Jony Ive, iPhone Designer, Leaving Apple To Form Independent Company (bloomberg.com) 100
Apple's chief designer Jony Ive is leaving after decades at the iPhone maker to form an independent company -- with Apple as one of its primary clients. Ive was at Apple for more than two decades in which his iconic designs for the Mac, iPod and iPhone turned one of Silicon Valley's faded giants into the world's most valuable company and defined a generation of consumer products. From a report: "Jony is a singular figure in the design world and his role in Apple's revival cannot be overstated, from 1998's groundbreaking iMac to the iPhone and the unprecedented ambition of Apple Park," Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said in a statement. "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." Ive will be replaced by existing Apple designers. Evans Hankey, vice president of Industrial Design, and Alan Dye, vice president of Human Interface Design, will report to Jeff Williams, Apple's chief operating officer, the company said. In an interview with Financial Times, Ive said: "While I will not be an [Apple] employee, I will still be very involved -- I hope for many, many years to come. This just seems like a natural and gentle time to make this change."
User impact (Score:5, Insightful)
Say goodbye to the "designer" who allowed a mouse to go out the door with its charging port on the bottom, the Mac Pro to be turned, almost literally, into a trashcan, and phones to be stripped of the audio jacks? With pleasure.
Perhaps we'll even get good looking desktop/padtop icons again instead of these flat pastel atrocities.
This could be a very good day for Apple. It certainly is a cheerful one for me. :)
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Not to favour fruit here (pro fruit-hater) but...
Is it possible that allowing random-fucktard-with-a-computer-repair-store-but-no-actual-training-in-anything-at-all, to:
* destroy their customer loyalty by fucking up repairs which the customer will then consider fruit should fix?
* add additional difficulties to resolve the non-standard fix-attempts by said fucktard
?
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... might not be on the strategy board at fruit hq?
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Apple could be saved yet. Is it any coincidence that the person who was in charge of product design the last time Apple declined has overseen this one?
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The dongle that comes in the box that still gives you a fully functional 3.5mm jack would disagree with your conspiracy theory.
Re: User impact (Score:1)
"No Person except a natural born Citizen [...] shall be eligible to the Office of President" --US Constitution (Sir Jony was born in London)
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I agree it will probably shrink tomorrow. But I expect like when Jobs died Apple will probably keep on going. I think Ives has been holding Apple back. Many of the Apple style choices for the past 20 years has been stagnant. The 2002 PowerBook I got looks nearly identical to the latest MacBook Pro. A gray metal clamshell laptop.
The iPhone has been a glass square.
Even the new MacPro is a lot like the G5 powermac. Just with larger cringing holes.
Re:Market Impact? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, they did try conical and pyramid shapes without much success. The tesseract shape was kind of cool, but people freaked out that when they touched the touch screen, their finger ended up in Oregon.
Re:Market Impact? (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing is Apple is so focused on the minimalist design, (A 60-year-old version of "Modern" art) The problem with minimalism is that it does reduce diversity, with a goal to keep things at the most basic shape as possible.
Now, this was in Apple's favor for a while, especially as common computer designs wanted to show off their complexities, Mainframe computers at the time had nobs and buttons that didn't do anything, the lights to show all the memory values in LEDs were not really useful. Even IBM PC designs (And compatibles) were designed to say LOOK AT ME I AM A COMPUTER. Apple with the minimalist design did a lot of work to make the computer look more like an appliance, and something that a non-tech person can own, without the geeky showoff of all its parts, that we geeks loved to do.
Most tech companies have copied Apple in one way or another. However, now that 2020 is approaching, technology is smaller, faster, cheaper and far more disposable. The effort in making a computer a piece of art at the expense of functionality or price is a declining model. In a world with 3d printing, CNC cutting, boards that are really small, which can fit in nearly any shape. A computer can really fit into nearly anything now.
Re: Market Impact? (Score:1)
what is "diversity" good for in a tool?
Re: Market Impact? (Score:4, Funny)
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what is "diversity" good for in a tool?
Oh dear did the word trigger you?
Tools can be used for different purposes or by different people, and therefore need to be designed differently. We're happy enough with different PC layouts, some people like trackpads, some people prefer mice. Why are phones one-design-fits-all? Depends on what you want to do with your phone - one solution doesn't fit all.
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Well, they did try conical and pyramid shapes without much success. The tesseract shape was kind of cool, but people freaked out that when they touched the touch screen, their finger ended up in Oregon.
The mobius strip shaped Apples were cool looking but when cleaning up my desk I was never quite sure when I was done dusting off the top of the computer.
I was going to make a joke about the tesseract touch screen causing a user's finger to end up in Uranus but I think that's just too easy.
No One Left From The Original Apple Design Team (Score:2)
https://appleinsider.com/artic... [appleinsider.com]
"Recent departures from Apple's Industrial Design group mean that no one remains from the original group that began to turn around Apple's fortunes. And, only two members who joined a year later are still with Apple —although one of those is Jony Ive."
And now Ive is leaving.
If Jobs was still alive this would be an dangerous but exciting time for a new direction for Apple.
With Cook unfortunately still running Apple it is just a question of how bad he bungles this huge t
Re:No One Left From The Original Apple Design Team (Score:5, Interesting)
With Cook unfortunately still running Apple it is just a question of how bad he bungles this huge transition.
