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> This is pure speculation, ungrounded from any evidence. It's not ungrounded from the anecdotal evidence that these changes are coming after Ive's departure.

> This is pure speculation, ungrounded from any evidence. It's not ungrounded from the anecdotal evidence that these changes are coming after Ive's departure. > I have seen no evidence that Jony Ive was its patron, and no evidence that including it had anything to with making laptops expensive as a goal. Holy, evidence Batman! Leadership 101: When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you. When your company releases an updated design to an existing product, you had some kind of say in that design. Period. Even if your "say" was just that you were aware of it, and didn't veto it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
BoorishBears 5y ago
> Holy, evidence Batman! Leadership 101: When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you. When your company releases an updated design to an existing product, you had some kind of say in that design. Period. Even if your "say" was just that you were aware of it, and didn't veto it. This is just shifting goalposts because you got called out. You didn't word your comment as "these things happened on Ive's watch" you consistently word your comment like Ives was personally pushing for something. It's a common refrain on HN and it's never backed with proof. And speaking of your first comment: > Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no accident. ... you realize that this is a new generation of MBP landing on the exact same cadence they've come out on in the last few decades? So it makes perfect sense to have drastic changes land now regardless of who's in charge? Not mention the fact it hasn't even been two full years since Ives left. And the fact the HDMI port was coming back leaked at the start of the year. So unless you seriously think Apple designs a laptop in the course of a single year, it's highly unlikely he had no input on the current machine.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  > You didn't word your comment as "these things happened on Ive's watch" you consistently word your comment like Ives was personally pushing for something. This is not a meaningful difference when he's in charge and it's a flagship product.
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    I knew this would be the response, and it's utter nonsense. But definitely extra points for trying to act like it being a flagship is why maybe this is an exception. - Flagship product or not, people do not say "Sundar Pichai recently made an unliked change to YouTube" despite his Director role People do not say "Kevin Scott's new Windows version is being disliked" despite him being MS's CTO > these things happened on Ive's watch Is a factual statement > Ives was personally pushing for X. Is gossip that HNs tell themselves to feel better. Or is Johnny Ives magically a special case because people don't like him? I mean seriously, if you think being a leader means you are personally pushing for every single solution as opposed to personally accepting every solution... and that you always have the exact same level of personal love for everything that you allow, you've never lead anything with any sort of scale. Being a leader is about compromise, not turning every project into a 1:1 reflection of what your preferred choices would have been.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      You're naming people that are managing entire companies. The person in charge of design, for a company that has a handful of physical products, is a completely different situation. It's reasonable to blame them for top level product design decisions. What happens in that specific realm is what they want. The top priority of their job is those few dozen decisions. The opposite of a CEO that's overseeing ten thousand different things. Be a little less stuck on the word 'pushing'. The fact is, when it's one of the main things you're in charge of choosing, and you allow a decision and then stand by it for a long time, you are now pushing it. Also, wait, you're the one that inserted the word 'pushing' into the conversation! If you're upset with that wording, you're upset at a strawman.
      - BoorishBears 5y ago
        Kevin Scott is a CTO. He's in charge of top level product technical decisions The top priority of his job is those few dozen decisions. Be a little less stuck on the word "Director". The fact is, when you're one of the main people in charge of allowing decisions, it's not the same as personally championing them. - > Also, wait, you're the one that inserted the word 'pushing' into the conversation! If you're upset with that wording, you're upset at a strawman. You know you can just read the comment I referred to right if you've already forgotten right? The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the width for a worse user experience with a higher production cost and less reliability. Does that sound like personally assigning blame to Johnny Ive for something? It'd be one thing if it said Ive's team or something, but it's the common refrain parroted on this site - If John manages Joe and Joe deletes a database in prod, do you say "John's subordinate deleted a database in prod" or do you say "John deleted a database in prod". You see how there's a difference there even though both acknowledge that John has a part in what happened? It's not that complicated to see the difference if you've ever interacted with any sort of situation where the buck actually stopped with leadership, but I guess that's not universal.
danaris 5y ago
There's a big difference between "Jony Ive, as CDO, must have signed off on this, and thus bears responsibility for it" and "Jony Ive was pushing for this, for these specific reasons".
karaterobot 5y ago
> When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you. Agreed with this. When you're coming to the CDO position after 20 years of being a hands-on designer at that company, most recently as the head of both human interface and industrial design across the entire organization, and having been described as being the person with the most operational power at Apple, after Steve Jobs himself, even before being promoted, my guess is that these design changes did not sneak under his radar. It is most likely that he set the goals that produced these designs, and that he was aware of and approved of them from the beginning. And I suspect that as a new C-level, he was probably even more hands on than that. But since in this thread we are being asked to hold ourselves to a very high standard of rigor, I should note that I have not submitted this comment to peer review, or made my data available for replication at this time. I'm just basing this on, you know, how jobs work.
- threeseed 5y ago
  > my guess is that these design changes did not sneak under his radar Ive is part of the Senior Leadership Team. No major decision in the company sneaks under his radar. But that doesn't mean he is responsible for every decision.
threeseed 5y ago
> When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you. That's only because in your ignorant reality you have made it so. The actual reality is that what constitutes a product is so much more than just the design. For example it includes what features should and shouldn't be there. And that is a decision largely coming from the Product team. Or how it works. Which comes from Hardware Engineering team.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

