26 ms·

The dissolution of Apple’s legacy design team

302 points by Pulcinella 4y ago

majjam 4y ago
The list of trackers on that website is the largest Ive ever seen
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  Hmm, I think top 10 US banks easily beat those.
  - naet 4y ago
    Banks obviously have a lot of financial data at their disposal to use how they see fit. But out of curiosity I checked my bank website which falls under this category and there were only 2-3 trackers picked up by my browser and extensions.
- dubswithus 4y ago
  44 trackers and ads blocked by Brave.
  - pronoiac 4y ago
    Huh, Mobile Safari reported 54.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Sebb767 4y ago
  On mobile, you also get that stupid video on the middle of the page attached at the top once scrolling by. And you can't tap it away. Just, why?
  - drakonka 4y ago
    There is a tiny, barely visible close button above it on the right.
- can16358p 4y ago
  For a few seconds I interpreted "Ive" as Jony Ive and tried to make sense of it.
runjake 4y ago
I respect Ive's design skills but I think that Ive leaving is one of the best things to happen to Apple in decades. They're slowly going from Ive's minimalist artistic designs back to useful computing devices and user interfaces.
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
  Yeah, I've always thought he would sell out on functionality to get some meaningless design feature included for the aesthetic.
- ajaimk 4y ago
  I agree. Jon Ive was a genius with design when he had to work under constrained scenarios. But the moment he had unconstrained power, form was able to win over functionality.
  - hbosch 4y ago
    I think Ive was a fantastic and visionary industrial designer, but when he debuted as the design czar over software as well I think Apple’s UX kinda entered a nosedive. The actual designers “on the ground” there really pulled iOS through those times and I agree with other commenter that nowadays Apple is really so much better.
    - etempleton 4y ago
      Yes, it felt like Ive had too much unilateral decision making power. Steve loved the push and pull of constructive arguments and disagreements and famously lamented that even he didn’t always get his way if others had compelling arguments. Ive is and was a designer. Design and—more specifically, his design asthetic—always came first under his tenure post Steve.
      - alexsereno 4y ago
        He needed to have Fadell around to argue with, but Tim prefers an office style with less tension. Which has been great for shareholders, bad for consumer design tho. It’s hard to know what is more “right” since more people have apple products than ever before, but wow I love my post-Ive Mac a lot more, and design across the board has focused a bit on function w/ Craig getting a bigger role
thomond 4y ago
Is it me or does the article too end suddenly?
- gumby 4y ago
  The cliffhanger is to get you to buy the book. That “article” is just an ad.
scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago
That bit about the firing of the designer who used the river metaphor in that email is such a good lesson for anyone: Never ever ever ever announce moves like this if there is still money on the table that can still be taken away from you. No matter how awesome your company is, how great the team, product or how wonderful the atmosphere is. This guy thought he wrote a heartfelt goodbye to his beloved team and was instead brutally punished for it. That made me lose a whole lot of respect for Ive.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > That made me lose a whole lot of respect for Ive. You mean you lost respect for Alan Dye? Seems to have been the one who fired Imran Chaudhri. > Shortly after the email, Dye fired Chaudhri.
  - jasonlotito 4y ago
    No, they mean Ive. > The email alarmed Ive and Dye. They feared that the message Chaudhri sent could be interpreted to mean that Apple’s best days had passed. It’s clear from the article that both Ive and Dye were directly involved in the firing.
    - kumarmanket 4y ago
    - smugma 4y ago
      It’s hearsay, as even the article says it was Dye who did the firing. I’ve read many articles/interviews where Jony talks about being “hurt” by something. As in, he puts everything he has into these creations and certain things he takes very personally, as if someone is trying to stomp on a rose in his garden. Chaudhri is known to have a big personality himself and went to start a company that has hired a lot from Apple (not exclusively but sometimes browsing LinkedIn it looks that way). So he sends an email while resting and vesting (and also planning his next big thing), and they decide to cut ties, as he’s now seen as a potential liability. It doesn’t need to be petty or vindictive, but a decision based on bad vibes they got. Chaudhri could have given his notice two months in advance and cruised and sent the email on his last day, but he didn’t.
coldtea 4y ago
I prefer the current balance of Ive-inspired-designs WITHOUT Ive's obsessions. But something also not frequently said: Apple had amazing designs (compared to the rest of the industry), for 2 decades before Ive started his thing. Heck, NeXT too. Also, if I had to suffer yet another cookie-cutter Ive post-release video about a product, I'd kill myself...
- mickelsen 4y ago
  Oh man, those trailers with him speaking are the stuff I MISS the most, it was the last reminder of that old Apple now that keynotes and product launch commercials are so bland and boring I don't even bother to watch them anymore.
  - thoms_a 4y ago
