Jony was out for a long time. To be provocative: When was the last time Apple made some big mistake that's largely due to design and product thinness. The 2016 Macbook. That design was probably fixed a year before (2015), since then Ive is (mentally) elsewhere.
Since then Apple stopped risking things in product design. Which I think is bad. If you don't risk you no longer impress. That's what happened at Apple. They no longer push the envelope further. The latest (totally boring looking) Air is proof of that. I think that is sad and will damage Apple in the long term bigger than any design flaw did in the past.
Yes we probably won't see another 'innovation' like the butterfly keyboard. But we probably won't see innovation, like the Unibody Laptop designs, flat panel all in one computer (started by Spartacus) etc either. New innovations will probably come from the bean counters: 'Let's make it cheaper to manufacture, looks are not important'. I would rather like to see Apple fail once in a while to over-design, than to bore people to death with 'things as usual'.
Tim knows that himself: While Steve always lead up to the new designs and generated excitement in his keynotes. Tim shows the 'product' up front and continues with lot's of techno bubble and costs. While Steve concentrated on 'how this will imrpove your live', Tim concentrates on lists and numbers.
The company will execute well based on the momentum generated by Jony and Steve (at that time Apple was always ahead of the curve), but no momentum has come after that. So enjoy it while it lasts.
Well said. I’ve took risks because that’s what it takes to lead. This is especially true in such a cutthroat industry. And in an era of throwaway design, Ive’s designs are enduring. Says so much on its own.
Take the “failure of the 2016 MBP. WHAT WAS THE FAILURE? THe thin design? Actually, that was what everyone raved about. Even today, many say it looks better compared to the newest MBPs (which themselves are a copy of older Ive designs).
The Touch Bar? Great idea, but Craig’s software team did nothing with it - the blame rests with Craig, not Jony. The ports? Boardroom decision. They all wanted that sleek notebook. So a bold decision was made to revolutionize the ports with a single standard - every port did everything! Paradigm shift - set to take over the entire industry - except the got cold feet and kept the status quo on all other products.
You can fault Tim for both signing off on the ports as well as being afraid to go all in - either way. He’s not a risk taker or a maverick. He’s a top supply chain guy. The keyboard - amazing idea and ballsy move. But the hardware team couldn’t get it right. That’s not on Jony. And it may just never work fundamentally.
But Ive isn’t the engineer who brought the concept to life. That blame goes on the hardware team. Sure, jony was pushing everyone to make things that fit into Apples vision of the sleekest and coolest looking computers around, but that’s a good thing.
And the fact that he pushed to leave no stone unturned is also a good thing. The fact that the board got cold feet on ports or that the hardware team couldn’t deliver on keyboard durability is not on Jony Ive. Some due diligence testing was obviously not done on the keyboard. The touchbar was left to languish by Federighi. And the ports were left that way for half a decade. And really out of those three, the only actual failure was the keyboard.
Performance is another issue as the laptops ran hot - but that’s due to intel failing to produce what they promised to apple who’d already designed around the expectation.
So what some bloggers like to point to as Ive’s big failure was a stream of missteps by Apple as a whole and a third party that was so bad that apple is making its own chips now.
Ive is an industrial designer who ensures that form follows function. It’s always been this way.
So let’s get this straight:
you want to crucify the guy who brought Apple back from the dead with:
the iMac (and related computers and accessories following that theme)
iPod
iphone
ipad
Titanium/aluminum notebooks
earbuds/airpods
the magic/mighty mouse
The freaking Apple Park headquarters
And so much more
and you want to shut him down because one product had a problem…
hopefully none of you are ever in a position to hire/fire mission critical talent.
Jobs was Apples heart. Ive it’s soul. And now it’s going to take some kind of miracle to capture that moving forward.
His early stuff wasn't awful. Everything he's touched for the last 15+ years has been.
It's like he forgot that people buy products in order to use them, not just for looking at them. A good designer needs to blend both. Looking good while being fully functional
Definitely true. Yes, the stuff is beautiful, but functionality suffered.
MacBooks so beautiful and thin that a rogue staple can cause $800 in damage.
