9 ms·

Ive’s Legacy, the Post-Ive Apple

104 points by quanganhdo 7y ago

pazimzadeh 7y ago
Maybe Steve Jobs' greatest accomplishment was getting titans like Jony Ive and Steve Forstall, who could each run their own successful design and/or tech companies, to put aside ego and work together under one roof.
- willio58 7y ago
  Scott, not Steve.
- xuki 7y ago
  Yup. “My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people.”
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    The Beatles exploded into rancour, hate, and bitterness, so they're maybe not the ideal role model. Bands are hard. People in bands are passionate, often drunk and/or on drugs, almost guaranteed to be egotistical, and fiercely competitive - not at all team players by default, more like literal 10X music rock stars. (It doesn't help if they are.) There's almost never a supervising manager to keep it all together. (Producers are temporary, and band managers are more like salespeople and hired negotiators than corporate managers.) It's interesting to wonder what would happen if you took difficult but talented musicians and somehow managed them into smooth cooperation. Maybe Jobs did indeed do the software and design talent equivalent - but even he would have struggled with getting to happen in the music business.
    - silvestrov 7y ago
      You could end up with K-pop: South Korean Pop, something that is too smooth and too focused on the market.
    - braythwayt 7y ago
      Genuine bands are hard. So are genuine partnerships in every field, including founding companies. Top-down, command-and-control organizations that churn out product are different. Not all achieve the same success, but nearly every industry has figured out how to industrialize “creativity.” In music, pop has had industrialization for sixty to seventy years. Instead of The Beatles, think of all the “bands” that were actually vocalists fronting for The Wrecking Crew or The Funk Brothers. Think of producers and arrangers like Quincy Jones or Trevor Horn or Prince. They produced many acts, including their own, but they were essentially scaling themselves. Bands of equals are hard. But industrializing music is an understood business.
- shuckles 7y ago
  Yes, he was an amazing leader.
- Austin_Conlon 7y ago
  Blaine Garst who worked for him at NeXT and Apple said that this was indeed true: https://youtu.be/qtEIq7fe_KQ?t=9502 https://youtu.be/qtEIq7fe_KQ?t=9502. > So Steve Jobs’ real talent was hiring good people. 'Cause he didn't invent most of that stuff but he sold it. He had ideas, and some of his ideas were the inventions and some of them got battered around and thrown away, you know, but he knew how to hire great people. And the people he hired, the reason they were great was they were great together. It was a very egoless environment in all honesty. People had their ideas, they would push 'em but they could be talked out of 'em. They could learn, we were all there, we were small enough. As you said, I was doing kernel work, language work, you know, whatever work needed to be done, we were all in it together. So it was a very positive environment. It was the closest work environment to my high school that I ever had. Tolerant, directed, but you know, and focused.
- jjtheblunt 7y ago
  (Scott Forstall)
ryeights 7y ago
>In their separate interviews with the FT this week, Mr Cook and Sir Jonathan insisted that no single person at Apple decides which innovations graduate from its R&D labs and which are sent back to the drawing board. “The company runs very much horizontally,” said Mr Cook. “The reason it’s probably not so clear about who [sets product strategy] is that the most important decisions, there are several people involved in it, by the nature of how we operate.” This would certainly explain Apple’s apparent lack of direction in recent years. Between this, their recent refocusing on “services”, and the clusterfuck of ports, dongles, and redesigns on new products, I am fearful for the future of Apple hardware.
- kevin_b_er 7y ago
  Ok so its now a committee that approves designs. But does anyone in the engineering groups yet get to pushback enough against bufferfly keyboards before they go to market or will function[ality] still follow after form?
- mevile 7y ago
  I'm ready for a post-Apple world. Fine attention to detail in the user experience of their products, but at the expense of a pernicious ecosystem that traps you in and works with nothing else. It feels weird to say it, but I much more prefer Microsoft and their recent culture change. They're putting xbox gamepass on non-Microsoft devices, their own PC games on Steam, open sourcing their software, building world class android apps. I don't care how many Jony Ive's you've got, it's the openness and willingness to work with others that I want.
  - snazz 7y ago
    Apple has their own walled garden ecosystem because they can afford to. It really isn't much different from Microsoft in the 90s and early 00s, when they were at the peak of their market lock-in with Windows. Then the rest of the world changed, and it took them a really long time to adapt. Since they've been forced to open up their software and their ecosystem, the consumer has benefited immensely. Had everyone still been working on Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows with generic PC hardware and the mobile revolution had not occurred, Microsoft would have never left their old ways because they didn't need to. Whether the same thing will at some point happen to Apple we do not know (although I'll wager we're nearing Apple's peak), but it will likely take a monumental change in the way that the technology world works for such a transformation to happen.
amelius 7y ago