    As a counterpoint, I bought my first iPhone (first ever Apple product) this week, and it was specifically because it seems like Apple is finally designing products with usability and functionality as their top priority. Ive was great, but he was way too much of an artist to understand that computers are mostly tools. Ive was more interested in folding katanas and the process of creation than the mundane design of a productivity tool. As an example, I remember being utterly bemused by the relentless port-pruning on the Macbook Pro. It just didn't make sense to me to remove ports on a machine designed primarily for productivity. But Ive didn't like ports, because katanas don't have ports. So the MBP didn't have ports.
    - SllX 4y ago
      I think he understood perfectly that computers were tools. The PowerBook/MacBook Pro designs up through 2016, the MacBook Air from 2010 onwards, the Power Macs G3-G5/Macs Pro through 2013 and the 2019 Mac Pro, the iBook/MacBook line through 2011, and the entirety of the iMac’s history all reflect a recognition that computers are fundamentally tools. They just held the conceit that tools can also be beautiful. But yes, sometime between Job’s death and 2017, the wheels just completely fell off when they introduced new Mac designs, and they spent the better part of the last 5 years putting them back on after Ive was promoted into the sky and left the company.
stevebmark 4y ago
From the outside, it seems like the poison of flat design only flourished when Jobs died. The beautiful, thoughtful, intuitive, accessible skeuomorphism was replaced with flat design only after Jobs wasn’t there. Was Jony only able to wrench away the beauty then? It seems like it. Humans live in a 3D world and take visual cues from things like lighting, gradients, shadows, materials and textures. Flat design strips that all away.
- bogwog 4y ago
  I agree, I love skeuomorphic designs even though the common consensus seems to be that it's obsolete/outdated. I guess it's a consequence of the unusually high influence Apple has on the design world. It seems like no matter what Apple decides to do, every single designer will blindly follow them.
  - bluk 4y ago
    I don't know if most people consider skeuomorphic designs obsolete/outdated, but the costs would be far greater today compared to when iOS was only for a handful of different resolutions for the iPhone and iPad. Not only do you have to consider the physical screen size differences with possibly different PPI, but all of the sidebar/split-screen/multi-window modes would require additional work. It's kind of like when most websites started to switch to responsive designs where image heavy layouts and other fun animations kinda dropped off. It was just too costly to make things work well.
    - musesum 4y ago
      > when most websites started to switch to responsive designs where image heavy layouts and other fun animations kinda dropped off Yep, things got harder with AutoRotate on the iPad. It took a while to get used to SwiftUI. But the pay off is immediate when switching from Portrait to Landscape mode. Now, everything flows perfectly. Imagine designing for every single kind of device: be it watch, phone, pad, desktop, and TV. It kinda forces you to think differently.
ballenf 4y ago
At work, the new MacBooks with HDMI are trickling in and I've never seen so much excitement around a laptop. People (mostly Product people) just giddy they don't need a dongle to connect to screens. I didn't realize how much people hate dongles.
- wincy 4y ago
  I mean, I buy a dongle and maybe it’ll support 1080p, maybe 1440p, maybe 4K? Who knows! The Amazon review certainly won’t tell you, the company selling it to you will lie through their teeth. You won’t find out until you’re plugging it in (probably during a presentation) It’s just so much fun playing dongle roulette.
  - topicseed 4y ago
    This made me laugh too much. It's true on so many levels with anything I bought recently on Amazon.
    - SllX 4y ago
      Kind of makes me wonder if Ive’s late Apple designs would stand up better in a world where Amazon was better and you could reliably receive what you ordered. Does anyone else remember that gentleman who worked at Google with one of their USB-C charging Chromebooks that would test various USB-C cables to see if they met spec until one fried his Chromebook? But dongles would still suck so probably the answer is “technically yes, but not in a meaningful way”.
  - grecy 4y ago
    Buy the dongle from Apple and it will be expensive, but it will work perfectly.
    - goosedragons 4y ago
      Well that depends. The old Apple HDMI to USB C dongle doesn't do 4K 60Hz so if you buy used or the shop you're at has old stock... The other adapters like the VGA one they make also don't support more than 60W PD passthrough and they don't really make this clear on the store page or packaging either.
chevman 4y ago
Pro tip - always wait until the money is in your bank account!
imwillofficial 4y ago
After reading that, Ive is a piece of shit. That guy went out of His way to be cool. Instead of clarifying the misunderstanding, they just nuked him from orbit.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
can16358p 4y ago
I really loved the design of the Touch Bar/Butterfly keyboard visually. It would have been great if: - They kept the butterfly but completely solved the failure problem. - Supported Touch Bar with actual haptic feedback that could really be used "professionally" as in a Pro device. It could at best become a gimmick, but if played right, had great potential. - Had a simplified thin chassis with less ports. I really don't wanna pay for an HDMI port, SD reader, and a headphone jack that I'll never use in my entire life. I still believe after all the years, unification of everything to a single port (USB-C) was right. The industry should have forward to, say, support HDMI over USB-C on ubiqutiously, and really should have adopted a single card type: now we practically have 3: SD, microSD, and CF. My camera has a CF card, my drone has a microSD, and ironically regular SD is the only one that don't use so I still carry a dongle anyway (microSD adapter in this sense can be considered a passive dongle). Instead of the headphone jack it could stream raw audio over USB-C and offload DAC to the connected device. I also get that without a single standard, Apple also couldn't make everyone happy at the same time, but if there was a single standard port, or even a wireless standard that provided Gigabit speeds in around less than a meter, that would have been a great device with much less ports. Of course, this is not reality, and I of course also get why Apple added all those back, and I love my M1 MacBook Pro regardless. I just wanted to share a vision.