Removing color to differentiate different things. Removing obvious buttons with subtle text in obscure locations, making icons small and obscure without indication, removing scroll bars to indicate additional content, etc, etc. So many poor decisions that made things look prettier but harder to actually use. It sucks that there isn't an alternative option available.
iOS 7 and subsequent releases are trash from a UI stance. Bring back Scott Forstall.
Lol. I like the ios7+ experience far more than the Forstall approach. The Forstall approach was ok in the 200x years.
So does most of the world. Thats why the ios7 design stuck with some minor changes along the way.
At the time ios7 came out, the world was sick of the skeuomorphic look of the old is and thought it was outdated. People were even calling Android the superior UI and UX.
IOS7 came out snd that all changed. iPhone was back at the top in a big way.
It’s a more authentic and clean design snd makes lots of sense.
people who complain about flat design or a streamlined os are Luddite’s who can’t let go of the distant past.
Jony was out for a long time. To be provocative: When was the last time Apple made some big mistake that's largely due to design and product thinness. The 2016 Macbook. That design was probably fixed a year before (2015), since then Ive is (mentally) elsewhere.
Since then Apple stopped risking things in product design. Which I think is bad. If you don't risk you no longer impress. That's what happened at Apple. They no longer push the envelope further. The latest (totally boring looking) Air is proof of that. I think that is sad and will damage Apple in the long term bigger than any design flaw did in the past.
Yes we probably won't see another 'innovation' like the butterfly keyboard. But we probably won't see innovation, like the Unibody Laptop designs, flat panel all in one computer (started by Spartacus) etc either. New innovations will probably come from the bean counters: 'Let's make it cheaper to manufacture, looks are not important'. I would rather like to see Apple fail once in a while to over-design, than to bore people to death with 'things as usual'.
Tim knows that himself: While Steve always lead up to the new designs and generated excitement in his keynotes. Tim shows the 'product' up front and continues with lot's of techno bubble and costs. While Steve concentrated on 'how this will imrpove your live', Tim concentrates on lists and numbers.
The company will execute well based on the momentum generated by Jony and Steve (at that time Apple was always ahead of the curve), but no momentum has come after that. So enjoy it while it lasts.
Jobs was Apples heart. Ive it’s soul. And now it’s going to take some kind of miracle to capture that moving forward.
But a free-floating soul not anchored to a heart is of little use. A lot of people talk about how Jobs saved Apple and that's incorrect Jobs and Ive did. Remember Jobs had just come from a really unsuccessful run with NEXT. A great OS but the computers were what you would expect of an engineer with no eye for design. That's why NEXT never caught on. Jobs was as lost without Ive to make his things pretty, as Ive was without Jobs to make them functional.
Time will tell... The bondy iMac, the Mac Cube, the dustbin Mac Pro and the all-in-one iMacs were iconic.
The Mac Studio (i.e. a form factor Apple designed on their own)? Could it be any more boring? Did the guy who designed the chip also design the box?? On a particularly uninspired day?
Jony Ive's designs will be benchmarks for many designers - even in the future, and will be shown in museums. They may not have been super practical (yes, I know - most of the iconic designs mentioned above).
I speak from my own experience, of course - I "just wanted" Apple's products that were designed by Jony Ive, which helped me over the pain of the high price. Current product designs? I'll only look at specs and the price-performance ratio. There will not by any emotion when I choose a new Apple product. My fridge is cooler (pardon the pun).
I'll replace my current iMac when I HAVE to, not when I WANT to...
Jony was out for a long time. To be provocative: When was the last time Apple made some big mistake that's largely due to design and product thinness. The 2016 Macbook. That design was probably fixed a year before (2015), since then Ive is (mentally) elsewhere.
Since then Apple stopped risking things in product design. Which I think is bad. If you don't risk you no longer impress. That's what happened at Apple. They no longer push the envelope further. The latest (totally boring looking) Air is proof of that. I think that is sad and will damage Apple in the long term bigger than any design flaw did in the past.
Yes we probably won't see another 'innovation' like the butterfly keyboard. But we probably won't see innovation, like the Unibody Laptop designs, flat panel all in one computer (started by Spartacus) etc either. New innovations will probably come from the bean counters: 'Let's make it cheaper to manufacture, looks are not important'. I would rather like to see Apple fail once in a while to over-design, than to bore people to death with 'things as usual'.
