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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

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
      - lupire 4y ago
        Apple's post-Jobs success has been the snowball effect of iPhone capturing more of the market. Mac suffered a lot under Jobsless Ive (Cook doesn't care about product one way or the other), surviving the butterfly / touchbar winter because customers were able to keep their old Retina laptops, customers groaned and beared with lemon laptops for a few years, and desktop declined in overall relevance (except gaming where Apple never had a presence anyway), and started to recover in the post-butterfly/post-touchbar/M1 era.
      - etempleton 4y ago
        From what I have read Fadell didn’t seem to have a lot of internal fans, and there were some major software issues under his leadership, but there is no doubt he has clout with Jobs and provided a different perspective. Jobs was always willing to play the role of tie breaker that I am not sure Cook is comfortable in, so it makes sense to have a more harmonious leadership team that can come to a consensus more often than not without an intermediator. There does seem to be more collaboration and sensible compromises from all internal stakeholders than at any time at Apple, at least that is how it feels as an end user. Apple products of the last few years have less head scratching omissions and/or design/engineering decision. The MacBook Pro from 2016 to 2021 is the embodiment of that weirdness.
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    Yes, he's a great physical product designer. But to bring that, and apply the same principles into SW just doesn't make sense
    - ben_w 4y ago
      I’m not so sure he’s even that, I think the hockey puck iMac mouse was his?
      - lupire 4y ago
        He's a great physical aesthetic designer. He's terrible at human interfaces, hardware or software.
        azemetre 4y ago
        I feel like you can't be a great designer if you neglect human interfaces, at that point you're just an artist. Nothing wrong with that, but good design it is not.
      - tchalla 4y ago
        I’m not sure if having some badly designed products doesn’t make one a great physical product designer. It’s completely possible to be a great product designer with few bad products. I’m not arguing that Ive is a great designer. Ok just saying that the iMac hockey puck mouse doesn’t invalidate that claim.
        ben_w 4y ago
        Fair. I use it as an example of uncontroversially bad design, and his most infamous mistake being ages ago does count in his favour (even if the dead cockroach charging mechanism of the modern mouse is also his), even though I chose that example in part because people argue both ways about his more recent design choices. Myself, I do not like any design choice I’ve heard attributed to him, but that’s not enough by itself either.
  - blackhaz 4y ago
    - rafram 4y ago
      > gay U2 album artwork … (Your car playing music from your phone every time it connects is a problem with your car’s UX, not your phone’s.)
- junofan 4y ago
  From the article: > nonrecurring engineering costs led Apple’s business division to suspend the iPad [redesign] That doesn’t sound like Ive had unconstrained power?
  - jolux 4y ago
    That was after he left.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    Imagine a design change costing $1 billion. There are very few people with that much power.
- w0mbat 4y ago
  Jonathan Ive got rich and started designing luxury products for himself. Stuff like gold Apple Watches that were soon obsolete or ridiculous luxury bands for them. Even a regular leather Apple Watch strap ended costing hundreds of dollars. At one point I needed a new leather band for mine and I bought a perfectly nice third party band for the same price as the sales tax on the equivalent Apple one.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    I think part of the reason they sold insanely expensive Apple Watches is that they wanted to compete with luxury watches. Of course, the functionality is very different; the similarity is that both are methods of conspicuous consumption. I’m not an Apple Watch fan myself (still clutching my Pebble for dear life), but I can understand why the uber-expensive Apple Watches would appeal to a certain audience.
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      > I can understand why the uber-expensive Apple Watches would appeal to a certain audience. I never could understand why Apple (or anyone else) this would be a possibility. Luxury watches are almost synonymous with heirloom; there is no way anyone will be wearing a functional Gold Apple watch in 2085 with the anecdote "This was my dad's watch" - it would be hopelessly outdated, and likely non-functional by then. This is not the case with other luxury watches. This has little to do with branding, but everything to do with expected longevity and utility.
      - foobiekr 4y ago
        That heirloom stuff is purely marketing the fantasy of rich parents handing down a bauble (instead of, say, a business or real assets) aimed entirely at middle class and upper middle class people. It’s not real.
        sangnoir 4y ago
        I may not be understanding your point: are you suggesting that 60-year-old still-functional swiss-made "baubles" don't get inherited? Old money is almost entirely defined by items inherited from forebears.
dubswithus 4y ago
> They're slowly going from Ive's minimalist artistic designs back to useful computing devices and user interfaces. Is this a subtle attack on USB-C?
- wmf 4y ago
  It's an attack on the butterfly keyboard, removing MagSafe, removing HDMI, removing the headphone jack, reducing battery capacity, the unreadable iOS 7 UI, the trash can, etc.
- barkingcat 4y ago
  Nothing "subtle" about the attack. The butterfly keyboard is a very obvious and outright failure. This failure resulted in a support program that covered the entire output of the Apple MacBook Pro product line for half a decade. Nothing subtle about that at all.
  - ratww 4y ago
    I wonder if we're being too quick to blame him for the Butterfly keyboard. Sure it was his design, but there were engineering issue. Was Ive powerful enough to overrule Tim Cook and everyone else and keep a faulty keyboard for that long? So far I've only seen a lot of speculation from tech websites, but maybe someone has some proper source, I might be totally wrong. It could also be a widespread cultural issue where Apple is unable to admit fault. Sure, Apple removed the butterfly after he left, but they're still quite stubborn about not putting USB-C on iPhones, for example.
