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Apple's Brain Drain Hinders Efforts To Pick Its Next Jony Ive (bloomberg.com) 67

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Turnover at Apple has hindered efforts to replace the head of product design, leaving a gaping hole at the helm of a prominent team that's been key to the iPhone maker's prolonged success. From a report: Legendary design leader Jony Ive departed Apple in 2019, and his replacement for hardware design lasted just about three years. Now the department -- still in Ive's shadow -- needs a new leader at a time when there are few obvious choices. And the fate of Apple's hardware devices, which accounted for more than three-quarters of its nearly $400 billion in revenue last year, hangs in the balance. Evans Hankey, who has held the job since Ive left, informed Apple last month that she will be departing. Though Hankey had been at the company for about 20 years, her relatively brief tenure at the top of the industrial design team made it hard to establish a distinct vision for new products. Apple also lacks a clear succession plan for the job, a significant problem for a company that sells premium-priced products largely based on their look.
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Apple's Brain Drain Hinders Efforts To Pick Its Next Jony Ive More

Apple's Brain Drain Hinders Efforts To Pick Its Next Jony Ive

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  • Drama queens much? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @12:24PM (#63035997) Homepage

    Seems to me there's lots of businesses with lots of talented designers. Or are we really still stuck on this idea that Apple products are something revolutionary?

    • Re:Drama queens much? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @12:36PM (#63036019) Journal

      Maybe the trick is really talented marketers, not necessarily talented designers, who convince you a plastic bar of soap with electronics inside is "truly innovative!"

      A good enough marketing campaign could sell iBoogers, and get the Kardashians to say, "Wow! It's like a futuristic lava lamp!"

      Bullshit often wins. That reminds me, don't forget to vote.

      • A bit of both. Apple makes good products (I'm a satisfied user) but to many people they are a fashion statement as well. Apple need a lead designer who is not just very good at design, but also has a good feel for the market they are selling to.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Apple needs to sell both mediocrity and user hostile changes in the next few years.

        The last few iPhones have been pretty much static. Better CPU, but basically the same as last year, a slight incremental improvement. Nothing to really wow you with.

        The EU is forcing them to ditch lightning too, so they are either going to have to switch to USB C or remove the charging port entirely. My money is on the latter.

        So they need a highly skilled salesman.

        • I used my iPhone 6s from brand new until jut this month with the iPhone 14 Pro replacing it. It's something to be said that I haven't felt there has been any feature that has made me think, "Wow, that would be awesome." Getting the new phone I'm still like, "hmm, it is more responsive, better pictures and better audio quality, but there isn't anything NEW I'm doing with it."

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dbialac ( 320955 )
      Well you need somebody to add another 5 cameras, put in another gap on either side of the display and replace the UI with concave icons because flat isn't cool anymore. All new displays should be made to simulate dot matrix printing to give Millennials flashbacks from their early childhood, abandoning retina, which is also uncool now.

    • Apple turn over (Score:5, Funny)

      by flyingfsck ( 986395 ) on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @02:52PM (#63036457)
      Now I am feeling hungry.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Apple also lacks a clear succession plan for the [design] job, a significant problem for a company that sells premium-priced products largely based on their look.

    There are only so many variations on semi-translucent white blobs of plastic. It's getting old, and heavily cloned.

    Brushed metal is cool, experiment more around that.

  • Q. Have you designed an Apple phone before?
    A.No
    Q.Do you believe in over simplifying hardware so it 'looks nice' to the point that it grossly inconveniences users?
    A. No.

    It's so hard to figure Nd the right people.

  • Pro hardware needs to have slots / user disks (Score:3)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @12:38PM (#63036025)

    Pro hardware needs to have slots / user changeable storage disks

    • I don't think anybody ever said apple makes pro hardware. In fact it's pretty bad hardware, they're pretty notorious for buying the cheapest components from the worst manufacturers, like hynix memory. If you buy into the apple ecosystem you're basically just buying a fashion statement / status symbol. Same reason people buy beats headphones (though I'll admit, beats happens to be the only maker of ear buds that actually don't fall out of my small ears, but it's just one particular model; earbuds in general

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        MANY people say it although you are right, it is not true. To Apple, "Pro" is a term used to appeal to the egos of its customers, not to describe the equipment.