I hope Apple goes back to Frog Design, I think those designs had much more character. Also, if you make a design slimmer and slimmer, you're bound to end up with something flat and uninteresting. I also don't like the sharpness of the aluminum at the edges. The plastic designs were much more friendly, imho.
- zapzupnz 7y ago
  > you're bound to end up with something flat and uninteresting That's the ideal: a computer that gets out of the way. They've been wanting that since long before Steve died, too. Hence the iPad, literally just a screen. Or last year's iPad Pro, where they took the bezel away and there's even less screen, same for the MacBooks. The iMac must be the poster child: literally just a screen. The less device you see, and the more content (ergo screen), the better. > The plastic designs were much more friendly, imho But plastic also chips and breaks. Of all the plastic MacBooks I had, none of them finished life without a few chips of plastic missing. The plastic also didn't vent the computers' heat very well. I agree that the sharp edges aren't fantastic but, strictly speaking, you're supposed to keep your wrists raised above the keyboard to avoid developing RSI so the edges shouldn't come into it anyway. I miss the PowerBook G4 design. That was aluminium but had round edges. That design but with modern thinness, that would be nice to have back.
  - amelius 7y ago
    > That's the ideal: a computer that gets out of the way. They've been wanting that since long before Steve died, too. Yeah, but what's Ive's role here? Isn't the miniaturization more due to electrical engineering efforts (placement/routing/PCB design), than to visual design efforts (making it look thinner than it actually is)? > But plastic also chips and breaks. Yes, and I think it gives a device more identity and character :) > The plastic also didn't vent the computers' heat very well. True! But Apple is known for their obsession of "form over function", so this is a curious aspect that goes against their principle. > the edges shouldn't come into it anyway Yes, that's a good point. But you can't always prevent that e.g. when traveling, or lying down, which is what laptops are made for. Anyway, I just wanted to share my view because I don't understand what all the fuss is about. I liked Apple in the days of the Apple ][, but I absolutely despise their walled garden, and their assimilation of the supply chain. Design is absolutely secondary to all that.
myt6fore 7y ago
Does anyone else miss 'early' Ben Thompson? Ben of Then would easily spend an hour meticulously crafting around the topic whilst carefully rationing his listeners' attention. Once listeners are thoroughly primed, Thompson would then proceed with a sudden, massive contextual leap shifting the laid groundwork (vertically) into potential energy, lifting us along. Ben of today, writes mechanistically, with two main pillars: 1)catering to his technocratic subscriber-base 2)asserting himself as an expert historian of the industry. Technocrats demand affirmation of their worldview (that is what they do), so static narratives provide an important anchor. The preeminent historian supports this rigidity as his main competitive advantage (over lesser historians) is his cultivated cache of (niche) interlinks. In our (violently) changing world we need thermonuclear Ben not the historian Ben.
mekpro 7y ago
"even Ive’s exit was beautifully designed."
blunderkid 7y ago
I liked iOS' "skeuomorphic" design and despise the flatness that Mr Ive introduced, i think 5 years back. The first iPhone was mind blowing because it seemed to make apps pop out of the screen and invited you to tap on them. Flatness is two steps back and made iOS Androidish, not a great design inspiration. Also the ridiculous obsession with thinness of macs and iPhones probably at the cost of making them do something useful, if that is Mr Ive's doing, he has clearly outlived his usefulness. Those iMacs though were pretty. Never used one but Ben is right about them being Ive's best work. Wish him a happy and most well deserved retirement.
- dijit 7y ago
  I also really loved the skeuomorphic design that came with my iPhone 4s. Buttons looked like buttons, leather and denim accents made the phone feel like a luxury device even though it was just digital fabrication. Even the notes application looked like a sketch pad with a special “handwriting” font. I was sad when it went but now I’m in full nostalgia mode. I wonder why they decided to kill it. There must have been a good reason.
  - raverbashing 7y ago
    > I wonder why they decided to kill it. There must have been a good reason. Because it is tacky and it didn't age well I'd say the initial use of it was maybe in discoverability, but I suppose when smartphones became more popular that lost its main function. I think it gets distracting sometimes and it is needlessly design heavy (think how much images you need to do that).
    - zapzupnz 7y ago
      You got distracted by the Rose Tinted Glasses Brigade, but I think you're absolutely right. On top of that, I think there were other design considerations — how to make iOS' scale up to iPad more easily (remember when Siri was in a little box in the middle of the screen?) to the point where iPad apps can now be adapted with a checkbox to run on macOS. I think the groundwork started in iOS 7.
    - 7y ago
IloveHN84 7y ago
The best Ive's product is the Magic Mouse... How could you put the charging port UNDER the mouse?
- thstart 7y ago
  Because if you charge AND use it at same time the battery would be damaged.
- philjohn 7y ago
  Because they didn't want you to plug in the lightning cable and just use it as a wired mouse ... because that defeats the purpose of it. I mean, I plug mine in once in a blue moon ... and always when I leave the office for the night ... and it's fully charged for many weeks thereafter. You might have more of a point if the battery only lasted a few hours ...