- lupire 4y ago
  > loved the design of the [product] visually [but it was a functional failure] Is Ive's trademark.
  - grishka 4y ago
    Way too many of today's UIs are like that, too. Especially desktop ones. And it's not just Apple, it's endemic in the entire industry.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  I used the old Touch Bar in my profession daily - used it for debugging command shortcuts.
deanCommie 4y ago
> Stringer found the HomePod dissatisfying because Apple treated it as a hobby, depriving it of the cross-division focus it lavished on core products, such as the iPhone and iPad. I mean...yeah? iPod, iPhone and iPad are Apple's whole 21st century legacy. And most recently, arguably Apple Watch and EarPods. They all have the same thing in common - they're wearables that you see on the person on the street. Apple is a trillion dollar company (and not a skeleton in a graveyard of companies crushed by Microsoft in the 1990's that it almost was) because of iPhone and iPad. Every other Apple product is a "hobby" by comparison, and that includes iMacs, and Macbook Pros. You have to have your eyes open about the product you work on, and where it sits in the company hierarchy. Not everything is a core product, but that doesn't mean it's not important.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I partly agree. But what makes the iPhone so sticky is ecosystem--and that includes a bunch of other products that might be a lot less interesting in isolation.
  - ejj28 4y ago
    Indeed. I'm a staunch Android user, but I seriously envy iPhone users for the Apple Watch. Nobody else has put the same level of care and resources into their smartwatch and if it wasn't for a myriad of personal dealbreakers I have with Apple products, I'd be tempted to switch to iPhone to be able to have an Apple Watch.
- kccqzy 4y ago
  This hobby attitude is exactly why Google kills so many products. Google Reader is a hobby; leadership can't ever imagine it being a billion-dollar business so it doesn't justify any more maintenance effort. HomePod is certainly going down that path.
mdmglr 4y ago
Today, none of Apple’s products spark my excitement and joy like they did from 1999-2011. Everything today is predictable, safe and iterative. I look forward to reading this book. Maybe it can provide some insight. I hope Apple’s design team can recover.
- roflyear 4y ago
  I agree, but I think much of this was the excitement of watching Jobs. The feeling you got was something else.
rubyist5eva 4y ago
Getting fired for that river analogy…that must’ve stung holy cow
stephc_int13 4y ago
In my opinion, the work Ive did at Apple is greatly over rated. Yes it is clean and minimalist, and some devices like the iPhone 4 were truly innovative, bold and impressive designs. But overall, this is mostly bland, generic, boring. In the same minimalist style, I prefer the work of Dieter Rams. Some Sony products have really good design, including devices that were released a few years before the iPhone, but that were unfortunately built around a weak and already dying software stack (PalmOS). The Sony Clié are, in my opinion, less boring and better designed than most Apple products. IBM comes also to mind, the ThinkPad was a stylish and sturdy computer. There is a world outside of Apple headquarter, and I feel that they reached a dead-end, design wise.
- deleted 4y ago
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- newsclues 4y ago
  Sony worked with apple on early PowerBooks
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  Citing IBM as good at design makes this read like a parody. Everything IBM does is so hilariously ugly in the least imaginative, boring, industrial way that they’ve gone through “boxy” into some other universe where it’s almost — but not quite — good style. For crying out loud, everything they make is black. There are famous Apple ads deriding the bland corporate look of IBM!
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    IBM has made lots of not black things. Were any of their typewriters black? The IBM PC sure wasn't and many models after that weren't. I think the ThinkPad was their first black computer at the very least. IMO ThinkPads look great and they've done some really cool things like the butterfly keyboard.
    - formerly_proven 4y ago
caycep 4y ago
The one thing about all this press from "After Steve" - the author is one of those reporters who tend to make speculative guesses about Apple that have not borne out. Granted, perhaps he took extra effort to get sources/research material for the book but I'd take it with a grain of salt.
iancmceachern 4y ago
People are great until they aren't.
fortran77 4y ago
The full title of the book this is excerpted from is: > After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul Having worked for Apple during the Steve days, I'm not sure there was a soul to be lost.
psaux 4y ago
There is a lot to digest in this piece. Work environments are very dynamic and context and time-in-point is very important. I did not see this behavior, but I was not part of that group at Apple. I worked with Jony after we were acquired. The original Siri linen background was his idea, the bubbles had to be perfect, the padding, the text size, the lists goes on. I inferred this as design obsession and did not find it offending, he was right 95% of the time. When I left Apple, I emailed with Jony on a device I had designed and pitched internally in 2011 but was shelved. His response has stayed with me to this day, “not all ideas make the cut, even the best ones”. He could have cut me down or ignored me, but he responded with honesty. I think that void he left when he moved on was too big to be filled. Steve and Jony were always together, pretty much every day we would see them at lunch.
