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Jony Ive is departing Apple, but he started leaving years ago

245 points by forgingahead 7y ago

ninedays 7y ago
AirPower and the macbook butterfly keyboards are probably good examples of what is not working in terms of design. The balance between thinness and function is not right the last few years at Apple and change is most definitely welcome. Still Ive departure is hard to swallow and marks a huge shift in Apple's history. Time will tell if is the right move.
olliej 7y ago
This seems like a reasonable summary. I can understand his (apparent, based on the internet :D) frustration with finance and ops people filling the executive ranks. But never forget the wireless "magic" mouse with the lightning plug in the bottom.
- e1ghtSpace 7y ago
  I don't think the lightning plug being on the bottom was really that big of a deal since a full charge lasts 2 months.
  - untog 7y ago
    It still means the thing is unusable when charging, no matter how long a charge lasts. In the grand scheme of things, no, it isn't that big of a deal. But it showcased a stereotype people associate with Apple: aesthetics over function. The plug could have gone in the top of the mouse, so you could use it just like you would a wired mouse while it charged. But no, the plug must be invisible, damn the inconvenience.
    - garmaine 7y ago
      Actually it's worse--it's explicitly inconvenient to the point of being impossible to use in a wired fashion. The inconvenience of the user is a designed-in feature. They purposefully screwed over the user for aesthetic reasons. That's messed up.
      - crehn 7y ago
        Don’t use it wired; it lasts a very long time. A port on the side would break its continuous curve, the sharp contrast of a dark port would be visually jarring (especially since the mouse is small and the overall tone is bright and smooth; it’s relative), and invite unnecessary long-term imperfections (e.g. deformities to the sharp aluminum cut, dust, etc.). I’m very thankful Apple doesn’t always listen to what “people” want. True creativity (especially in a pervasive aesthetic sense) is rare and most can’t envision new concepts or feelings before experiencing them.
        untog 7y ago
        > A port on the side would be break its continuous curve, the sharp contrast of a dark port would be visually jarring This is literally the stuff people make jokes about when they talk about Apple.
        crehn 7y ago
        Yes, it sounds silly to most. Most people would also say an asymmetric phone notch and chin doesn’t bother them. That’s why pushing pragmatic and perfectionist design (it’s a delicate balance, and Apple isn’t perfect) is difficult. But on a deeper level, most people feel good design and experiences without ever noticing them. It’s much more pervasive than you think.
        solarkraft 7y ago
        I dislike Apple for many of their user hostile decisions, but for this I love them. I'm bothered by phone bezels not being consistent, for one example, and Apple are the only ones who seem to care about it as well.
      - nseggs 7y ago
        Please. "Purposefully screwed over" is pretty dramatic and almost certainly not true. The mouse is sold as wireless. That seems to me a more likely reason it's impossible to use in a wired fashion. It also eliminates the need for a me to keep a giant pack of AA batteries at both my office and home office. It does require power occasionally, but then very briefly and almost never. The OS will also remind you almost comically early that the battery is getting low, and then you just plug it in when you go for lunch or a coffee run. When you get back you're good for another month or something like that.
    - dbt00 7y ago
      Seriously I never ever ever found this to be a problem when I was using one. It charges from zero to usable in as long as it takes to type “ha ha this mouse charging port is on the bottom” on the internet, and a full charge lasts a long time. The bad keyboards and no hardware escape key are real problems. Magsafe was a real loss (although of course they lost MagSafe to standardize on a third party standard with usb-c).
      - sneak 7y ago
        The rumor is that USB-C was an Apple invention, quietly pushed into the USB-IF so that it wouldn't have the Apple stink on it, and so that it would become a global hardware standard in the way an "Apple Thing" never could: power and high speed data, in a convenient and reversible plug. Now they're on Chromebooks, WinTel machines, and the Raspberry Pi. If the rumor is true, it was a really smooth move by Apple. It would be an extremely Apple-esque thing to hack an industry-wide movement just so that your laptop could be charged by any power brick made by any manufacturer at any time (even if your competitors get this functionality too).
        izacus 7y ago
        "The rumor" sounds like rather common history rewriting to from Apple fans. Do you have any sources for that rumor?
        dannyw 7y ago
        The convergence of USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 (an Apple standard) isn’t an accident, but I doubt Apple covertly pushed it behind the scenes.
        sneak 7y ago
        John Gruber made the claim. https://www.macrumors.com/2015/03/13/apple-invents-usb-c/ https://www.macrumors.com/2015/03/13/apple-invents-usb-c/ https://www.cultofmac.com/315989/is-this-proof-that-apple-invented-usb-c/ https://www.cultofmac.com/315989/is-this-proof-that-apple-in... https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/03/14/apple-usbc https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/03/14/apple-usbc
    - lyxsus1 7y ago
      > It still means the thing is unusable when charging, no matter how long a charge lasts. That was the whole purpose of putting it in a bottom. The thing works several months on a single charge and it takes just a couple of hours to recharge. And it starts giving notification at least a day before battery's depleted. It's not aesthetics over function mantra, but realisation that they can't be decoupled or developed by separate divisions. That's what concerns me about Ive leaving. He and Jobs evidently had enough courage to ignore public opinion to make things the right way and in most cases it turned to be excellent decisions. With no successor I'm seriously afraid they'll eventually resort to safe decisions and become another Samsung/MS/Android/whatever..
      - kkarakk 7y ago
        What happens when the battery conks out? throw away the mouse and buy a new one is what apple wants you to do but most people would prefer the safety net of being able to run wired in case the mouse battery started acting up. Remember this was a wireless mouse at a time when wireless was definitely not the preferred choice
        lyxsus1 7y ago
        > What happens when the battery conks out? throw away the mouse and buy a new one That's the easiest thing to do, yes. But you can bring it to apple care, they do battery replacement for smth like $35 I guess. And if it's factory problem they just replace it, afaik. > Remember this was a wireless mouse at a time when wireless was definitely not the preferred choice At the time it had regular batteries you could replace by yourself and we were talking about latest versions. But anyway, I don't see how it can be relevant.
