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'.
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'.
Re:Apple died (Score:5, Insightful)
Daring Fireball made a good point about Jobs and Ives. They where a Lennon-and-McCartney team. Jobs without Ives made good but ugly tech (NeXT was a phenomenal OS for its time, but it was butt ugly, although so was everything else). Ives is a designer and *only* a designer. But you put Ives and Jobs together and you got the iMac or the iPod. Johnny Ives made beautiful designs , but he needed Jobs to make it work as a functional product. After Jobs died, the macs got thinner and thinner until they became unuseable. Then when Ives left apple, all he was really left designing was Apples architecture (The campus, shop layouts) and then the macs got a bit fatter and the maglock port came back. Not QUITE as pretty as the earlier thin macbooks but infinitely more functional.
But nothing Ives , or apple, has designed was quite as beautiful as his work with Jobs where he actually had someone with the good taste and the stones to yell at him if he was getting too carried away with a design decision.. That balance between form and function is what made Apples golden era of Jobs shine.
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Re:Apple died (Score:4, Interesting)
(NeXT was a phenomenal OS for its time, but it was butt ugly, although so was everything else).
Ugly? What? Both NeXT computers and the NeXT OS itself were considered to be very attractive by geeks and the media alike. That's why Windows 95 (and by extension, NT4) featured a gui that was a blatant ripoff of NeXTStep. In the pre-Enlightenment era, there were basically two graphical styles emulated by 99% of everyone: Motif, and NeXT. Motif was based on the CUA [wikipedia.org] as was Windows, which is why the two looked materially similar at the time (and why Windows' widgets and window decorations still work like that to this day)) but everyone wanted to look like NeXTStep. There was a very popular Xaw twiddled to produce NeXT-style widgets, and the Afterstep window manager which also copied the NeXT look was very popular in Unix land.
Re:Apple died (Score:4, Interesting)
NeXT OS itself were considered to be very attractive by geeks and the media alike..and why Windows' widgets and window decorations still work like that to this day
You're confusing functionality and design. It didn't actually look nice. It was a good, functional layout. That may be attractive to you but don't confuse it with aesthetics.
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It looked amazing by the standards of the day, which you are ignoring. We know this because everyone and their mother copied it, including Microsoft and IBM (OS/2 was heavily influenced by it as well.) By the time OSX rolled around it was dated, but then Apple implemented their even more dated interface instead (with the legacy menu bar that is convenient only with the full screen apps that were the only thing possible on the tiny little screen of the original Macintosh) and the rest is the present, since t
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I installed NextOs on to some PC hardware in about August1993 when they came out with the 486 compatible version - but it was so very specific about what hardware worked it (small range of motherboards, only a few graphics and network cards, scsi adapters etc) , if it wasn't for the fact that I worked as a PC tech in a computer shop in Japan at the time with access to lots of different hardware, it would have been all but impossible to lay my hands on compatible components to build the beast of a machine
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SCO UNIX was an OK product, but it was ultimately doomed in various ways which we need not rehash.
NeXTStep's use case was only really arguable when Adobe stuff would run on it. It was cheaper than running it on another Unix. It didn't last long. NeXT hardware was too expensive for the horsepower the whole time, though. Display Postscript was a neat gimmick, but not really that important.
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Ugly? What? Both NeXT computers and the NeXT OS itself were considered to be very attractive by geeks and the media alike.
I once went to a local gallery and saw a canvas that was entirely black (or a really dark brown). Next to it was a 3 paragraph description of the "painting". Point is, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You think it looks great? Good, more power to you. I think the NeXT cubs were horrendously fugly.
And no, there was nothing rip-off about the Windows 95 GUI from NeXTStep. They have literally nothing in common other than the existence of windows (which predated Windows 95), and that an X was in the top rig
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Modern art is a money laundering and tax avoidance scheme. But I digress.
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Not quite true, the Next design and also the OS UI design was considered to be the design pinnacle of its time. Btw. the Next Design was not done by Jobs, but by Frog Design a design company also used by Apple.
But I agree in the aspect that Jobs was the corrective factor who made Ives designs working by stopping him at the right point.
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(NeXT was a phenomenal OS for its time, but it was butt ugly, although so was everything else).
The boxes or the OS itself? Because Susan Kare did the design of the OS, which I think looked great. The hardware was good looking for the time. Everything else were beige or white boxes. The only other workstation company that put effort into hardware design was SGI. IBM and Apple, at least, put some engineering thought into their machines, and were relatively easy to work on.
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Then when Ives left apple, all he was really left designing was Apples architecture (The campus, shop layouts) and then the macs got a bit fatter and the maglock port came back. Not QUITE as pretty as the earlier thin macbooks but infinitely more functional.
MagSafe.
The only things still missing from the new MBP are:
But yes, it is infinitely more usable. And you forgot the #1 improvement: No more [expletives deleted] Touch Bar.
