'Apple is Not in Trouble Because Jony Ive is Leaving, It Is in Trouble Because He's Not Being Replaced' (daringfireball.net) 181
Apple's chief design officer announced on Thursday that he is leaving the company after nearly 30 years at the firm. John Gruber of DaringFireball making sense of things and what it means for the company: I've never been an "Apple is doomed without Steve Jobs" person. But part of what made Apple the Apple we know in the post-1997 era is that when Jobs was at the helm, all design decisions were going through someone with great taste. Not perfect taste, but great taste. But the other part of what made Jobs such a great leader is that he could recognize bad decisions, sooner rather than later, and get them fixed.
I think Tim Cook is a great CEO and Jeff Williams is a great COO. But who's in charge of product design now? There is no new chief design officer, which, really, is what Steve Jobs always was. From a product standpoint, the post-Jobs era at Apple has been the Jony Ive era, not the Tim Cook era. That's not a knock on Tim Cook. To his credit, Tim Cook has never pretended to be a product guy, which is exactly the hubris that John Sculley succumbed to back in the early '90s, leading to the Newton being launched far before it was ready and the Macintosh platform languishing.
[...] It makes me queasy to see that Apple's chief designers are now reporting to operations. This makes no more sense to me than having them report to the LLVM compiler team in the Xcode group. Again, nothing against Jeff Williams, nothing against the LLVM team, but someone needs to be in charge of design for Apple to be Apple and I can't see how that comes from operations. I don't think that "chief design officer" should have been a one-off title created just for Jony Ive. Not just for Apple, but especially at Apple, it should be a permanent C-level title. I don't think Ive ever should have been put in control of software design, but at least he is a designer. I don't worry that Apple is in trouble because Jony Ive is leaving; I worry that Apple is in trouble because he's not being replaced.
I think Tim Cook is a great CEO and Jeff Williams is a great COO. But who's in charge of product design now? There is no new chief design officer, which, really, is what Steve Jobs always was. From a product standpoint, the post-Jobs era at Apple has been the Jony Ive era, not the Tim Cook era. That's not a knock on Tim Cook. To his credit, Tim Cook has never pretended to be a product guy, which is exactly the hubris that John Sculley succumbed to back in the early '90s, leading to the Newton being launched far before it was ready and the Macintosh platform languishing.
[...] It makes me queasy to see that Apple's chief designers are now reporting to operations. This makes no more sense to me than having them report to the LLVM compiler team in the Xcode group. Again, nothing against Jeff Williams, nothing against the LLVM team, but someone needs to be in charge of design for Apple to be Apple and I can't see how that comes from operations. I don't think that "chief design officer" should have been a one-off title created just for Jony Ive. Not just for Apple, but especially at Apple, it should be a permanent C-level title. I don't think Ive ever should have been put in control of software design, but at least he is a designer. I don't worry that Apple is in trouble because Jony Ive is leaving; I worry that Apple is in trouble because he's not being replaced.
I guess he will now be... (Score:5, Funny)
Apple is not Doomed... (Score:1, Insightful)
However, Apple is now no different than any other technology company recycling the same crap over and over and offering nothing new or interesting.
Apple has been pretty much coasting since Steve's death and will soon have to start pedaling again or it may in fact be doomed.
Re:Apple is not Doomed... (Score:5, Funny)
However, Apple is now no different than any other technology company recycling the same crap over and over and offering nothing new or interesting.
Apple has been pretty much coasting since Steve's death and will soon have to start pedaling again or it may in fact be doomed.
If I had a handful of Apple stock for every time I have heard somebody predict the imminent death of Apple I could retire to my super villain lair in a hollow volcano on my own private island in the Pacific guarded by sharks with lasers on their heads.
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However, Apple is now no different than any other technology company recycling the same crap over and over and offering nothing new or interesting.
Apple has been pretty much coasting since Steve's death and will soon have to start pedaling again or it may in fact be doomed.
If I had a handful of Apple stock for every time I have heard somebody predict the imminent death of Apple I could retire to my super villain lair in a hollow volcano on my own private island in the Pacific guarded by sharks with lasers on their heads.
Apple: Proudly going out of business for over FORTY years...
And the new Mac Pro and XHD Display, with niceties like the Afterburner card and near-reference-display performance with eye-bleeding, industry-leading continuous brightness levels are anything but "recycling the same crap"; so, you can stuff that!