        wastedhours 7y ago
        I think a lot of people forget the original wireless Magic Mouse was battery powered. I still have mine, and a couple of AAs (I think) will see it running for a good 'ol while. Nothing made me contemplate upgrading, and it's still a darn good experience.
      - izacus 7y ago
  - woutr_be 7y ago
    I've used a magic mouse for over 3 years, and I've never ran into a situation where I couldn't use it because it was charging. When I see the battery is low, I plug it in during my next bathroom break, and then fully charge it over night.
    - nkingsy 7y ago
      I had a Magic Mouse at work and I fought it for days at a time forgetting to charge it when I went home. Thinking about stuff like this is a waste of mental energy.
    - mcv 7y ago
      I also never ran into a situation where I couldn't use it because I didn't buy it because it looked like a tremendously stupid idea. It's entirely possible the idea wasn't as stupid as it looked, but it still looked stupid enough that it cost them sales.
  - xienze 7y ago
    That’s not the point. It looks completely ridiculous coming from a world-renowned designer and company (or anyone, really). It might be excusable if it were a case of “form over function“, but it’s not even that. It’s Apple going to great lengths to avoid putting the charging port in the most obvious place possible, lest someone try to use it as a wired mouse. That and sticking the Apple Pencil into the iPad’s Lightning port are two of the most baffling design decisions to come out of Apple in recent memory. Well, I take that back, I completely understand why they did the Apple Pencil that way. It’s because doing it the right way would require redesigning the iPad, so ehhh, just stick it in the Lightning port. Another brilliant design by Ive and company!
    - jen20 7y ago
      Of course, the next generation of pencil and iPad charges differently - and without question in a more sensible manner. Are you QUITE sure you’re not attributing to incompetence what is obviously better explained by shipping schedule?
      - xienze 7y ago
        I never said it was incompetence, I said it was a rush job. Viewed without any additional context though, one would probably conclude that an incompetent designer had had their hands over such a goofy looking design.
  - mikeash 7y ago
    That means you never build up a habit, but it still comes up fairly regularly. If you forget to charge it before it dies completely, then you either find another mouse or take a forced break. Not ideal.
  - taneq 7y ago
    Time was when you'd never see a "poor choice but not that big of a deal" issue with an Apple product. Sure, there were things which would piss you off but they were big bold statements, not minor details.
  - mcv 7y ago
    It's a big enough deal that I didn't buy it. I prefer replaceable batteries. Failing that, I want to be able to continue using it while it's charging.
- paulcole 7y ago
  I thought that was intentional so people wouldn’t treat it like a wired mouse?
  - philliphaydon 7y ago
    That’s right but it still sucks when the mouse dies and you can’t do anything till you’ve charged it a bit.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      To be fair, that only happens if you ignore the warnings that should show up days before and aren’t willing to wait a minute for it to charge.
      - garmaine 7y ago
        Why should I have to wait, at all? Let me plug it in and keep using it. Best of both worlds.
      - askvictor 7y ago
        The solution would have been to allow use while charging, but once battery is full, pop up regular warnings to unplug it to "prevent battery degradation" or some other white lie
    - rimliu 7y ago
      You go grab a cap of coffee and by the time you are back it is charged for the rest of the day. This is a perfect example of the problem which is more imagined than real. I'd bet most people making fun of this design never used the said mouse, and those who use it never found placement of the charging port to be an issue.
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    If that's true Apple has a very low opinion of their average customer.
    - 7y ago
- jon-wood 7y ago
  Everyone goes on about the charing port. Personally I think the much more fundamental problem with the Apple mouse is that its just not a very good mouse. I've tried using them several times and I just can't get used to the lack of actual physical buttons, or the fact it doesn't sit in the hand comfortably. My personal opinion is that they should have just gone all in on the external touch pad, and quietly recommended that if you want a mouse you should go and buy a Logitech one.
  - jdpedrie 7y ago
    For me, the trackpad and multi-touch gestures are pretty much indispensable. I occasionally consider switching to a PC, but having to go back to using a traditional mouse would be a real painful experience.
tomrod 7y ago
I've not used but a handful of Apple devices over the years. For those (probably few?) of us out of the loop, is this particularly newsworthy?
- TaylorAlexander 7y ago
  I don't know if Apple is still the biggest company on earth, but they're pretty big in tech. They are also a notoriously design focused company and their main designer is leaving after 20 years. The story feeds in to people's fascination with the company, which has an added aura of being part of the original Silicon Valley boom.
  - tomrod 7y ago
    That makes sense. Thanks!
- ben509 7y ago
  Like many Apple stories, it's definitely being over-reported.
RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
If one chooses to be extremely cynical, this is exactly the story Apple would want to tell shareholders in the wake of Ive's departure: Everything is fine, Ive was already detached from the company's recent successes, Eurasia has always been at war with Eastasia. Nothing to be worried about. Dialing that back a few notches, I genuinely hope that Ive's departure means Apple is considering a new approach for the design of their products. Years of product releases with crummy butterfly keyboards, nixed headphone jacks and missing magSafe have left me with no desire to purchase my next laptop from Apple. Maybe once the current pipeline drains we can look forward to Mac laptops that gain useful features and don't fall apart in months. Maybe. I'm not holding my breath.
- rorykoehler 7y ago
  The new Mac Pro was the first glimmer of hope. Now I read that they are releasing updated mbp 13 without touchbar. If they start offering full powered full port mbp 13 without touchbar my optimisim will be back.
  - maxxxxx 7y ago
    I think Apple’s problem will be that Jobs usually had a very good feeling which radical change will get accepted and which won’t. The current Apple will probably listen to customer feedback but I doubt they will be able to release game changers like iPod or iPhone.
    - threeseed 7y ago
      Apple Watch has been a game changer in some respects. I don't think anybody expected it to be as successful as it has been. And the feature set and their acquisitions e.g. Beddit gives a really interesting insight into where Apple is heading in the health sector.
      - ekianjo 7y ago