- cultofmetatron 4y ago
  usbc is the one good thing about the ive years. everything else was a step away from usability for power users.
- Matthias247 4y ago
  USB-C itself is great. Love the fact that I can plug a single cable into my MacBook for all docking purposes (charging, display, peripherals). The annoying thing was the lack of everything else except usb-c. Especially in 2017 when it was uncommon and for devices featuring only 2 ports. „Dongle life“ was a serious step backwards.
ivraatiems 4y ago
I saw a woman using one of the new Macbook Pros in an airport a few weeks ago, and I was confused, because it looked exactly like my beloved silver Macbook Pro from 2007. It even had lots of ports! With the speed of the M-series processors, and the fact that I can get one with ports and without an idiotic touchbar, I've started considering an Apple laptop for the first time in years. I'm sure it's just a matter of time before the pendulum swings back again, alas.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  It’s only begun to swing towards usefulness. We got a decade or more to enjoy this time of “doing things right”
  - sephamorr 4y ago
    Maybe by next decade, all the MacBook "pro" models will support more than one external display.
    - jb1991 4y ago
      The MacBook Pro can support several external displays simultaneously: Up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Pro) or up to three external displays with up to 6K resolution and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Max)
      - infinityio 4y ago
        The old-chassis pros (incl. the new m2 13") can only do one monitor, if I remember correctly?
        moooo99 4y ago
        I think you remember right, this is the same issue as with the M1. The continued existence of this specific model (M2 13“ Pro) is by far the most confusing aspect of the current Mac lineup
wahnfrieden 4y ago
Another point of the article that's compatible with what you're saying but still a concern - anything under Tim's $10b potential threshold gets more excluded from cross-team collaboration and attention and resources than they did previously
- NegativeLatency 4y ago
  Makes the disappearance of the airport stuff make sense
oreilles 4y ago
I can't tell for iOS, but for macOS the UI has only gone downhill since Ive's departure. Broken navigation gestures and shortcuts, UI inconsistencies, indistinguishable toolbar icons, wasted space everywhere... Since Big Sur I feel like I'm using a bad Linux clone of macOS.
- moistly 4y ago
  They desperately need someone running the show who is obsessive about consistency, will QA the UI obsessively, and will terrorize the UI designers into compliance. Jobs’ biggest role was to demand conformance to his design tastes.
- ksec 4y ago
  I felt because current Apple is all about optimising. From Hardware Cost, Market Fit, and even Software. Making Software that looks and feels the same across iPad, iPhone and macOS may save some engineering cost or design cost. But to me, that is still a very toaster fridge design.
rmk 4y ago
Larry Ellison was prescient when he said that Jony Ive would run amok without an editor in Steve Jobs, in an interview after Jobs' death (Ellison was good friends with Jobs). Perhaps the utter lack of design innovation and frankly, new consumer products led Jony Ive to obsess over the ring campus, going to ridiculous lengths to make things just so. All that money and creative energy could have been put into groundbreaking product, but with Steve Jobs gone, I doubt there was anyone else who could do what he did.
- musicale 4y ago
  > and frankly, new consumer products I already have a half-dozen Apple devices that I use every day. I don't really need more of them.
  - rmk 4y ago
    Neither do I. But if Apple created a new category of device that drastically changes how people use computing in their everyday lives, would you like to own one or not, eventually? Chances are you'd eventually buy one and start using it. I steadfastly refused to use a smartphone and a tablet when the products came out but ended up making them an integral part of my daily life. Apple has made products that have fundamentally altered our idea of a computer a few times, our idea of a phone once, and our idea of a music player once, and a consumer information consumption device (tablet). I'm talking about that level of innovation here. A laptop without ports and that is x mm thick is not a 'new' consumer product from this perspective.
- elzbardico 4y ago
  On the other side, maybe it is a good thing he could distract himself with the ring campus instead of submitting the MacBook pro to "more design." My opinion of Jony Ive is that he is better consumed in moderation, as some cheeses. Just a little bit of Jony at a time is just about perfect.
duxup 4y ago
I wonder how exactly Steve managed Ive, getting his best out of him without ... going full Ive ;)
- grishka 4y ago
  From my own observations working at a company with a visionary CEO/founder, people with personalities like this tend to kinda balance each other out — so you need more than one. The CEO would suggest some batshit crazy idea, but the engineering lead would bring it down to earth and make it practical before even beginning to discuss it with the rest of the team. If there's no contention, no one to keep such a person in check, no other visionary person to criticize their ideas and ask the right questions, these batshit crazy ideas end up getting implemented and shipped as is. Guess how I found out.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gnicholas 4y ago
One thing I wonder about is whether Apple could have ever built the current crop of laptops if it hadn't gone through the terrible design that over-emphasized minification. That is, were there gains in space-saving that were only possible because of the single-minded focus on making small laptops, which we now enjoy in our more-sensibly sized MBPs? As an outsider, I have no idea whether this is the case. But I could imaging that if they had stayed on a more evolutionary design path, their current laptops might not be quite so amazing.