Tim knows that himself: While Steve always lead up to the new designs and generated excitement in his keynotes. Tim shows the 'product' up front and continues with lot's of techno bubble and costs. While Steve concentrated on 'how this will imrpove your live', Tim concentrates on lists and numbers.
The company will execute well based on the momentum generated by Jony and Steve (at that time Apple was always ahead of the curve), but no momentum has come after that. So enjoy it while it lasts.
Jobs was Apples heart. Ive it’s soul. And now it’s going to take some kind of miracle to capture that moving forward.
But a free-floating soul not anchored to a heart is of little use. A lot of people talk about how Jobs saved Apple and that's incorrect Jobs and Ive did. Remember Jobs had just come from a really unsuccessful run with NEXT. A great OS but the computers were what you would expect of an engineer with no eye for design. That's why NEXT never caught on. Jobs was as lost without Ive to make his things pretty, as Ive was without Jobs to make them functional.
Except it wasn’t. Ive kept getting better and apple benefitted. Ive knows apple better than anyone Alice’s and cares more than anyone alive. But when you’re strapped to people who make a point of poo pooing that care in order to shave some Pennies or to thwart your long established workflow for the sake of their idea of what’s better , it gets frustrating.
Ive innovated, solved problems and made things that people couldn’t have imagined they needed and wanted. He changed the world multiple times really.
An apple that is run by committee, designs by committee, and is afraid of risks is not going to have that same innovative flavor.
The apple car and next gen CarPlay will be the last touches from Ive most likely. After that, good luck.
Jony was out for a long time. To be provocative: When was the last time Apple made some big mistake that's largely due to design and product thinness. The 2016 Macbook. That design was probably fixed a year before (2015), since then Ive is (mentally) elsewhere.
Since then Apple stopped risking things in product design. Which I think is bad. If you don't risk you no longer impress. That's what happened at Apple. They no longer push the envelope further. The latest (totally boring looking) Air is proof of that. I think that is sad and will damage Apple in the long term bigger than any design flaw did in the past.
Yes we probably won't see another 'innovation' like the butterfly keyboard. But we probably won't see innovation, like the Unibody Laptop designs, flat panel all in one computer (started by Spartacus) etc either. New innovations will probably come from the bean counters: 'Let's make it cheaper to manufacture, looks are not important'. I would rather like to see Apple fail once in a while to over-design, than to bore people to death with 'things as usual'.
Tim knows that himself: While Steve always lead up to the new designs and generated excitement in his keynotes. Tim shows the 'product' up front and continues with lot's of techno bubble and costs. While Steve concentrated on 'how this will imrpove your live', Tim concentrates on lists and numbers.
The company will execute well based on the momentum generated by Jony and Steve (at that time Apple was always ahead of the curve), but no momentum has come after that. So enjoy it while it lasts.
Jobs was Apples heart. Ive it’s soul. And now it’s going to take some kind of miracle to capture that moving forward.
But a free-floating soul not anchored to a heart is of little use. A lot of people talk about how Jobs saved Apple and that's incorrect Jobs and Ive did. Remember Jobs had just come from a really unsuccessful run with NEXT. A great OS but the computers were what you would expect of an engineer with no eye for design. That's why NEXT never caught on. Jobs was as lost without Ive to make his things pretty, as Ive was without Jobs to make them functional.
His early stuff wasn't awful. Everything he's touched for the last 15+ years has been.
Yeah... all that junk he touched that resulted in the fastest and highest AAPL. Right? All those countless Apple customers for the past 15+ years buying all those products when they shouldn't have.
Keep doing your revisionist stuff. Maybe someday someone will believe you.
I think you’re missing the point of his post. Jony was clearly a talented designer. However, he’s an example of what happens when the designer has too much authority and is not kept in check.
The fundamental design of many of his products are great. However, there are countless examples where he let function follow form. He had an obsession with symmetry for example which led to the removal of important ports. Thankfully, some of this has been reversed in recent products. Then, there was the butterfly keyboard with his obsession for thinness, etc. Seriously, Jony deserves equal amounts of praise and criticism. If you can’t objectively see his obvious faults then you’re not being honest with yourself.
It's hard to assess Jony's contributions over the past 3 years without knowing which products reflect his design input and to what degree. We can guess, but can't know for sure.