    • This hasn't been true since 2012. It all fits on a tiny board now.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by ACForever ( 6277156 )
      The Pro in apples lineup stands for profits, not professionals.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      For Apple, "Pro" now seems to mean

      - Expansion? Buy a thunderbolt dock.
      - RAM upgrade? Fuck you!

  • Out of ideas (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Retired Chemist ( 5039029 ) on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @12:40PM (#63036027)
    The phone industry is out of ideas. Their best "improvement" is fancier and fancier cameras. Frankly, the ones they have now will do anything a reasonable person would expect a phone camera to do. If you want more, buy a real camera. Their whole business model is based on selling people a new camera every year or two and there just is no reason for people to do it. They are living off the people who feel they have to have the latest and greatest, even though it does not do anything that they really want to do that their old one cannot. That is not a market segment that is likely to be viable, if as everyone seems to expect the global economy goes into even a mild slowdown.
    • They are living off the people who feel they have to have the latest and greatest, even though it does not do anything that they really want to do that their old one cannot.

      So long as people are dumb enough, Apple will keep selling.

      That is not a market segment that is likely to be viable, if as everyone seems to expect the global economy goes into even a mild slowdown.

      There are still new people to come onboard the Apple bandwagon.

    • The problem is, we have arrived at the "good enough" point a long time ago. There isn't really anything you could add to that phone that people would really want. And since everything that could possibly be removed also has been removed already, what's left to change?

      • ...what's left to change?

        Make it 5mm thicker and double the battery life?

        • But then it's not thin enough anymore that you have to put it into a protective cover of 5mm thickness so it doesn't break!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Scoth ( 879800 )

        I'd personally like something along the lines of the "webtop" thing the Atrix tried years ago, and Samsung DeX kind of does where you can plug your phone into a dock and get a full desktop experience. The Atrix was closer to a real desktop experience with what I believe was a full-on Ubuntu distro while the DeX is a more limited Android-esque experience, but they both are a taste of what I'd love more generally. I've not been a fan of Samsung's phone design for awhile so I'd prefer to avoid them even if it

      • This will depend heavily on where you live, but where I live, satellite backup connectivity will be a pretty big deal. That's the biggest thing I'm looking forward to.
      • Exactly why removable batteries were axed by every company. There had to be some way to get people to buy new phones, and batteries that wouldn't hold a charge that were unable to be replaced was the way.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 )

      Frankly, the ones they have now will do anything a reasonable person would expect a phone camera to do.

      Obviously not, as they have improved dramatically over the years. When the Pentium II came out it could do anything a reasonable person expected a high end processor to do. Then the P3 came out and blew the doors off P2s. (ok, maybe not the best example, but you get what I'm getting at.)

      That being said, I would tend to agree that the phone industry is running low on ideas. They are fresh out of plugs/sockets to remove, now that you can barely buy a phone with a headphone jack, SIM slot, or flash slot. Th

    • Phones have been at a point where they're more than good enough for years now. About the only thing they really need is a faster processor to keep up with the ever-bolting web in all its cobbled together JavaScript glory. Most changes these days are UI changes for little more than the sake of change and Apple has done more to annoy me than delight me with these changes in the past several releases.

      If they really wanted to do something useful they could just stop developing new crap that no one asked for

    • The phone industry is out of ideas.

      The smartphone reached its final form, more or less, back in the mid 2010's. We know what a smartphone is. We know what a smartphone does. We know what a smartphone looks like.

      Everything from here on out is just incremental improvements in cameras and batteries. It's going to be harder and harder to demand premium prices for barely improved stuff that does that same thing it's done for years.