104 points by quanganhdo 7y ago

Maybe Steve Jobs' greatest accomplishment was getting titans like Jony Ive and Steve Forstall, who could each run their own successful design and/or tech companies, to put aside ego and work together under one roof.

willio58 7y ago
Scott, not Steve.
xuki 7y ago
Yup. “My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people.”
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  The Beatles exploded into rancour, hate, and bitterness, so they're maybe not the ideal role model. Bands are hard. People in bands are passionate, often drunk and/or on drugs, almost guaranteed to be egotistical, and fiercely competitive - not at all team players by default, more like literal 10X music rock stars. (It doesn't help if they are.) There's almost never a supervising manager to keep it all together. (Producers are temporary, and band managers are more like salespeople and hired negotiators than corporate managers.) It's interesting to wonder what would happen if you took difficult but talented musicians and somehow managed them into smooth cooperation. Maybe Jobs did indeed do the software and design talent equivalent - but even he would have struggled with getting to happen in the music business.
  - silvestrov 7y ago
    You could end up with K-pop: South Korean Pop, something that is too smooth and too focused on the market.
  - braythwayt 7y ago
    Genuine bands are hard. So are genuine partnerships in every field, including founding companies. Top-down, command-and-control organizations that churn out product are different. Not all achieve the same success, but nearly every industry has figured out how to industrialize “creativity.” In music, pop has had industrialization for sixty to seventy years. Instead of The Beatles, think of all the “bands” that were actually vocalists fronting for The Wrecking Crew or The Funk Brothers. Think of producers and arrangers like Quincy Jones or Trevor Horn or Prince. They produced many acts, including their own, but they were essentially scaling themselves. Bands of equals are hard. But industrializing music is an understood business.
shuckles 7y ago
Yes, he was an amazing leader.
Austin_Conlon 7y ago
Blaine Garst who worked for him at NeXT and Apple said that this was indeed true: https://youtu.be/qtEIq7fe_KQ?t=9502 https://youtu.be/qtEIq7fe_KQ?t=9502. > So Steve Jobs’ real talent was hiring good people. 'Cause he didn't invent most of that stuff but he sold it. He had ideas, and some of his ideas were the inventions and some of them got battered around and thrown away, you know, but he knew how to hire great people. And the people he hired, the reason they were great was they were great together. It was a very egoless environment in all honesty. People had their ideas, they would push 'em but they could be talked out of 'em. They could learn, we were all there, we were small enough. As you said, I was doing kernel work, language work, you know, whatever work needed to be done, we were all in it together. So it was a very positive environment. It was the closest work environment to my high school that I ever had. Tolerant, directed, but you know, and focused.
jjtheblunt 7y ago
(Scott Forstall)