It’s hard to say for certain, but from accounts I’ve read, the deal he had from Apple was mostly to prevent him from working on competing products. I’m sure to some degree pretending to still be “consulting” with Apple was mostly for show so as to not show concern from the financial analysts. I suspect he’s been done with Apple for a few years now.
Jony was out for a long time. To be provocative: When was the last time Apple made some big mistake that's largely due to design and product thinness. The 2016 Macbook. That design was probably fixed a year before (2015), since then Ive is (mentally) elsewhere.
Since then Apple stopped risking things in product design. Which I think is bad. If you don't risk you no longer impress. That's what happened at Apple. They no longer push the envelope further. The latest (totally boring looking) Air is proof of that. I think that is sad and will damage Apple in the long term bigger than any design flaw did in the past.
Yes we probably won't see another 'innovation' like the butterfly keyboard. But we probably won't see innovation, like the Unibody Laptop designs, flat panel all in one computer (started by Spartacus) etc either. New innovations will probably come from the bean counters: 'Let's make it cheaper to manufacture, looks are not important'. I would rather like to see Apple fail once in a while to over-design, than to bore people to death with 'things as usual'.
Tim knows that himself: While Steve always lead up to the new designs and generated excitement in his keynotes. Tim shows the 'product' up front and continues with lot's of techno bubble and costs. While Steve concentrated on 'how this will imrpove your live', Tim concentrates on lists and numbers.
The company will execute well based on the momentum generated by Jony and Steve (at that time Apple was always ahead of the curve), but no momentum has come after that. So enjoy it while it lasts.
Jobs was Apples heart. Ive it’s soul. And now it’s going to take some kind of miracle to capture that moving forward.
But a free-floating soul not anchored to a heart is of little use.
Don't be tied to other people's dumb analogies in making your point, you'll just end up making your point in a dumb way too.
I mean who doesn't just love Jony Ive designs...He's done a few good things, but a lot of his designs were form over function instead of the other way around. His obsessiveness with making products thin with no I/O were just horrible designs and really limited Apple and its customers. Yes, they sold but Apple got a lot of flack for it and their marketing department was working overtime and then some to sell these bad designs.
I wish the UX would be more clear and intuitive and he literally made the iOS 7 difficult. There's so much cognitive burden. It's too flat. It's difficult to intuitively discover.
But I see the refinements over time and every iteration, the cognitive burden becomes lighter and lighter.
And yet the Geeks at the time on this website celebrated the flat design on this site.
Without Insanely Great design, Apple loses its iconic status and slides into the field of mediocrity. No one with an eye for design would have released the Mac Studio nor eliminated the wedge of the MacBook Air. The wedge is expensive, requiring multiple stacked li-ion cells, but practical because you intuitively know which way round it is when closed and of course the slight slope aids typing efficiency. The M2 MBA typifies Apple's current direction of travel - a few incremental spec upgrades to satisfy focus groups but throwing away priceless design innovations. Ive was Apple's last link to its golden era.
Not sure what your issue with the Studio is. You wanted no ports on the front? But, I completely agree on the Air. That wedge shape is pretty special.
The Mac Studio should have been a Mac Mini. The M1 Ultra config should have been carried forward to the new Mac Pro and the M1 Max didn't need the OTT cooling, i.e. fitted in the Mac Mini body. To me this was a glaring error on several levels. Finally, the Studio is very expensive and not even beautiful.
I have the Mac Studio and love it. But I can't disagree that if Jobs were around, it would have had a far more iconic exterior design. Something special about Apple has been lost.
Jony was out for a long time. To be provocative: When was the last time Apple made some big mistake that's largely due to design and product thinness. The 2016 Macbook. That design was probably fixed a year before (2015), since then Ive is (mentally) elsewhere.
Since then Apple stopped risking things in product design. Which I think is bad. If you don't risk you no longer impress. That's what happened at Apple. They no longer push the envelope further. The latest (totally boring looking) Air is proof of that. I think that is sad and will damage Apple in the long term bigger than any design flaw did in the past.
Yes we probably won't see another 'innovation' like the butterfly keyboard. But we probably won't see innovation, like the Unibody Laptop designs, flat panel all in one computer (started by Spartacus) etc either. New innovations will probably come from the bean counters: 'Let's make it cheaper to manufacture, looks are not important'. I would rather like to see Apple fail once in a while to over-design, than to bore people to death with 'things as usual'.