CAPTCHA: Calamity
In other news, I do agree that not having the Design Team report to Tim Cook seems somewhat non-Apple.
CAPTCHA (Score:1)
Some irrelevant comment
CAPTCHA: Hey I'm a Captcha fucker!
Honest I really had that captcha!
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I don't think Apple is doomed or anything close to it. I do think they will have a hard time with developing new hit products though, and with Jobs and Ive gone they have lost a lot of what made them trendsetters in tech.
However for the company's bottom line none of that really matters. The majority of their revenue comes from their services ecosystem at this point. They have enough money to easily completely leave the tech world, put it all in financial services and never have to look back. In fact, short
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Except that....many people use Apple's services because they have Apple hardware. If there is no Apple hardware in this BNW that you describe (Apple leaving tech to someone else), incentive to use the services is lacking.
I ONLY use iCloud b/c I have Apple stuff.
I ONLY use Apple Music b/c I have Apple stuff.
I ONLY rent movies from Apple b/c I have Apple stuff.
Without the Apple stuff, I can get any of these services from anyone else, and it will be the same difference to me.
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Apple is doomed.
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Apple is doomed.
Apple just can't turn away from its tawdry trollmodding of social sites. That is one of the reasons that Apple is doomed.
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Your stock would be something 1,000:9 ratio for profitability, but I would guess you already figured that out.
The first time I heard somebody claim Apple was done for was Michael Dell in 1997. The value of Apple stock has increased by a factor of well over 100 since then. Given what I had in terms of savings back in 1997 that would not be enough money to buy an island, hollow out a volcano, set up a super-villain lair there and buy some sharks with lasers on their heads but it is still a pretty good investment in my book.
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Bad grammar? (Score:2)
One should not say "Ive is leaving". Properly it is "I'm leaving" right?
Now who can name the Human Interface Guideline Architects that made the original Mac what it was? How about the HIG team for the Next? It was blend of those that is OSX.
All of those were triumphs of design. Not in their Bauhaus boldness but in their foresight and brilliance. It's everyting that made windows shit and Macs elegant and easy in thos early days. And the only reason at all the Linux and windows caught up is people copie
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You misunderstand the advantage of menu location. Any edge of the screen will work. I prefer top and bottom, but I can even (if I must) adapt to the vertical sides.
What the real advantage was was a definite easily reached position, which the top of an application window doesn't have. For that you need to look carefully at that section of the screen, and hope the GUI yields definite edges of the active window for you to see. (And I really *HATE* the way some interfaces have narrowed scrollbars to where y
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Y'know you can put the dock on the side?
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Y'know you can put the dock on the side?
The side is not the corner. Putting it in the corner, where it belongs and used to be, takes a silly level of effort [cultofmac.com] given that it used to be there. (Albeit on the other side, not sure how convenient that is.)
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A side is easier to hit and reorient,
Wrong and wrong. Because the dock is centered on a side, everything on the dock moves around every time any apps open or close, and you can't use muscle memory to locate the mouse pointer. You have to look and parse the icons every time. Even Windows 7 has a superior Dock/task bar.
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Windows 7 is very-late windows. they were copying mac by then.
Windows never copied anything from the Macintosh. They both copied GUIs from the same source, and Windows both looked and behaved fundamentally differently from MacOS.
Prior to that many programs had functions that could only be reached on a mouse
Lots of Mac programs didn't follow the HIG. You can't blame that on the OS. You could do literally anything in the OS or in any Microsoft applications (and in general, most applications, period) with the keyboard because you could simply tab around the various buttons and fields. You could not do that on a Macintosh. You had to drive a virtual
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Too bad macOS hasn't had sufficient Keyboard Shortcuts since pretty much DAY ONE:
Oh yeah? Where are the window manipulation shortcuts? There aren't any. How do you jump to the next input field? Oh yeah, you can't. Windows and Unix (with Motif, anyway) let you manipulate windows from only the keyboard. You could maximize, minimize, or resize them, for example. There's simply no way to do that on the Mac. There's also no way to select an icon from a folder with the keyboard without using the virtual mouse pointer.
But I guess it's excusable that you didn't know this; since articles like the one below have been around for more than a DECADE:
Your logical fallacy, besides thinking that Apple knows fuck about UI (as di
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The new Mac Pro is actually new and interesting. The price means that it's for a tiny sliver of the user base, but for the people who need a system like that it appears to be a good design.
