an Ives fanboy; I know the iOS 7 thing was controversial, but ultimately it had to happen. iOS 6 (and Bondi Blue era Mac OS) were embarrassingly garish, this shit had to grow up. Keyboard reliability aside, I love modern Macbooks. Ives brought us the future, full stop.
If you’re an Ive fanboy, maybe you should learn to spell his name.
Also, there was next to nothing wrong with iOS 6’s visual design. My iPhone 4 still runs it because I refused to cripple and uglify it with iOS 7. Every time I use it, I see how beautiful it is compared to today’s ugly iOS. Low contrast UI elements, flat Corel Draw-style oversimplified clipart icons, and borderless text as buttons isn’t the future. It’s a massive detour from the beauty, intuitiveness, and readability that put Apple on top with iOS and iPhone. We have pocket-sized print-level resolution displays with fantastic color capabilities, and the current over-simplistic UI skin barely takes advantage of this.
By the way, that’s all it is: a skin. The only actual GUI change was the control center; everything else is the same UI elements, reskinned as harder to look at (and lacking any visual cues as to what the control is). Dark mode might help, marginally, but it too looks like a clumsy shift to mere tone/color opposites, not a mode made with curated design choices.
iOS 7 was all about Tufte’s concept of non-data ink. I’d bet every dollar I have that Ive is a student of Tufte.
I don’t know. What I know is that high resolution Retina display would require a lightweight interface in terms of processing. 3D effects, text shadows, natural textures were all beautiful, previous designers did nothing wrong. Meanwhile they had a price in the age of Retina displays and consequently they had to go away. Retina fits more data thanks to high resolution, why waste that very precious space for “skin”? And recall that that was Federighi who introduced the new interface, not Ive.
What? You spout a lot of rubbish sometimes. The iPhone 4 had a retina display, and was able to handle the Forstall UI just fine. In fact there's more translucency and 3D animations in the iOS7+ UI than there was in the skeuomorphic one. The UI was designed by Ive, who introduced it is irrelevant.
The UI was designed by Ive? No. I’m sure he gave some input and direction by it was the human interface team and software engineers that actually designed it. Whether it’s better or worse than iOS 6 style is mostly a matter of personal preference. I hated the faux leather, green felt, linen. I hated that app icon had this glossy look like someone threw a coat of varnish over them. For me the only thing that should be skeuomorphic is games. Of course iOS 7 went radically the other way and now Apple is starting to dial that back a bit. I still don’t think we’ll see iOS 6 style again.
> “He's forming his own design firm, and Tim Cook is very clear on how he'll be contributing to Apple going forward. ‘Apple will continue to benefit from Jony's talents by working directly with him on exclusive projects, and through the ongoing work of the brilliant and passionate design team he has built’”
2013: "Scott Forstall will be leaving Apple and will serve as an advisor to CEO Tim Cook in the interim.”
Do you think Scott got more than a birthday card from Cook since leaving the company?
I'm not saying there's bad blood, but this is just corporate-speak. Ive is out.
Except when Forstall left he barely got a mention by Cook and was not quoted in Apple’s press release at all. Ive was plus gave an interview to discuss it. Of course that doesn’t mean this isn’t just an exit strategy. But the announcement is very different to what happened with Forstall.
Well I would argue/speculate the difference is Forstall was fired, and Ives is just bored out of his mind and amicably departed.
Anyway I hope you're right. I'm an Ives fanboy; I know the iOS 7 thing was controversial, but ultimately it had to happen. iOS 6 (and Bondi Blue era Mac OS) were embarrassingly garish, this shit had to grow up. Keyboard reliability aside, I love modern Macbooks. Ives brought us the future, full stop.
If you’re an Ive fanboy, maybe you should learn to spell his name.
Also, there was next to nothing wrong with iOS 6’s visual design. My iPhone 4 still runs it because I refused to cripple and uglify it with iOS 7. Every time I use it, I see how beautiful it is compared to today’s ugly iOS. Low contrast UI elements, flat Corel Draw-style oversimplified clipart icons, and borderless text as buttons isn’t the future. It’s a massive detour from the beauty, intuitiveness, and readability that put Apple on top with iOS and iPhone. We have pocket-sized print-level resolution displays with fantastic color capabilities, and the current over-simplistic UI skin barely takes advantage of this.
By the way, that’s all it is: a skin. The only actual GUI change was the control center; everything else is the same UI elements, reskinned as harder to look at (and lacking any visual cues as to what the control is). Dark mode might help, marginally, but it too looks like a clumsy shift to mere tone/color opposites, not a mode made with curated design choices.
Pretty much every thing you wrote is subjective. In my opinion, because we now have these beautiful retina displays we don’t iOS and prior heavy design. Anyway Apple has slowly been dialing it back in the other direction. Almost to the point where I think some things are too bold now (like the player controls in the music app). But there are a lot of other changes in iOS 13 I really like. I definitely wouldn’t want to go back iOS 6 which looks so dated to me. Of course that’s just my personal preference.
I remember when Windows 8 came out. Some thought it was brilliant and the future of UI design; others hated it with a passion. Then Windows 10 came along and it looked more like Windows 7 (a flatter version) than Windows 8.
Actually a fair amount of the complaints I’ve made about the iOS 7 redesign over the years aren’t subjective but are actual design language issues. There’s no accounting for taste, but things like contrast, distinctiveness, and readability aren’t subjective. I won’t go into details about GUI design because people seem to think there’s no such thing as correct UI design and experts are labeled “arrogant know it alls”, and “Apple pays people to do this work, why do you think they wouldn’t have the best people possible who know more than you...” I’m not saying that’s what you’re going to say, it’s just what I see frequently and I’m tired of arguing with it.
Windows ... is Windows. Windows 8.1 didn’t bother me any more than any other Windows. I have always hated the design of Windows, except for Windows Vista, which was the one everyone hated and I thought was a minor improvement. The flat garbage Microsoft took on after that was ... meh. Linux picked up on it. And then Apple went there too (it boggles my mind that they copied the flat minimalist nonsense of two other operating systems instead of maintaining their own look). I don’t mind Windows 10 any more than the average Windows (I still hate it, but not more than average). But the thing about Windows’ flat minimalism is that it’s readable. Its new GUI (the modern part of the schizoid UI) is even duller and more full of whitespace than Apple’s iOS, but it’s more readable on average, even on a low resolution screen. The color choices and font sizes work better and they still seem to be willing to use at least outlines & shapes for buttons and other controls.
I have no problem admitting iOS 7 was basically like starting with a blank piece of paper and was probably rushed. Apple has been refining it ever since though bug fixes and new features usually take precedence over UI redesigns. To me iOS 13 is the biggest change on that front. And a welcome one.
Comments
I'd argue that this is actually better to have him working on non-apple projects, as it's going to give him a bit more breadth to his work. Which in turn could mean that we'll start seeing more interesting or experimental designs again, rather than just the old design minus a few millimetres.
When one thinks back to when Ive was relatively new to Apple and was still being influenced by a wider audience of products, we saw designs like the iPod, the G3 iMac and so on, these are designs which were inspired by other works (Early Braun, B&O, etc.). Living a design-life where he only lives and breathes apple actually blunts his skills.