Jony Ive's replacement Evans Hankey is leaving Apple
Apple's vice president of industrial design, Evans Hankey, is leaving the company three years after she was appointed Jony Ive's replacement.
Evans Hankey (Source: Wallpaper*)
After Ive left, Hankey was made the head of hardware design while Alan Dye was design lead for software and user interfaces. Hankey had already been with Apple and in the design team for many years before stepping up to lead it, and her departure creates a major gap for Apple.
According to Bloomberg, Hankey has told colleagues that she will remain in post for the next six months. No details have been given of what she is leaving to do, nor of whether there is a succession plan.
"Apple's design team brings together expert creatives from around the world and across many disciplines to imagine products that are undeniably Apple," an Apple spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg. "The senior design team has strong leaders with decades of experience."
"Evans plans to stay on as we work through the transition," continued the spokesperson. "We'd like to thank her for her leadership and contributions."
Evans has become a more public figure since taking over the hardware design team, including speaking to publications such as Wallpaper* about the team's moving in to Apple Park.
"It's just so quiet and calming," Hankey told the magazine. "We never really understood what that would mean for us until we'd been here for a while. It's been designed for serendipitous meetings as well as collaboration."
Hankey's counterpart in software, Alan Dye, is reportedly staying with Apple.
Read on AppleInsider
Evans Hankey (Source: Wallpaper*)
After Ive left, Hankey was made the head of hardware design while Alan Dye was design lead for software and user interfaces. Hankey had already been with Apple and in the design team for many years before stepping up to lead it, and her departure creates a major gap for Apple.
According to Bloomberg, Hankey has told colleagues that she will remain in post for the next six months. No details have been given of what she is leaving to do, nor of whether there is a succession plan.
"Apple's design team brings together expert creatives from around the world and across many disciplines to imagine products that are undeniably Apple," an Apple spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg. "The senior design team has strong leaders with decades of experience."
"Evans plans to stay on as we work through the transition," continued the spokesperson. "We'd like to thank her for her leadership and contributions."
Evans has become a more public figure since taking over the hardware design team, including speaking to publications such as Wallpaper* about the team's moving in to Apple Park.
"It's just so quiet and calming," Hankey told the magazine. "We never really understood what that would mean for us until we'd been here for a while. It's been designed for serendipitous meetings as well as collaboration."
Hankey's counterpart in software, Alan Dye, is reportedly staying with Apple.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
The industrial design of the MBP14/16 and M2 MBA are great. I've been using a work issued M1 Pro MBP16 for the past that month, and it's probably the best Mac laptop ever. It finally looks and feels like a workstation laptop. Always cool to the touch. Incredibly quiet. It leaves an impression of dependability, performance, and robustness that prior Mac laptops have not. It has its quirks that I'd like to change, but overall quite impressed. That's Evans Hankey leading the design team. The iMac 24? I'm neutral on, and I haven't used it.
I'm not sure if Alan Dye is a net positive. The dynamic island looks to be promising, but I haven't used it, and may not even get the chance by the time I have a new iPhone. The GUI designs have been treading water at best? He seems to like dynamic UI elements but hasn't learned where and when dynamic UI elements should be used. The Safari UI has dynamically scaling browser tabs. They widen or shorten depending on input focus. Then, Stage Manager applied that to the app views.
Users do not like things that dynamically change without their input. Perhaps I'm speaking two generally here, and it's just me, but this type of dynamism is disorienting to users. As soon as I saw them demo Stage Manager where windows were moving and changing sizes without user input, I immediately knew people were going to have problems with that, and Apple would have to at least have a Setting to turn off auto-sizing, auto-placement in Stage Manager. A person at Dye's level should have learned that when he was in his 20s, perhaps even earlier. It's an affectation that he really needs to learn when to apply it.
Edit: The iPad UI team should really thinking of the UI as a direct manipulation UI. Users are moving and touching physical objects. There's a bit of gesture input UI in iPadOS that makes it harder or unpleasant to use. Been waiting for them to understand this for the longest time.
this sucks really bad.
Tim Cook will be retiring sooner or later too. It will be sooner than we think imo, like within the next 3 years. The CEO of Apple is basically that of a leader of a powerful nation state now. If they maintain such a position or even grow bigger, very few people are willing to take on such a responsibility. It's going to be interesting to see who it is.
Couldn't agree more. They might come out with a better one, one day, but there has never been a better laptop from Apple -and I have been using them since the Duo.
Some people like to keep their private lives that way.
Steve leaned that direction very strongly. However as a very high profile CEO, inevitably a few things would leak out from time to time. He kept a very low profile and never posted to social media. He never voluntarily offered anything from his personal life.
Tim Cook is a little more verbal on social media for contemporary issues but he doesn't really share anything when he's not being CEO.
It's okay to go through life without posting what event you're attending or what coffee drink the barista made for you.
My guess is that Apple's heavy privacy focus came from Steve. Apple cares about privacy because Steve cared about privacy.
A total winner.
The direct manipulation paragraph you added is completely on point as well. This is why I personally hate “natural scrolling” on macOS because unlike the iPhone/iPad where I’m directly dragging the entire canvas with my finger, on macOS I am controlling the scroll bar through a device that is not directly the screen (a mouse, a trackpad). Therefore the “unnatural scrolling” should be default setting in my opinion, and they should have added the option “touchscreen style scrolling”, or something of that kind.
Although on iPadOS I like the multi-tasking aspect that Stage Manager brings and the fact this can be turned on/off, I find it confusing in some situations.
For example, they’ve added “add another window” as an option in the app top menu bar (three dots) of an app. To me that reads as “add another window of this app” such as another Mail window instance of Mail, because it’s on the menu bar of the app in question. The other options correctly refer to the “current app” such as “close window”. Instead, we essentially see thumbnails of all open apps and I have to select one to “add”. That does not make sense to me.
I find all the bouncing down/up/left/right of windows disorienting and find it confusing when sometimes app open in full screen and hide the other windows that are part of the current selected Stage Manager stack.
It’s a difficult task for them I realize, to support all these use-cases on a tablet that has a bit of an identity problem.
Several inconsistencies exist even on macOS where Notes shows an “edit” button which isn’t edit at all, but actually “create a new note”. That icon is grouped together with icons that are actions based on the current open note, which “create new note” is not. Instead, that icon belongs on the left column top, which is not about “the current open note” but “all notes / general management”. I know, I’m nitpicking! But it’s these things that add up. I am hoping for the next versions of macOS and iPadOS/iOS to focus on ‘clean up’ and ‘refinement’ rather than new stuff.
I personally feel that some UI elements should look like what they do more. E.g buttons. We’ve gone through several stages of minimalism the past 5-7 years, but it would be good to reconsider UX from a usability point of view and make elements look like how they behave (they call that ‘affordance’ in UX land, like a door handle being designed so that you can see how it should be used).
, I completely agree with you , Nothing is permanent
the world goes on ......
Hoping the MBP will go on a diet and get back some style.