But the rest of the Mac line has suffered from some dubious decisions. #1 on the recent list is the bad keyboard design. The TouchBar on the MacBook Pro is another questionable one; for some users (developers who heavily use the Escape key, anybody who uses applications that make extensive use of the function keys) it has
Two Points (Score:2)
Designing Cheese Graters for celebrity chefs now?
A) What makes you think Ives was part of that design? He's been working on Apple Park for quite some time now.
B) Not sure if you knew, but the original Cheese Grater Mac Pro was beloved by all, most people wanted a nicer refresh of that design - and that is exactly what Apple delivered! It's even easier to access the inside than the original, and that is saying something...
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These days Apple puts more effort into selling headphones than phones.
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These days Apple puts more effort into selling headphones than phones.
Thug Apple trollmods really don't like being confronted with reality.
Yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
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Boring piece about a boring company.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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I haven't seen anything good from Apple in years. Whatever his job was related to designing either didn't help or was ineffective. If a single person leaving is enough to cripple a giant organization, maybe the organization should crumble.
The single person was Jobs, not Ive. Apple's been slowly crumbling ever since he died.
"Crumbling" (Score:3)
Apple's been slowly crumbling ever since he died.
Look at Apple stock over time. Odd definition of "crumbling".
Look at the absolutely number of anything Apple sells. Over 1.4 billion active Apple devices [theverge.com], and growing... how is that "crumbling"??
It always been amusing to me that Apple Haters worship Steve Jobs far more than any Apple fan ever did, attributing all success to him as they do...
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Down 20% since last October fits the definition of crumbling. Any bit of bad news could send AAPL down another 20% in a matter of days. This is not a stock you want to put your retirement savings into, far from it. I hope you own some.
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Oh yah you're a stock tycoon and you're posting anon on Slashdot. So easy to believe you, just so easy. Here's some advice: mortgage the house and sink it all into AAPL, you deserve it. Oh you don't have a house then pawn your I-watch.
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Oh yah you're a stock tycoon and you're posting anon on Slashdot. So easy to believe you, just so easy. Here's some advice: mortgagehttps://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=14258870&op=Reply&threshold=2&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=58841294 the house and sink it all into AAPL, you deserve it. Oh you don't have a house then pawn your I-watch.
If you can't attack the data, resort to ad horman, eh?
Idiot who can't spell, I will have you know that it's "ad horcrux"! Get it right next time.
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You know, it amazes me the efforts you go through to twist the truth. You're like an unrepentant abusive boyfriend who compulsively gaslights everyone.
If you had even bothered to read _the very first sentence_ in the article, you would have read that iphones sales _fell_ a whopping 15% over the year previous. That's a massive drop!
1.4 billion active devices is a statistic Apple came up with to divert attention from the fact that their sales are tanking. Their product lines have become, at best, stagnant.
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Look at Apple stock over time. Odd definition of "crumbling".
I don't have an opinion, but I immediately thought of a counter response:
What if the MBAs over at Apple are just more efficient at pulling money from what Jobs (with engineers) already did.
Think about it: What does Apple have on their roadmap that looks like anything that another company wouldn't/couldn't do? They have rode the success of the iPod, Macbook, and iPhone as far as it will take them. Where to now?
There is potential there, but I suspect they will end up like Hewlett Packard and sink into the dus
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To be fair, a lot of that is market saturation. So to keep the growth rate they need to design a new product that "everyone who is anyone" in some large group wants. This is difficult. And they seem to have abandoned personal computers.
Re:Don't see the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
From rockstar CEOs to figurehead engineers and keystone designers, anytime a company depends too much on one person to get vital work accomplished it is doomed.
No one, no matter how big their ego is or how many VPs and Board Members they convince otherwise, is indispensable, and if they are indispensable for the running of the company, really, truly baked into the DNA of how the work is done, then they have provided a dis-service to the shareholders.
Apple was doomed by mediocre design and bad business decisions before Jobs arrived and are twice as doomed now that they signed up for the Cult Of Personality method of business management. They made dumb decisions all along, it's just that some of their dumb decisions made people money. They can't die fast enough for me.
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Sure, Ive isn't indispensible, but that's not the argument. The role is indispensible. You need a top level manager in charge of your product, separate from your operations team.
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True, but design by committee is usually a trainwreck as well.
The simple truth is that the world is run by a small number of deviants who get ideas and give orders, and a large number of drones who do the execution.