Tim knows that himself: While Steve always lead up to the new designs and generated excitement in his keynotes. Tim shows the 'product' up front and continues with lot's of techno bubble and costs. While Steve concentrated on 'how this will imrpove your live', Tim concentrates on lists and numbers.
The company will execute well based on the momentum generated by Jony and Steve (at that time Apple was always ahead of the curve), but no momentum has come after that. So enjoy it while it lasts.
Jobs was Apples heart. Ive it’s soul. And now it’s going to take some kind of miracle to capture that moving forward.
But a free-floating soul not anchored to a heart is of little use. A lot of people talk about how Jobs saved Apple and that's incorrect Jobs and Ive did. Remember Jobs had just come from a really unsuccessful run with NEXT. A great OS but the computers were what you would expect of an engineer with no eye for design. That's why NEXT never caught on. Jobs was as lost without Ive to make his things pretty, as Ive was without Jobs to make them functional.
Except it wasn’t. Ive kept getting better and apple benefitted. Ive knows apple better than anyone Alice’s and cares more than anyone alive. But when you’re strapped to people who make a point of poo pooing that care in order to shave some Pennies or to thwart your long established workflow for the sake of their idea of what’s better , it gets frustrating.
Ive innovated, solved problems and made things that people couldn’t have imagined they needed and wanted. He changed the world multiple times really.
An apple that is run by committee, designs by committee, and is afraid of risks is not going to have that same innovative flavor.
The apple car and next gen CarPlay will be the last touches from Ive most likely. After that, good luck.
Can't help but agree. Running the company by committee, designing by committee will cost Apple in the long term.
The whole Apple Car thing is a disturbing sign. Project Titan came to light in 2014 and here we are eight year later with nothing to show for it except a larger CarPlay dash. How many reorgs and restarts has project Titan (or whatever it's called now) gone through? As the CEO that failure to deliver is 100% on Tim Cook. Tim needs to sh*t or get off the pot.
... Pro customers can't adjust internal storage or ram for need let alone take advantage of imminent GPU/CPU options on a $4k 'pro' studio mac... Is it time for an efficacy reality check...?
Jony was out for a long time. To be provocative: When was the last time Apple made some big mistake that's largely due to design and product thinness. The 2016 Macbook. That design was probably fixed a year before (2015), since then Ive is (mentally) elsewhere.
Since then Apple stopped risking things in product design. Which I think is bad. If you don't risk you no longer impress. That's what happened at Apple. They no longer push the envelope further. The latest (totally boring looking) Air is proof of that. I think that is sad and will damage Apple in the long term bigger than any design flaw did in the past.
Yes we probably won't see another 'innovation' like the butterfly keyboard. But we probably won't see innovation, like the Unibody Laptop designs, flat panel all in one computer (started by Spartacus) etc either. New innovations will probably come from the bean counters: 'Let's make it cheaper to manufacture, looks are not important'. I would rather like to see Apple fail once in a while to over-design, than to bore people to death with 'things as usual'.
Tim knows that himself: While Steve always lead up to the new designs and generated excitement in his keynotes. Tim shows the 'product' up front and continues with lot's of techno bubble and costs. While Steve concentrated on 'how this will imrpove your live', Tim concentrates on lists and numbers.
The company will execute well based on the momentum generated by Jony and Steve (at that time Apple was always ahead of the curve), but no momentum has come after that. So enjoy it while it lasts.
Well said. I’ve took risks because that’s what it takes to lead. This is especially true in such a cutthroat industry. And in an era of throwaway design, Ive’s designs are enduring. Says so much on its own.
Take the “failure of the 2016 MBP. WHAT WAS THE FAILURE? THe thin design? Actually, that was what everyone raved about. Even today, many say it looks better compared to the newest MBPs (which themselves are a copy of older Ive designs).
The Touch Bar? Great idea, but Craig’s software team did nothing with it - the blame rests with Craig, not Jony. The ports? Boardroom decision. They all wanted that sleek notebook. So a bold decision was made to revolutionize the ports with a single standard - every port did everything! Paradigm shift - set to take over the entire industry - except the got cold feet and kept the status quo on all other products.