I read an article in The Economist a while back about Cook . . . they seemed to think that he was an excellent administrator for streamlining operations. But unfortunately not very good with coming up with new product ideas.
So I think that Apple needs a new post of CIO . . . "Chief Innovation Officer". Someone who is not in charge with managing things smoothly . . . but will come up with a new blockbuster product.
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I still can't believe Cook didn't take at least one huge flying leap with some crazy product to prove that Apple could still be innovative under his leadership.
Arguably, Apple Watch.
Re: No One Left From The Original Apple Design Tea (Score:1)
iPad mini and the Plus series iPhones were pure Tim. Steve flat out rejected the iPad mini proposal, and one of the very first things Tim did was green-light the project.
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iPad Mini came out 1 year almost to the day after Steve Jobs' death. Are you really saying that Apple immediately kicked off a product design and build after Jobs kicked off and launched within a year?
No, that thing was underway before Jobs was in the ground.
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You think only the CEO of a company with over 100,00 employees has the job to come up with new product ideas?
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He shouldn't get in the way. Remember he made the hardware designers come up with two competing designs all the way to prototype for the macbook pro. he can't just look at a design/mock and make the call. He wasted all that time when they could have been making other products, refreshing the mac mini or mac pro, etc. He set back the mac pro and mini refreshes by years because he can't picture something.
Apple announces new product (Score:2)
a new iPod colored brown and dubbed the iZune. It folds and has rectangular corners (design patented) and an auxillirary hockey puck shaped beige yellow mouse with a single button.
Maybe they'll be able to fix the Macbook Pro now? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Seriously: add a few more ports,
Whatever. People have been buying docks for their laptops since there have been laptops. Shut up and spend a measly $50 on a dock that has HDMI, SD slot, two USB-A ports, USB-C power pass through port, and is the size of a deck of playing cards. If that's not enough there are docks with many other price points and features, including models going for a kilobuck with your choice of GPUs, Ethernet, USB, and other ports. You paid a small fortune for a laptop that is small, light, powerful, and good looking
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Dock, dongle- still another thing to carry around that could be avoided if they didn't REMOVE existing ports that already fit.
Re:Maybe they'll be able to fix the Macbook Pro no (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure. Buy a nice sleek portable device, and then buy a large knobbly awkward hunk of plastic to carry around with it.
Or I could buy a well designed laptop.
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I don't think it's too much to ask to get ONE standard USB-A connection on there somewhere, so that we don't have to carry a fuckton of stupid dongles and cable converters to use the last 20 years of devices kicking around and still functional. Oh, and that way I could plug an Apple iPhone into an Apple MacBook Pro without buying a not-included-with-either Apple USB-C to Lightning cable.
It's the pinnacle of stupidity to have incompatible product lines for multiple years in this day and age. Yet Apple seem
I hope that over the years (Score:5, Insightful)
as the focus of mister Ive moves from apple to his other fashionable customers, this means no more Flash soldered to the mobo of desktop machines, no more DRAM soldered to the mobo of desktop machines, no more propiertary connectors, real connectors and not dongles, and usable keyboard
Amen
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Unless this is an engineering decision vs a design decision.
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Unfortunately Apple has already announced that it will be one of the "primary customers" of this new company.
Could be interesting from a legal standpoint. If you screw up as an employee then oh well, it's the company's problem. If you screw up as a contractor you better have good insurance and legal cover.
Thank God (Score:2)
I'm so sick of slippery soap bars that change volume every time I try to turn off the screen
BRING BACK FORESTALL
FIRE THE BEANMASTER COOK
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If you look at the modern market, the materials used play a large part of what market segment they belong to. If it's a flagship phone, it has to be glass or ceramic.. maybe metal if it doesn't have wireless charging. If it's plastic or the like, it's a budget model. Blame it on
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Wait... why did they give a 'glass" surface to the entire phone, so that it literally squirts out of your hands like a bar of soap if your hands are wet?
Because if it was made of metal then it would be a tiny Faraday cage. If it's going to be able to connect to a cellular, WiFI, or Bluetooth network then it needs to be transparent to RF or need antennas sticking out. People don't like antennas sticking out of their phones any more.
This does make a rubber phone case nearly mandatory. I'm not going to get upset about a $20 case for a $500 phone.
Remember how these cases got started? People had their phones but they were all boring black plastic. So someon
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Why not stop trying to persuade fruit and buy from a manufacturer that already meets your needs?
I know, crazy talk...
does apple get a better write off (Score:1)
Celebrate!!! WOOT! WOOT! Goodbye Mr. Thin! (Score:3, Funny)
It will be good to see Mr. Thin go! Hallelujah! Hopefully Apple will stop building non-upgradable laptops! Johnny probably saw the new Cheese Grater Mac and realized that it COULD be upgraded and wasn't minimalistic then threw a hissy fit. Goodbye and good riddens!
So what? (Score:2)
He "designed" a rectangle with rounded corners? That's his claim to fame? Pffft!
Spending more time with the proverbial family (Score:2)
Yah we know. Not fired, oh no. Has nothing to do with the complete and utter drought of fresh ideas at flabby old flimflam artist Apple.