4 ms·

I’m not a fan of Jony Ive’s, and quite resentful about Apple products, but the sentiment here is quite negative. Some are ad hominem, others are harsh on the de

I’m not a fan of Jony Ive’s, and quite resentful about Apple products, but the sentiment here is quite negative. Some are ad hominem, others are harsh on the design itself. How does this affect you? The company paid him. If they don’t like it, that’s on them. If other companies think his design suck, then they won’t pay for it. Maybe they’re paying for his name instead of his design. Prince Harry is some kind influencer for a startup / Vc or something now. Is he qualified ? Who knows. Does it affect you? Apple doesn’t owe you anything to be honest, but he doesn’t work there anymore. I understand the culture in design and fine arts is to critique. But since when did HackerNews become a forum for critiquing subjective aesthetic appeal and goodness? Jony Ives is still probably a better graphic designer than most engineers here. As for people who trained in design, if Jony Ive’s isn’t your inspiration, we get it, but are you doing groundbreaking design or designing another unsexy B2B CRUD app. Are your own designs and bloated CSS / assets inflating your ego or actually useful to users? Are people just envious that Jony Ives was the one who won the lottery and gets to design for Apple?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
petilon 5y ago
> How does this affect you? Are you kidding? The original iPhone was a revolutionary product. iOS was a revolution in user experience. Steve Jobs showed the world that you can build a complex, sophisticated product and still make it simple to use, intuitive and breathtakingly beautiful. That amazing creation has been severely crippled, and Jony is the person that did it. Of course there is a lot of disappointment in the tech community.
- alephnan 5y ago
  > How does this affect you? I'm referring to his post Apple career and this seal/logo design. > The original iPhone was a revolutionary product. Sure, but in a parallel universe it could have flopped. Risks need to be taken nonetheless. In this case, too aggressively, and it sucks that the users have to pay the price. It's not fundamentally that all USB-C minimalism is inherently bad design, it's just that the standard is confusing, so it's bad in implementation. If we were to imagine a perfect sci-fi future, a single connector or no connector would be ideal. The alternative is slow incremental iteration, but there's no guarantee that would lead us to a global optimum either. Look at Sony. Sony had some of the most groundbreaking products, then they merely iterated and didn't take risks. Where is Sony now?
tinus_hn 5y ago
Jony Ive didn’t just win the lottery and get to design for Apple, het got to design for Apple because he’s great at design. Armchair designers can whine all they want but they were the same know it all’s who ridiculed EarPods when they came out (haha it’s like a toothbrush) and every Apple product before then. Of course not all these products became a runaway success. But a pretty significant amount of them changed the world.
- alephnan 5y ago
  It almost seems people here hasn't had experience building a resume of creative work. I used to do poetry, and you take risks, and sometimes it doesn't land the way you expect it to. We look at great artists and remember their greatest works, but forget about all the mediocre crap they produced. Ridley Scott or Christopher Nolan, they take risks, and produce a movie that's a little too high browed and is not engaging or compelling as they envisioned, but they've already committed, launch it, and wait for the next cycle.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
I find these sorts of arguments disingenuous. Of course "Apple doesn't owe us anything", but we're all just shooting the shit on some random topic, so of course people have strong opinions about the products they use everyday. I don't so much get the hate on Jony Ive, but I do get the disappointment, in the sense that we could have had really great products 5 years ago if it weren't for Ive's obsession with thinness and "svelteness" as I put it. Things like the failed butterfly keyboard, always sacrificing decent battery life for shaving another millimeter, etc. Glad to see Apple reversing many of these poor decisions with the latest MacBook Pro, but again, just frustrating because it could have been so close to perfection years ago if it didn't run off the rails with Ive's design obsessions.
- alephnan 5y ago
  > just frustrating because it could have been so close to perfection years ago if it didn't run off the rails I agree. But we're buying Apple's reputation, not Apple products. If Apple makes crappy products consistently long enough, people will stop buying. I think it is in Apple's financial incentive to alternate back and forth between "near perfect" products than to mediocre ones. In the same way Facebook and Social media shows you a mix of stuff that you don't like and just enough interesting stuff to keep you hooked. What should be blamed here is corporations maximizing profit.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

petilon 5y ago

> How does this affect you? Are you kidding? The original iPhone was a revolutionary product. iOS was a revolution in user experience. Steve Jobs showed the world that you can build a complex, sophisticated product and still make it simple to use, intuitive and breathtakingly beautiful. That amazing creation has been severely crippled, and Jony is the person that did it. Of course there is a lot of disappointment in the tech community.

alephnan 5y ago
> How does this affect you? I'm referring to his post Apple career and this seal/logo design. > The original iPhone was a revolutionary product. Sure, but in a parallel universe it could have flopped. Risks need to be taken nonetheless. In this case, too aggressively, and it sucks that the users have to pay the price. It's not fundamentally that all USB-C minimalism is inherently bad design, it's just that the standard is confusing, so it's bad in implementation. If we were to imagine a perfect sci-fi future, a single connector or no connector would be ideal. The alternative is slow incremental iteration, but there's no guarantee that would lead us to a global optimum either. Look at Sony. Sony had some of the most groundbreaking products, then they merely iterated and didn't take risks. Where is Sony now?

tinus_hn 5y ago

Jony Ive didn’t just win the lottery and get to design for Apple, het got to design for Apple because he’s great at design. Armchair designers can whine all they want but they were the same know it all’s who ridiculed EarPods when they came out (haha it’s like a toothbrush) and every Apple product before then. Of course not all these products became a runaway success. But a pretty significant amount of them changed the world.

alephnan 5y ago
It almost seems people here hasn't had experience building a resume of creative work. I used to do poetry, and you take risks, and sometimes it doesn't land the way you expect it to. We look at great artists and remember their greatest works, but forget about all the mediocre crap they produced. Ridley Scott or Christopher Nolan, they take risks, and produce a movie that's a little too high browed and is not engaging or compelling as they envisioned, but they've already committed, launch it, and wait for the next cycle.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

I find these sorts of arguments disingenuous. Of course "Apple doesn't owe us anything", but we're all just shooting the shit on some random topic, so of course people have strong opinions about the products they use everyday. I don't so much get the hate on Jony Ive, but I do get the disappointment, in the sense that we could have had really great products 5 years ago if it weren't for Ive's obsession with thinness and "svelteness" as I put it. Things like the failed butterfly keyboard, always sacrificing decent battery life for shaving another millimeter, etc. Glad to see Apple reversing many of these poor decisions with the latest MacBook Pro, but again, just frustrating because it could have been so close to perfection years ago if it didn't run off the rails with Ive's design obsessions.

alephnan 5y ago
> just frustrating because it could have been so close to perfection years ago if it didn't run off the rails I agree. But we're buying Apple's reputation, not Apple products. If Apple makes crappy products consistently long enough, people will stop buying. I think it is in Apple's financial incentive to alternate back and forth between "near perfect" products than to mediocre ones. In the same way Facebook and Social media shows you a mix of stuff that you don't like and just enough interesting stuff to keep you hooked. What should be blamed here is corporations maximizing profit.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]