You can fault Tim for both signing off on the ports as well as being afraid to go all in - either way. He’s not a risk taker or a maverick. He’s a top supply chain guy. The keyboard - amazing idea and ballsy move. But the hardware team couldn’t get it right. That’s not on Jony. And it may just never work fundamentally.
But Ive isn’t the engineer who brought the concept to life. That blame goes on the hardware team. Sure, jony was pushing everyone to make things that fit into Apples vision of the sleekest and coolest looking computers around, but that’s a good thing.
And the fact that he pushed to leave no stone unturned is also a good thing. The fact that the board got cold feet on ports or that the hardware team couldn’t deliver on keyboard durability is not on Jony Ive. Some due diligence testing was obviously not done on the keyboard. The touchbar was left to languish by Federighi. And the ports were left that way for half a decade. And really out of those three, the only actual failure was the keyboard.
Performance is another issue as the laptops ran hot - but that’s due to intel failing to produce what they promised to apple who’d already designed around the expectation.
So what some bloggers like to point to as Ive’s big failure was a stream of missteps by Apple as a whole and a third party that was so bad that apple is making its own chips now.
Ive is an industrial designer who ensures that form follows function. It’s always been this way.
So let’s get this straight:
you want to crucify the guy who brought Apple back from the dead with:
the iMac (and related computers and accessories following that theme)
iPod
iphone
ipad
Titanium/aluminum notebooks
earbuds/airpods
the magic/mighty mouse
The freaking Apple Park headquarters
And so much more
and you want to shut him down because one product had a problem…
hopefully none of you are ever in a position to hire/fire mission critical talent.
Jobs was Apples heart. Ive it’s soul. And now it’s going to take some kind of miracle to capture that moving forward.
Giving 3 billion dollars to the NFL will do the trick…..
Hint Ive is an innovator and this is why he left Apple. Tim Cook is a different CEO with a different way of doing things that didn’t Jive with Jony. We owe Jony so much as he’s absolutely an incredible designer and was responsible for many of Apples great successes. Without him, Apple would not have been as successful. I though am thankful to have more ports on the 14’ MacBook Pro 😊
Comments
you want to crucify the guy who brought Apple back from the dead with:
the iMac (and related computers and accessories following that theme)
iPod
iphone
ipad
Titanium/aluminum notebooks
earbuds/airpods
the magic/mighty mouse
The freaking Apple Park headquarters
And so much more
and you want to shut him down because one product had a problem…
hopefully none of you are ever in a position to hire/fire mission critical talent.
IOS7 came out snd that all changed. iPhone was back at the top in a big way.
people who complain about flat design or a streamlined os are Luddite’s who can’t let go of the distant past.
A lot of people talk about how Jobs saved Apple and that's incorrect Jobs and Ive did. Remember Jobs had just come from a really unsuccessful run with NEXT. A great OS but the computers were what you would expect of an engineer with no eye for design. That's why NEXT never caught on. Jobs was as lost without Ive to make his things pretty, as Ive was without Jobs to make them functional.
The Mac Studio (i.e. a form factor Apple designed on their own)?
Could it be any more boring? Did the guy who designed the chip also design the box?? On a particularly uninspired day?
Jony Ive's designs will be benchmarks for many designers - even in the future, and will be shown in museums. They may not have been super practical (yes, I know - most of the iconic designs mentioned above).
I speak from my own experience, of course - I "just wanted" Apple's products that were designed by Jony Ive, which helped me over the pain of the high price.
Current product designs? I'll only look at specs and the price-performance ratio. There will not by any emotion when I choose a new Apple product.
My fridge is cooler (pardon the pun).
I'll replace my current iMac when I HAVE to, not when I WANT to...
Don't be tied to other people's dumb analogies in making your point, you'll just end up making your point in a dumb way too.
The whole Apple Car thing is a disturbing sign. Project Titan came to light in 2014 and here we are eight year later with nothing to show for it except a larger CarPlay dash. How many reorgs and restarts has project Titan (or whatever it's called now) gone through? As the CEO that failure to deliver is 100% on Tim Cook. Tim needs to sh*t or get off the pot.
Is it time for an efficacy reality check...?
Giving 3 billion dollars to the NFL will do the trick…..