They made dumb decisions all along, it's just that some of their dumb decisions made people money.
This is the real problem. Stupid ideas can make tons of money. There are loads of companies that survive by this principle and Apple is by far the most famous and successful of the bunch.
stone tablet wisdom from Analysis 101 (Score:2)
Well, congratulations on making it through the first week of Analysis 101.
Here's what you missed from week two:
Same knife, different cut.
———
And here's what you
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From rockstar CEOs to figurehead engineers and keystone designers, anytime a company depends too much on one person to get vital work accomplished it is doomed.
Interesting shit would never get created then. I don't want to live in your world. I want a world where a 17 inch PowerBook with a Unix based operating system can reside. That is not possible in your world of shareholders being serviced safely.
Choose: Safety or Risk. Risk brought you iPads. Safety brought you gas chambers.
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When Steve Jobs was still around, he would act as a dictator. Jobs always got his way. So when Jony Ive came up with an idea that Jobs liked, Jobs would make it happen.
Inevitably, Apple has slid back into corporate mediocrity, with board meetings, focus groups, and vision statements. Jony Ive still had a lot of influence, but there was nobody there to stop his ideas being watered down by committee. Ive probably got fed up of spending most of his work days in pointless meetings.
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I haven't seen anything good from Apple in years. Whatever his job was related to designing either didn't help or was ineffective. If a single person leaving is enough to cripple a giant organization, maybe the organization should crumble.
Ives isn't just anybody.
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Ives will show you whether he's just anybody or not when his new adventure rules or sucks. I'm betting on sucks.
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I've seen a lot of bad from Apple in the last years. Boring me-too lineup, failed to ship a power adapter, more walled garden, more form over function, more sucking on the necks of a dwindling base of faddish followers, more tax cheating, more camping on social networking boards, basically more of everything that makes Apple an emaciated shadow of its former self. Maybe think about another liver transplant.
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Once upon a time, Apple was the de facto choice in education, and that market was willing to pay high prices for perceived value. Because it was ignorant of what was going on with the highest-quality operating systems on the planet at the time (All of them various UNIXes) it was operating in a false dichotomy of Macintosh versus "PC". Back in those days, application developers were more willing to port their software to an upstart platform, which is how things like WordPerfect or Lotus for Amiga happened. A
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I haven't seen anything good from Apple in years.
Have you ever seen anything designed from Apple and said, "wow, that's really good design."
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Hardware wide, I don't know. I don't care to much about that. But I liked my first 17" Mac Book Pro, a G4 if I recall correctly.
Software wise till about OS X 10.3/10.4 most software had brilliant UIs. I assume there was a gap around Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9, though. I liked Mac OS 6 and 7 ... but dislike everything after OS X 10.6. Luckily the Mail.app is still "the same".
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Yeah, the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OSX was rather rough. But I stuck with them until around Mac OS 10.3 when they tried to slip an extremely noxious EULA change in with a security update. It was bad enough that I basically disconnected the Mac from the Internet and wrote off Apple as a company I could work with. I kept using that Mac for over a decade, though, because of some applications that had no competition on any other platform I was using.
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Have you ever seen anything designed from Apple and said, "wow, that's really good design."
The old school unibody mac pros with magsafe were pretty cool.
Also, the Macintosh IIci was great, like almost inspired for its day. The case lid popped off with one optional screw, an optional security lock, and two easily-pulled plastic tabs. The power supply pulled up and out, and then I think maybe one screw held the motherboard in place. You'd slide it (sideways? I forget) and then it would pop out. Reset and debug switch access was available from a snap-in "programmer's key" which installed without too
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with magsafe were pretty cool.
Oh yeah, I forgot how great that magsafe was.
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The latch mechanism for the G4 Cube [wixstatic.com]
Target Disk mode [youtube.com] (currently on TB3, but i've been using this since 6 pin firewire)
This 2008 macbook [youtu.be] was a joy to work on, with tool-less access to a replaceable battery.
the layout of the mac pro towers [greggant.com] four hotswappable drives on trays, independent horizontal airflows for power supply, processor/ram, PCI slots. compared with the jet airliner of the predecessor powermac G
good riddance (Score:1, Interesting)
Johnny Ive is why Apple made the "cheese grater" and effectively abandoned the "pro" market (until they redefined "pro" to mean "hipsters who need an emoji touchbar," and then later redefined "pro" to mean "the thousand or so diehard Mac users editing film and broadcast television"). Johnny Ive demanded that Apple's half-baked self-driving car not having a steering wheel, because it had Siri (!!).
