rogifan_new

RadMax said:

I think plenty of people found the recent designs from Apple to represent a poor choice of compromises.  I for one am glad to hear that the lead design position at Apple will be occupied by someone other than JI.  He did some great things, but his departure is overdue.

Sanctum1972 said:

rogifan_new said:

Sanctum1972 said:

rogifan_new said:

Well Apple does know how to keep secrets. I still think all these hot takes of [insert Apple product I don’t like here] is because of Ive is a little too simplistic. John Gruber was pretty scathing in his blog post. But if you read the New Yorker profile it’s clear Ive never wanted the role of “THE product guy” at Apple. It’s everyone else crowned him that person.

He is now one of the two most powerful people in the world’s most valuable company. He sometimes listens to CNBC Radio on his hour-long commute from San Francisco to Apple’s offices, in Silicon Valley, but he’s uncomfortable knowing that a hundred thousand Apple employees rely on his decision-making—his taste—and that a sudden announcement of his retirement would ambush Apple shareholders. (To take a number: a ten-percent drop in Apple’s valuation represents seventy-one billion dollars.) According to Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow, who is close to Ive and his family, “Jony’s an artist with an artist’s temperament, and he’d be the first to tell you artists aren’t supposed to be responsible for this kind of thing.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/shape-things-come

It seems pretty clear with his working on Apple Campus and Apple Stores that he was getting bored designing computers. Which makes me wonder just how much he was involved in things like the butterfly keyboard. I doubt he spent much time at all on software design. I do wonder what will happen now. Surely Jeff Williams overseeing his teams is temporary. But I wonder if they’ll put the human interface team under software engineering and the industrial designers under hardware engineering and get rid of the CDO position for good.

 I expect that position to be phased out for good. After all, the Chief Design Officer position is not very common so in that sense, he had one foot inside Apple and the other foot outside of it. And yes, boredom does happen when creative burnout occurs. I'm sure he'll do some contractual work for Apple time to time but when it comes to some of the work, I suspect the internal design team will keep it in-house for NDA purposes. The allure of going independent as a designer or creative is very strong even though he claimed that his work with Apple is not done even though with some limits so that he can juggle between clients. The signs of him wanting to get the F out were there.

I see a lot of chatter about certain products or design decisions and his involvement but my first thought after him just being burned out is, is there another reason he might be leaving, maybe some other decisions inside the company that made him think it’s time to go? Maybe Apple becoming more and more of a services company just isn’t appealing to him. Maybe he thinks design will have less of a place inside the company in the future. Who knows. What is interesting is the person taking over for ID isn’t the same person who got that job when Ive was promoted to CDO. So I wonder if he’s no longer at the company or it didn’t work out with him in charge?

You mean Evans Hankey and Alan Dye? They're both in charge of the Industrial Design and Human Interface Design respectively.They will answer to Jeff Williams. It's possible the Services aspect of Apple is making him realize he's got less work to deal with there and decided to go freelance to tackle other creative problems. Apple may be the main client but it would not surprise me if other big name companies will gravitate to him. In my view, going independent is the right thing to do to get the creative juices flowing and handle unique projects that are not related to Apple. It's possible he saw some things within Apple's transition into a direction he found disturbing and wanted out but only as a consultant on a certain capacity. When you go independent, you work with a creative brief and then within the client's parameters and budget. But how much creative control will he have outside of Apple remains to be seen. His creative services will not come cheap. I suspect Tesla might be one of his future clients. Just a hunch. 

macplusplus said:

DAalseth said:

Ive has been great, but I truly believe his best designs and ideas came when he had Jobs there to balance his ideas with practical common sense. His original iMac, the iterations that followed, those were clever, creative, and functional. In the last few years we have thinner and thinner at the expense of keyboards that are comfortable to use. We have flat color schemes that are simply less user friendly. We have less interesting designs now that Ive does not have Jobs to push back. 

I wish Ive well, but I'm very interested in what the new blood in the design office does. We won't see what that is for three or more years, but it will be interesting.

Thanks to Ive, the necessary interface changes required by the high resolution Retina display has been achieved the best way, considering the absence of Steve Jobs. Thinness is not an artist snobbism, it is an engineering requirement for the dissipation of heat. Take the Watch, for example, reminds me of Jethro Tull’s album Thick as a Brick. Take the Pencil 1, not thin not short, thick and unnecessarily long. Design must bow to engineering requirements. Regarding keyboards, the repair statistics are there, and Apple certainly makes the necessary changes as new statistics emerge.

