Read the whole thing, I was really not convinced. Ive had some brilliant hits, but I think became more of a liability in the end. Look at what happened to the MacBook Pro, losing most of its ports and the thinness causing them to put a much worse keyboard in it that caused massive problems. Sacrificing a bit of thinness and going back on those changes with the newest iteration has been much better.<p>Honestly to me the M1 era of Apple is the more exciting than things have been in years. The article linked is really negative (saying Apple only have “legacy products”) but with the M1 series they seems to be smashing it out of the park…
I’ve always gotten the impression that Ive may be a truly great designer be he needs an editor. He had that in Steve Jobs.<p>Once he lost his editor the designs Apple shipped moved more and more towards being perfect designs at the expense of thoughts of usability.<p>And now he’s known as the guy who helped “ruin” Apple’s products until they kicked him out.<p>Unfortunate. For the lack of an editor.
Regarding the title with "technocrats" reminded me of Bret Victor referring to it as a "designer aristocracy" - <a href="http://worrydream.com/#!/DynamicPicturesMotivation" rel="nofollow">http://worrydream.com/#!/DynamicPicturesMotivation</a> (2011 , mentioned later on in the essay)<p>--<p>The 2011 Bret Victor essay: "I spent a few years hanging around various UI design groups at Apple, and I met brilliant designers, and these brilliant designers could not make real things. They could only suggest. They would draw mockups in Photoshop, maybe animate them in Keynote, maybe add simple interactivity in Director or Quartz Composer. But the designers could not produce anything that they could ship as-is. Instead, they were dependent on engineers to translate their ideas into lines of text. Even at Apple, a designer aristocracy like no other, there was always a subtle undercurrent of helplessness, and the timidity and hesitation that come from not being self-reliant."<p>--<p>The 2022 NYT article "technocrats triumphed at apple": "Mr. Ive’s absence, the designers say that they collaborate more with colleagues in engineering and operations and face more cost pressures than they did previously."
What a weird take.<p>A lot of the changes the "accountants" have made recently are responsive to user request to my eye.<p>So so many more ports on the new products. I absolutely love this. I hated the pure design direction things were going under Ive.<p>Battery life once again going big. I love this. Usability again the key.<p>The trashcan Mac Pro? Too much design. Give folks a square box if you need to crank power up.<p>Self service repair program? Only one out there from what I can tell? I like it.<p>Iphone mini - yes I was one of the few folks who bought this. Sorry to see this go away, I like the small phones. But giving a range of options was great.<p>And this list goes on. My wife keeps her stuff (iphone / macbook) around FOREVER - software updates on phones going back 5+ years? Fantastic.<p>Their run rate is now something like $400B++ per year? With nuts gross margins (maybe getting close to $200B in gross margin?!!)<p>They've done this with almost no acquisitions (relatively speaking). And throwing off $150B in operating cash flow (6 months). I think stock buybacks are lame but what can they spend this on really? A moon launch and base?<p>This is the reward for being trusted (in my view) far FAR more than many other players in the market despite the complaints you see on HN.<p>I know they are considered a "ripoff" but if someone has a monitor / keyboard, dropping $700 for a mac mini, you can basically do all the programming / video editing / photo editing you could want.
Question: After reading some comments here, I still think I might be in a bubble? I think its all becoming better now that Ive is not responsible for then mac design any more.<p>All the mac hardware (mini, imac, macbooks) became smaller, less repairable and overdesigned to the extent of being impacted in usability after steve jobs died and Ive was running without counterweight:<p>The magic mouse you could not use while charging. The horrible keyboard that died from merely a few crumbs. having only two ports on a computer so you would always need a couple of dongles. Just to name a few.<p>Sometimes clever design has to be combined with <i>boring</i> choices, like still having a hdmi port and micro sd slot. A decent, resilient keyboard. Now I long for a macbook that has replaceable/repairable memory (ram, ssd) again as well as a battery that is not glued in place ...
