Apple Hires CEO of Yves Saint Laurent To Head Special Projects 79
alphadogg writes "Apple has hired Paul Deneve, until Tuesday the CEO of French luxury brand Yves Saint Laurent, to work as its vice president for special projects, igniting fresh speculation about possible new product launches including a TV or wearable computing devices such as a smart watch. He'll be reporting directly to CEO Tim Cook. Unsurprisingly, the company doesn't want to elaborate on what kind of special projects Deneve, who has worked at Apple in the past, will be working on. But the hire has resulted in analysts speculating, and wearable computing is on top of the list."
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Hodor.
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Microsoft Microsoft. Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft?
Mushroom!
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It's a snake [inkedmag.com]!
Speculation is nothing more than naval gazing (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't have anything to report, then don't report. Enough with worthless speculation.
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Apple did report something .. and now the media is falling over themselves to try to come up with what that means (ie worthless speculation); it's kinda what they do.
The pundits need to say something, because they get paid to.
Wrong, wrong, wrong speculation! (Score:3)
It must be smellable computing! Yeah, stinky computers.
After all, YSL peddles a load of overpriced fragrances [fragrantica.com].
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To me they're a cheap line of clothing from KMart or something -- though, I'm sure they're more than just that.
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Apple perfects new scent. "It smells [cough] wonderful!!!" report dying Apple fans. "It smells like Chlorine Gas," report PC fans.
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In other news, rumor has it that Microsoft is rapidly trying to get their latest cloud offering 'Microsoft Chlorine' to market as soon as possible.
Analysts expect it to be an exciting new venture in the marketplace and will allow them to compete with Apple in this new and exciting area.
No news yet on DRM requirements.
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The iWhiff?
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And if you're in the military, it's potentially an important job—particularly if it's somebody else's navy.
Now navel gazing (omphaloskepsis), on the other hand, is rather pointless.
The word is navel, moran. (Score:1)
What does staring at the navy have to do with rumpr mongering?
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Rumor*. Oh phone keyboards...
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That sounds dirty, I'll be in my bunk. ;-)
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The problem is, Apple is newsworthy. VERY newsworthy. If Tim Cook farts in public, it'll be reported. If he blinks his eyes, they'll report it.
Why? The public pretty much ensures ANY Apple news gets a ton of eyeballs. And thus, ad views and thus, revenue.
Look at the crowds of people Apple attracts. Any Apple story. You get Apple fanbois. Apple haters. Android fanbois. Microsoft fanbois. Windows fanbois. Google fanboi
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well they did just report.
that apple's research arm is now headed by a guy who used to be a ceo for a company I really don't give a fuck about.
I mean, I pepsi is more relevant for me than yves saint laurent as a company.
Remember when they hired that Pepsi guy? (Score:2)
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Sad. You'd think they never learn.
What are you talking about? Apple is following a proven strategy for success.
They'll bring him into the company, his ideas will fall flat and he'll be asked to leave. 10 years later, he'll come back to apple and restore it to greatness.
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Would it really be a strategy to endure 10 years of struggling just to save the day later?
No wonder the economy is in the shitter, apparently the people who run businesses don't know how.
Short-term incompetence isn't a strategy. :-P
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He already worked at Apple over 10 years ago, so according to this pattern he will now be restoring Apple to greatness.
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Sculley was a consumer marketer who didn't know jack shit about technology, but who pretended he did. He used the margins Apple was collecting from the Mac (Steve Jobs' baby) to start dozens of "cool" technology projects that didn't pan out.
Jobs apparently liked him at first because Sculley was all about image. The young California technology whiz with the tousled hair equally at home in the boardroom and in the computer labs.
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That Pepsi guy turned Apple from a $1B company to a $10B company.
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Hate it for its Thunderbolt-based expansion or not, the new Mac Pro design is anything but boring, and not one rumor site came close to guessing.
Re:The end my friends! (Score:4, Informative)
the new Mac Pro design is anything but boring
It's anything but good too.
I mean, unless you want exactly what's in the can it comes in. Then its great.
But usually people ordering desktop workstations want a higher degree of control over what is inside it, and above all they don't want to be ripped off.
I expect the Mac Pro will be plausible value for what is in it the day its released, but it won't be refreshed anywhere nearly fast enough, while the price will be held the same, until like the last mac pro you end up shaking your head that they would even try to charge that cutting edge price for technology that was 1 to 2 generations behind what you could get from anyone else.
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You buy it for the power. The most anybody usually upgrades a graphics workstation (what this is mainly meant for) is expanding RAM. CPU and graphics are usually pretty stable, upgraded at the next machine purchase, although sometimes graphics is updated (and Apple is seriously future-proofing that with dual integrated cards). Beyond that, you want storage a
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Anybody who does any type of serious work wouldn't use in-machine storage anyway, so why bother putting it in the machine?
