7 ms·

Apple loses one of the last remaining designers from Jony Ive era

44 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

seydor 3y ago
their design is fossilized. Even the rounded edges get rounder as the air smoothes them more and more. Either they achieved perfection, or sales keep going well
ramesh31 3y ago
Jony defined the Apple aesthetic for a generation, and got them to this point. But his relentlessness reached a level of obsession with purity of design. He lost touch with reality when Steve was no longer around to reign him in. Nearly every Apple product has become objectively better since his departure. The complaints actually got addressed. Customers are being treated as valid sources of input to the product. Hard to see an issue here.
- threeseed 3y ago
  Ive was head of Design not Product or Hardware Engineering. So most of the complaints you're alluding to e.g. ports, touch bar etc had little to do with the design team. It's largely been the rise of people like John Ternus that have improved their hardware.
  - Spartan-S63 3y ago
    The industrial design of the 2016-2019 MacBook Pro was under his purview, from what I understand. That obsession with thinness over the functionality of the device put them at odds with the chips Intel was producing at the time. In some ways, his passion for form over function maybe forced the Apple Silicon transition sooner to get away from hot, power hungry Intel chips. Either way, since his seeming marginalization and departure from Apple, the design of their devices haven't suffered aesthetically and they've gained significant function.
    - threeseed 3y ago
      Industrial design is not the same as hardware engineering. Ive doesn't decide on the thermal characteristics of their products nor does he decide what features go into them. And it's ridiculous to think that he in some way forced Apple to build their own silicon. And as someone who was at Apple during his reign he was an important voice but just one of many.
      - atonse 3y ago
        That's correct. Years before we got Apple Silicon macs (which I think are the best laptops I've ever owned, literally no compromise I am aware of), I was reading about JS benchmarks where Safari on an iPhone was on par or faster than Safari on Intel. I remember being shocked seeing that – so even though Apple bought Palo Alto Semiconductor 10+ years ago and created their chips for iOS devices, they've had to have wanted to migrate ever since they saw these huge gains, Jony Ive or not. It's another Johny (Srouji) that's the head of the semiconductor division that's producing stellar chips.
    - noncoml 3y ago
      Design wise it feels to me like they stagnated since his departure. Every other iPhone design used to be different and exciting before he left.
  - spacedcowboy 3y ago
    if you think Jony Ive didn’t have the ultimate say over which ports, user interaction facilities, etc. were on Macs, you are sorely mistaken. Apple was (and still is) a very design orientated company and the design group is very much in charge.
  - airstrike 3y ago
    Do you know the name of the head of Product or Hardware Engineering? Maybe you personally do, but I doubt the average HN does. And neither do I. I doubt that person had the internal clout to challenge any of the braindead design decisions from the later part of Ive's tenure.
- ballooney 3y ago
  I will take your word for it seeing as you are/were on first name terms with them both, suggesting this is all first-hand knowledge.
- liuliu 3y ago
  > Nearly every Apple product has become objectively better since his departure. The complaints actually got addressed. Customers are being treated as valid sources of input to the product. Hard to see an issue here. This is a subjective matter actually. The MacBook Pros got thicker, and Apple have no desire to address this. The iPhone camera modules sticks out more each generation to the point that a case is a must. I do wish there are some Ive left in Apple so there are at least some care for the form rather than just functionality.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    >The iPhone camera modules sticks out more I just upgraded from a 6S+ to a 15Pro, and the cameras are taking some getting used to. i am impressed by the battery life, so i've been thinking a new case instead of a battery pack would be some form of an external SSD to capture the ProRes in a nice tight form factor that still fits all of the gimbals and other attachments. but, yeah, the protruding camera mount is well past ridiculous
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - jmisavage 3y ago