- davidhariri 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing this!
- the_af 4y ago
  > “not all ideas make the cut, even the best ones” I'm not sure I understand. If the best ideas don't make the cut, which ones do? Or was Jony acknowledging a flaw in Apple's process?
  - synu 4y ago
    I read it as “even (some of) the best ones” based on the “not all ideas” start.
    - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
      Could also be speaking with hindsight
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    Carful to remember the “some of”… but the best ideas might be too risky, not as practical, timed poorly, too controversial, etc.
deergomoo 4y ago
Putting software design under the hardware design folks after Forstall was outed was and remains disastrous IMO. Dye and his team continue to make beautiful hardware but fuck me hiding every function of a program behind a hover state or overflow menu absolutely kills usability. Productivity is being sacrificed for some weird notion of “cleanliness”. We’re all running displays with millions of pixels, we can afford buttons for stuff.
- urthor 4y ago
  This, absolutely this. The hardware is getting better. The software is getting worse. They're hiding usability.
- ksec 4y ago
  This, and iOS7. I know I am in the extreme minority but I do miss Forstall. I just dont like Craig Federighi much.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  I also find software quality to be getting worse (more glitches and bugs, which can be very distracting), but I actually like having the main UI as free of distraction as possible. Though I'll agree they've overshot their goal a little/are focusing on the wrong things in places (I always use the search to crop things in preview).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
CodeWriter23 4y ago
Unfortunately, the design team isn’t the only thing afflicting Apple’s products. macOS crashes, previously extremely rare are no a weekly event for me. On Apple gear. My iPhone 8 Plus only intermittently generates notifications from colleagues while at work. Flaky Wi-Fi. Autocorrect has learned too much and instead of correcting typos natural to an onscreen keyboard, now materially changes sentences on the fly, respelling correctly-spelled words, apparently based upon some engineer’s idea of ML Nirvana and contextual language processing. Hey MF I don’t write _your_ way. Lock Screen appears abruptly during use and is unlockable, requiring a reboot. It’s almost like the “the new windows will fix all the crashes” (3.1/95/98bXP) guys have set up shop at Apple and are perpetrating Jobs’ feared “Bozo Explosion”. Ironically, Windows on my aging MBP is my most stable compute experience on the daily now. Well, except for the Linux servers and their mult-year uptimes.
- elzbardico 4y ago
  You should have a MacBook to be looked at. I have an intel mac from work and a personal M1 mac, and I rarely have to reboot them. The only time I remember having a kernel panic with a recent Mac OS was after installing Bluestack.
dougdonohoe 4y ago
Don't quit until the money is in the bank. I mean it. Don't trust your boss or HR or anyone. People can be capricious and you don't want your hard earned compensation to be subject to this. The HR department is not there for you - they are there to protect the company.
korginator 4y ago
People can (and often will) be vindictive, specially people with the power over you and your career. Call me cynical, but in my few decades of work life I've come across more than a few such people. Say what you will about how you wish leaders would behave, but reality is different. I've seen ego- and power-tripping at all levels, even in situations where the people playing these games had nothing to gain or lose from torpedoing the other. Imran Chaudhri would have been best served by keeping all written communications strictly minimal and work related. Something along the lines of "I'm leaving in a months' time for other opportunities. It was a pleasure working here, thank you for your support, wishing you all the best." Nothing would have been misinterpreted. Keep any and all sentiments out of work related communication.
ksec 4y ago
>Apple’s operations team determined that making the iPad would require building several new features from scratch. The first-time costs of new machinery, a new logic board, and other components would amount to billions of dollars, an investment that would take years to recoup. Those so-called nonrecurring engineering costs led Apple’s business division to suspend the iPad. I think this sums up pretty much everything that is wrong with Modern Apple. And as someone who used to scrutinise everything Apple, from their quarterly report to Supply Chains. This is sadly the case. You only need to look at Apple Retail to see how it went from a Marketing, Services and User experiences goal to some financial checkbox. I would imagine Steve would have authorise the few billions just to build a better iPad. It is also clear Johny have a some sort of burnout at Apple, Software UX should never have been under his decision making. After the departure of Forstall, Jony went all in and teared everything apart in iOS7 within a year. Spend most of this time on Apple Retail redesign and Apple Park. And clearly trying to make the ultimate product he long dreamed off, the Macbook and MacBook Pro Touch Bar before the tech was ready. And somehow had an Apple Design Book by the end of 2016, which I thought was basically a tribute dedicated to Johny.

