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Apple

Apple and Jony Ive Are Parting Ways (engadget.com) 75

Apple and Jony Ive are breaking up -- and this time, according to The New York Times, it's for real. Engadget reports: Ive left the tech giant in 2019 after over two decades and formed his own company called LoveFrom, which counted Apple as its first and primary client. The publication said that both parties agreed not to extend their contract in the weeks leading up to its renewal and to stop working together for the first time since the 90's.

The Times said LoveFrom's multi-year contract with Apple was worth $100 million and prohibited the firm from taking on any project that the tech giant considered to be in competition with its products. Ive reportedly wanted the freedom to take on new clients without needing to ask permission from Apple. Meanwhile, the company's executives had apparently been questioning the amount Apple was paying him and had grown frustrated over employees quitting to join his design firm instead.
Shortly after Jony Ive left Apple in 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that Ive was slowly drifting apart from the company for several years as the iPhone maker's priorities shifted from product design to operations.

Further reading: 'Apple is Not in Trouble Because Jony Ive is Leaving, It Is in Trouble Because He's Not Being Replaced'.
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Apple and Jony Ive Are Parting Ways

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  • by dschnur ( 61074 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2022 @02:13AM (#62698888)
    Ive made a tremendous contribution to Apple under Steve Jobs's authoritarian rule, but lost touch with customers after he was made completely responsible Apple's product design. Newer post-Ive MacBook Pro's have *ports*, a better keyboard, a larger battery and lost the silly touch bar. Ive's contributions to Apple will be around for a long time to come, but it's better for customers that he's moved on. It was time.
    • Here here. Writing this on my 16" 2021 MBP, the first one in a long time that wasn't a piece of shit.
      Though I do wish they'd ditch the fucking mini-LED. It's truly trash. If the dimming-zone tracking is as bad on the Pro Display XDR as it is on this thing, there must be a shitload of really fucking annoyed "professionals".
      • I'm still using a 2015 13" MacBook Pro for personal stuff. I've got an M1 Air that was provided by my employer - for my particular use case, I don't really notice any significant performance difference between the two.

        I will note that I upgraded the 2015 laptop with a faster (and larger) SSD a few years ago.

        • by DamnOregonian ( 963763 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2022 @03:14AM (#62698968)

          I'm still using a 2015 13" MacBook Pro for personal stuff. I've got an M1 Air that was provided by my employer - for my particular use case, I don't really notice any significant performance difference between the two.

          I've got an M1 Air as well... I bought it, was so impressed, that I decided to get the MBP when it came out (and was less impressed, but that's another story for another time), and ya, I concur, if you're just using it for desktoppy stuff, there isn't much distinction.

          The biggest distinction for that use case really is just the power usage. Our Airs chug along at a around 2-4W total for the entire computer while not doing much.
          Under moderate load (mild browsing and such) it generally doesn't break 10W.
          So it never gets warm (and thus, cooling simply isn't a consideration that matters) and lasts an obscene amount of time on a tiny battery (If the Air had the same battery size as my MBP, the Air would have a somewhere between 28 and 36 hours... of use.

          This also means carrying around a 50Wh battery pack doubles the battery life of the Air (if you ever needed such a thing).

          Ultimately, though you never run into it- that Air also has the distinction of being obscenely faster than the 2015 MBP if you ever did need to crunch numbers- about 110% faster. With no fan.

          • Ultimately, though you never run into it- that Air also has the distinction of being obscenely faster than the 2015 MBP if you ever did need to crunch numbers- about 110% faster. With no fan.

            Ansible (python) is still slow on the M1, though. ;-)

    • Who needs useful, we need marketable.

    • Arguably Job's primary contribution was to hire very smart people, and help them work together. (Interestingly, the same can be said of Napoleon).

      After Jobs died, the smart people fought with each other instead of working together. Some of them quit Jony Ive gained too much power. There was no one powerful enough to push back against him when he came up with a bad idea.

    • Didnâ(TM)t Tony Fadell and Jobs make the iPod?
    • by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2022 @03:44AM (#62699008) Homepage

      Usability of ICE and dashboards seems to have gone out the window with the rush to touchscreens. It all seems to be about the look rather than the functionality with the latest VW setup being borderline unusable.