    • The AI coprocessor or whatever they want to call them on the new chips are pretty interesting. They're seeing a lot of use for image and voice processing. I'm sure there's still a lot of novel uses to come but largely agree with your point.

  • Can't you come out to play in your empty garden, Jony?

  • missing the problem entirely (Score:3)

    by Kristoph ( 242780 ) on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @12:52PM (#63036067)

    The problem with hardware design at Apple is not the lack of capable individuals who would like to join and participate in the teams.

    The problem is that, after dozens of product variations in core categories, there really is little design innovation that can occur that will actually be favorable to customers.

    I mean do you really want another / different iPhone / iPad / MacBook design or have these devices really reached an optimal design and the only meaningful change is now in terms of dimensions? If so, designers would not get to create anything iconic unless they work on new products and those are very rare at Apple.

  • OK, OK, you talked me into it (Score:5, Funny)

    by Linux Torvalds ( 647197 ) on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @12:53PM (#63036083)

    I'll do it.

    First thing we do is get rid of all the extra keys on the keyboard that nobody uses. Fuck the 'J' key in paticular. The Romans were fine with using 'I' for both 'I' and 'J', and that's good enough for us. This strategy will take courage to execute, but it will lower warranty costs, simplify the bill of materials, and improve other key performance metrics such as user documentation and training requirements.

    Then, we will put the headphone jack back on the iPhone. We will use a 3-pin XLR connector this time, however. This courageous innovation will lend our products an industrial look and feel, helping us recapture some of the professional media-production customers that we've lost over the past few years. Also Tim Apple accidentally bought a bunch of XLR jacks on eBay last week and by a bunch I mean 300,000,000.

    After that, we will remove the cubicles from the toroidal-shaped headquarters building designed by my predecessor, completing our transition to the open-plan Panofficecon(tm) layout. This change is prompted by the realization that orthogonal cubicle partitions waste a lot of space in corners near the curved outer walls. Incidentally, we owe the Gehry consultants $85 million for pointing that out. They have agreed to release the lien on our building as soon as somebody cuts them a check. But again, Jonny Ive is the one who hired them, so that would be a Jonny problem, not a Me problem.

    Finally, my department will move forward on my predecessor's previously-shelved plans to replace lithium-ion batteries across our product line with Pu-239 energy cells originally designed in the Soviet Union to run various devices ranging from pacemakers to forklifts. This will save approximately 0.1 mm in average device thickness while improving battery life by 250,000% as a minor ancillary benefit. Our employees^Wcolleagues at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have promised a streamlined approval process.

    And all it took was courage.... courage that my predecessors were sadly lacking.

    • can ruin the whole barrel.

    • Re:OK, OK, you talked me into it (Score:4, Funny)

      by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @02:32PM (#63036403) Journal

      First thing we do is get rid of all the extra keys on the keyboard that nobody uses. Fuck the 'J' key in paticular. The Romans were fine with using 'I' for both 'I' and 'J', and that's good enough for us.

      You should eliminate that useless 'u' while you're at it. The Romans didn't need it.

      This strategy will take covrage to execvte, bvt it will lower warranty costs, simplify the bill of materials, and improve other key performance metrics svch as vser docvmentation and training reqvirements.

      Then, we will pvt the headphone iack back on the iPhone

      Yov mispelled 'iack'. I fixed it for yov, as well as yovr other oversight.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sfcat ( 872532 )
      LOL, very funny. Just one FYI, A radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG, RITEG) are powered by Pu-238 (but could also be U-232) not Pu-239. Pu-239 is for making nuclear weapons and isn't really very useful for making RTGs. BTW, we are running out of Pu-238 as most of it was extracted during the cold war.
    • Getting rid of all keys: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com]
  • who could and would do this job if offered 1% of Apple's annual revenue as salary?
    That's about $4 Billion a year btw.