        > I don't think anybody expected it to be as successful as it has been How do you measure success? Because there is no way any comparison with the number of people who own an iPhone or any other kind of Apple device. Even in Japan where Apple has the lion share of the smartphone market I hardly see people with an Apple watch.
forgingahead 7y ago
It's interesting that a lot of the frustrations being expressed online over the past few years about Apple's product design choices (Macbook Pros losing their developer focus, iPhones getting more ridiculous with their designs, etc) are linked directly to what this article claims -- that Ive has been pretty absent since 2016, and it's not just the lack of a strong product leader at Apple, but also a rudderless design team that has led to these issues. Whether any of that will improve now remains to be seen.
- threeseed 7y ago
  Hilarious how Ive gets blamed for everything. He is not responsible for the features that goes into a product. Nor is he responsible for which demographic a product is targeted towards. It's a combination of various executives in particular Phil Schiller and Jeff Williams.
  - x0x0 7y ago
    Do you think Ive couldn't get the keyboard or the useless bar removed if he wanted?
    - threeseed 7y ago
      It's not like Apple has thousands of products. The entire executive team would be discussing the strategic direction for their products and the R&D investments needed e.g. TouchBar. But ultimately Apple is product marketing driven just like other large product companies. And people like thin devices (hence the keyboard) and shiny new features. What users think is far more important to Apple than what Ive thinks.
      - huffmsa 7y ago
        > What users think is far more important to Apple than what Ive thinks. Then why do they keep soldering RAM onto their mobos when there's not a single person who wants it?
deleted 7y ago
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exabrial 7y ago
Sigh, Tim Cook is the Steve Ballmer of Apple. Just pay him out before is too late and put another creative in his place. To lose a person of this caliber indicates a total lack of vision and trust in the executive leadership at Apple.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  From a business point of view Ballmer did an excellent job. The company grew every year and was always one of the top tech companies. The same will probably happen to Apple (and Google) too. They magic touch goes away but they will be solid companies run by business people.
  - exabrial 7y ago
    I attribute this largely from platform lock-in than technical leadership, though my opinion is largely on sentiment so please feel free to roast
  - coliveira 7y ago
    Yes, run by business people who will milk the company until it is not possible to do that anymore...
  - vitorgrs 7y ago
    That's debatable. https://imgur.com/a/8mderpX https://imgur.com/a/8mderpX 2000-2013 was pretty... frozen. You don't need to remind of the failed battle of Mobile (that even Gates said it would give them at least 400b). Also the Xbox One launch fiasco, Surface RT, etc. And of course, the longhorn... Which I don't think is a Ballmer problem exactly, but it happened.
- mushufasa 7y ago
  I don't think that comparison is warranted. Tim Cook seems to be spearheading Apple's new strategic focus on services and privacy. I'd say that's a strong path forwards for the brand and business overall. He's not a product designer like Jobs, but he's not taking a MBA-style bean counter approach like Balmer.
inflatableDodo 7y ago
Wonder if we will get to see an IvePhone?
- ben509 7y ago
  Ive not seen any indication of such a thing.
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    As long as he doesn't release a Jony Walkman.
    - anjc 7y ago
      Well I appreciated the word play
- gumby 7y ago
  That ship has sailed; Andy Rubin tried to do that but the market has matured to the point where it doesn't have room for a new entrant (look at the super low end android market: lots of churn). I was talking with my gf's kid today and the same point came up: Linux, the MacOS and iPhone didn't displace Windows; Windows continues to dominate a market that simply doesn't matter hugely any more (desktop/Laptop PCs). A post on the HN front page right now says that Linux exceeds Windows on the Azure cloud...but nope, not on the desktop.
starik36 7y ago
Well, that's a hit piece if I've ever seen one. They even manage to paint spending time with his ailing father in the UK as a sign he was neglecting Apple.
sverhagen 7y ago
I had not heard about mr. Ive before his departure. I must be a function over form person. But I'm just wondering if he wasn't just tired of his design leadership turning into people leadership (increasingly so, from the article). Apparently the design team "ballooned" into a big organization, and overseeing those people may not be where your ambitions lie, as a world-renowned designer. As a (small? -- don't know what he has in mind there) design firm, it may be clearer that he comes in as a design brain, not as a department head. He is accomplished enough to be just working on where the true passions lie, or even just tuning out when a loved one is in bad shape, or retire altogether (if he chose so).
redthrowaway 7y ago
I was struck, reading this, of the analogous situation at Boeing: a company founded on engineering talent and propelled to stardom by a string of successful moonshots, merges with McDonnell Douglas, a government contractor par excellence. At first, it seems synergistic: the dynamic Boeing can build amazing planes and MD can secure a steady defence revenue stream. But then the moonshots quietly end. Boeing makes cost effective tweaks to its current lineup, and lands fat defence contracts that pad the bottom line and drive the stock to stratospheric prices. It gets comfortable, it gets efficient, and it stops being what made it great in the first place. Apple post-Jobs will likely be an extremely profitable company for many years to come. But it will never again be the pioneering company that forged whole markets from vision and belief. And that's sad.
deleted 7y ago
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rajacombinator 7y ago
So why is Apple pushing all these Ive bashing articles? Just part ways with some class Tim...
wodenokoto 7y ago
2 things I don’t understand: 1. If Ive has been on his way out for over a year ago (some say since 4) why is he so prominently featured in the design videos? Give a little room to the next guy, surely someone must have been in the pipeline for such a long departure. 2. If Ive have been practically absent all this time, working on the office rather than product, why will his actual departure turn things around with regards to product design?
- BinaryIdiot 7y ago
  1. It's great PR. Ive is very well known and liked outside of Apple (and probably inside, depending on who you worked with if we're to believe the article is correct). You're not wrong, though. They should have included more people to showcase as designers. 2. Yeah I agree, that doesn't make much sense. I've also seen a lot of places saying his departure will severely hurt Apple but he leads a team, he probably is rarely directly involved in anything anyway. I don't see how him leaving changes anything, honestly.