A dog without a leash is a menace. Good riddance, Fido.
Re:good riddance (Score:5, Interesting)
Many people on the internet seem to claim that many of Apples choices which are used to control their customers are a result of the design and vision of Jony Ives.
Removal of the audio jack
Making ram soldered to the board
The much beloved LCD on the keyboard
Making batteries un-removable in iPhones and Macbooks
Each of these serves Apple with much more control of the end user, and their ability to maintain and repair their own iPhone/iPad/Macbook Pro etc. If you cant replace your own battery then obsolescence is built in. Which is why Battery Gate happened. audio jack is a compromise/gift to close the analog loop which looks like a gift to the recording industry. The mostly unused LCD on the keyboard never made sense but could be his concept except it seems like a push from the tech teams. Soldered RAM to save 7 mm of space in a laptop form factor is just a way to force people into buying the extortion pricing for RAM to a captive audience.
Does Jony have the ability to make technical decisions, when they are so clearly driven by customer control, err profit motives?
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There are reasons for each of these...
Removal of the audio jack: This makes it easier to waterproof the device, and if saves quite a bit of space inside the phone to be used for batteries and other electronics. When Apple removed it, they needed the space for the Taptic Engine [appleinsider.com]. Wireless headphones had already become very popular, and as you can both do line out from many bluetooth devices - and of course from the analog headphone dongle included with the iPhone - that wouldn't close any hole.
Making batter
But who's in charge of product design now? (Score:4, Funny)
Their ML/AI has come up with an "influencer" based product design scheme using various social media feeds.
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Apple has a secret research group designed just to answer this question. Their ML/AI has come up with an "influencer" based product design scheme using various social media feeds.
So you are saying that Apple is about to release dickbutt-shaped phone any day now?
Absolutely true (Score:3)
Even Apple's design failures, like the G4 cube, promoted Apple's brand and increased their reputation as a vendor of style. Hell, the trashcan has a following. Their product family failures, likewise, like Newton. When they got back into handheld devices, Apple fans were quick to cite the Newton as an example of why they were qualified, even though the only thing they really have in common with iOS devices is being ARM-based.
Apple needs to spend some of the cash they're sitting on, and take some chances.
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> Hell, the trashcan has a following
â"It probably would have gone over better had they gone whole hog with cross-licensing and made it look like a Dalek.
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The Newton was not a failure. It was a great success. However Apple canceled it for no good reason, except: spent to much money on research, not enough revenue on sales.
Perhaps you want to look on eBay or just google, the second hand Newton market is still striving.
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The Newton was not a failure. It was a great success. However Apple canceled it for no good reason, except: spent to much money on research, not enough revenue on sales.
That's how you know it was a failure.
Perhaps you want to look on eBay or just google, the second hand Newton market is still striving.
So is the second hand Amiga market, but that doesn't make the Amiga a success story. Or maybe I should use the Vectrex as my example, since it's more obscure.
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The Amiga was a success story.
Why the company in the end failed, I don't know/remember.
Great OS, great hardware, great games.
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Why the company in the end failed, I don't know/remember.
It failed due to gross mismanagement. It had no reason to exist much longer, though, because commodity parts were growing up and maturing to the point that you could accomplish similar goals for less money by just throwing parts at a board (following the reference designs.)
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The Amiga was a success story. Why the company in the end failed, I don't know/remember. Great OS, great hardware, great games.
Ars Technica has a great feature on the downfall of Commodore [arstechnica.com].
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Fuck the poor! Let them use Android!!
Better off without him? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe Apple is better off without him?
* The horrible butterfly keyboard
* The crappy TouchBar
* Severe thermal issues in the quest for thinness
* Only 2 USB-C ports on MacBooks
* Removal of MagSafe
* The list goes on and on...
Perhaps Apple will actually be better off without his "vision."
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Maybe Apple is better off without him?
* The horrible butterfly keyboard
* The crappy TouchBar
* Severe thermal issues in the quest for thinness
* Only 2 USB-C ports on MacBooks
* Removal of MagSafe
* The list goes on and on...
Perhaps Apple will actually be better off without his "vision."
