14 ms·

Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple

245 points by sinak 12y ago

blisse 12y ago
Not to write an irrelevant comment, but printed out this article is 52 pages... c'mon, that's a bit excessive even if you really like Apple.
- AVTizzle 12y ago
  Agreed - I read the first paragraph before realizing how long the thing was. It's a bit of a turnoff TBH. I'd read the distilled bullet points for takeaways if there were any. But in this long of form? I have trouble committing!
- dewey 12y ago
  It's an article for a print magazine, not a Buzzfeed post.
  - rospaya 12y ago
    With a few ads and an op-ed that IS a magazine.
  - jethro_tell 12y ago
    10 Jonny Ive quotes you'll have to read out of context. You'll never believe 7.
- kmfrk 12y ago
  I imagine they wanted to make it a paywalled article but thought no one in their right mind would want to read the story outside of the magazine anyway and made it free. :) Speaking of, does their iOS app still crash five minutes into reading an article? I had to give up on reading the magazine altogether, when their digital app couldn't even be bothered to remember my reading position in their longform articles after each crash.
- hengheng 12y ago
  23 pages in two-column Calibri 10pt ... I'm going to spare that one for lunch break.
- pervycreeper 12y ago
  There is a segment of the population who will read anything, as long as it is related in some way to Apple. Some of them are on HN, too.
  - mariodiana 12y ago
    There is a tiny segment of the population who will read the New Yorker, where pieces of this length are the norm. This segment represents the last of the literate.
- arrrg 12y ago
  What's liking Apple got to do with that? Even if you despise Apple you cannot just ignore its relevance and the role it plays. Do you really think it's wasted effort to write a couple thousand words about a designer as influential as their lead designer – even if you think his work sucks or is just average or whatever?
  - blisse 12y ago
    Not trying to bash the company, meant the comment as even Apple fans are going to have a hard time reading that much, especially with the writer's prose. I love in-depth material, but this feels a lot more like an author's book rather than journalist's article.
    - eropple 12y ago
      I have no problems reading long-form articles. I have an attention span, and for things that interest me I will use it. Do you not? I mean, this is how journalism was fifty years ago. Go read an old issue of Harper's or The Atlantic from the fifties or sixties. They're better, because in addition to being informative they're a joy to read. They're written by people who understand and respect English and want you to enjoy the prose of their work as well as the content.
amelius 12y ago
> Things are "developed to be different, not better." This is certainly true for the Apple keyboard. It is totally an-organic. Give me a cheap standard Logitec keyboard over an Apple keyboard anytime.
- zelos 12y ago
  Funny - the Apple Wireless keyboard is my favourite keyboard. I love the feel of the keypress.
  - glhaynes 12y ago
    I love how much it feels like the MacBook keyboard so there's a consistent typing experience when I'm using my computer at a desk or in my lap.
- lewisflude 12y ago
  I respectfully disagree completely. The Apple keyboard is one of the best non-mechanical keyboards I've used. Typing on a cheap Logitech keyboard is the worst thing ever.
  - spacecowboy_lon 12y ago
    Well its better than a CBM 2001 (PET) or a ZX80 or Spectrum keyboard i will give you that - compared to the rolls royce IBM Type M and F Keyboards its very poor
    - spacecowboy_lon 12y ago
      oh dear did the nasty man rain on your parade I thought this was Hacker news and not some Macbooks and MBA echo chamber.
  - joshuapants 12y ago
    I find Apple's keyboards to be mostly inoffensive, but I can't say I really like using them. The one on my MBP is a bit shallow and the key shape doesn't feel right since they're just flat square pieces. I like the oft-vaunted Thinkpad keyboard - even since the advent of their pseudo-chiclets - a lot better. When it comes to desktop keyboards, they're better than the typical cheapo rubber-domes but it's still not terribly ergonomic.
joosters 12y ago
A TL;DR would be useful. Is there a focus or a direction or a point somewhere in the article? I've read the first few pages but it's just a meandering nothingness so far.
- IBM 12y ago
  It's a profile of Jony Ive.
  - joosters 12y ago
    Was the author paid by the word?
    - jethro_tell 12y ago
      By the compliment, and or celebrity name drop, I would think.