I guess you are one of those people who doesn't care about latency. Not to mention that you have a lot of space to waste with computer boxes.
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Your average workstation may hold four data drives, and it's going to be put in a RAID most likely. It'll probably be using SAS. SAS is up to, what, 6 Gb these days? A 20 Gb channel to a huge number of external disks isn't good enough? You can do do a RAID10 across many disks, quite fast. Do you know of latency problems I haven't heard of?
Space to waste? Isn't that kind of the point? It's 1/8th the size of the current Mac Pro, which wasn't a very large workstation to begin with.
Still thinking in the 90s.
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In the 90s I had an Amiga computer which had nearly zero internal expansion. The only thing you could expand internally was the RAM. Everything else had to be done by external slots. People had hardware devices and cords littered all over their desks. Hard disks, CPU upgrades, MIDI, genlocks, the works. Then NCR came up with the tower format and that rat's nest of external expansion devices/power supply bricks, etc ceased to be. And you think I'm stuck in the 90s? That is rich.
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You know what's really funny? My response was that the new Mac Pro is anything but boring, and here we are arguing various aspects about it because the new design is obviously quite contentious. Do you see us doing that for the latest Dell or Lenovo?
Apple definitely retains the ability to cause a stir in the industry by going outside the box.
Re:The end my friends! (Score:4, Insightful)
The most anybody usually upgrades a graphics workstation (what this is mainly meant for) is expanding RAM
That precisely because that's the ONLY thing its any good at. By not giving us more flexibility its too expensive / ill suited to be anything else.
CPU and graphics are usually pretty stable, upgraded at the next machine purchase, although sometimes graphics is updated (and Apple is seriously future-proofing that with dual integrated cards)
Quite the contrary. Graphics, in a graphics workstation might get upgraded annually or every 2 years. That's a fraction of what I'd expect the base platform to last. Apple has shot that in the foot with completely custom form factor cards.
. Storage? Anybody who does any type of serious work wouldn't use in-machine storage anyway, so why bother putting it in the machine? They'd use a fast connection to external storage like a SAN.
What if they already have a SAN? What if they need fibrechannel? What if -gasp- they want a desktop computer for something that isn't a "graphics workstation"? Can I buy a thunderbolt to 16gbps fibrechannel adapter? In theory thunderbolt can do the speed... but does the adapter exist? At what price? I mean the only people on the planet who are likely to need a 16gbps fibrechannel to thunderbolt 2 adapter are people who bought a new mac pro and already have a SAN...
Now I -know- I'm in the minority, but I still regularly work with proprietary stuff accessed via PCI and PCI-express boards. So now I'm getting what? A thunderbolt to pci-express expansion chassis for each one. Yeah... that costs as much as a regular PC.
Or I can just buy a normal machine with expansion slots.
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Finally, someone who recognizes that the system isn't for all cases. If buying a normal machine works for you, then go for it. If you want a lot of power in a small, quiet package on your desk, here it is.
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The problem isn't that a "normal" OSX machine doesn't exist. The imac, mac mini and mac pro are all good at particular things, but there is no "normal machine" for people who need more flexibility.
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That's a pretty sad testament for a computer. You meant to say something positive about it but you nailed its unacceptable flaw on the head. Workstations should be suitable for a wide variety of tasks and have long legs.
Most people wouldn't guess that a premier desktop workstation would be disposable by design. Did you ever think that could be why no one guessed?
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You know what else were considered unacceptable Apple design flaws? Removing the floppy and removing the optical disk. Hell, the original Mac's "design flaw" was using only a GUI. Yet somehow, everybody is doing these things now.
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Yet somehow MacOS X now has a command line shell. A lot of people also used to complain about their one button mice. But they fixed that too.
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Hate it for its Thunderbolt-based expansion or not, the new Mac Pro design is anything but boring
It really reminds me of the G4 Cube and doesn't appear to be particularly well thought out, I like the ability to rotate it so you can access the ports easily and the lighting on it is neat but it's things like the power cord that seem to have been overlooked, everytime you spin it around you wrench up the power cord from behind the desk or you have a whole heap of slack sitting on the desk. Really that applies to any corded device you've got plugged in (so anything that isn't USB dongles) but the power cor
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Now that is the best criticism I've heard so far, the only one that doesn't have its roots in personal taste or "I'm afraid of new things." I wonder if someone at Apple has actually tried spinning a fully plugged-up Mac Pro 180 degrees, dragging a few pounds of cable with it. Also think of the sideways stress on all those ports if it's done a lot. Was it designed to handle that
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the new Mac Pro design is anything but boring
So's syphilis.
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What I find interesting and I see nobody reporting, is how much bunga bunga party cost and what exactly was consumed there per person and night. That is of scientific interest of course - I always wandered how stars and starlets can survive the whole drugs consumption and how come they never contracted some deadly or at least difficult to hide std. Seems like resistance to common std and high tolerance
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People keep saying this, but I don't see it. Apple never released things that quickly before. They had a couple of flashy launches a year. That's it.