302 points by Pulcinella 4y ago

majjam 4y ago

The list of trackers on that website is the largest Ive ever seen

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
Hmm, I think top 10 US banks easily beat those.
- naet 4y ago
  Banks obviously have a lot of financial data at their disposal to use how they see fit. But out of curiosity I checked my bank website which falls under this category and there were only 2-3 trackers picked up by my browser and extensions.
dubswithus 4y ago
44 trackers and ads blocked by Brave.
- pronoiac 4y ago
  Huh, Mobile Safari reported 54.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Sebb767 4y ago
On mobile, you also get that stupid video on the middle of the page attached at the top once scrolling by. And you can't tap it away. Just, why?
- drakonka 4y ago
  There is a tiny, barely visible close button above it on the right.
can16358p 4y ago
For a few seconds I interpreted "Ive" as Jony Ive and tried to make sense of it.

runjake 4y ago

I respect Ive's design skills but I think that Ive leaving is one of the best things to happen to Apple in decades. They're slowly going from Ive's minimalist artistic designs back to useful computing devices and user interfaces.

Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
Yeah, I've always thought he would sell out on functionality to get some meaningless design feature included for the aesthetic.
ajaimk 4y ago
I agree. Jon Ive was a genius with design when he had to work under constrained scenarios. But the moment he had unconstrained power, form was able to win over functionality.
- hbosch 4y ago
  I think Ive was a fantastic and visionary industrial designer, but when he debuted as the design czar over software as well I think Apple’s UX kinda entered a nosedive. The actual designers “on the ground” there really pulled iOS through those times and I agree with other commenter that nowadays Apple is really so much better.
  - etempleton 4y ago
    Yes, it felt like Ive had too much unilateral decision making power. Steve loved the push and pull of constructive arguments and disagreements and famously lamented that even he didn’t always get his way if others had compelling arguments. Ive is and was a designer. Design and—more specifically, his design asthetic—always came first under his tenure post Steve.
    - alexsereno 4y ago
      He needed to have Fadell around to argue with, but Tim prefers an office style with less tension. Which has been great for shareholders, bad for consumer design tho. It’s hard to know what is more “right” since more people have apple products than ever before, but wow I love my post-Ive Mac a lot more, and design across the board has focused a bit on function w/ Craig getting a bigger role

thomond 4y ago

Is it me or does the article too end suddenly?

gumby 4y ago
The cliffhanger is to get you to buy the book. That “article” is just an ad.

scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago

That bit about the firing of the designer who used the river metaphor in that email is such a good lesson for anyone: Never ever ever ever announce moves like this if there is still money on the table that can still be taken away from you. No matter how awesome your company is, how great the team, product or how wonderful the atmosphere is. This guy thought he wrote a heartfelt goodbye to his beloved team and was instead brutally punished for it. That made me lose a whole lot of respect for Ive.

capableweb 4y ago
> That made me lose a whole lot of respect for Ive. You mean you lost respect for Alan Dye? Seems to have been the one who fired Imran Chaudhri. > Shortly after the email, Dye fired Chaudhri.
- jasonlotito 4y ago
  No, they mean Ive. > The email alarmed Ive and Dye. They feared that the message Chaudhri sent could be interpreted to mean that Apple’s best days had passed. It’s clear from the article that both Ive and Dye were directly involved in the firing.
  - kumarmanket 4y ago
  - smugma 4y ago
    It’s hearsay, as even the article says it was Dye who did the firing. I’ve read many articles/interviews where Jony talks about being “hurt” by something. As in, he puts everything he has into these creations and certain things he takes very personally, as if someone is trying to stomp on a rose in his garden. Chaudhri is known to have a big personality himself and went to start a company that has hired a lot from Apple (not exclusively but sometimes browsing LinkedIn it looks that way). So he sends an email while resting and vesting (and also planning his next big thing), and they decide to cut ties, as he’s now seen as a potential liability. It doesn’t need to be petty or vindictive, but a decision based on bad vibes they got. Chaudhri could have given his notice two months in advance and cruised and sent the email on his last day, but he didn’t.

coldtea 4y ago

I prefer the current balance of Ive-inspired-designs WITHOUT Ive's obsessions. But something also not frequently said: Apple had amazing designs (compared to the rest of the industry), for 2 decades before Ive started his thing. Heck, NeXT too. Also, if I had to suffer yet another cookie-cutter Ive post-release video about a product, I'd kill myself...