- justincormack 12y ago
  Flushed out of the UK after a toilet manufacturer turned down his designs, Jony Ive, who is friends with Stephen Fry, Bono and lots of other celebs, clicked with Steve Jobs and now wants to retire but is chained in by the watch and the billion objects he designed that were sold, so he is driven around in a Bentley but hey he can get rid of Job's awful taste in calendar apps designed to look like the interior of his (now Ive's) private jet. The Apple store will have carpets because no one will buy a watch on a non carpeted floor.
  - acqq 12y ago
    So he wants to be free. Well, there is already a petition: https://www.change.org/p/apple-free-jony-ive-from-his-white-room https://www.change.org/p/apple-free-jony-ive-from-his-white-...
  - mojuba 12y ago
    Thanks, it's a nice summary of a very ADHD-unfriendly article :)
rotub 12y ago
TL;DR via Article Summariser (Chrome extension): Ive is uncomfortable knowing that a hundred thousand Apple employees rely on his decision-making-his taste-and that a sudden announcement of his retirement would ambush Apple shareholders. The Apple Watch-the first Apple device with a design history older than its founder, or its designer-was conceived "Close to Steve's death," Ive said. John Gruber, an influential Apple blogger, has written that the prices may be "Shockingly high ... from the perspective of the tech industry," but perhaps "Disruptively low from the perspective of the traditional watch and jewelry world." Sebastian Vivas, the director of a watch museum maintained by Audemars Piguet, the Swiss manufacturer, recently described his industry as unperturbed by Apple's plans: "We're not afraid; we're just a little bit smiling." It would be a greater threat, he told me, if men widely accepted that they could wear gemstones without a time-keeping pretext. Ive has begun to work with Ahrendts, Apple's senior vice-president of retail, on a redesign-as yet unannounced-of the Apple Stores.
- puranjay 12y ago
  That's a criminal disservice to some incredibly insightful writing.
  - minthd 12y ago
    Care to write a better summary ? I'm sure many would be interested and upvote.
    - arfliw 12y ago
      Read it. It's an awesome piece.
      - minthd 12y ago
        I started reading it ,but didn't find it very interesting. A summary would be surely far more interesting.
      - falcolas 12y ago
        Personally, I find the brand of his sunglasses and the cut of his pants to be irrelevant. They may help paint a picture of the man (if you're familiar with the brand names or the latest styles), but for the most part they are a part of the narrative I could do without. I'm not reading a novel where I must paint my own picture of the characters, I'm reading a news article related to tech. A picture would have sufficed. Long form narrative requires long form attention and a decent chunk of time. This piece is competing against 29 others on the front page of HN (and another 10-15 which hit the front page and subsequently fell off since I last logged on), and I prefer a concise summary to see if there's information I want or need from this article.
juliangamble 12y ago
A fun bit is the defence of the hockey puck mouse (at the end).
leoc 12y ago
> Behind Ive, at a distance that suggested self-exile, was Steve Wozniak, who, in 1976, co-founded Apple with Jobs, and who was wearing a black steam-punk watch the size of an ashtray. (“What is that?” Ive later asked, rhetorically, in mock affront at its design.) Well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2gy53vVRNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2gy53vVRNs , the binary watch is a silvery-metal colour and not as big as the Nixie watch, so it's probably the Nixie watch http://www.cathodecorner.com/nixiewatch/ http://www.cathodecorner.com/nixiewatch/ . (But of course you knew that. ;) )
- m-i-l 12y ago
  The one he was showing to the BBC yesterday was the Nixie tube one: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31463351 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31463351
felixbraun 12y ago
I have no idea why they are giving this article away for free (loaded it into Instapaper and won't see ads). Who wouldn't pay $3 for this via Stripe?
- nicky0 12y ago
  > Who wouldn't pay $3 for this via Stripe? A lot of people, I think. I'd guess less than 1% of those who would read it for free.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  I wouldn't pay $0.10 for it.
  - felixbraun 12y ago
    You spend 60 minutes on something that isn't worth $0.10 for you?
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      No, I didn't spend time on it at all. Apple does not interest me.