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
    - lupire 4y ago
      Apple's post-Jobs success has been the snowball effect of iPhone capturing more of the market. Mac suffered a lot under Jobsless Ive (Cook doesn't care about product one way or the other), surviving the butterfly / touchbar winter because customers were able to keep their old Retina laptops, customers groaned and beared with lemon laptops for a few years, and desktop declined in overall relevance (except gaming where Apple never had a presence anyway), and started to recover in the post-butterfly/post-touchbar/M1 era.
    - etempleton 4y ago
      From what I have read Fadell didn’t seem to have a lot of internal fans, and there were some major software issues under his leadership, but there is no doubt he has clout with Jobs and provided a different perspective. Jobs was always willing to play the role of tie breaker that I am not sure Cook is comfortable in, so it makes sense to have a more harmonious leadership team that can come to a consensus more often than not without an intermediator. There does seem to be more collaboration and sensible compromises from all internal stakeholders than at any time at Apple, at least that is how it feels as an end user. Apple products of the last few years have less head scratching omissions and/or design/engineering decision. The MacBook Pro from 2016 to 2021 is the embodiment of that weirdness.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  Yes, he's a great physical product designer. But to bring that, and apply the same principles into SW just doesn't make sense
  - ben_w 4y ago
    I’m not so sure he’s even that, I think the hockey puck iMac mouse was his?
    - lupire 4y ago
      He's a great physical aesthetic designer. He's terrible at human interfaces, hardware or software.
      - azemetre 4y ago
        I feel like you can't be a great designer if you neglect human interfaces, at that point you're just an artist. Nothing wrong with that, but good design it is not.
    - tchalla 4y ago
      I’m not sure if having some badly designed products doesn’t make one a great physical product designer. It’s completely possible to be a great product designer with few bad products. I’m not arguing that Ive is a great designer. Ok just saying that the iMac hockey puck mouse doesn’t invalidate that claim.
      - ben_w 4y ago
        Fair. I use it as an example of uncontroversially bad design, and his most infamous mistake being ages ago does count in his favour (even if the dead cockroach charging mechanism of the modern mouse is also his), even though I chose that example in part because people argue both ways about his more recent design choices. Myself, I do not like any design choice I’ve heard attributed to him, but that’s not enough by itself either.
- blackhaz 4y ago
  - rafram 4y ago
    > gay U2 album artwork … (Your car playing music from your phone every time it connects is a problem with your car’s UX, not your phone’s.)
junofan 4y ago
From the article: > nonrecurring engineering costs led Apple’s business division to suspend the iPad [redesign] That doesn’t sound like Ive had unconstrained power?
- jolux 4y ago
  That was after he left.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Imagine a design change costing $1 billion. There are very few people with that much power.
w0mbat 4y ago
Jonathan Ive got rich and started designing luxury products for himself. Stuff like gold Apple Watches that were soon obsolete or ridiculous luxury bands for them. Even a regular leather Apple Watch strap ended costing hundreds of dollars. At one point I needed a new leather band for mine and I bought a perfectly nice third party band for the same price as the sales tax on the equivalent Apple one.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  I think part of the reason they sold insanely expensive Apple Watches is that they wanted to compete with luxury watches. Of course, the functionality is very different; the similarity is that both are methods of conspicuous consumption. I’m not an Apple Watch fan myself (still clutching my Pebble for dear life), but I can understand why the uber-expensive Apple Watches would appeal to a certain audience.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    > I can understand why the uber-expensive Apple Watches would appeal to a certain audience. I never could understand why Apple (or anyone else) this would be a possibility. Luxury watches are almost synonymous with heirloom; there is no way anyone will be wearing a functional Gold Apple watch in 2085 with the anecdote "This was my dad's watch" - it would be hopelessly outdated, and likely non-functional by then. This is not the case with other luxury watches. This has little to do with branding, but everything to do with expected longevity and utility.
    - foobiekr 4y ago
      That heirloom stuff is purely marketing the fantasy of rich parents handing down a bauble (instead of, say, a business or real assets) aimed entirely at middle class and upper middle class people. It’s not real.
      - sangnoir 4y ago
        I may not be understanding your point: are you suggesting that 60-year-old still-functional swiss-made "baubles" don't get inherited? Old money is almost entirely defined by items inherited from forebears.