      I went from a XS with a case to a 15 Pro. It’s like no one at Apple has ever played a game in landscape mode. The camera bump is awful and uncomfortable. I haven’t found a case that makes it usable.
  - PhasmaFelis 3y ago
    > The MacBook Pros got thicker The obsession with thinness above all else is a great example of Apple's style-over-substance failures. It's good for a laptop to be reasonably light and portable. Having one line that focuses on reducing size/weight and another that focuses on power, as Apple does, also makes sense. But if the power-focused branch is 15mm instead of 13, that is deeply not a problem.
  - pdabbadabba 3y ago
    > a case is a must I haven't used a case on my iPhone for years. No issue at all. (Except that one time when I accidentally flung my phone into a concrete floor.)
- giancarlostoro 3y ago
  It killed me most when the Macbook looked lighter than a Macbook Air, they needed to swap the names it made no sense.
- robertoandred 3y ago
  Except there are no reasonably sized iPhones anymore, just phablets. I miss when the Steve/Jony team recognized that your hands do in fact stop growing.
  - frankjr 3y ago
    The SE is still alive and kicking at its 3rd generation.
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      Exactly, and it's been rumored Apple will release a 4th gen next year.
    - robertoandred 3y ago
      Which is currently bigger than the mini and expected to get even bigger.
      - cassianoleal 3y ago
        And the mini was too big already.
  - AceJohnny2 3y ago
    Turns out, the small phone form factor is a vocal minority, whose market size isn't sufficient to sustain Apple's scaling economics, which is why they only cater to it every few years because that's enough to saturate that market.
    - dijit 3y ago
      Well, maybe. I think you're assuming that missed sales for the Mini means there's no market for small phones. I would take a different assumption: the 12 Mini (I owned one btw) was as large as an iPhone 6 which for many was the point where phones had gotten to be too large. If your answer to: "Small phone" is to go back to the first unacceptable phone size for many people, maybe they don't really think of it as "small phone". Why buy it? There was some minor issues with the phone too, laughable battery life for example and the fact that the 5-sized SE was still generally available and receiving support until even after the 13 mini was discontinued. People discuss the "SE" moniker as if it's an answer to small phones when ironically the first SE was the only actually small phone and everything since then just gets larger and larger. I bought a mini because I intentionally wanted to support Apples small phone endeavour. It was too big and going from a 12 Mini to a 15 pro doesn't feel like such a leap anymore because I can use neither of these phones one-handed anyway.
- hackerbeat 3y ago
  Nonsense!
- michaelcampbell 3y ago
  I don't keep up with things so this is an ignorant take, but when you need STEVE JOBS to keep you "grounded", I just don't know what to say. I never was a fan of Ive's obsession with making the Mac so thin; I don't need to shave with it, and getting rid of actual function things (replaceable parts, ports, etc.) to do it just irritated me greatly. I don't use Macs as a fashion accessory.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
Can the flat design trend end now and go back towards skeuomorphic when UI designers actually needed some talent?
- max-throat 3y ago
  I really do hate how it's just assumed we know what's clickable and what isn't.
- ivan_gammel 3y ago
  That‘s a weird desire. A good app doesn’t need talent in illustration, it needs platform consistency and UX. Flat design can deliver on both and at a lower cost (in DOS era every UI was flat and that was cool). If anything did ruin the UX, it was the migration of print designers to UI/Web with font explosion, element-specific styles etc. They added some fun, but totally killed consistency and accessibility.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Flat design can deliver on both and at a lower cost I suppose it technically can, but this assertion makes me ask: why haven't we seen this actually happen? I mean yes, we got consistency -- but at a pretty serious cost in terms of usability.
    - ivan_gammel 3y ago
      We haven’t seen this happen because there’s generally huge underinvestment and labor shortage in UX _AND_ exponential growth in Web, not because flat has serious usability costs. Even now most people in industry have no idea about various specializations in design and hire designers with nice-looking portfolios on Behance who were trained for print media in art schools instead of hiring UXD who can think in terms of customer journey.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