What a testament to ego.<p>Rather than the Apple watch being a Vogue-celebrated product for the 1%, it’s an attractive and high quality product for many people. I see it on the wrists fashion icons and on the wrists of people working at my local grocery store. Billionaires and ordinary people can have basically the same phone, watch, and AirPods. <i>That</i> is the true genius of Cook, reviving the “computer for the rest of us”.<p>I do think Apple’s design has become a little stale, but if there has to be a choice of once vs the other they are currently picking the right one. Let’s not forget that the vaunted focus on design has given us a mouse with the charger on the bottom as well as innumerable other botches over the years. I am glad Apple was willing to push the envelope, but some of that stubbornness has worked against them.
Jony Ive is a hack without the firm hand of a Steve Jobs to keep his self-indulgent tendencies in check. He is responsible for the butterfly keyboard fiasco. Scott Forstall was famously fired for refusing to apologize for the Apple Maps first release woes, but AFAIK Ive never has for those garbage key switches, and I’m sure there are multibillion dollar class-action lawsuits working their way through the legal system.<p>It is notable Apple has not named a new Chief Design Officer. Ive’s failure is so manifest he’s destroyed designers’ seat at the table in the company that was the poster child for design.
Ive may have done great work under Steve Jobs, but his work since Jobs' passing has been disastrous.<p>Let's consider Jony's performance on software design first. This is what some prominent people have said about iOS 7: The Verge wrote in their review: "iOS 7 isn't harder to use, just less obvious. That's a momentous change: iOS used to be so obvious." Michael Heilemann, Interface Director at Squarespace wrote, "when I look at [iOS 7 beta] I see anti-patterns and basic mistakes that should have been caught on the whiteboard before anyone even began thinking about coding it." And famed blogger John Gruber said this about iOS 7: "my guess is that [Steve Jobs] would not have supported this direction."<p>And what about Jony's other responsibility, industrial design? The iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and other Apple products from Jobs era are all amazingly well designed and breathtakingly beautiful. But these products weren't designed by Jony Ive all by himself. He designed them under Steve Jobs's guidance and direction. Steve was the tastemaker. Apple's post-Steve products are nowhere near as well-designed.<p>Consider iPhone 5c, for example. The colors were horrid, and when you added those Crocs-like cases it looked more like a Fisher-Price toy than like a device an executive would want to be seen holding. That the 5c didn't do well in the market shouldn't surprise anyone.<p>As an Apple shareholder and customer I am glad Ive is gone.
The bottom line is Apple products post-Ive have improved dramatically in terms of practicality, efficiency, and even design. Without Jobs, the guy should be without jobs.
How was this ever going to work?<p>If I worked for 20 years with one of history's most influential entrepreneur, and we had a deep working partnership sustained by mutual respect and trust, and then that person died, I simply don't know how I'd continue showing up every day.<p>Keep in mind that when Jobs returned to Apple, Ive was not at all influential within Apple and on the verge of leaving. To go from that place to one of the world's most influential industrial designers — gosh, I'd have some ego too.<p>I'm grateful for his contribution. And I'm also grateful that his departure seemed to have opened new avenues of creativity and flexibility of thought at Apple.<p>After all, it was Jobs himself at the Stanford connection who said that death (or, thought of another way, departure) is life's change agent.
> In the wake of Mr. Jobs’s death, colleagues said, Mr. Ive fumed about corporate bloat, chafed at Mr. Cook’s egalitarian structure, lamented the rise of operational leaders and struggled with a shift in the company’s focus from making devices to developing services.<p>I think this is particularly clear when you compare Apple's current product introduction keynotes to ones from the Jobs/Ive days: nowadays, they to forego the bit where they talk about how the device was made.<p>Ex: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SjIuzhdd_g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SjIuzhdd_g</a> (Apple Watch Steel introduction video, with a heavy focus on how it's made)
Back in 2017, many of us were frustrated with Apple's Mac offerings (price/performance/features). In other words, Apple seemed to be stagnating hard at the time, forcing us to move to Linux on better hardware.<p>I also remember people throwing out lines at the time, such as "Apple needs to focus on not making things thinner" or "Price with Apple is only an issue in the absence of value".<p>Since the introduction of the M1, Apple has regained all of that lost momentum in my opinion. And from judging Internet commentary, most others wholeheartedly agree. People wanted speed/performance/battery/ports rather than another millimeter of thinness. The only gripe I hear today with Macs surrounds the pace of innovation with macOS.<p>I think this article would have been better received if it were released before the introduction of the M1.<p>Moreover, the ending paragraph states "the designers say that they collaborate more with colleagues in engineering and operations and face more cost pressures than they did previously. Meanwhile, the products remain largely as they were when Mr. Ive left." I can't see how this engineering collaboration and cost accountability would be a negative thing for consumers or Apple, and the products are definitely a lot better (and faster!) than before Mr. Ive left.