dubswithus 4y ago

> They're slowly going from Ive's minimalist artistic designs back to useful computing devices and user interfaces. Is this a subtle attack on USB-C?

wmf 4y ago
It's an attack on the butterfly keyboard, removing MagSafe, removing HDMI, removing the headphone jack, reducing battery capacity, the unreadable iOS 7 UI, the trash can, etc.
barkingcat 4y ago
Nothing "subtle" about the attack. The butterfly keyboard is a very obvious and outright failure. This failure resulted in a support program that covered the entire output of the Apple MacBook Pro product line for half a decade. Nothing subtle about that at all.
- ratww 4y ago
  I wonder if we're being too quick to blame him for the Butterfly keyboard. Sure it was his design, but there were engineering issue. Was Ive powerful enough to overrule Tim Cook and everyone else and keep a faulty keyboard for that long? So far I've only seen a lot of speculation from tech websites, but maybe someone has some proper source, I might be totally wrong. It could also be a widespread cultural issue where Apple is unable to admit fault. Sure, Apple removed the butterfly after he left, but they're still quite stubborn about not putting USB-C on iPhones, for example.
cultofmetatron 4y ago
usbc is the one good thing about the ive years. everything else was a step away from usability for power users.
Matthias247 4y ago
USB-C itself is great. Love the fact that I can plug a single cable into my MacBook for all docking purposes (charging, display, peripherals). The annoying thing was the lack of everything else except usb-c. Especially in 2017 when it was uncommon and for devices featuring only 2 ports. „Dongle life“ was a serious step backwards.

ivraatiems 4y ago

I saw a woman using one of the new Macbook Pros in an airport a few weeks ago, and I was confused, because it looked exactly like my beloved silver Macbook Pro from 2007. It even had lots of ports! With the speed of the M-series processors, and the fact that I can get one with ports and without an idiotic touchbar, I've started considering an Apple laptop for the first time in years. I'm sure it's just a matter of time before the pendulum swings back again, alas.