- cmsj 7y ago
  The WSJ article was so inconsistent in terms of which products are hitting/failing, whether Ive was absent or setting up new structures, whether the claimed failures are his fault or not, etc. For me, the real impact of Jony leaving, is what will happen to the other members of the design team. His team has been reported to have had very very little churn in the last couple of decades - with him leaving it seems likely that others will also look around. That will definitely have some kind of an effect - maybe for the worse, maybe for the better.
- ninedays 7y ago
  1. Because in most Apple videos, the product is the most important person in the room. Ive is a great storyteller when it comes to design (probably the best at Apple) so it makes sense that he is the one telling that story. Steve Jobs was by far the best keynote speaker at Apple so he did most of it himself. 2. Because the organisation is now structured with the design team reporting directly to Operations which is unusual as designers at Apple didn't use to report to anyone (except the CEO).
pcr910303 7y ago
It seems most of the comments have an assumption that current Apple hardware is not doing well, pushing more for aesthetics and failing to be a truly useful computer. I don’t really think so, negative reviews get to have much more spotlight and views than positive ones; (One reason is that positive people about the devices won’t be ‘whining’ as loudly as the negative ones do; another one is that post-SJ Apple is constantly criticized by ‘not becoming innovative as much as SJ’) and HN is a particularly great place for these negative reviews take place. While I also think time to time that Apple could do better than the current HW(e.g. turning on haptic feedback on the TB as default), the current HW lineup is pretty great, I would say. I find the TB immensely useful in my workflow, (partially because I use a custom Emacs that I took my time to hack on to display touchbar buttons for my workflow... why doesn’t Emacs/gVim gain TB support?̊̈) especially when I’m using Finder or Safari, Emacs, MS Office... and my friends that sneered at using an Apple laptop started to evaluate using it after '18, when the keyboard issues got pretty much fixed. I also find the discussion around the butterfly mechanism of the MacBooks pretty much disconcerning, there are pretty much people who love the feel of the butterfly, (not all people like long pitched keyboards, especially on laptops), and Apple managed to fix the keyboard issues with dust in 2018, which I would say, pretty much immediately after it was discovered. I’m fine with Mr. Ive departuring from Apple, as far as Apple designs great products that value on both function and form. If Apple becomes a usual computer company that starts to listen to all consumer complaints and makes and sells usual computers that other companies can make, that’s a pretty concerning future.
- alpaca128 7y ago
  > Apple managed to fix the keyboard issues with dust in 2018 Then why did they put the newest 2019 model's keyboard into the same replacement program before it even launched?
  - pcr910303 7y ago
    (AFAIK As Apple stated too,) to give confidence to customers that are skeptical due to keyboard issues.
- empath75 7y ago
nobrains 7y ago
The last line is so crushing: "Mr. Ive’s old design team—a group of aesthetes once thought of as gods inside Apple—will report to COO Jeff Williams, a mechanical engineer with an M.B.A."
- sneak 7y ago
  It hit me that way, too. Gruber recently wrote: > I don’t worry that Apple is in trouble because Jony Ive is leaving; I worry that Apple is in trouble because he’s not being replaced. I think that's spot on. Jobs is dead and Ive checked out. Who's doing the thing that they did, now? I don't want to buy products that are designed by committee.
- traderjane 7y ago
  Why is that crushing? The decision is likely interim, and we're talking about design in terms of industrial engineering.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  That's how journalists used to sneak their opinion into otherwise factual reporting. WSJ still has enough old-school editors that Tripp Mickle couldn't go full WaPo or NYT and write a pure opinion page rant, so he used a factual statement to thinly veil his opinion.
  - dannyw 7y ago
    Good journalism is more than just fact regurgitation.
    - huffmsa 7y ago
      Correct. It's the distillation of those facts into something digestible, and provide a bit of an angle to it. It is certainly not the breathless pearl clutching which has taken over the NYT and WaPo (amongst others).
    - jessriedel 7y ago
      That is not a good defense of covertly editorializing in an opinion piece. Great journalism is more than just fact regurgitation. But most modern journalism would be improved if it was replaced with fact regurgitation because most journalists cannot distinguish between their opinion and objective beyond-the-facts reporting.
betimsl 7y ago
He left because he's hit his limit. So better leave than start designing bad products. Plus apple has lost its compass among other things.
wayanon 7y ago
Is Apple Park such a success? Agree it looks wonderful but I saw reports of people getting injured from walking into glass and it not being a comfortable place to work. Style over substance?
- ssully 7y ago
  Honestly, those just sound like growing pains for a new building. I would be curious to hear an update on how people like it in a few years.
mukundmr 7y ago
There was no point in Jony Ive hanging around when the passion was gone. It is good to know that Apple is engaging the new firm launched by Jony to help Apple continue to design and improve their products.
dependsontheq 7y ago
I think the article shows how ridiculous it is when they talk about Tim Cook seeing products for the first time on the exhibition floor in photos. Really? So the CEO of a technology company has never seen the products they release and this is not just a pretty dorky PR shooting ?
MR4D 7y ago
There seems to be a lot of turnover at the top lately, also considering that Angela Ahrendts left earlier. What worries me are two things: 1, prior turnover in the design department (as noted by the WSJ in their article); 2 - what happens when Craig Federighi leaves? I think their design language is pretty strong that nobody should muck it up for a while, and hopefully someone can rise to the top. But #2 - "Hair Force One" is a force of nature. I really worry that his leadership is the last thread upon which Apple's greatness hangs.
jordache 7y ago
Good.. maybe they can dial back a bit on the interview format promo video with Ive talking like the new Apple TV is possess museum caliber design.
msoad 7y ago
People I know at Apple have been working on 2020 iPhone SUPPLY CHAIN since last year. That means designs are almost final. What I'm trying to say is, impact of this departure will be felt in maybe 4~5 years. Apple's hardware development pipeline is steady but slow.
crunkykd 7y ago
Ive is a great soldier, but Jobs knew which battles to fight. Apple has lost its way and doesn't know what directions to go in, where technology needs to move to serve its users. And Apple's huge money chest and insularity are of no help. They need an inspired product leader.