Why do we ever only read stories about Ive, and not nearly as often about people who made software design decisions, who work on the OS or security, or who made strategic decisions such as Apple's walled garden?<p>The only technocrat who triumphed seems to be Ive.
On the flip side, one wonders what the departure of Scott Forstall meant for Apple, and where it would be today if he continued to be in a decision-making position.
The article leaves out some of the consequences of focusing on design over practicality and usability.
The MacBook Air keyboard had become a disaster. It was as close as one could get to just typing on a hard surface. It was around this time that I switched to a Surface laptop because it felt to me Apple was giving up on their own laptops in favor of the iPhone.
Fortunately, they’ve now fixed this.
> It was 2014, and Apple’s future, more than ever, seemed to hinge on Mr. Ive.<p>What?<p>I was there then and long before, and that's just nonsense, fabricated nonsense by whoever Tripp Mickle is. What a sensationalist assertion.<p>The engineering, hard-core engineering, was a not entirely hidden powerhouse, and still is.
Jony Ive‘s „design is everything, function is last“ approach.<p>I think Apple „grew up“ a little bit in the last years and realized, that they can not deliver any more or such substandard products.<p>- Like the Mac Pro (2013) which was thermal limited even with the launch configuration and could not be refreshed because more power would mean less power through throttling<p>- Magic Mouse 2 which well u could not use while charging<p>- Macbook Pro Touchbar which is there because there was nothing else to „innovate“<p>- MacBook Pro Keyboard which is so thin and lookin good that the owner has to replace it every 6 month
Unpopular and potentially downvoted to oblivion opinion, but have to say this - this kind of reverences to Ive make me physically ill. He's still to be accounted -alongside Apple- as one of the culprits of today's trend of irrepairability (and the consequent planned obsolescence) on devices for the sake of 'minimalism' and Dieter Rams wannabe designs.
What were Ive’s most notable accomplishment after Jobs died? The author suggests he would have produced amazing things if he had retained more power, but it’s not clear to me why we should think this.
I used to worry that Apple was slipping. Apple TV+ especially made me question the direction of the company. Then I got a MacBook Pro with an M1 chip. It’s honestly stunning.
No one talks about the mega disaster that is Apple Park. When you inside it mostly feels like hospital or airport. The glass cleaning is a major pain to do. Apple bought a quarry in Italy so that the wall tiles can line up or something. Will be fun ti see what happens when it gets damaged. The sinks are all carved out of one block of stone. Last but the least the chairs are 7k and are the works ever to sit on. There are som many apple buildings in Cupertino and collaborating with another team is quite painful. Ive without Jobs was definitely a disaster. After spending those billions on that building that looks like a tomb for Steve Jobs, I wonder what purpose was achieved.
I'm not sure that a $25 million tent & tree relocation really counts as a triumph for the accountants. Objecting to that expense seems fairly reasonable. The fact the Ive had to fight to get it done doesn't really tell me that the accountants have won out over quality product design. I certainly don't have any recollection of the trapping of the watch launch nor any coverage by vogue.<p>In general this conveys to me that Ive was growing increasingly out of touch with what was truly important rather than bean counters winning on $$$.
I think Apple has lost its mojo when they have started to sacrifice function to form, to make their Laptops even thinner. Remember the "revolutionary" butterfly keyboards that could not survive outside a clean lab? That was the moment.<p>Btw, the watch struggled rightfully so, because the battery still does not last a day. I can imagine how hard it was to sell it as a fashion accessory. It needs daily care, charging at least one time a day. Staggering! I have a different smart watch product that lasts a week! Now that's a fashion accessory!
Jony Ive was Steve Jobs’ extension. Steve needed Ive at Apple but Cook didn’t really need him because Apple fast became something entirely different since the introduction of iPhone. In my view, Apple will always be in its best form guided by engineers. I think there was a period (a couple of years since Jobs’ passing) where Apple was playing “What-would-Steve-do?” and I am so glad the executives leapfrogged that mentality of chasing after an icon’s shadow.