There will be no new blood etc. The designs in these markets are exhausted until the release of a breakthrough new invention. Of course one can always come with a steampunk or really cyberpunk computer or smartphone design (with or without Alcantara cloth). Those can only be niche ephemeral products and Ive or Apple wouldn’t deal with these.

maestro64 said:

Just means you can not design a service like you can design something you physically interact with. You do not get the same visceral experience with a service as you do with something like hardware that you pick up and use. There is nothing really left to do in hardware at this point and a bending phone is not the next great thing in design. 

AppleZulu said:

rogifan_new said:

leavingthebigg said:

rogifan_new said:

larz2112 said:

Rayz2016 said:

macxpress said:

Basically, Spotify is shitting their pants over Apple Music and are doing everything they can to try and survive since they don't make much of a profit. Apple Music has got to be slowly eating into their revenue stream. I think once investors start pulling out, it's game over for Spotify. 

The thing is, Apple Music isn’t their problem. 

Every user added costs them money, and they’re not making a profit on every user. 

Their problem is their business model. 

Exactly. I've been saying this for years. Spotify was founded on an unsustainable business model. You'd think the folks running that company would have figured it out by now.

And the only reason Apple’s isn’t is because they can subsidize it by the profit they make on other things, like hardware. We’re getting to a point where only a few big companies will own everything.

What is stopping Spotify from making “other things” it can make a profit?

Other things like what exactly? Netflix went the route of original programming, I’m not sure whether that would work in the music industry. An industry where most of the money is made off touring and merchandise.

Here’s the question I have though: what difference does it make to Apple if one signs up for Spotify via the Safari web browser or in-app (using Spotify’s payment processing)? The support Apple is providing in terms of app hosting, developer tools, etc. is exactly the same. If it’s a matter of security then Apple wouldn’t allow any in app payment that didn’t go through Apple. It’s clear Apple allows reader apps because they don’t want Netflix, Amazon, Spotify etc. to leave the App Store. So solve this issue once and for all by allowing digital media apps to offer their own payment processing in-app if they want to. Or at least a re-direct in-app to a website where users can sign up. Apple will still make a shit ton of money on IAP from games and non-digital goods.

Because an in-app payment system for an app that sells digital media in direct competition to Apple's own service becomes a parasite that benefits from Apple's investments while incurring none of the costs of those investments. This is not as difficult to understand as you're trying to make it.

Spotify doesn't exist without smartphones. Android makes its money by collecting data on its users and selling that data for targeted marketing. On Android, Spotify can participate in that unholy data sharing alliance, and everyone makes money.

Apple makes money not from selling its customers' data, but from selling devices in a tightly designed three-legged stool where the legs are hardware, software and services.

Spotify competes directly with the service component. Apple would not benefit by simply barring a digital media competitor like Spotify from the iOS platform. Doing so could cause some significant number of customers to choose Android over Apple just to get Spotify. On the other hand, setting up accounts and payments in a browser is a slight inconvenience for that consumer, but that's not likely enough by itself to keep them from choosing an iPhone. 

Coming from the other direction, however, it would be irresponsible management for Apple not to use that slight inconvenience for a digital media competitor in order to give Apple a slight edge when an Apple customer is choosing whether to use the Apple service or the competitor. It would be irresponsible business management to do otherwise.  They are acutely aware that doing a task in fewer steps is of considerable value to the user. They could simply leave it at that, and it's fair. You can choose Spotify on your iPhone; just handle your account in a browser. Instead, Apple offers an additional option: gain an equal competitive stance on the platform by having in-app payments; just give Apple its cut of the revenue to pay for the privilege. That is not unreasonable. Apple is the one that spent billions of dollars to develop the hardware and the OS platform. They should be able to benefit financially from that investment.

Spotify competes directly with Apple Music, and they can even do so on the iOS platform. It is only a minor inconvenience for its customers to open a browser to handle Spotify transactions. Spotify claims that having its payment system function in-app is both of no value, and of critically important value. They claim it has no value when they say Apple should allow it to happen on iOS, free of charge. At the same time, they claim it has significant value, because they assert that not having that feature puts them at a competitive disadvantage. Their "no value" argument is of course complete nonsense. Much as they want to, they can't have it both ways. If the feature is of value, then it's reasonable that they should pay for that value.