245 points by forgingahead 7y ago

AirPower and the macbook butterfly keyboards are probably good examples of what is not working in terms of design. The balance between thinness and function is not right the last few years at Apple and change is most definitely welcome. Still Ive departure is hard to swallow and marks a huge shift in Apple's history. Time will tell if is the right move.

olliej 7y ago

This seems like a reasonable summary. I can understand his (apparent, based on the internet :D) frustration with finance and ops people filling the executive ranks. But never forget the wireless "magic" mouse with the lightning plug in the bottom.

e1ghtSpace 7y ago
I don't think the lightning plug being on the bottom was really that big of a deal since a full charge lasts 2 months.
- untog 7y ago
  It still means the thing is unusable when charging, no matter how long a charge lasts. In the grand scheme of things, no, it isn't that big of a deal. But it showcased a stereotype people associate with Apple: aesthetics over function. The plug could have gone in the top of the mouse, so you could use it just like you would a wired mouse while it charged. But no, the plug must be invisible, damn the inconvenience.
  - garmaine 7y ago
    Actually it's worse--it's explicitly inconvenient to the point of being impossible to use in a wired fashion. The inconvenience of the user is a designed-in feature. They purposefully screwed over the user for aesthetic reasons. That's messed up.
    - crehn 7y ago
      Don’t use it wired; it lasts a very long time. A port on the side would break its continuous curve, the sharp contrast of a dark port would be visually jarring (especially since the mouse is small and the overall tone is bright and smooth; it’s relative), and invite unnecessary long-term imperfections (e.g. deformities to the sharp aluminum cut, dust, etc.). I’m very thankful Apple doesn’t always listen to what “people” want. True creativity (especially in a pervasive aesthetic sense) is rare and most can’t envision new concepts or feelings before experiencing them.
      - untog 7y ago
        > A port on the side would be break its continuous curve, the sharp contrast of a dark port would be visually jarring This is literally the stuff people make jokes about when they talk about Apple.
        crehn 7y ago
        Yes, it sounds silly to most. Most people would also say an asymmetric phone notch and chin doesn’t bother them. That’s why pushing pragmatic and perfectionist design (it’s a delicate balance, and Apple isn’t perfect) is difficult. But on a deeper level, most people feel good design and experiences without ever noticing them. It’s much more pervasive than you think.
        solarkraft 7y ago
        I dislike Apple for many of their user hostile decisions, but for this I love them. I'm bothered by phone bezels not being consistent, for one example, and Apple are the only ones who seem to care about it as well.
    - nseggs 7y ago
      Please. "Purposefully screwed over" is pretty dramatic and almost certainly not true. The mouse is sold as wireless. That seems to me a more likely reason it's impossible to use in a wired fashion. It also eliminates the need for a me to keep a giant pack of AA batteries at both my office and home office. It does require power occasionally, but then very briefly and almost never. The OS will also remind you almost comically early that the battery is getting low, and then you just plug it in when you go for lunch or a coffee run. When you get back you're good for another month or something like that.
  - dbt00 7y ago
    Seriously I never ever ever found this to be a problem when I was using one. It charges from zero to usable in as long as it takes to type “ha ha this mouse charging port is on the bottom” on the internet, and a full charge lasts a long time. The bad keyboards and no hardware escape key are real problems. Magsafe was a real loss (although of course they lost MagSafe to standardize on a third party standard with usb-c).
    - sneak 7y ago
      The rumor is that USB-C was an Apple invention, quietly pushed into the USB-IF so that it wouldn't have the Apple stink on it, and so that it would become a global hardware standard in the way an "Apple Thing" never could: power and high speed data, in a convenient and reversible plug. Now they're on Chromebooks, WinTel machines, and the Raspberry Pi. If the rumor is true, it was a really smooth move by Apple. It would be an extremely Apple-esque thing to hack an industry-wide movement just so that your laptop could be charged by any power brick made by any manufacturer at any time (even if your competitors get this functionality too).
      - izacus 7y ago
        "The rumor" sounds like rather common history rewriting to from Apple fans. Do you have any sources for that rumor?
        dannyw 7y ago
        The convergence of USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 (an Apple standard) isn’t an accident, but I doubt Apple covertly pushed it behind the scenes.
        sneak 7y ago
        John Gruber made the claim. https://www.macrumors.com/2015/03/13/apple-invents-usb-c/ https://www.macrumors.com/2015/03/13/apple-invents-usb-c/ https://www.cultofmac.com/315989/is-this-proof-that-apple-invented-usb-c/ https://www.cultofmac.com/315989/is-this-proof-that-apple-in... https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/03/14/apple-usbc https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/03/14/apple-usbc
  - lyxsus1 7y ago
    > It still means the thing is unusable when charging, no matter how long a charge lasts. That was the whole purpose of putting it in a bottom. The thing works several months on a single charge and it takes just a couple of hours to recharge. And it starts giving notification at least a day before battery's depleted. It's not aesthetics over function mantra, but realisation that they can't be decoupled or developed by separate divisions. That's what concerns me about Ive leaving. He and Jobs evidently had enough courage to ignore public opinion to make things the right way and in most cases it turned to be excellent decisions. With no successor I'm seriously afraid they'll eventually resort to safe decisions and become another Samsung/MS/Android/whatever..
    - kkarakk 7y ago
      What happens when the battery conks out? throw away the mouse and buy a new one is what apple wants you to do but most people would prefer the safety net of being able to run wired in case the mouse battery started acting up. Remember this was a wireless mouse at a time when wireless was definitely not the preferred choice
      - lyxsus1 7y ago
        > What happens when the battery conks out? throw away the mouse and buy a new one That's the easiest thing to do, yes. But you can bring it to apple care, they do battery replacement for smth like $35 I guess. And if it's factory problem they just replace it, afaik. > Remember this was a wireless mouse at a time when wireless was definitely not the preferred choice At the time it had regular batteries you could replace by yourself and we were talking about latest versions. But anyway, I don't see how it can be relevant.
      - wastedhours 7y ago
        I think a lot of people forget the original wireless Magic Mouse was battery powered. I still have mine, and a couple of AAs (I think) will see it running for a good 'ol while. Nothing made me contemplate upgrading, and it's still a darn good experience.
    - izacus 7y ago
- woutr_be 7y ago
  I've used a magic mouse for over 3 years, and I've never ran into a situation where I couldn't use it because it was charging. When I see the battery is low, I plug it in during my next bathroom break, and then fully charge it over night.
  - nkingsy 7y ago
    I had a Magic Mouse at work and I fought it for days at a time forgetting to charge it when I went home. Thinking about stuff like this is a waste of mental energy.
  - mcv 7y ago
    I also never ran into a situation where I couldn't use it because I didn't buy it because it looked like a tremendously stupid idea. It's entirely possible the idea wasn't as stupid as it looked, but it still looked stupid enough that it cost them sales.
- xienze 7y ago
  That’s not the point. It looks completely ridiculous coming from a world-renowned designer and company (or anyone, really). It might be excusable if it were a case of “form over function“, but it’s not even that. It’s Apple going to great lengths to avoid putting the charging port in the most obvious place possible, lest someone try to use it as a wired mouse. That and sticking the Apple Pencil into the iPad’s Lightning port are two of the most baffling design decisions to come out of Apple in recent memory. Well, I take that back, I completely understand why they did the Apple Pencil that way. It’s because doing it the right way would require redesigning the iPad, so ehhh, just stick it in the Lightning port. Another brilliant design by Ive and company!
  - jen20 7y ago
    Of course, the next generation of pencil and iPad charges differently - and without question in a more sensible manner. Are you QUITE sure you’re not attributing to incompetence what is obviously better explained by shipping schedule?
    - xienze 7y ago
      I never said it was incompetence, I said it was a rush job. Viewed without any additional context though, one would probably conclude that an incompetent designer had had their hands over such a goofy looking design.
- mikeash 7y ago
  That means you never build up a habit, but it still comes up fairly regularly. If you forget to charge it before it dies completely, then you either find another mouse or take a forced break. Not ideal.
- taneq 7y ago
  Time was when you'd never see a "poor choice but not that big of a deal" issue with an Apple product. Sure, there were things which would piss you off but they were big bold statements, not minor details.
- mcv 7y ago
  It's a big enough deal that I didn't buy it. I prefer replaceable batteries. Failing that, I want to be able to continue using it while it's charging.
paulcole 7y ago
I thought that was intentional so people wouldn’t treat it like a wired mouse?
- philliphaydon 7y ago
  That’s right but it still sucks when the mouse dies and you can’t do anything till you’ve charged it a bit.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    To be fair, that only happens if you ignore the warnings that should show up days before and aren’t willing to wait a minute for it to charge.
    - garmaine 7y ago
      Why should I have to wait, at all? Let me plug it in and keep using it. Best of both worlds.
    - askvictor 7y ago
      The solution would have been to allow use while charging, but once battery is full, pop up regular warnings to unplug it to "prevent battery degradation" or some other white lie
  - rimliu 7y ago
    You go grab a cap of coffee and by the time you are back it is charged for the rest of the day. This is a perfect example of the problem which is more imagined than real. I'd bet most people making fun of this design never used the said mouse, and those who use it never found placement of the charging port to be an issue.
- EpicEng 7y ago
  If that's true Apple has a very low opinion of their average customer.
  - 7y ago
jon-wood 7y ago
Everyone goes on about the charing port. Personally I think the much more fundamental problem with the Apple mouse is that its just not a very good mouse. I've tried using them several times and I just can't get used to the lack of actual physical buttons, or the fact it doesn't sit in the hand comfortably. My personal opinion is that they should have just gone all in on the external touch pad, and quietly recommended that if you want a mouse you should go and buy a Logitech one.
- jdpedrie 7y ago
  For me, the trackpad and multi-touch gestures are pretty much indispensable. I occasionally consider switching to a PC, but having to go back to using a traditional mouse would be a real painful experience.