Yeah, this... I love my Mac and I've been an Apple user since a Mac 512k, but ever since the G5 tower, their design has been backsliding, removing functionality in the quest for some sort of aesthetic goal that frankly, I just don't get. Magsafe was an absolutely brilliant power interface, both attractive and highly functional. The iMacs are great machines, with a huge array of ports for expandability. And then there's the new MacBook Pros, with... 4 TB3 ports? No USB, SD, or HDMI without a dongle? Did they
Re:Better off without him? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I suspect that at least part of what made Steve Jobs so valuable to Apple was he was willing and able to tell Ive "I love your amazing designs, but this particular idea is flat-out stupid and isn't going to happen".
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I think Steve brought the 'it just works' to the table.
And he brought "You're holding it wrong" to the conference stage.
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The original iMac was criticized for not having keyboard, printer, or mouse ports -- just USB. My 2019 MacBook Pro's 4 USB-C ports might end up working out in few years as USB-C replaces the irreversible and bulkier last gen version -- HDMI's already obsolete as it can't run a 4K display. That said, I totally miss my 2011 MacBook Pro's (RIP) SD/HDMI/Ethernet ports.
Many of those items Gruber agreed with... (Score:4, Insightful)
Gruber agreed that the keyboard issues were probably related to the quest for ultimate thinness... they seem to have resolved the keyboard issues now, but it was a shame users had to suffer that hit in reliability.
I don't know removal of MagSafe was on Ives though, that seems more like an engineering thing.
There are some who say that Ives really stopped working on Apple products about four years or so ago, and for some time has really been an Apple Park designer/architect. I think that is probably about right so we are near the end of his contributions to products and starting to see the work of other people come through. There are a lot of talented designers at Apple so I think they will be more than OK, especially after seeing what was in store software wise going forward.
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I don't know removal of MagSafe was on Ives though, that seems more like an engineering thing.
MagSafe was worthless once they moved to MagSafe 2, because they made it and the laptops too thin. This meant that the magnet didn't have enough "holding power" in response to up/down movement, while having too much for front/back movement. This meant you had a connection which both could easily just fall out in normal movement (since just about any up/down movement is enough to cause it to pop right out, while left/right movement can also pop it out without being excessive) and also drag the laptop off a t
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It won't be fixed until they eliminate the crap butterfly and go back to the proven tech.
Maybe they should move forward instead, and make an optical keyboard. It would cost more (as they do) but it would actually be better, and Apple charges more anyway. USB didn't go mainstream until Apple pushed it. Not everything Apple has pushed has won on the desktop, but optical keyboards don't inherently have to be expensive. It's just going to take more R&D to make them cheap. Isn't Apple supposed to be good at that stuff? They have cash lying around to do it with.
Hullo? (Score:5, Interesting)
They're not replacing him because they don't need to - yet.
The bigger problem Apple faces is that they have to slow down their release beat as "style" is no longer enough to maintain sales. Which is really just a symptom of their LARGER problem of lack of innovation and product development which is ultimately the reason Ives is probably leaving. He's bored.
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The bigger problem Apple faces is that they have to slow down their release beat as "style" is no longer enough to maintain sales.
Very true. The rest of the market caught up. No longer you have glass-and-metal sleek Apple phone vs. ugly plastic slabs by the rest. If Apple to keep its market share they will have to offer something drastically new, like roll up screens or holographic projectors.
Correction: (Score:2)
the corallary argument is... (Score:3)
...that of Apple doesn't have a c-level designer they might not have anyone insisting they put questionable keyboards on premium laptops, and their fastest growing segment (product-wise) might become something more exciting than dongles.
So one designer is going to kill Apple? (Score:2)
Nobody is irreplaceable. Not even this guy.
Besides, he's really not *leaving* Apple, he's hanging up his own shingle and starting his own company. He will still consult for Apple so what ever happens to Apple, you can blame him either way.
Apple is Not in Trouble Because... (Score:3, Informative)
...they have an incomprehensibly huge hoard of money.
Apple is sitting on $200 billion in cash and equivalents. They could keep paying their current workforce of about a hundred thousand people $200k a year for a thousand years without income. Rome rose and fell in less time than it would take Apple to go bankrupt if they never sold another anything ever.
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At this point, I'm wondering if Apple is going start acting more like IBM and Microsoft and buy other companies with innovative products instead of innovating new products themselves. They can certainly afford it with their current cash horde.
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Apple has been on a buying spree for a decade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Apple
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...they have an incomprehensibly huge hoard of money.