    From this article: These findings also confirm that flat or flat-ish designs can work better in certain conditions than others. As we saw in this experiment, the potential negative consequences of weak signifiers are diminished when the site has a low information density, traditional or consistent layout, and places important interactive elements where they stand out from surrounding elements. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-ui-less-attention-cause-uncertainty/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-ui-less-attention-caus... And this is what has happened. All over the modern web and applications there is a low information density which means I need to carry more context around as I browse through things. The article goes into it more in depth but flat design is bad in almost all regards apart from one: anybody can be a designer now.. the barriers to entry are that much lowered.
andrewstuart 3y ago
Is there anything left for designers to do at Apple?
- neilalexander 3y ago
  Yes, a mouse that can be charged and used simultaneously.
  - dijit 3y ago
    Intentional design choice so that people wouldn't leave it charging. People leave the keebs/trackpads connected where I work and it's not uncommon to have them balloon up because of the spicy pillow. Though; it's obviously more about aesthetic than anything else... I would argue that the (genuinely ergonomically terrible mouse) does not need to have a charging port on the top due simply to the fact that you can get 30minutes of usable charge from less than 5s of charging time. If you really can't leave your mouse for 5s (from dead, despite plenty of warning) to use it for the next 30 minutes then likely you have larger issues in your life.
    - neilalexander 3y ago
      > Intentional design choice so that people wouldn't leave it charging. And yet they don't care about people leaving their Magic Keyboards or Magic Trackpads plugged in, so I don't really buy it. > If you really can't leave your mouse for 5s (from dead, despite plenty of warning) to use it for the next 30 minutes then likely you have larger issues in your life. What a remarkably bad-faith attack line. I have two of these mice, both a few years old now. Aside from battery degradation they work fine but the battery degradation has also done away with the "plenty of warning" that the battery is low. One of them notifies me just before it dies, the other one often doesn't notify me at all. They also don't gain enough useful charge within a few seconds anymore either. I've been caught out with this right in the middle of doing something a few times and it would have been a complete non-issue if I could have just plugged the mouse in and kept working. Sure, I could replace the mice, but that doesn't stop it from being any less disappointing, nor does it stop it from being a silly design choice.
thatfrenchguy 3y ago
Fascinating where he's going: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231218747710/en/Renowned-Apple-Industrial-Designer-Peter-Russell-Clarke-Joins-Vast-as-Advisor https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231218747710/en/Ren...
blastro 3y ago
Jony did it, then overdid it.
ProfessorLayton 3y ago
Interesting that Jobs created the Chief Design Officer before his passing so that it had a voice equal to the other ones, but now it'll go back to being managed by the COO.
hackerbeat 3y ago
Apple design went downhill since Ive left. Cook failed on this one. With every year, everything looks more boring. I really hope Ive sings up for building the OpenAI-phone, and eventually is bringing sexy back.
- jsbisviewtiful 3y ago
  Is this a joke? Ive gave us the MacBook “Pro” that could only be connected to via a dongle for just about every port. Look at the Magic Mouse. Come on, those are both horrid designs and both happened under Ive.
  - hackerbeat 3y ago
    No joke. I’m dead serious.
- bathtub365 3y ago
  With how poorly and inconsistently GPT seems to work I can’t imagine using a phone made by them.
  - hackerbeat 3y ago
    Then don't.
bitsandboots 3y ago
Not sure I can tell one way or the other. Apple design has always seemed like a lost cause. Typing from a macbook pro with edges everywhere sharp enough to hurt, and which promotes fingerprint smudges all over the screen even when simply opening it. The "you're holding it wrong" opinion of design at apple never changed.