imwillofficial 4y ago
It’s only begun to swing towards usefulness. We got a decade or more to enjoy this time of “doing things right”
- sephamorr 4y ago
  Maybe by next decade, all the MacBook "pro" models will support more than one external display.
  - jb1991 4y ago
    The MacBook Pro can support several external displays simultaneously: Up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Pro) or up to three external displays with up to 6K resolution and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Max)
    - infinityio 4y ago
      The old-chassis pros (incl. the new m2 13") can only do one monitor, if I remember correctly?
      - moooo99 4y ago
        I think you remember right, this is the same issue as with the M1. The continued existence of this specific model (M2 13“ Pro) is by far the most confusing aspect of the current Mac lineup

wahnfrieden 4y ago

Another point of the article that's compatible with what you're saying but still a concern - anything under Tim's $10b potential threshold gets more excluded from cross-team collaboration and attention and resources than they did previously

NegativeLatency 4y ago
Makes the disappearance of the airport stuff make sense

oreilles 4y ago

I can't tell for iOS, but for macOS the UI has only gone downhill since Ive's departure. Broken navigation gestures and shortcuts, UI inconsistencies, indistinguishable toolbar icons, wasted space everywhere... Since Big Sur I feel like I'm using a bad Linux clone of macOS.

moistly 4y ago
They desperately need someone running the show who is obsessive about consistency, will QA the UI obsessively, and will terrorize the UI designers into compliance. Jobs’ biggest role was to demand conformance to his design tastes.
ksec 4y ago
I felt because current Apple is all about optimising. From Hardware Cost, Market Fit, and even Software. Making Software that looks and feels the same across iPad, iPhone and macOS may save some engineering cost or design cost. But to me, that is still a very toaster fridge design.

rmk 4y ago

Larry Ellison was prescient when he said that Jony Ive would run amok without an editor in Steve Jobs, in an interview after Jobs' death (Ellison was good friends with Jobs). Perhaps the utter lack of design innovation and frankly, new consumer products led Jony Ive to obsess over the ring campus, going to ridiculous lengths to make things just so. All that money and creative energy could have been put into groundbreaking product, but with Steve Jobs gone, I doubt there was anyone else who could do what he did.

musicale 4y ago
> and frankly, new consumer products I already have a half-dozen Apple devices that I use every day. I don't really need more of them.
- rmk 4y ago
  Neither do I. But if Apple created a new category of device that drastically changes how people use computing in their everyday lives, would you like to own one or not, eventually? Chances are you'd eventually buy one and start using it. I steadfastly refused to use a smartphone and a tablet when the products came out but ended up making them an integral part of my daily life. Apple has made products that have fundamentally altered our idea of a computer a few times, our idea of a phone once, and our idea of a music player once, and a consumer information consumption device (tablet). I'm talking about that level of innovation here. A laptop without ports and that is x mm thick is not a 'new' consumer product from this perspective.
elzbardico 4y ago
On the other side, maybe it is a good thing he could distract himself with the ring campus instead of submitting the MacBook pro to "more design." My opinion of Jony Ive is that he is better consumed in moderation, as some cheeses. Just a little bit of Jony at a time is just about perfect.

duxup 4y ago

I wonder how exactly Steve managed Ive, getting his best out of him without ... going full Ive ;)

grishka 4y ago
From my own observations working at a company with a visionary CEO/founder, people with personalities like this tend to kinda balance each other out — so you need more than one. The CEO would suggest some batshit crazy idea, but the engineering lead would bring it down to earth and make it practical before even beginning to discuss it with the rest of the team. If there's no contention, no one to keep such a person in check, no other visionary person to criticize their ideas and ask the right questions, these batshit crazy ideas end up getting implemented and shipped as is. Guess how I found out.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gnicholas 4y ago

One thing I wonder about is whether Apple could have ever built the current crop of laptops if it hadn't gone through the terrible design that over-emphasized minification. That is, were there gains in space-saving that were only possible because of the single-minded focus on making small laptops, which we now enjoy in our more-sensibly sized MBPs? As an outsider, I have no idea whether this is the case. But I could imaging that if they had stayed on a more evolutionary design path, their current laptops might not be quite so amazing.