      - puranjay 12y ago
        Which explains why you are here, commenting on an article about Apple's lead designer.
        jacquesm 12y ago
        I structurally read most comment threads on HN, even on subjects that I don't care about to see what's going on in the world of software and hardware without having to go and work with each and every device and piece of software out there. Part of my job is to stay informed about lots of things that I don't have direct experience with, there is simply too much out there for any individual to experience directly. So I use HN as a time-saving device, the collective wisdom and time invested vastly exceeds my own and it's not rare at all to find that HN comment threads are more informative and correct than the articles themselves. FWIW if a subject does interest me I'll read the article too (obviously...), and plenty of times the HN comment threads make me change my mind about what I should be interested in. The effect of this is that I can state with some certainty why apple does not interest me without investing a chunk of cash and a large amount of time first. Of course that wasn't what you were after, you'd like me to admit that I'm secretly interested in apple after all. But there isn't a single apple product that I'd like to own or use (I have an ancient Imac here that's been off for more than a year now), I don't want to buy an 'experience', I only believe in being able to run whatever software I want on the hardware that I own. As soon as I need to jailbreak a device in order to be able to really use it you can safely count me out and OS/X is not such a large step up from Ubuntu that it makes me want to run a different OS on my desktop than on my servers. So as far as I'm concerned Apple is not (currently) interesting to me.
jballanc 12y ago
My favorite story of Jonny Ive happened in the summer of 2008. At the time I was in the student internship program at Apple, and as part of the program each of the executives at Apple would sit down in Town Hall for a chat with that year's group of interns. Some of the executives would come with a slide deck briefly explaining what they did, something about the company, etc. Johnny just came in, sat on a stool in the middle of the stage, said "What would you like to know?", and started taking questions. About 20 minutes in to the conversation, one student asked him: "Why are so many of Apple's products white?" I think all of us expected some long explication of the clean and unassuming quality of white as a color. Instead, Johnny closed his eyes, took a breath, and said (as best as I can recall), "Imagine something that doesn't exist. Imagine something completely new. A new shape. A new device..." After a beat he continued, "Can you imagine something like that?" At this point he was obviously doing the very thing he was suggesting we all try. Then he opened his eyes and plainly said, "Well...when I do they're always white!" Then he laughed like a little kid and said, "I guess that sounds pretty ridiculous, huh?" and moved on to the next question...
- simonh 12y ago
  It always strikes me how things that other companies obsess over and create entire vocabularies for (we don't sell products, we sell experiences!) and experiment with obsessively come so naturaly to Apple. Other companies produce hundreds of tweaked and targetted models of things in dozens of colours and patterns that are produced by different market oriented product groups and focus-tested to death. Apple makes two products in the same category and they're both white, and they're white not because marketing, esperiences, focus groups or demographics but becuase Johny thinks it feels right for new things to be that way. Every 3-5 years or so they produce them in 5 different vivid primary colours, just for fun. Conversely Apple absolutely obsesses at the executive level over and exhaustively iterates on seemingly trivial details like optimising the exact minimum necessary number of buttons in a UI screen, the precision and fluidity of a scrolling action and bounce animation, even just exactly the correct shade of yellow in an icon (real example). Things most companies would assign to a random intern and then forget about.
  - 12y ago
ebbv 12y ago
I'll be honest I couldn't finish this article. I am so sick of writers fawning over Steve Jobs in every single article about Apple. Jobs has been gone for over 3 years now. It's time that he was only mentioned in passing in an article about Apple's future.
- ff10 12y ago
  I would not say the author was fawning, but it is obvious, and such articles try to explain that exact detail, that Jobs was and still is an immense influence. Writers need to – at least – acknowledge that, even if some people are tired of it.
  - ebbv 12y ago
    Of course he's a huge influence. But it's been 3 years of everyone who talks about Apple talking about what a huge influence he is. It really does not need to be mentioned other than in passing any more. This article spent way too much tiem on it right away, to the point where I only made it through the first section and had to stop.
dharbin 12y ago
I thought the bit on cars was timely: > Ive acknowledged that he and Marc Newson, who recently joined Apple as a London-based employee, could “incite ourselves to a sort of fever pitch” of design distress; they’ll complain about things “developed to a schedule, to a cost,” or “developed to be different, not better.” He and Newson are car guys, and they feel disappointed with most modern cars; each summer, they attend the Goodwood Festival of Speed, where vintage sports cars are exhibited and raced in the South of England. “There are some shocking cars on the road,” Ive said. “One person’s car is another person’s scenery.” To his right was a silver sedan with a jutting lower lip. Ive said, quietly, “For example.” As the disgraced car fell behind, I asked Ive to critique its design: “It is baffling, isn’t it? It’s just nothing, isn’t it? It’s just insipid.” He declined to name the model, muttering, “I don’t know, I don’t want to offend.” (Toyota Echo.)