tomrod 7y ago

I've not used but a handful of Apple devices over the years. For those (probably few?) of us out of the loop, is this particularly newsworthy?

TaylorAlexander 7y ago
I don't know if Apple is still the biggest company on earth, but they're pretty big in tech. They are also a notoriously design focused company and their main designer is leaving after 20 years. The story feeds in to people's fascination with the company, which has an added aura of being part of the original Silicon Valley boom.
- tomrod 7y ago
  That makes sense. Thanks!
ben509 7y ago
Like many Apple stories, it's definitely being over-reported.

RodgerTheGreat 7y ago

If one chooses to be extremely cynical, this is exactly the story Apple would want to tell shareholders in the wake of Ive's departure: Everything is fine, Ive was already detached from the company's recent successes, Eurasia has always been at war with Eastasia. Nothing to be worried about. Dialing that back a few notches, I genuinely hope that Ive's departure means Apple is considering a new approach for the design of their products. Years of product releases with crummy butterfly keyboards, nixed headphone jacks and missing magSafe have left me with no desire to purchase my next laptop from Apple. Maybe once the current pipeline drains we can look forward to Mac laptops that gain useful features and don't fall apart in months. Maybe. I'm not holding my breath.

rorykoehler 7y ago
The new Mac Pro was the first glimmer of hope. Now I read that they are releasing updated mbp 13 without touchbar. If they start offering full powered full port mbp 13 without touchbar my optimisim will be back.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  I think Apple’s problem will be that Jobs usually had a very good feeling which radical change will get accepted and which won’t. The current Apple will probably listen to customer feedback but I doubt they will be able to release game changers like iPod or iPhone.
  - threeseed 7y ago
    Apple Watch has been a game changer in some respects. I don't think anybody expected it to be as successful as it has been. And the feature set and their acquisitions e.g. Beddit gives a really interesting insight into where Apple is heading in the health sector.
    - ekianjo 7y ago
      > I don't think anybody expected it to be as successful as it has been How do you measure success? Because there is no way any comparison with the number of people who own an iPhone or any other kind of Apple device. Even in Japan where Apple has the lion share of the smartphone market I hardly see people with an Apple watch.