NeXT ugly!? (Score:2)
I'm super biased, but holy crap. You're suggesting that an OS that felt a whole lot like BSD with a UI like... NeXTSTEP was *ugly* in 1988 - when compared to Windows 3.1 or .. X11 on a SUN workstation back in the day? Shudder.
NeXT got nothing but accolades for virtually everything except price and compatibility. And I'm not saying those things weren't critical (obviously), but beauty is something it had in spades.
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NeXT was not ugly, either on screen or on the desktop. NeXSTEP had a great, and most importantly functional GUI. I still think it has not been surpassed for mouse and screen use.
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I don't know. But Jony Ive is a famous designer who has worked with Apple for decades.
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He has been the key designer for Apple, who help create Apples Look and Feel for their products.
Being that Apples big fame was their product design and look and feel over specs and features. It in general is not good news for Apple.
While you are probably going, well I am not an Apple guy, which is probably true, but a lot of the technology we use today has been inspired by Apple, Including the Smart Phone design, Laptop design, Tablets...
So with Ive's leaving Apple (who has a deep pockets) a lot of design
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He has been the key designer for Apple, who help create Apples Look and Feel for their products. Being that Apples big fame was their product design and look and feel over specs and features. It in general is not good news for Apple.
Except that IMO, the design of the products has gotten quite a bit better on the whole since he left. Instead of being form-over-function like the Touch Bar abominations, we have functional laptops that still look good. Instead of round trash can high-end machines that are so thermally limited that you can't ever upgrade the GPU, we have a cheese grater again, with some (IMO) nice improvements to the overall case design (though I do wish they would find a way to remove the bottom lip on the back so that y
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I never had a big deal about the touchbar, it just wasn't ever fully utilized. For Generations keyboards had Function key Most systems today has F1-F12, My old Amstrad 1512C had F1-F10 while I had IBM 3270 that went up to PF24 My PC laptop has these function keys, but there is also a Fn Key that will make it call some OS functions such as volume and screen brightness. However depending on the App I am running these function keys may do different things, or nothing at all. The Touch Bar would be a go
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I never had a big deal about the touchbar, it just wasn't ever fully utilized. For Generations keyboards had Function key Most systems today has F1-F12, My old Amstrad 1512C had F1-F10 while I had IBM 3270 that went up to PF24 My PC laptop has these function keys, but there is also a Fn Key that will make it call some OS functions such as volume and screen brightness. However depending on the App I am running these function keys may do different things, or nothing at all. The Touch Bar would be a good idea, if Apple (and PC's) didn't have decades of software not designed for such a feature.
The main problem with the Touch Bar is that it replaced physical buttons with a non-tactile touch surface, and worse, did so in a way that wasn't pressure-sensitive and was immediately adjacent to the number keys, resulting in a high false triggering rate when typing numbers — particularly when holding down modifier keys and typing numbers. I found myself basically turning it off entirely so that certain apps would be usable again because the false triggering rate was so intrusive.
All they had to do
Form over Function != Useful Products (Score:5, Insightful)
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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".
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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.
Re:Form over Function != Useful Products (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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. ;-)
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No edit function in posts, sadly.
Since we moved to a chat system at work that allows editing after the fact, I've really, really grown lazy in proof reading what my fingers have produced.
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Who needs useful, we need marketable.
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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.
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Microsoft was full of infighting during the Ballmer years. Nadella changed most of that attitude.
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Ugh, not a real fan of what windows has become.
I don't think I'd like to see Apple go that route.
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What is wrong with Windows? (ie, that wasn't wrong before)
Re: Form over Function != Useful Products (Score:1)
Car manufacturers should take note (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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
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Re: Form over Function != Useful Products (Score:2)
Are you aware pcie has access to system memory?
That Steve Jobs' favourite port, FireWire also had direct memory access?
Thunderbolt is the same, also available on Macs
I mostly agree, but touch bar was great (Score:1)
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
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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
The wonderful designer... (Score:1)
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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
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The problems with his designs started before Jobs returned to Apple. He worked on the design of the disastrous Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh [wikipedia.org].
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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.
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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.
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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.
Main difference since Ive left (Score:2, Troll)
The products become usable again instead of being a fashion item only.
The king of over-simplification is dead (Score:1)
Long live the king of ripping off the naive every way he can.
Biopic, played by Rick Moranis (Score:2)
Ive saw the holes on the front of "Mac Studio" (Score:2)
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That has the “ring of truth”
Cheese grater aesthetic for a flagship would be accident not design inspiration
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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
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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.
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>I only commend for their silicone division
lol, but I am eagerly awaiting their Silicone Division :)
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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.
Sick of Apple (Score:1)
apple needs to lower it's storage costs (Score:2)
apple needs to lower it's storage costs
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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?
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
$100m, seriously? (Score:2)
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Think of it as a gift to a buddy from a buddy who has 100x that much with nothing interesting to do.
News? (Score:2)
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