ryeights 7y ago

>In their separate interviews with the FT this week, Mr Cook and Sir Jonathan insisted that no single person at Apple decides which innovations graduate from its R&D labs and which are sent back to the drawing board. “The company runs very much horizontally,” said Mr Cook. “The reason it’s probably not so clear about who [sets product strategy] is that the most important decisions, there are several people involved in it, by the nature of how we operate.” This would certainly explain Apple’s apparent lack of direction in recent years. Between this, their recent refocusing on “services”, and the clusterfuck of ports, dongles, and redesigns on new products, I am fearful for the future of Apple hardware.

kevin_b_er 7y ago
Ok so its now a committee that approves designs. But does anyone in the engineering groups yet get to pushback enough against bufferfly keyboards before they go to market or will function[ality] still follow after form?
mevile 7y ago
I'm ready for a post-Apple world. Fine attention to detail in the user experience of their products, but at the expense of a pernicious ecosystem that traps you in and works with nothing else. It feels weird to say it, but I much more prefer Microsoft and their recent culture change. They're putting xbox gamepass on non-Microsoft devices, their own PC games on Steam, open sourcing their software, building world class android apps. I don't care how many Jony Ive's you've got, it's the openness and willingness to work with others that I want.
- snazz 7y ago
  Apple has their own walled garden ecosystem because they can afford to. It really isn't much different from Microsoft in the 90s and early 00s, when they were at the peak of their market lock-in with Windows. Then the rest of the world changed, and it took them a really long time to adapt. Since they've been forced to open up their software and their ecosystem, the consumer has benefited immensely. Had everyone still been working on Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows with generic PC hardware and the mobile revolution had not occurred, Microsoft would have never left their old ways because they didn't need to. Whether the same thing will at some point happen to Apple we do not know (although I'll wager we're nearing Apple's peak), but it will likely take a monumental change in the way that the technology world works for such a transformation to happen.

amelius 7y ago

I hope Apple goes back to Frog Design, I think those designs had much more character. Also, if you make a design slimmer and slimmer, you're bound to end up with something flat and uninteresting. I also don't like the sharpness of the aluminum at the edges. The plastic designs were much more friendly, imho.