forgingahead 7y ago

It's interesting that a lot of the frustrations being expressed online over the past few years about Apple's product design choices (Macbook Pros losing their developer focus, iPhones getting more ridiculous with their designs, etc) are linked directly to what this article claims -- that Ive has been pretty absent since 2016, and it's not just the lack of a strong product leader at Apple, but also a rudderless design team that has led to these issues. Whether any of that will improve now remains to be seen.

threeseed 7y ago
Hilarious how Ive gets blamed for everything. He is not responsible for the features that goes into a product. Nor is he responsible for which demographic a product is targeted towards. It's a combination of various executives in particular Phil Schiller and Jeff Williams.
- x0x0 7y ago
  Do you think Ive couldn't get the keyboard or the useless bar removed if he wanted?
  - threeseed 7y ago
    It's not like Apple has thousands of products. The entire executive team would be discussing the strategic direction for their products and the R&D investments needed e.g. TouchBar. But ultimately Apple is product marketing driven just like other large product companies. And people like thin devices (hence the keyboard) and shiny new features. What users think is far more important to Apple than what Ive thinks.
    - huffmsa 7y ago
      > What users think is far more important to Apple than what Ive thinks. Then why do they keep soldering RAM onto their mobos when there's not a single person who wants it?

deleted 7y ago

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exabrial 7y ago

Sigh, Tim Cook is the Steve Ballmer of Apple. Just pay him out before is too late and put another creative in his place. To lose a person of this caliber indicates a total lack of vision and trust in the executive leadership at Apple.

maxxxxx 7y ago
From a business point of view Ballmer did an excellent job. The company grew every year and was always one of the top tech companies. The same will probably happen to Apple (and Google) too. They magic touch goes away but they will be solid companies run by business people.
- exabrial 7y ago
  I attribute this largely from platform lock-in than technical leadership, though my opinion is largely on sentiment so please feel free to roast
- coliveira 7y ago
  Yes, run by business people who will milk the company until it is not possible to do that anymore...
- vitorgrs 7y ago
  That's debatable. https://imgur.com/a/8mderpX https://imgur.com/a/8mderpX 2000-2013 was pretty... frozen. You don't need to remind of the failed battle of Mobile (that even Gates said it would give them at least 400b). Also the Xbox One launch fiasco, Surface RT, etc. And of course, the longhorn... Which I don't think is a Ballmer problem exactly, but it happened.
mushufasa 7y ago
I don't think that comparison is warranted. Tim Cook seems to be spearheading Apple's new strategic focus on services and privacy. I'd say that's a strong path forwards for the brand and business overall. He's not a product designer like Jobs, but he's not taking a MBA-style bean counter approach like Balmer.

inflatableDodo 7y ago

Wonder if we will get to see an IvePhone?

ben509 7y ago
Ive not seen any indication of such a thing.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  As long as he doesn't release a Jony Walkman.
  - anjc 7y ago
    Well I appreciated the word play
gumby 7y ago
That ship has sailed; Andy Rubin tried to do that but the market has matured to the point where it doesn't have room for a new entrant (look at the super low end android market: lots of churn). I was talking with my gf's kid today and the same point came up: Linux, the MacOS and iPhone didn't displace Windows; Windows continues to dominate a market that simply doesn't matter hugely any more (desktop/Laptop PCs). A post on the HN front page right now says that Linux exceeds Windows on the Azure cloud...but nope, not on the desktop.

starik36 7y ago

Well, that's a hit piece if I've ever seen one. They even manage to paint spending time with his ailing father in the UK as a sign he was neglecting Apple.

sverhagen 7y ago

I had not heard about mr. Ive before his departure. I must be a function over form person. But I'm just wondering if he wasn't just tired of his design leadership turning into people leadership (increasingly so, from the article). Apparently the design team "ballooned" into a big organization, and overseeing those people may not be where your ambitions lie, as a world-renowned designer. As a (small? -- don't know what he has in mind there) design firm, it may be clearer that he comes in as a design brain, not as a department head. He is accomplished enough to be just working on where the true passions lie, or even just tuning out when a loved one is in bad shape, or retire altogether (if he chose so).

redthrowaway 7y ago

I was struck, reading this, of the analogous situation at Boeing: a company founded on engineering talent and propelled to stardom by a string of successful moonshots, merges with McDonnell Douglas, a government contractor par excellence. At first, it seems synergistic: the dynamic Boeing can build amazing planes and MD can secure a steady defence revenue stream. But then the moonshots quietly end. Boeing makes cost effective tweaks to its current lineup, and lands fat defence contracts that pad the bottom line and drive the stock to stratospheric prices. It gets comfortable, it gets efficient, and it stops being what made it great in the first place. Apple post-Jobs will likely be an extremely profitable company for many years to come. But it will never again be the pioneering company that forged whole markets from vision and belief. And that's sad.

deleted 7y ago

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rajacombinator 7y ago

So why is Apple pushing all these Ive bashing articles? Just part ways with some class Tim...

wodenokoto 7y ago

2 things I don’t understand: 1. If Ive has been on his way out for over a year ago (some say since 4) why is he so prominently featured in the design videos? Give a little room to the next guy, surely someone must have been in the pipeline for such a long departure. 2. If Ive have been practically absent all this time, working on the office rather than product, why will his actual departure turn things around with regards to product design?