mickelsen 4y ago
Oh man, those trailers with him speaking are the stuff I MISS the most, it was the last reminder of that old Apple now that keynotes and product launch commercials are so bland and boring I don't even bother to watch them anymore.
- thoms_a 4y ago
  As a counterpoint, I bought my first iPhone (first ever Apple product) this week, and it was specifically because it seems like Apple is finally designing products with usability and functionality as their top priority. Ive was great, but he was way too much of an artist to understand that computers are mostly tools. Ive was more interested in folding katanas and the process of creation than the mundane design of a productivity tool. As an example, I remember being utterly bemused by the relentless port-pruning on the Macbook Pro. It just didn't make sense to me to remove ports on a machine designed primarily for productivity. But Ive didn't like ports, because katanas don't have ports. So the MBP didn't have ports.
  - SllX 4y ago
    I think he understood perfectly that computers were tools. The PowerBook/MacBook Pro designs up through 2016, the MacBook Air from 2010 onwards, the Power Macs G3-G5/Macs Pro through 2013 and the 2019 Mac Pro, the iBook/MacBook line through 2011, and the entirety of the iMac’s history all reflect a recognition that computers are fundamentally tools. They just held the conceit that tools can also be beautiful. But yes, sometime between Job’s death and 2017, the wheels just completely fell off when they introduced new Mac designs, and they spent the better part of the last 5 years putting them back on after Ive was promoted into the sky and left the company.

stevebmark 4y ago

From the outside, it seems like the poison of flat design only flourished when Jobs died. The beautiful, thoughtful, intuitive, accessible skeuomorphism was replaced with flat design only after Jobs wasn’t there. Was Jony only able to wrench away the beauty then? It seems like it. Humans live in a 3D world and take visual cues from things like lighting, gradients, shadows, materials and textures. Flat design strips that all away.

bogwog 4y ago
I agree, I love skeuomorphic designs even though the common consensus seems to be that it's obsolete/outdated. I guess it's a consequence of the unusually high influence Apple has on the design world. It seems like no matter what Apple decides to do, every single designer will blindly follow them.
- bluk 4y ago
  I don't know if most people consider skeuomorphic designs obsolete/outdated, but the costs would be far greater today compared to when iOS was only for a handful of different resolutions for the iPhone and iPad. Not only do you have to consider the physical screen size differences with possibly different PPI, but all of the sidebar/split-screen/multi-window modes would require additional work. It's kind of like when most websites started to switch to responsive designs where image heavy layouts and other fun animations kinda dropped off. It was just too costly to make things work well.
  - musesum 4y ago
    > when most websites started to switch to responsive designs where image heavy layouts and other fun animations kinda dropped off Yep, things got harder with AutoRotate on the iPad. It took a while to get used to SwiftUI. But the pay off is immediate when switching from Portrait to Landscape mode. Now, everything flows perfectly. Imagine designing for every single kind of device: be it watch, phone, pad, desktop, and TV. It kinda forces you to think differently.

ballenf 4y ago

At work, the new MacBooks with HDMI are trickling in and I've never seen so much excitement around a laptop. People (mostly Product people) just giddy they don't need a dongle to connect to screens. I didn't realize how much people hate dongles.

wincy 4y ago
I mean, I buy a dongle and maybe it’ll support 1080p, maybe 1440p, maybe 4K? Who knows! The Amazon review certainly won’t tell you, the company selling it to you will lie through their teeth. You won’t find out until you’re plugging it in (probably during a presentation) It’s just so much fun playing dongle roulette.
- topicseed 4y ago
  This made me laugh too much. It's true on so many levels with anything I bought recently on Amazon.
  - SllX 4y ago
    Kind of makes me wonder if Ive’s late Apple designs would stand up better in a world where Amazon was better and you could reliably receive what you ordered. Does anyone else remember that gentleman who worked at Google with one of their USB-C charging Chromebooks that would test various USB-C cables to see if they met spec until one fried his Chromebook? But dongles would still suck so probably the answer is “technically yes, but not in a meaningful way”.
- grecy 4y ago
  Buy the dongle from Apple and it will be expensive, but it will work perfectly.
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    Well that depends. The old Apple HDMI to USB C dongle doesn't do 4K 60Hz so if you buy used or the shop you're at has old stock... The other adapters like the VGA one they make also don't support more than 60W PD passthrough and they don't really make this clear on the store page or packaging either.

chevman 4y ago

Pro tip - always wait until the money is in your bank account!

imwillofficial 4y ago

After reading that, Ive is a piece of shit. That guy went out of His way to be cool. Instead of clarifying the misunderstanding, they just nuked him from orbit.

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can16358p 4y ago

I really loved the design of the Touch Bar/Butterfly keyboard visually. It would have been great if: - They kept the butterfly but completely solved the failure problem. - Supported Touch Bar with actual haptic feedback that could really be used "professionally" as in a Pro device. It could at best become a gimmick, but if played right, had great potential. - Had a simplified thin chassis with less ports. I really don't wanna pay for an HDMI port, SD reader, and a headphone jack that I'll never use in my entire life. I still believe after all the years, unification of everything to a single port (USB-C) was right. The industry should have forward to, say, support HDMI over USB-C on ubiqutiously, and really should have adopted a single card type: now we practically have 3: SD, microSD, and CF. My camera has a CF card, my drone has a microSD, and ironically regular SD is the only one that don't use so I still carry a dongle anyway (microSD adapter in this sense can be considered a passive dongle). Instead of the headphone jack it could stream raw audio over USB-C and offload DAC to the connected device. I also get that without a single standard, Apple also couldn't make everyone happy at the same time, but if there was a single standard port, or even a wireless standard that provided Gigabit speeds in around less than a meter, that would have been a great device with much less ports. Of course, this is not reality, and I of course also get why Apple added all those back, and I love my M1 MacBook Pro regardless. I just wanted to share a vision.