zapzupnz 7y ago
> you're bound to end up with something flat and uninteresting That's the ideal: a computer that gets out of the way. They've been wanting that since long before Steve died, too. Hence the iPad, literally just a screen. Or last year's iPad Pro, where they took the bezel away and there's even less screen, same for the MacBooks. The iMac must be the poster child: literally just a screen. The less device you see, and the more content (ergo screen), the better. > The plastic designs were much more friendly, imho But plastic also chips and breaks. Of all the plastic MacBooks I had, none of them finished life without a few chips of plastic missing. The plastic also didn't vent the computers' heat very well. I agree that the sharp edges aren't fantastic but, strictly speaking, you're supposed to keep your wrists raised above the keyboard to avoid developing RSI so the edges shouldn't come into it anyway. I miss the PowerBook G4 design. That was aluminium but had round edges. That design but with modern thinness, that would be nice to have back.
- amelius 7y ago
  > That's the ideal: a computer that gets out of the way. They've been wanting that since long before Steve died, too. Yeah, but what's Ive's role here? Isn't the miniaturization more due to electrical engineering efforts (placement/routing/PCB design), than to visual design efforts (making it look thinner than it actually is)? > But plastic also chips and breaks. Yes, and I think it gives a device more identity and character :) > The plastic also didn't vent the computers' heat very well. True! But Apple is known for their obsession of "form over function", so this is a curious aspect that goes against their principle. > the edges shouldn't come into it anyway Yes, that's a good point. But you can't always prevent that e.g. when traveling, or lying down, which is what laptops are made for. Anyway, I just wanted to share my view because I don't understand what all the fuss is about. I liked Apple in the days of the Apple ][, but I absolutely despise their walled garden, and their assimilation of the supply chain. Design is absolutely secondary to all that.

myt6fore 7y ago

Does anyone else miss 'early' Ben Thompson? Ben of Then would easily spend an hour meticulously crafting around the topic whilst carefully rationing his listeners' attention. Once listeners are thoroughly primed, Thompson would then proceed with a sudden, massive contextual leap shifting the laid groundwork (vertically) into potential energy, lifting us along. Ben of today, writes mechanistically, with two main pillars: 1)catering to his technocratic subscriber-base 2)asserting himself as an expert historian of the industry. Technocrats demand affirmation of their worldview (that is what they do), so static narratives provide an important anchor. The preeminent historian supports this rigidity as his main competitive advantage (over lesser historians) is his cultivated cache of (niche) interlinks. In our (violently) changing world we need thermonuclear Ben not the historian Ben.

mekpro 7y ago

"even Ive’s exit was beautifully designed."

blunderkid 7y ago

I liked iOS' "skeuomorphic" design and despise the flatness that Mr Ive introduced, i think 5 years back. The first iPhone was mind blowing because it seemed to make apps pop out of the screen and invited you to tap on them. Flatness is two steps back and made iOS Androidish, not a great design inspiration. Also the ridiculous obsession with thinness of macs and iPhones probably at the cost of making them do something useful, if that is Mr Ive's doing, he has clearly outlived his usefulness. Those iMacs though were pretty. Never used one but Ben is right about them being Ive's best work. Wish him a happy and most well deserved retirement.

dijit 7y ago
I also really loved the skeuomorphic design that came with my iPhone 4s. Buttons looked like buttons, leather and denim accents made the phone feel like a luxury device even though it was just digital fabrication. Even the notes application looked like a sketch pad with a special “handwriting” font. I was sad when it went but now I’m in full nostalgia mode. I wonder why they decided to kill it. There must have been a good reason.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  > I wonder why they decided to kill it. There must have been a good reason. Because it is tacky and it didn't age well I'd say the initial use of it was maybe in discoverability, but I suppose when smartphones became more popular that lost its main function. I think it gets distracting sometimes and it is needlessly design heavy (think how much images you need to do that).
  - zapzupnz 7y ago
    You got distracted by the Rose Tinted Glasses Brigade, but I think you're absolutely right. On top of that, I think there were other design considerations — how to make iOS' scale up to iPad more easily (remember when Siri was in a little box in the middle of the screen?) to the point where iPad apps can now be adapted with a checkbox to run on macOS. I think the groundwork started in iOS 7.
  - 7y ago

IloveHN84 7y ago

The best Ive's product is the Magic Mouse... How could you put the charging port UNDER the mouse?

thstart 7y ago
Because if you charge AND use it at same time the battery would be damaged.
philjohn 7y ago
Because they didn't want you to plug in the lightning cable and just use it as a wired mouse ... because that defeats the purpose of it. I mean, I plug mine in once in a blue moon ... and always when I leave the office for the night ... and it's fully charged for many weeks thereafter. You might have more of a point if the battery only lasted a few hours ...