I listened to this author's interview on the A16z podcast. An important detail is that Scott Forstall brought him up through Apple over the years. Scott Forstall, the head of software for Apple, later lost a power battle after Steve Jobs' death to Tim Cook & Jony Ive. One wonders if this is coloring his opinion.
> [...] struggled with a shift in the company’s focus from making devices to developing services.<p>Boy can I ever empathize with that.<p>This shift is the worst thing that ever happened to Apple. Personally, it was maybe the biggest reason I got disillusioned working for them and quit (I should note I was only a Retail employee, nothing big).
It's interesting that the article attributed the shift in Apple Watch's marketing strategy to Tim Cook. I am pretty sure that Jeff Williams led that change. He is a smart guy who doesn't get the press he deserves, in my opinion.
The article doesn’t delve its title that technocrats thrive at apple. It only focuses on what it calls “accountants”.<p>However is it possible that Ive himself was just done? With artists , either composers or of the visual arts, they usually have a stock of good ones they churn out and after that the output is usually a repetition or a hodgepodge their previous work. It’s possible Ive reached that point too as the iPhone kind of became an all in one computer that killed a lot of accessories, so any idea for a new kind of device is killed automatically. In that scenario, I don’t know what else is there after a watch.
I want a phone that knows I'm going to put a screen protector on it and put it in a case.<p>So what if it's thinner? I'm going to put it in a case that makes it huge. Design it with the case in mind. You put a stupid camera bulge on it. The whole phone could be the thickness of the bulge.<p>Why do I have to put a screen protector on it? Why doesn't it come from the factory with a screen protector?<p>I don't know how to design a phone that knows it will be wearing clothes, but it should be obvious to designers that many people do not use a naked phone.
It was the Jobs Ive combo that worked. I think Ive was making too many form over function decisions towards the end which benefitted neither Apple nor its customers. Cook is a bean counter.<p>That does not neat to be all bad as much as I hate to say it. That is why I liken get he new Apple to Microsoft with all of he pros and cons that entails:<p><a href="https://erik-engheim.medium.com/apple-is-turning-into-the-next-microsoft-b080102051ed" rel="nofollow">https://erik-engheim.medium.com/apple-is-turning-into-the-ne...</a>
Rock star designers leaving big companies is nothing new. I happen to like "Bangled" BMWs like the original Z4, before it was watered down to a retro-ish design. But I also know I'm in the minority.<p>Apple's primary advantage is gaining unique capabilities and protecting them through domination of the supply chain. Not all of these succeed (<i>vide</i> large sapphire crystals) but these kinds of competitive moats are actually more important than unique designs.
The intro story soured me on the guy. Millions of dollars to move a few trees for a party feels like a maybe waste of resources. That's not the sort of mentality I expect from design leadership on any company, even Apple.<p>And tbqh Ive always represented the worst of form over function to me. The puck mouse was ridiculous, as was a bunch of stuff he created or sponsored.<p>Good riddance.
Ive seems to have left because he was no longer powerful enough. He was likely burned out. He got a good amount of money out of leaving as well.<p>I don’t know what any of that has anything to do with Apple being run by technocrats? I don’t know if the person who wrote this truly understands how much creativity is needed to pull off the engineering feats that Apple seems to have been pulling off for better part of last two decades.
In 2016, the Apple Watch was selling so badly that Apple was giving it away to its employees at an 80% discount. If any engineer at the company were responsible for such an epochal failure, he would have been tarred and feathered and then hanged, drawn and quartered. Instead, the manager responsible was allowed to let his RSUs vest for 4 years, and then let go with a $100m parachute deal.
Shirky's review is much better than the excerpt: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/01/books/review/after-steve-tripp-mickle.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/01/books/review/after-steve-...</a>
Not much information, very verbose. The only valuable information is that Apple's strategy under Cook has shifted from devices to more profitable services.
Don’t they do extensive user testing on these products ? Surprising some of the design decisions they make with the amount of resources at their disposal
I think he created the Apple look and feel which will stay with the company probably forever as something to distinguish it from all the other products in the marketplace. For this reason he should be celebrated. Sure we can blame him for the terrible butterfly keyboard and the nearly port-less MacBook major blunders, but in the end without Ivy Apple hardware would not be distinguishable from a generic laptop running Windows.<p>Without a rigorous and function-first engineering mindset it's dangerous to let designers run havoc. An Ivy without Jobs was doomed from the get-go.