      Only some head in the clouds designers straight out of art school and never having past a driving test could think that burying common functions such as the heating or radio 2 menus down that can't be used safely on the move was a good idea.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      To be fair Jobs seems to have hated ports too. Back in the 80s he didn't want Apple computers to be expandable and engineers had to sneak things like expansion slots into the designs. He thought an iPod with a battery that lasts a few years and then you throw it in the trash was acceptable. iMacs had few ports, and ditched any "legacy" stuff like floppy drives before it was practical for most people.

      So I don't think you can blame Ive alone for the way MacBooks went, although they certainly reached peak stup

    • Newer post-Ive MacBook Pro's have *ports*, a better keyboard, a larger battery and lost the silly touch bar.

      I agree that design has actually improved since Ives left, and not even just hardware - even software designs I think are a little clearer.

      One thing I will always be sad about though, is the loss of the touch bar. I thought that was really useful but it was stuck on a keyboard that most people didn't like. Also, it was never on a desktop keyboard which is where it really could have gained large sca

      • So, the escape key is now physical.
        My beef with it, is that it still takes over for the function keys, and it's simply fucking unpleasant to have to use in that capacity.

        I think it's a fucking cool feature, but I think it needs to be above where the function keys would be. An additional user interface, not a replacement for a core functionality that people still use. I get that for some people it isn't a big deal, but you guys need to accept that us function key users still make up a sizeable portion of
  • ... that was behind the Apple Mac recycling can Pro? Then went back to revisit the G5 design and made a variation for the new line? Don't see why people thought he was so great.
    • by Guspaz ( 556486 )

      The Post-Jobs era of Ive's designs (where he didn't have Jobs reigning him in) certainly have their issues, but he was also behind the original iMac design at a time when other computers (even macs) were beige rectangles, which was the device and design that saved Apple from bankruptcy, the iPod, which looked futuristic compared to the bulky and ugly hard-disk MP3 players of the day, the iPhone, which looked nothing at all like the blackberry style that all other smartphones used at the time (and the basic

      • by _merlin ( 160982 )

        The problems with his designs started before Jobs returned to Apple. He worked on the design of the disastrous Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh [wikipedia.org].

        • by Guspaz ( 556486 )

          The 20th Anniversary Macintosh was a disaster because of the price (and limited manufacturing scale), not the design. It was a beautiful computer, and as far as I know it didn't really have any major technical flaws. Which isn't something that can be said about some of Ive's other designs. For example, the G4 cube, which was a usability nightmare that overheated and easily developed cracks, or the iMac's hockey puck mouse, which was extremely uncomfortable to use.

          • by _merlin ( 160982 )

            The 20th Anniversary Mac had speaker buzz, the metallic paint tended to chip, the keyboard palm rests wore rather quickly, and IIRC there were reliability issues with the CD-ROM drive.

            I never used the original iMac puck mouse, but the later one with the indentation on the button that came with the second-generation PowerMac G4 "Snakebike" was fine ergonomically. The cable ended up failing internally though, and the cable was rather short, being intended to be plugged into a USB port on the keyboard.

            • by Guspaz ( 556486 )

              Some of those are technical issues, though, rather than design ones. The speaker buzz was something they fixed for free (a few choice resistors), and the CD-ROM issues came down to wanting to speed development time using off-the-shelf parts instead of building a new CD-ROM unit that could handle the inclined angle.

  • The products become usable again instead of being a fashion item only.

  • Long live the king of ripping off the naive every way he can.

  • Jony Ive Shrunk the Phone
  • and that was too much for him to bear ;-)
    • That has the “ring of truth”

      Cheese grater aesthetic for a flagship would be accident not design inspiration

      • You say that, but it was amazing with the Power Mac G5 and MacPro1 - MacPro5, and they sold shitloads of them even at premium prices because they were real workstations and not just a gaming PC sold by a mainstream brand. Looked excellent, allowed for fantastic cooling, modularity, and expansion. Even had easy repair unlike basically any other Apple product in the last 10 years - basically the biggest flaw was one they didn't see coming - people wanting to run ever more power hungry GPUs that the built-in

        • You say that, but it was amazing with the Power Mac G5 and MacPro1 - MacPro5, and they sold shitloads of them even at premium prices because they were real workstations and not just a gaming PC sold by a mainstream brand. Looked excellent, allowed for fantastic cooling, modularity, and expansion. Even had easy repair unlike basically any other Apple product in the last 10 years - basically the biggest flaw was one they didn't see coming - people wanting to run ever more power hungry GPUs that the built-in power supply couldn't effectively drive without an additional PSU installed in one of the optical drive bays (which you could do).