lupire 4y ago
> loved the design of the [product] visually [but it was a functional failure] Is Ive's trademark.
- grishka 4y ago
  Way too many of today's UIs are like that, too. Especially desktop ones. And it's not just Apple, it's endemic in the entire industry.
chrisseaton 4y ago
I used the old Touch Bar in my profession daily - used it for debugging command shortcuts.

deanCommie 4y ago

> Stringer found the HomePod dissatisfying because Apple treated it as a hobby, depriving it of the cross-division focus it lavished on core products, such as the iPhone and iPad. I mean...yeah? iPod, iPhone and iPad are Apple's whole 21st century legacy. And most recently, arguably Apple Watch and EarPods. They all have the same thing in common - they're wearables that you see on the person on the street. Apple is a trillion dollar company (and not a skeleton in a graveyard of companies crushed by Microsoft in the 1990's that it almost was) because of iPhone and iPad. Every other Apple product is a "hobby" by comparison, and that includes iMacs, and Macbook Pros. You have to have your eyes open about the product you work on, and where it sits in the company hierarchy. Not everything is a core product, but that doesn't mean it's not important.

ghaff 4y ago
I partly agree. But what makes the iPhone so sticky is ecosystem--and that includes a bunch of other products that might be a lot less interesting in isolation.
- ejj28 4y ago
  Indeed. I'm a staunch Android user, but I seriously envy iPhone users for the Apple Watch. Nobody else has put the same level of care and resources into their smartwatch and if it wasn't for a myriad of personal dealbreakers I have with Apple products, I'd be tempted to switch to iPhone to be able to have an Apple Watch.
kccqzy 4y ago
This hobby attitude is exactly why Google kills so many products. Google Reader is a hobby; leadership can't ever imagine it being a billion-dollar business so it doesn't justify any more maintenance effort. HomePod is certainly going down that path.

mdmglr 4y ago

Today, none of Apple’s products spark my excitement and joy like they did from 1999-2011. Everything today is predictable, safe and iterative. I look forward to reading this book. Maybe it can provide some insight. I hope Apple’s design team can recover.

roflyear 4y ago
I agree, but I think much of this was the excitement of watching Jobs. The feeling you got was something else.

rubyist5eva 4y ago

Getting fired for that river analogy…that must’ve stung holy cow

stephc_int13 4y ago

In my opinion, the work Ive did at Apple is greatly over rated. Yes it is clean and minimalist, and some devices like the iPhone 4 were truly innovative, bold and impressive designs. But overall, this is mostly bland, generic, boring. In the same minimalist style, I prefer the work of Dieter Rams. Some Sony products have really good design, including devices that were released a few years before the iPhone, but that were unfortunately built around a weak and already dying software stack (PalmOS). The Sony Clié are, in my opinion, less boring and better designed than most Apple products. IBM comes also to mind, the ThinkPad was a stylish and sturdy computer. There is a world outside of Apple headquarter, and I feel that they reached a dead-end, design wise.

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newsclues 4y ago
Sony worked with apple on early PowerBooks
jiggawatts 4y ago
Citing IBM as good at design makes this read like a parody. Everything IBM does is so hilariously ugly in the least imaginative, boring, industrial way that they’ve gone through “boxy” into some other universe where it’s almost — but not quite — good style. For crying out loud, everything they make is black. There are famous Apple ads deriding the bland corporate look of IBM!
- goosedragons 4y ago
  IBM has made lots of not black things. Were any of their typewriters black? The IBM PC sure wasn't and many models after that weren't. I think the ThinkPad was their first black computer at the very least. IMO ThinkPads look great and they've done some really cool things like the butterfly keyboard.
  - formerly_proven 4y ago

caycep 4y ago

The one thing about all this press from "After Steve" - the author is one of those reporters who tend to make speculative guesses about Apple that have not borne out. Granted, perhaps he took extra effort to get sources/research material for the book but I'd take it with a grain of salt.

iancmceachern 4y ago

People are great until they aren't.

fortran77 4y ago

The full title of the book this is excerpted from is: > After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul Having worked for Apple during the Steve days, I'm not sure there was a soul to be lost.