- leoc 12y ago
  I'm willing to guess that the word in the notebook wasn't 'Airbug' either.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
minthd 12y ago
There's really one clear goal behind this: building Ive's image as a design genius, responsible for the major decisions behind Apple's products, in the same way Jobs's image was created. Why ? because it creates a unique image for Apple's products - the products of genius, which really helps positioning them as luxury brands.This is a common technique with many luxury brands. But it's most likely a false image.Most likely Apple 's products design is due to the talent of many designers within it's halls,the unique culture within, and their intense attention to detail.
- ErikHuisman 12y ago
  "their intense attention to detail". Someone has to lead otherwise you'll get design by committee no matter how talented.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- leoc 12y ago
  That seems unfair in this case: if anything this article seems to be intended to raise the profile of the other studio members and acknowledge them by name.
- mike_hearn 12y ago
  Yes, you nailed it. They know Tim Cook can't carry the brand as a detail obsessed designer so they need Ive to do so instead. The problem is, does it work? I got a few impressions from the article, beyond "Jony Ive is a really nice guy" which everyone seems to agree on. One: all his experience is in hardware. All of it. He wasn't given any responsibility over software design when Jobs was in charge at all. This leads to the question of why, given their closeness .... I suspect it's because Jobs knew that Ive is really an industrial hardware designer and the skills needed to do great software design are different. Two: he comes across as kind of burned out. He's spent years designing a relatively small number of products, most of which are (as the article points out) basically just variants on the same "slab of glass with a button" idea. Can he really feel like he's fully exercising his design muscles in such an environment? The article says several times he's sort of wanted to leave and go off and do other things like luxury products several times, but feels he can't go now because so many Apple employees depend on him. Another thing is that the Apple (hardware) design team seems to be a lot smaller than I expected. They have three recruiters and hire one designer per year? Seriously? I've seen picky hiring before at Google but one hire per year given three full time recruiters is crazy. This is meant to impress upon us how incredibly elite and discerning Ive is. I read something else in it: they are all friends who trust each other, and quite simply don't like hiring. They are expected to do it by the company but would much prefer not to. It also leads me to think they are having problems. The iPod and iPhone were huge successes, partly because none of the competitors in those spaces cared much about industrial design. In some areas (in-car systems?) that's still the case. But increasingly Apple has been competing with Google and the big Asian firms for consumer electronics, and there they have been losing their edge. They started talking about the Apple watch in 2011. In 2015 it's still not on the market. Meanwhile the Android team and their hardware partners have launched several watches, of which the round Moto 360 has been attracting the most attention (disclosure: I got one for Christmas, it's neat). But despite a 50+ page article, the journalist lets Jony Ive dismiss round watches in the span of a single sentence. Apparently they just "don't make sense" because smart watches are using "for lists". Except that they do make sense and the one I have works pretty well. I got the strong impression from reading this that the design team at Apple is small, insular, ignores their competition completely, doesn't want to scale up and doesn't feel any real sense of urgency. For example, they work long hours but many of those hours were spent making dozens of slightly different sized models so they could rediscover the insight that people wanted larger smartphone screens. Something that all the other smartphone makers had already realised ages ago, designed and shipped. Surely they could have reduced their time to market by simply spending some time with their competitors products instead?
runj__ 12y ago
The cloth covering the table nearest the door was curiously flat. “This is actually complicated,” Ive said, feeling through the material. “This will make sense later. I’m not messing with you at all, I promise.” This sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel.
- bravo22 12y ago
  it was the watch display case the author talks about later.