          Then the flower pot Mac Pro destroyed the product line.

          They also kept on improving the MP 5,1s for a long time, adding things like NVMe boot support. My 2010 5,1 is running just fine and has been upgraded a *lot*. It's long since been replaced as my desktop mac by an M1 mini but it's still a cool machine and its longevity is staggering.

  • "as the iPhone maker's priorities shifted from product design to operations"

    Also known as "let's milk this sucker dry". That's the most worrying thing in my opinion, that Jony Ive left not because of personal issues or because someone paid him better, but because he doesn't like working at Apple anymore because Apple doesn't like designing things anymore.
  • It's so overdue for Apple to change. I'm so sick of new models that are getting more and more expensive each year, while the company stops supporting and even DOWNGRADES old models with software updates. Really would love the market to prove it can compete with Apple. Hope this event makes Apple stop profiting and start innovating again.
    • apple needs to lower it's storage costs

    • It's already happening. Apple used to offer immense value with their offerings, even at premium prices. Now, you can get similar performance and design from practically anyone out there, and in some cases you can do better from Dell / Lenovo / HP than Apple, for less money.

      When is the last time Apple actually made a new designed anything that actually caught attention? The watch?

      • Now, you can get similar performance and design from practically anyone out there, and in some cases you can do better from Dell / Lenovo / HP than Apple, for less money.

        What products?

        Linus Tech Tips compared a similarly-specced and priced HP editing workstation to the Mac Studio Ultra, and the Mac pounded it. I've seen the 13" M2 MacBook Pro put up against a similarly specced Dell XPS 13", and the Mac smoked the Dell - and was cheaper.

        Apple Silicon is giving their computers a significant advantage over Intel powered machines.

      • Depending on what you do, the current lineup of Apple Silicon laptops is IMO the best laptop you can buy. If you need legacy Windows software that isn't readily supported via Parallels, or native Windows boot capability, that's an obvious caveat.

        The current iteration 14"/16" MacBook Pro lineup in particular is amazing. Battery life is fantastic, performance is great, and the build quality is the best of pre-2016 MacBook with an amazing screen.

        PC manufacturers have done some great work with design, but there

        • Don't get me wrong - I'm typing this on a 2021 M1 Max MacBook Pro 14". I'm not just some Apple hater, and I've made a career out of supporting and integrating Apple machines in enterprise environments until I pivoted to cloud and devops. But there's still issues that Apple refuses to deal with, such as the absolutely fucked multi-display support if you have the audacity to use a Thunderbolt dock to connect your displays - when the system wakes up, you either get a working desktop with your displays, no ex

          • I plug my 2021 16" into a dock nightly and while I do have to reboot once in awhile to "reset" things (which takes literally ~8 seconds depending on what I have open) due to this platform being relatively new for desktop use, I plug in and 99.9% of the time my displays just work. And I don't even open the laptop, just take it out of my bag and drop it into my dock and plug in one cable.

            Windows 10 is simultaneously the best and shittiest Windows ever. I like some of what they've done, but lots of what they'r

    • It's so overdue for Apple to change. I'm so sick of new models that are getting more and more expensive each year, while the company stops supporting and even DOWNGRADES old models with software updates.

      Not sure what you're on about here.

      I mean, my cell phone migration went form like Motorola Trac Phone -> iPhone 3GS->iPhone 6S Plus -> iPhone 12 max pro.

      Now, that is, to me, certainly long enough lasting phones.

      The first Mac I bought new, was a MBP late 2011.

      That little laptop is STILL in use

  • There's only so many ways you can design what is effectively glass rectangle so I can understand why anyone would think paying $100m for someone to "re-design" a rectangular slab is a stupid amount of money to spend.
  • Wasn't this announced forever ago?

    Everyone complains no innovation, but how much more can you shove in a phone, have everyone copy, have the stupid features get dropped when they realize apple-clones aren't ALL good ideas?

    People here complain about Apple - how many are users? Over-simplification of device hardware is SO low on my list of 'things-to-do' as a user. We want better battery life (bigger battery) - but no manufacturer is doing that, and it's just not going to happen. We want smooth and f

Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as the strawberries, knows nothing about grapes. -- Philippus Paracelsus

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