Investors are just upset because reality set in on the tablet front. They're starting to become mature products so it's not new shiny every day. Tech news isn't interesting anymore because most innovation is from losing features and dumbing down products. It's true of Tablets, Windows, Google (no more reader for instance), etc.
We're seeing the other end o
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Yves Saint Laurent died a while ago, but this guy managed to keep the company ticking without the original crazy genius. So he may be more suitable than the sugar water peddler.
Hrm (Score:5, Funny)
They could be bringing him on in order to introduce a new brand of perfume.
iSmell.
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Judging by the summary, looks like they're hard at work on the iSpeculate as well.
This can mean only one thing (Score:4, Funny)
French designed black-and-white-and-flattened handbags are coming.
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Job's boat sure needs rounded corners; it's blockier than the "Money for Nothing" MTV movers. The one thing that is supposed to have rounded corners doesn't.
I guess part of being "cool" is going against the grain of how everybody else does it: if everybody is making rectangular buttons, you make them rounded; and if everybody is sailing rounded boats, you make them rectangular. If anybody could sell a cubic bowling ball, it would be Jobs.
Who needs scoring when you are Thinking Different.
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I would go with a short sleeved one. In cold weather you can wear it over a common long shirt.
iShirt (Score:2)
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Taken. http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/2010-toyota-iq-first-drive-review
Yves Saint Laurent? (Score:2)
They should have hired Jean-Paul Gaultier, he did all the costumes for The Fifth Element.
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They should have hired Jean-Paul Gaultier, he did all the costumes for The Fifth Element.
The Laurent designs for Daft Punk are at least comparably futuristic:
http://www.canto-photographer.com/daft-punk-yves-saint-laurent/ [canto-photographer.com]
Not that this guy they hired to VP is a designer, but he has worked with designers, and he is a member of the executive committee of the French Federation of Fashion and of Ready-to-Wear of Couturiers and Fashion Designers, and a jury member for the ANDAM Fashion Awards.
Perhaps they are trying to get someone with taste to select from the many designs Jon Ivy comes up with for n
Deneve's Project (Score:2)
Nothing new. (Score:3)
Considering that these luxury brands know nothing about practical usability, I can only assume this guy has been hired for some kind of special edition product. If I had to make a random assumption I'd even suggest it's for a China-specific product. The Chinese have a fetish for over-priced ultra-luxury brands on a level Americans can't fathom. It's bad enough that a few years back Louis Vuitton was concerned about the tarnishing of the brand due to increased prevalence of their bags. So they raised prices to keep them out of the hands of the plebeians. In the West, however, outside certain circles these brands don't carry a whole lot of prevalence. I can't imagine the YSL connection being of particular significance for most Apple devotees.
The whole thing is a bit odd given that YSL's foundation is in attire, not product design. They certainly have no experience in anything even remotely practical. If the goal here were some apparel based implementation of Apple's technology there are dozens of other companies better suited to the task. Additionally, those companies would have much more experience in cost-effective sourcing of materials and efficient manufacturing. Not like these luxury brands who burn last year's unsold product so that they can maintain exclusivity.
The practice of hiring renown designers is not unheard of, but companies tend to hire expertise that makes sense for the context. This almost always means that they hire product designers. Several years back, for example, Microsoft was working with Philippe Starck on peripherals. Even in that environment, however, it's often a miss because these designers know far more about aesthetics than about reliability and practicality. They're used to making products that sit untouched and are ogled from afar. Whatever issues arise are usually handled directly by the company and with the level of care you'd expect from a high-priced product. It's a totally different environment than consumer electronics. The optical mouse created under the Microsoft/Starck union looks cool, but was generally considered to be crap.
That said, Apple doesn't really need outside help to value form over function. Remember the puck mouse? How about the current piece of shit Magic Mouse? We've also all seen the new Mac Pro. What's concerning is the picture this paints for the company. It's not a big deal in the scheme of things if this is really just for a special edition product. However, if this is where they're looking to define future trends for the company I think we're seeing the beginning of the end. That's the sort of crap OEMs engage in when they're tring to build a reputation for themselves by coming up with goofy co-branded products.
Might Bring Apple Back to the Top (Score:2, Insightful)
A lot of Apple products are basically luxuries, and without directly admitting it, most of their marketing strategies have been similar to those for luxury products, so this sounds like a perfect match.
Also, of course Apple is experiementing with wearable computing, they probably have been experimenting with it for a decade or two. Apple doesn't bring products to market until they are ready. The problem with wearable computing is that the interface and display tends to be minute, and glasses can only fix
Fashion brands (Score:1)
What is surprising here? They are both brands that rely on fashion over substance.
Of course (Score:2)
Now Apple will make fashion - just like when YSL hired a former Apple manager as CEO, they started making computers.