BoorishBears 5y ago

> Holy, evidence Batman! Leadership 101: When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you. When your company releases an updated design to an existing product, you had some kind of say in that design. Period. Even if your "say" was just that you were aware of it, and didn't veto it. This is just shifting goalposts because you got called out. You didn't word your comment as "these things happened on Ive's watch" you consistently word your comment like Ives was personally pushing for something. It's a common refrain on HN and it's never backed with proof. And speaking of your first comment: > Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no accident. ... you realize that this is a new generation of MBP landing on the exact same cadence they've come out on in the last few decades? So it makes perfect sense to have drastic changes land now regardless of who's in charge? Not mention the fact it hasn't even been two full years since Ives left. And the fact the HDMI port was coming back leaked at the start of the year. So unless you seriously think Apple designs a laptop in the course of a single year, it's highly unlikely he had no input on the current machine.

Dylan16807 5y ago
> You didn't word your comment as "these things happened on Ive's watch" you consistently word your comment like Ives was personally pushing for something. This is not a meaningful difference when he's in charge and it's a flagship product.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  I knew this would be the response, and it's utter nonsense. But definitely extra points for trying to act like it being a flagship is why maybe this is an exception. - Flagship product or not, people do not say "Sundar Pichai recently made an unliked change to YouTube" despite his Director role People do not say "Kevin Scott's new Windows version is being disliked" despite him being MS's CTO > these things happened on Ive's watch Is a factual statement > Ives was personally pushing for X. Is gossip that HNs tell themselves to feel better. Or is Johnny Ives magically a special case because people don't like him? I mean seriously, if you think being a leader means you are personally pushing for every single solution as opposed to personally accepting every solution... and that you always have the exact same level of personal love for everything that you allow, you've never lead anything with any sort of scale. Being a leader is about compromise, not turning every project into a 1:1 reflection of what your preferred choices would have been.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    You're naming people that are managing entire companies. The person in charge of design, for a company that has a handful of physical products, is a completely different situation. It's reasonable to blame them for top level product design decisions. What happens in that specific realm is what they want. The top priority of their job is those few dozen decisions. The opposite of a CEO that's overseeing ten thousand different things. Be a little less stuck on the word 'pushing'. The fact is, when it's one of the main things you're in charge of choosing, and you allow a decision and then stand by it for a long time, you are now pushing it. Also, wait, you're the one that inserted the word 'pushing' into the conversation! If you're upset with that wording, you're upset at a strawman.
    - BoorishBears 5y ago
      Kevin Scott is a CTO. He's in charge of top level product technical decisions The top priority of his job is those few dozen decisions. Be a little less stuck on the word "Director". The fact is, when you're one of the main people in charge of allowing decisions, it's not the same as personally championing them. - > Also, wait, you're the one that inserted the word 'pushing' into the conversation! If you're upset with that wording, you're upset at a strawman. You know you can just read the comment I referred to right if you've already forgotten right? The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the width for a worse user experience with a higher production cost and less reliability. Does that sound like personally assigning blame to Johnny Ive for something? It'd be one thing if it said Ive's team or something, but it's the common refrain parroted on this site - If John manages Joe and Joe deletes a database in prod, do you say "John's subordinate deleted a database in prod" or do you say "John deleted a database in prod". You see how there's a difference there even though both acknowledge that John has a part in what happened? It's not that complicated to see the difference if you've ever interacted with any sort of situation where the buck actually stopped with leadership, but I guess that's not universal.

danaris 5y ago

There's a big difference between "Jony Ive, as CDO, must have signed off on this, and thus bears responsibility for it" and "Jony Ive was pushing for this, for these specific reasons".

karaterobot 5y ago

> When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you. Agreed with this. When you're coming to the CDO position after 20 years of being a hands-on designer at that company, most recently as the head of both human interface and industrial design across the entire organization, and having been described as being the person with the most operational power at Apple, after Steve Jobs himself, even before being promoted, my guess is that these design changes did not sneak under his radar. It is most likely that he set the goals that produced these designs, and that he was aware of and approved of them from the beginning. And I suspect that as a new C-level, he was probably even more hands on than that. But since in this thread we are being asked to hold ourselves to a very high standard of rigor, I should note that I have not submitted this comment to peer review, or made my data available for replication at this time. I'm just basing this on, you know, how jobs work.

threeseed 5y ago
> my guess is that these design changes did not sneak under his radar Ive is part of the Senior Leadership Team. No major decision in the company sneaks under his radar. But that doesn't mean he is responsible for every decision.

threeseed 5y ago

> When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you. That's only because in your ignorant reality you have made it so. The actual reality is that what constitutes a product is so much more than just the design. For example it includes what features should and shouldn't be there. And that is a decision largely coming from the Product team. Or how it works. Which comes from Hardware Engineering team.