Car design is much more interesting than the wholly homogeneous world of mobile and computing. Hasn't anyone come up with a nice idea for 15 years?
I think the problem that happened with Ive's designs is that he kept trying to out-do himself <i>in the same direction.</i> I've was important with regard to making really nice products that felt really good. Even a plastic iPhone 3G felt really solid compared to the creaky Android phones that would keep coming out years later, never mind an iPhone 4 with its amazing metal and glass feel.<p>However, Ive kept wanting to push things in the same direction. Apple made wonderful and thin MacBooks that were solid with unibody enclosures. I remember the thick, creaky, plastic PC laptops of 2008 and the MacBook Pros were just amazing in comparison. Later, Ive wanted to shave 0.25mm worth of keyboard space and we ended up with MacBooks that no one wanted.<p>I think labeling this as "the technocrats won" is way overstating the case. Ive's legacy is all around Apple's new products. It's in the Mac Studio which is a small and quiet machine made out of nice materials. It's just a tad more balanced with the practical implications of managing heat. Instead of trying to make the Mac Studio as small as humanly possible, they've made it small and nice. It isn't anything like the mini-towers that are typical. The new Apple Watch really pushes the display to the edge. It's amazing.<p>I think part of it was that Ive didn't have a lot of places to go. He'd won. Apple had moved over to his way of thinking almost entirely - with tiny exceptions like "I'd like a functional keyboard." The industry has moved over to his way of thinking a lot. Android phones aren't creaky plastic nearly as often - you can get ones with nice materials and build quality. Once everyone is won over to your way of thinking, where do you go?<p>In fact, I think a lot of people really like attention. For a long time, Ive got attention. He'd get positive attention from Apple fans who loved his nice designs and negative attention from those who would complain that the iMac didn't have a floppy drive or whatnot - but he was sure he was correct. Fast forward to 2016 and what was Ive really doing that would garner such attention? Apple's product line was all Ive'd. The industry had copied him in a lot of ways (even if they were potentially bad copies). In a way, he wasn't a thought-leader anymore because people had all accepted his thesis. If Newton were around today talking about gravity existing, we'd all be like "yea, we know...got anything new?"<p>As time went on Ive would either need to find some amazing new way of pushing things forward or his work would just be passé. Oh, another unibody MacBook Pro. Oh, another computer like the last one. He didn't have a battle to fight anymore.<p>Back in 2000-2010, he could be telling engineers "you need to make it this way because it's better" and most of the time he was right. Once he'd proven out the fact that he was right over that decade, everyone was on board because they saw the value. What would the next thing be that he was right about? Maybe there wasn't a next thing. Maybe they'd taken computers to the right level of design.<p>Apple's whole lineup is basically Ive's legacy - with a tiny bit of extra room for a decent keyboard or cooling.
This frames his departure as being about conflict with the 'accountants', and it doesn't mention the laptop thinness debacle. I have zero inside information, but I understood Ive to have been pushing for thinness, even at the expense of functionality. The company went down his path for a few years, but it has recently made an abrupt about-face. It seems strange not to mention this dimension of Ive's work and the possible conflicts it could have caused.<p>OTOH, this guy apparently conducted hundreds of interviews, and I'm just some guy who's been watching from the outside! Maybe I'm way off-base.
"a shift in strategy that has made the company <i>better known</i> for offering TV shows and a credit card than introducing the kind of revolutionary new devices that once defined it"<p>I nearly stopped reading here. Does anyone think that's true? Sure they make much more money than they used to but to everyone I know apple is still very much a hardware and product company.
This article is from some clown that wrote a book with an opinionated story (this same one) about Apple.<p>It’s an advertisement for his book and dovetails with NYT’s crazed and rabid need to attack the tech industry that diluted their chokehold on discourse.<p>There is nothing serious going on here.
Jony Ive leaving Apple was there best thing that could have happened. The horrible keyboards, the form over function trash can MacPro, the removal of ports, the one port MacBook (“the adorable”), the gold Apple Watch, are all the fault ultimately of the design team under Ive.