BinaryIdiot 7y ago
1. It's great PR. Ive is very well known and liked outside of Apple (and probably inside, depending on who you worked with if we're to believe the article is correct). You're not wrong, though. They should have included more people to showcase as designers. 2. Yeah I agree, that doesn't make much sense. I've also seen a lot of places saying his departure will severely hurt Apple but he leads a team, he probably is rarely directly involved in anything anyway. I don't see how him leaving changes anything, honestly.
cmsj 7y ago
The WSJ article was so inconsistent in terms of which products are hitting/failing, whether Ive was absent or setting up new structures, whether the claimed failures are his fault or not, etc. For me, the real impact of Jony leaving, is what will happen to the other members of the design team. His team has been reported to have had very very little churn in the last couple of decades - with him leaving it seems likely that others will also look around. That will definitely have some kind of an effect - maybe for the worse, maybe for the better.
ninedays 7y ago
1. Because in most Apple videos, the product is the most important person in the room. Ive is a great storyteller when it comes to design (probably the best at Apple) so it makes sense that he is the one telling that story. Steve Jobs was by far the best keynote speaker at Apple so he did most of it himself. 2. Because the organisation is now structured with the design team reporting directly to Operations which is unusual as designers at Apple didn't use to report to anyone (except the CEO).

pcr910303 7y ago

It seems most of the comments have an assumption that current Apple hardware is not doing well, pushing more for aesthetics and failing to be a truly useful computer. I don’t really think so, negative reviews get to have much more spotlight and views than positive ones; (One reason is that positive people about the devices won’t be ‘whining’ as loudly as the negative ones do; another one is that post-SJ Apple is constantly criticized by ‘not becoming innovative as much as SJ’) and HN is a particularly great place for these negative reviews take place. While I also think time to time that Apple could do better than the current HW(e.g. turning on haptic feedback on the TB as default), the current HW lineup is pretty great, I would say. I find the TB immensely useful in my workflow, (partially because I use a custom Emacs that I took my time to hack on to display touchbar buttons for my workflow... why doesn’t Emacs/gVim gain TB support?̊̈) especially when I’m using Finder or Safari, Emacs, MS Office... and my friends that sneered at using an Apple laptop started to evaluate using it after '18, when the keyboard issues got pretty much fixed. I also find the discussion around the butterfly mechanism of the MacBooks pretty much disconcerning, there are pretty much people who love the feel of the butterfly, (not all people like long pitched keyboards, especially on laptops), and Apple managed to fix the keyboard issues with dust in 2018, which I would say, pretty much immediately after it was discovered. I’m fine with Mr. Ive departuring from Apple, as far as Apple designs great products that value on both function and form. If Apple becomes a usual computer company that starts to listen to all consumer complaints and makes and sells usual computers that other companies can make, that’s a pretty concerning future.

alpaca128 7y ago
> Apple managed to fix the keyboard issues with dust in 2018 Then why did they put the newest 2019 model's keyboard into the same replacement program before it even launched?
- pcr910303 7y ago
  (AFAIK As Apple stated too,) to give confidence to customers that are skeptical due to keyboard issues.
empath75 7y ago

nobrains 7y ago

The last line is so crushing: "Mr. Ive’s old design team—a group of aesthetes once thought of as gods inside Apple—will report to COO Jeff Williams, a mechanical engineer with an M.B.A."

sneak 7y ago
It hit me that way, too. Gruber recently wrote: > I don’t worry that Apple is in trouble because Jony Ive is leaving; I worry that Apple is in trouble because he’s not being replaced. I think that's spot on. Jobs is dead and Ive checked out. Who's doing the thing that they did, now? I don't want to buy products that are designed by committee.
traderjane 7y ago
Why is that crushing? The decision is likely interim, and we're talking about design in terms of industrial engineering.
huffmsa 7y ago
That's how journalists used to sneak their opinion into otherwise factual reporting. WSJ still has enough old-school editors that Tripp Mickle couldn't go full WaPo or NYT and write a pure opinion page rant, so he used a factual statement to thinly veil his opinion.
- dannyw 7y ago
  Good journalism is more than just fact regurgitation.
  - huffmsa 7y ago
    Correct. It's the distillation of those facts into something digestible, and provide a bit of an angle to it. It is certainly not the breathless pearl clutching which has taken over the NYT and WaPo (amongst others).
  - jessriedel 7y ago
    That is not a good defense of covertly editorializing in an opinion piece. Great journalism is more than just fact regurgitation. But most modern journalism would be improved if it was replaced with fact regurgitation because most journalists cannot distinguish between their opinion and objective beyond-the-facts reporting.

betimsl 7y ago

He left because he's hit his limit. So better leave than start designing bad products. Plus apple has lost its compass among other things.

wayanon 7y ago

Is Apple Park such a success? Agree it looks wonderful but I saw reports of people getting injured from walking into glass and it not being a comfortable place to work. Style over substance?

ssully 7y ago
Honestly, those just sound like growing pains for a new building. I would be curious to hear an update on how people like it in a few years.

mukundmr 7y ago

There was no point in Jony Ive hanging around when the passion was gone. It is good to know that Apple is engaging the new firm launched by Jony to help Apple continue to design and improve their products.

dependsontheq 7y ago

I think the article shows how ridiculous it is when they talk about Tim Cook seeing products for the first time on the exhibition floor in photos. Really? So the CEO of a technology company has never seen the products they release and this is not just a pretty dorky PR shooting ?

MR4D 7y ago

There seems to be a lot of turnover at the top lately, also considering that Angela Ahrendts left earlier. What worries me are two things: 1, prior turnover in the design department (as noted by the WSJ in their article); 2 - what happens when Craig Federighi leaves? I think their design language is pretty strong that nobody should muck it up for a while, and hopefully someone can rise to the top. But #2 - "Hair Force One" is a force of nature. I really worry that his leadership is the last thread upon which Apple's greatness hangs.

jordache 7y ago

Good.. maybe they can dial back a bit on the interview format promo video with Ive talking like the new Apple TV is possess museum caliber design.

msoad 7y ago

People I know at Apple have been working on 2020 iPhone SUPPLY CHAIN since last year. That means designs are almost final. What I'm trying to say is, impact of this departure will be felt in maybe 4~5 years. Apple's hardware development pipeline is steady but slow.

crunkykd 7y ago

Ive is a great soldier, but Jobs knew which battles to fight. Apple has lost its way and doesn't know what directions to go in, where technology needs to move to serve its users. And Apple's huge money chest and insularity are of no help. They need an inspired product leader.