Osmium 12y ago
Apparently, Ive helps design lightsabres now too: > And Ive once sat next to J. J. Abrams at a boozy dinner party in New York, and made what Abrams recalled as “very specific” suggestions about the design of lightsabres. Abrams told me that “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” would reflect those thoughts, but he wouldn’t say how. After the release of the film’s first trailer—which featured a fiery new lightsabre, with a cross guard, and a resemblance to a burning crucifix—I asked Ive about his contribution. “It was just a conversation,” he said, then explained that, although he’d said nothing about cross guards, he had made a case for unevenness: “I thought it would be interesting if it were less precise, and just a little bit more spitty.” A redesigned weapon could be “more analog and more primitive, and I think, in that way, somehow more ominous.” Kinda cool, though no doubt this will be result in some more pointless controversy. I thought this was also revealing: > He [Abrams] later told me that Ive had shared some of the company’s news in advance, and that they had discussed “the fact that we were both working on things that had a level of expectation and anticipation that was preposterous.”
- Eric_WVGG 12y ago
  “less precise, and just a little bit more spitty” I initially took that to be in reference to the handle, but the trailer clearly shows blades that appear to be almost made of flame.
- kenferry 12y ago
  Ive probably doesn't know that there was already precedent for a lightsaber with an uneven blade. https://www.google.com/search?q=unstable+lightsaber+crystal https://www.google.com/search?q=unstable+lightsaber+crystal
bshimmin 12y ago
"His manner suggests the burden of being fully appreciated." - I don't really know what that phrase means, but I love it.
- skore 12y ago
  I would imagine something along the lines of - After you have been right so many times (and profitably so), people stop challenging you and just take your word as gospel. At that point, there is no longer a burden to convince people, which is a very helpful mechanism to keep you on your toes. This mechanism is what you then have to internalize and have out with yourself (and perhaps the very few people you have to work insanely hard on to keep out of acolyte mode) because it is now the only thing in the world that even can keep you on your toes.
golemotron 12y ago
> Jobs’s taste for merciless criticism was notorious; Ive recalled that, years ago, after seeing colleagues crushed, he protested. Jobs replied, “Why would you be vague?,” arguing that ambiguity was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” Sociopathy in a nutshell. I've seen this line of thought in a few places in popular culture. It's toxic. Caring about other people's feelings can be authentic.
- melling 12y ago
  '''He lamented that there were “so many anecdotes” about Jobs’s acerbity: “His intention, and motivation, wasn’t to be hurtful.'''
- itchyouch 12y ago
  Keep in mind that the unspoken context in the preceding paragraph illustrates Ive's tact in passing criticism through a metaphor rather than the Jobsian, "this sucks."
brackenbury 12y ago
Am I the only one who thinks Jony Ive is a fraud? Let's examine the evidence, shall we? Let's consider Jony's performance on software design first. This is what some prominent people have said about iOS 7: The Verge wrote in their review: "iOS 7 isn't harder to use, just less obvious. That's a momentous change: iOS used to be so obvious." In iOS 7 basic usability features such as making buttons look like buttons are now stuffed under Accessibility options. About this, Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment wrote: "If iOS 8 can’t remove any of these options, it's a design failure." (And iOS 8 hasn't.) Michael Heilemann, Interface Director at Squarespace wrote, "when I look at [iOS 7 beta] I see anti-patterns and basic mistakes that should have been caught on the whiteboard before anyone even began thinking about coding it." And famed blogger John Gruber said this about iOS 7: "my guess is that [Steve Jobs] would not have supported this direction." And what about Jony's other responsibility, industrial design? The iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and other Apple products are all amazingly well designed and breathtakingly beautiful. But these products weren't designed by Jony Ive all by himself. He designed them under Steve Jobs's guidance and direction. Steve was the tastemaker. Apple's post-Steve products are nowhere near as well-designed. Consider iPhone 5c, for example. The colors are horrid, and when you add those Crocs-like cases it looks more like a Fisher-Price toy than like a device an executive would want to be seen holding. Then they released some ads for the 5c, and I kid you not, one of the ads had sounds of bleating farm animals. (It was titled "Every color has a story", published on tumblr. That the 5c hasn't done well in the market shouldn't surprise anyone. Of late Apple has done phenomenally well, financially. But this isn't because of Jony Ive's design. It is because of the ecosystem created by Steve Jobs. The larger phone size met an important demand, and is not an innovation, and this is not repeatable innovation. References: http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/18/4741724/ios-7-review http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/18/4741724/ios-7-review http://www.marco.org/2013/12/15/button-shapes http://www.marco.org/2013/12/15/button-shapes http://fireballed.org/linked/2013/06/18/heilemann-ios-7/ http://fireballed.org/linked/2013/06/18/heilemann-ios-7/ http://daringfireball.net/2013/10/this_weeks_ipad_event http://daringfireball.net/2013/10/this_weeks_ipad_event
- georgespencer 12y ago
  lol
- 12y ago
72deluxe 12y ago
Likely an interesting article, but to warn you: it is difficult to read, due to, the, many, many, commas. And short sentences. And, short, pithy statements, with no, obvious direction, with added details thrown in, that are nothing, to do with the, main reason for this, paragraph. There is also consistent incessant name dropping. Meant in good humour.