Apple is sitting on $200 billion in cash and equivalents. They could keep paying their current workforce of about a hundred thousand people $200k a year for a thousand years without income. Rome rose and fell in less time than it would take Apple to go bankrupt if they never sold another anything ever.
Paying 100,000 people $200,000 per year would be $20,000,000,000 per year. They'd run out of money in 10 years.
Re: (Score:2)
You are ignoring the money they make by simply having money....even at 5%, that is $10B/year (on $200B). That's half the $20B/year payroll right there.
Re: (Score:2)
They could keep paying their current workforce of about a hundred thousand people $200k a year for a thousand years without income. Rome rose and fell in less time than it would take Apple to go bankrupt if they never sold another anything ever.
...I'm not sure that math works out, but the point is well taken.
Re: (Score:2)
...they have an incomprehensibly huge hoard of money.
Apple is sitting on $200 billion in cash and equivalents. They could keep paying their current workforce of about a hundred thousand people $200k a year for a thousand years without income. Rome rose and fell in less time than it would take Apple to go bankrupt if they never sold another anything ever.
And as an AAPL stock holder, all I can say is "thank god!!"
design and functionality (Score:2)
Sort of (Score:3)
He's leaving the employ of Apple but will continue as a consultant with his own company. This way he can continue to work for Apple while also having other creative projects.
However, that will end too some day but unless some entirely new product line happens I think they'll do just fine. Other companies do just fine without him and new talented designers at Apple already have his and Apples design philosophy (which is unique but also well defined) as a starting point.
People complain Apple haven't come up with anything revolutionary. Well, it's really really hard to do that and most other big tech companies don't either. I'm not sure why we pick on Apple specifically for that. I think tech journalism steer our expectations too much.
Jeff Bezon put it well "All big companies will die, we will too. In the meantime, let's make money, that's why we're here" (paraphrasing).
In the meantime they do details really well; for example FaceId I really enjoy (some don't and that's OK too), the phone will tell you if the lightening adapter is wet and suggest you dry it, it has a power reserve so when it's dead you can still use your transit card, Privacy is a big thing for them (may change but not soon), etc.
Now these won't save the company because they're not attention getting features but they're still top end stuff. I think my main disappointment is their laptop line but I can't afford those anymore anyway, so I'm not their target "demographic". I'll buy a cheap Clevo or something.
People complain about being locked in. I don't see that, I've moved between Apple phones and Android several times (I am fine with both and think tribalism is utterly childish), and a Macbook Pro Core Duo to Linux laptop once, it takes 20 min to setup the same accounts and off you go.
In short, they may well die eventually, unless they come up with something new, like they have already done more than most but I think that losing Mr. Ive won't be the reason.
Well, looking back, that was a bit of a ramble.
Instead of the operations, it should be marketing (Score:2)
The design team should be with the product managers, which should be under the marketing team.
His creativity dried up a long time ago. (Score:1)
It is time for him to go, his creativity dried up a long time ago.
Thank You (Score:3)
No more simple essence of elegance nonsense. I am so happy to see him go. He has reduced everything to be beautiful, but functionally limited.
Can I have my ports back now?
Products aren't the future (Score:2)
Ive is out because products aren't the future anymore. Services is the future. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google all know this. Apple knows this. They can no longer so back and let the iPhone be their cash cow. The cheap handset makers are catching up too quickly. It's already to the point where, other than iOS, there is little obvious benefit to paying $1000 for an iPhone vs $300 for a mid-range generic.
Who the hell... (Score:2)
Which is precisely why no one gives a crap about this headline...
Re: (Score:2)
So.. (Score:2)
Someone please explain how making a (Score:2)
rectangle with rounded corners can be called "design". If he's a designer, I am a designer, and so are you!
no loss.. (Score:2)
MagSafe? (Score:2)
Can we just have MagSafe back? Or maybe have a MagSafe hub where I can plug in a sh**load of peripherals into a MagSafe plug and come and go with ease? Or some type of wireless hub where I can plug in everything under the sun and still leave with my laptop? Can Apple just make my life easier again? My last three laptops have been PCs, but I would be happy to go back to Apple if the products would actually be a little innovative again. I don't mean innovative design. I mean not having my dog pull the laptop
A replacement will be found, and that person will (Score:2)
Jony Ive still designing for Apple (Score:2)
He is starting his own design company, but they will continue to design for Apple, that was made clear.
As a result there is no need to replace him, he's still designing for them.