44 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

their design is fossilized. Even the rounded edges get rounder as the air smoothes them more and more. Either they achieved perfection, or sales keep going well

ramesh31 3y ago

Jony defined the Apple aesthetic for a generation, and got them to this point. But his relentlessness reached a level of obsession with purity of design. He lost touch with reality when Steve was no longer around to reign him in. Nearly every Apple product has become objectively better since his departure. The complaints actually got addressed. Customers are being treated as valid sources of input to the product. Hard to see an issue here.

threeseed 3y ago
Ive was head of Design not Product or Hardware Engineering. So most of the complaints you're alluding to e.g. ports, touch bar etc had little to do with the design team. It's largely been the rise of people like John Ternus that have improved their hardware.
- Spartan-S63 3y ago
  The industrial design of the 2016-2019 MacBook Pro was under his purview, from what I understand. That obsession with thinness over the functionality of the device put them at odds with the chips Intel was producing at the time. In some ways, his passion for form over function maybe forced the Apple Silicon transition sooner to get away from hot, power hungry Intel chips. Either way, since his seeming marginalization and departure from Apple, the design of their devices haven't suffered aesthetically and they've gained significant function.
  - threeseed 3y ago
    Industrial design is not the same as hardware engineering. Ive doesn't decide on the thermal characteristics of their products nor does he decide what features go into them. And it's ridiculous to think that he in some way forced Apple to build their own silicon. And as someone who was at Apple during his reign he was an important voice but just one of many.
    - atonse 3y ago
      That's correct. Years before we got Apple Silicon macs (which I think are the best laptops I've ever owned, literally no compromise I am aware of), I was reading about JS benchmarks where Safari on an iPhone was on par or faster than Safari on Intel. I remember being shocked seeing that – so even though Apple bought Palo Alto Semiconductor 10+ years ago and created their chips for iOS devices, they've had to have wanted to migrate ever since they saw these huge gains, Jony Ive or not. It's another Johny (Srouji) that's the head of the semiconductor division that's producing stellar chips.
  - noncoml 3y ago
    Design wise it feels to me like they stagnated since his departure. Every other iPhone design used to be different and exciting before he left.
- spacedcowboy 3y ago
  if you think Jony Ive didn’t have the ultimate say over which ports, user interaction facilities, etc. were on Macs, you are sorely mistaken. Apple was (and still is) a very design orientated company and the design group is very much in charge.
- airstrike 3y ago
  Do you know the name of the head of Product or Hardware Engineering? Maybe you personally do, but I doubt the average HN does. And neither do I. I doubt that person had the internal clout to challenge any of the braindead design decisions from the later part of Ive's tenure.
ballooney 3y ago
I will take your word for it seeing as you are/were on first name terms with them both, suggesting this is all first-hand knowledge.
liuliu 3y ago
> Nearly every Apple product has become objectively better since his departure. The complaints actually got addressed. Customers are being treated as valid sources of input to the product. Hard to see an issue here. This is a subjective matter actually. The MacBook Pros got thicker, and Apple have no desire to address this. The iPhone camera modules sticks out more each generation to the point that a case is a must. I do wish there are some Ive left in Apple so there are at least some care for the form rather than just functionality.
- dylan604 3y ago
  >The iPhone camera modules sticks out more I just upgraded from a 6S+ to a 15Pro, and the cameras are taking some getting used to. i am impressed by the battery life, so i've been thinking a new case instead of a battery pack would be some form of an external SSD to capture the ProRes in a nice tight form factor that still fits all of the gimbals and other attachments. but, yeah, the protruding camera mount is well past ridiculous
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - jmisavage 3y ago
    I went from a XS with a case to a 15 Pro. It’s like no one at Apple has ever played a game in landscape mode. The camera bump is awful and uncomfortable. I haven’t found a case that makes it usable.
- PhasmaFelis 3y ago
  > The MacBook Pros got thicker The obsession with thinness above all else is a great example of Apple's style-over-substance failures. It's good for a laptop to be reasonably light and portable. Having one line that focuses on reducing size/weight and another that focuses on power, as Apple does, also makes sense. But if the power-focused branch is 15mm instead of 13, that is deeply not a problem.
- pdabbadabba 3y ago
  > a case is a must I haven't used a case on my iPhone for years. No issue at all. (Except that one time when I accidentally flung my phone into a concrete floor.)
giancarlostoro 3y ago
It killed me most when the Macbook looked lighter than a Macbook Air, they needed to swap the names it made no sense.
robertoandred 3y ago
Except there are no reasonably sized iPhones anymore, just phablets. I miss when the Steve/Jony team recognized that your hands do in fact stop growing.
- frankjr 3y ago
  The SE is still alive and kicking at its 3rd generation.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Exactly, and it's been rumored Apple will release a 4th gen next year.
  - robertoandred 3y ago
    Which is currently bigger than the mini and expected to get even bigger.
    - cassianoleal 3y ago
      And the mini was too big already.
- AceJohnny2 3y ago
  Turns out, the small phone form factor is a vocal minority, whose market size isn't sufficient to sustain Apple's scaling economics, which is why they only cater to it every few years because that's enough to saturate that market.
  - dijit 3y ago
    Well, maybe. I think you're assuming that missed sales for the Mini means there's no market for small phones. I would take a different assumption: the 12 Mini (I owned one btw) was as large as an iPhone 6 which for many was the point where phones had gotten to be too large. If your answer to: "Small phone" is to go back to the first unacceptable phone size for many people, maybe they don't really think of it as "small phone". Why buy it? There was some minor issues with the phone too, laughable battery life for example and the fact that the 5-sized SE was still generally available and receiving support until even after the 13 mini was discontinued. People discuss the "SE" moniker as if it's an answer to small phones when ironically the first SE was the only actually small phone and everything since then just gets larger and larger. I bought a mini because I intentionally wanted to support Apples small phone endeavour. It was too big and going from a 12 Mini to a 15 pro doesn't feel like such a leap anymore because I can use neither of these phones one-handed anyway.
hackerbeat 3y ago
Nonsense!
michaelcampbell 3y ago
I don't keep up with things so this is an ignorant take, but when you need STEVE JOBS to keep you "grounded", I just don't know what to say. I never was a fan of Ive's obsession with making the Mac so thin; I don't need to shave with it, and getting rid of actual function things (replaceable parts, ports, etc.) to do it just irritated me greatly. I don't use Macs as a fashion accessory.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

Can the flat design trend end now and go back towards skeuomorphic when UI designers actually needed some talent?