    Apple's just not thinking out of the box, evidently.
    • Yeah I'd like to know the backstory on why the current person is leaving. I'm sure it's an incredibly well-compensated position.
  • Or maybe he has an offspring old enough? It's been a long time since Apple focused on usability, rather than design for its own sake. (In case you don't know Tog, search "Tog on Interface".)
  • Twenty years ago, the iMac and iPod were marvels of industrial design. The only "design" these days with the major products is about how to make the bezel smaller and the enclosure thinner. The only real industrial design happening at Apple is with minor products like ear buds. The position Ives held simply isn't very important these days.
  • Didn't he push Apple toward disposable computers? Were there and aren't there a sharp corners on a lot of Apple products. No, thinness doesn't count that much in a computer; in a tablet, yes, but not a computer. Actually, glossy screens are stupid.

  • All the Apple's fine brains went working for Microsoft and now they can finally move ahead with their long repressed project of putting ads in sign-out menus [slashdot.org]. Take that, Apple!

  • It's designed. It's done. Leave it be.

  • Yeah not surprised... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SerpentMage ( 13390 ) on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @03:06PM (#63036511)

    So who was surprised by this? Apple is in the Ballmer years where innovation and design don't matter. Cook is a number cruncher and has zero vision ability. Not saying it is a bad thing. It is a bad thing when you are CEO of the company. Cook needs to take a hands off attitude and begin to take a risk. Steve Jobs was quite ruthless in that if the design cannibalized the existing products and is a better design so be it. Cook is not able to do that and that is why Apple is not getting anywhere anymore.

  • As others have pointed out in various ways "Design" is dead. We have arrived at usable form factors and ux conventions some time ago. So called designers are just pissing off users at this point.

  • Apple wants to tout the "look" as a key reason for the success of the iPhone. iPhones have seen fairly rapid changes in external design, and most changes have been heralded as genius. However, how much of the revenue success has been due to other factors, such as the Apple brand and lock-in (e.g., iMessages incompatability)? Since Ive left, how much has the iPhone revenue dropped? Hint, revenue has continued to increase (with a blip for the pandemic).

  • "...a significant problem for a company that sells premium-priced products largely based on their look." That's a strange characterization of Apple. Who buys iPhone's and MacBooks based on their appearance, rather than functionality and performance and compatibility?

    • Well, you don't buy it because "it just works" anymore. I actually like the design of the newer generation of iMacs, but almost everything they make now is just a replacement for something broken or lost. I'm not sure what they could offer to get any more of my money at this point beyond that. Breakage and warranty rejection really make it a losing proposition now. I have even kept my iPad Pro (which is my primary computer) three extra years despite its giant crack running diagonally across my screen be

  • We 'went there' pretty quick . . .

    Anyhoo, Tesla sucks. Wait, what? There, that's it.

    The Model S: something people didn't know they wanted or needed. Some selective perqs like 'free' charging and ten grand on the US taxpayer and it was a hit.

    What did the iPhone do? Screens. Screens were absolute CRAP and it immediately set the bar from 'you can use it as a touch screen' to "it works when you touch it". Everyone followed and the awfulness that was touch screens went away.

    The smart watch STILL hasn't pop

  • I'll even add a 'y' to my first name so that everyone can call me Jony.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • This will never happen, but Apple could change the electronics industry, not just phones and computers, by committing to users' being able to upgrade their devices or replace batteries. Imagine being able to buy a wireless device with a special industry symbol on it knowing that it had been certified repairable. I would assume that most Slashdot readers can use a soldering iron and replace a rechargeable battery, but wouldn't it be awesome if you could just order a battery meeting the specs in the manual wh

  • The industry has matured. It is like any other now. Its business models rely on hype and fads to sell things people -- and even businesses -- don't need nor even want (gotta keep up with the Kardashians!).

    Corporations -- and the people they hire, retain, and promote -- do not lend themselves to creative thinking. Their hiring practices -- which are designed with the intent of weeding out "under performers" -- remove ALL outliers, on BOTH sides of the bell curve. The "techie bro" of today is the same as t

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