psaux 4y ago

There is a lot to digest in this piece. Work environments are very dynamic and context and time-in-point is very important. I did not see this behavior, but I was not part of that group at Apple. I worked with Jony after we were acquired. The original Siri linen background was his idea, the bubbles had to be perfect, the padding, the text size, the lists goes on. I inferred this as design obsession and did not find it offending, he was right 95% of the time. When I left Apple, I emailed with Jony on a device I had designed and pitched internally in 2011 but was shelved. His response has stayed with me to this day, “not all ideas make the cut, even the best ones”. He could have cut me down or ignored me, but he responded with honesty. I think that void he left when he moved on was too big to be filled. Steve and Jony were always together, pretty much every day we would see them at lunch.

davidhariri 4y ago
Thanks for sharing this!
the_af 4y ago
> “not all ideas make the cut, even the best ones” I'm not sure I understand. If the best ideas don't make the cut, which ones do? Or was Jony acknowledging a flaw in Apple's process?
- synu 4y ago
  I read it as “even (some of) the best ones” based on the “not all ideas” start.
  - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
    Could also be speaking with hindsight
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  Carful to remember the “some of”… but the best ideas might be too risky, not as practical, timed poorly, too controversial, etc.

deergomoo 4y ago

Putting software design under the hardware design folks after Forstall was outed was and remains disastrous IMO. Dye and his team continue to make beautiful hardware but fuck me hiding every function of a program behind a hover state or overflow menu absolutely kills usability. Productivity is being sacrificed for some weird notion of “cleanliness”. We’re all running displays with millions of pixels, we can afford buttons for stuff.

urthor 4y ago
This, absolutely this. The hardware is getting better. The software is getting worse. They're hiding usability.
ksec 4y ago
This, and iOS7. I know I am in the extreme minority but I do miss Forstall. I just dont like Craig Federighi much.
solarkraft 4y ago
I also find software quality to be getting worse (more glitches and bugs, which can be very distracting), but I actually like having the main UI as free of distraction as possible. Though I'll agree they've overshot their goal a little/are focusing on the wrong things in places (I always use the search to crop things in preview).

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CodeWriter23 4y ago

Unfortunately, the design team isn’t the only thing afflicting Apple’s products. macOS crashes, previously extremely rare are no a weekly event for me. On Apple gear. My iPhone 8 Plus only intermittently generates notifications from colleagues while at work. Flaky Wi-Fi. Autocorrect has learned too much and instead of correcting typos natural to an onscreen keyboard, now materially changes sentences on the fly, respelling correctly-spelled words, apparently based upon some engineer’s idea of ML Nirvana and contextual language processing. Hey MF I don’t write _your_ way. Lock Screen appears abruptly during use and is unlockable, requiring a reboot. It’s almost like the “the new windows will fix all the crashes” (3.1/95/98bXP) guys have set up shop at Apple and are perpetrating Jobs’ feared “Bozo Explosion”. Ironically, Windows on my aging MBP is my most stable compute experience on the daily now. Well, except for the Linux servers and their mult-year uptimes.

elzbardico 4y ago
You should have a MacBook to be looked at. I have an intel mac from work and a personal M1 mac, and I rarely have to reboot them. The only time I remember having a kernel panic with a recent Mac OS was after installing Bluestack.

dougdonohoe 4y ago

Don't quit until the money is in the bank. I mean it. Don't trust your boss or HR or anyone. People can be capricious and you don't want your hard earned compensation to be subject to this. The HR department is not there for you - they are there to protect the company.

korginator 4y ago

People can (and often will) be vindictive, specially people with the power over you and your career. Call me cynical, but in my few decades of work life I've come across more than a few such people. Say what you will about how you wish leaders would behave, but reality is different. I've seen ego- and power-tripping at all levels, even in situations where the people playing these games had nothing to gain or lose from torpedoing the other. Imran Chaudhri would have been best served by keeping all written communications strictly minimal and work related. Something along the lines of "I'm leaving in a months' time for other opportunities. It was a pleasure working here, thank you for your support, wishing you all the best." Nothing would have been misinterpreted. Keep any and all sentiments out of work related communication.

ksec 4y ago

>Apple’s operations team determined that making the iPad would require building several new features from scratch. The first-time costs of new machinery, a new logic board, and other components would amount to billions of dollars, an investment that would take years to recoup. Those so-called nonrecurring engineering costs led Apple’s business division to suspend the iPad. I think this sums up pretty much everything that is wrong with Modern Apple. And as someone who used to scrutinise everything Apple, from their quarterly report to Supply Chains. This is sadly the case. You only need to look at Apple Retail to see how it went from a Marketing, Services and User experiences goal to some financial checkbox. I would imagine Steve would have authorise the few billions just to build a better iPad. It is also clear Johny have a some sort of burnout at Apple, Software UX should never have been under his decision making. After the departure of Forstall, Jony went all in and teared everything apart in iOS7 within a year. Spend most of this time on Apple Retail redesign and Apple Park. And clearly trying to make the ultimate product he long dreamed off, the Macbook and MacBook Pro Touch Bar before the tech was ready. And somehow had an Apple Design Book by the end of 2016, which I thought was basically a tribute dedicated to Johny.