max-throat 3y ago
I really do hate how it's just assumed we know what's clickable and what isn't.
ivan_gammel 3y ago
That‘s a weird desire. A good app doesn’t need talent in illustration, it needs platform consistency and UX. Flat design can deliver on both and at a lower cost (in DOS era every UI was flat and that was cool). If anything did ruin the UX, it was the migration of print designers to UI/Web with font explosion, element-specific styles etc. They added some fun, but totally killed consistency and accessibility.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Flat design can deliver on both and at a lower cost I suppose it technically can, but this assertion makes me ask: why haven't we seen this actually happen? I mean yes, we got consistency -- but at a pretty serious cost in terms of usability.
  - ivan_gammel 3y ago
    We haven’t seen this happen because there’s generally huge underinvestment and labor shortage in UX _AND_ exponential growth in Web, not because flat has serious usability costs. Even now most people in industry have no idea about various specializations in design and hire designers with nice-looking portfolios on Behance who were trained for print media in art schools instead of hiring UXD who can think in terms of customer journey.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  From this article: These findings also confirm that flat or flat-ish designs can work better in certain conditions than others. As we saw in this experiment, the potential negative consequences of weak signifiers are diminished when the site has a low information density, traditional or consistent layout, and places important interactive elements where they stand out from surrounding elements. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-ui-less-attention-cause-uncertainty/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-ui-less-attention-caus... And this is what has happened. All over the modern web and applications there is a low information density which means I need to carry more context around as I browse through things. The article goes into it more in depth but flat design is bad in almost all regards apart from one: anybody can be a designer now.. the barriers to entry are that much lowered.

andrewstuart 3y ago

Is there anything left for designers to do at Apple?

neilalexander 3y ago
Yes, a mouse that can be charged and used simultaneously.
- dijit 3y ago
  Intentional design choice so that people wouldn't leave it charging. People leave the keebs/trackpads connected where I work and it's not uncommon to have them balloon up because of the spicy pillow. Though; it's obviously more about aesthetic than anything else... I would argue that the (genuinely ergonomically terrible mouse) does not need to have a charging port on the top due simply to the fact that you can get 30minutes of usable charge from less than 5s of charging time. If you really can't leave your mouse for 5s (from dead, despite plenty of warning) to use it for the next 30 minutes then likely you have larger issues in your life.
  - neilalexander 3y ago
    > Intentional design choice so that people wouldn't leave it charging. And yet they don't care about people leaving their Magic Keyboards or Magic Trackpads plugged in, so I don't really buy it. > If you really can't leave your mouse for 5s (from dead, despite plenty of warning) to use it for the next 30 minutes then likely you have larger issues in your life. What a remarkably bad-faith attack line. I have two of these mice, both a few years old now. Aside from battery degradation they work fine but the battery degradation has also done away with the "plenty of warning" that the battery is low. One of them notifies me just before it dies, the other one often doesn't notify me at all. They also don't gain enough useful charge within a few seconds anymore either. I've been caught out with this right in the middle of doing something a few times and it would have been a complete non-issue if I could have just plugged the mouse in and kept working. Sure, I could replace the mice, but that doesn't stop it from being any less disappointing, nor does it stop it from being a silly design choice.

thatfrenchguy 3y ago

Fascinating where he's going: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231218747710/en/Renowned-Apple-Industrial-Designer-Peter-Russell-Clarke-Joins-Vast-as-Advisor https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231218747710/en/Ren...

blastro 3y ago

Jony did it, then overdid it.

ProfessorLayton 3y ago

Interesting that Jobs created the Chief Design Officer before his passing so that it had a voice equal to the other ones, but now it'll go back to being managed by the COO.

hackerbeat 3y ago

Apple design went downhill since Ive left. Cook failed on this one. With every year, everything looks more boring. I really hope Ive sings up for building the OpenAI-phone, and eventually is bringing sexy back.

jsbisviewtiful 3y ago
Is this a joke? Ive gave us the MacBook “Pro” that could only be connected to via a dongle for just about every port. Look at the Magic Mouse. Come on, those are both horrid designs and both happened under Ive.
- hackerbeat 3y ago
  No joke. I’m dead serious.
bathtub365 3y ago
With how poorly and inconsistently GPT seems to work I can’t imagine using a phone made by them.
- hackerbeat 3y ago
  Then don't.

bitsandboots 3y ago

Not sure I can tell one way or the other. Apple design has always seemed like a lost cause. Typing from a macbook pro with edges everywhere sharp enough to hurt, and which promotes fingerprint smudges all over the screen even when simply opening it. The "you're holding it wrong" opinion of design at apple never changed.