at-fates-hands 12y ago
The Wired article which was referenced in the beginning of the article: The cover: http://hypercritical.co/2013/09/02/images/wired-pray-cover.png http://hypercritical.co/2013/09/02/images/wired-pray-cover.p... The article - "101 Ways to Save Apple" : http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple.html The list is pretty interesting we can look back and see which ones were spot on and the others were way, way off.
bsdpython 12y ago
As a software developer I am of course biased but I feel like Ive wielding so much control without a strong technical counterpart is a mistake. The first evidence of this in my mind was the iPhone 5C - a cute shell around 1 year old technology. It's too early to tell but I feel like the Apple Watch has similarities - cute designs and features without compelling utility or really any sort of technical innovation, which is surprising. You also see this in the lack of focus on stable software throughout Apple's ecosystem which I honestly think has gotten a lot worse in the past year. I can appreciate what Apple has done for industrial design, user interfaces, and heck even in packaging, but there is a tipping point.
- sbuk 12y ago
  The shell isn't all what Ive and his team does. They will work closely with the electronic engineering team. They also will have a decent level of technical knowledge themselves; that is what an industrial designer is. Industrial design degrees tend to be bachelor of science degrees...
  - bsdpython 12y ago
    I didn't say they only design the shell for everything - the shell was the only change for the iPhone 5C so for that particular product that is all they did. It's not even about how technical the design team is, it's that they are making the majority of the decisions and hold clout over other teams within the company.
    - brenschluss 12y ago
      Uh, that was the whole point. The 5C was not a new phone, but a way to gradually introduce a low-budget iPhone so that, one year after its introduction, Apple could offer an iPhone free with contract, expanding their market share and App Store consumption.
- jkestner 12y ago
  What exactly do you think is the mistake in the iPhone 5C? Does every new product have to be technologically more advanced than the one before? Market segmentation by introducing lower-cost models is nothing new. Also no technical innovation: iMac, iPod, etc.
inthewoods 12y ago
"J. J. Abrams, the filmmaker and showrunner, is a friend of Ive’s, but he could not attend the September launch, because he was shooting “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” in London. He later told me that Ive had shared some of the company’s news in advance, and that they had discussed “the fact that we were both working on things that had a level of expectation and anticipation that was preposterous." Am I the only one that thought that sounds a lot like you just gave away material, non-public info to someone who could have easily acted on it? Probably nothing beyond what was in the rumor bin, but still.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  Having non-public information is not criminal. Only trading on it is.
  - isamuel 12y ago
    It's not even criminal to possess material, non-public information and trade on it. It's only illegal (at least in the United States) if the insider gives you the information in exchange for some tangible benefit, and then you trade on it.
    - inthewoods 12y ago
      Yes, that is true - however, it is generally frowned on by public companies to admit you shared such information outside the company.
randomsearch 12y ago
I love this piece. What a fantastic work. I love that it's much longer than most articles shared on HN, and that reading the whole thing took me a long time, but was totally rewarding. A whole day of coffee breaks, in fact. And now I'm too late to join in the discussion! More high quality articles like this, please internets!

245 points by sinak 12y ago

Not to write an irrelevant comment, but printed out this article is 52 pages... c'mon, that's a bit excessive even if you really like Apple.

AVTizzle 12y ago
Agreed - I read the first paragraph before realizing how long the thing was. It's a bit of a turnoff TBH. I'd read the distilled bullet points for takeaways if there were any. But in this long of form? I have trouble committing!
dewey 12y ago
It's an article for a print magazine, not a Buzzfeed post.
- rospaya 12y ago
  With a few ads and an op-ed that IS a magazine.
- jethro_tell 12y ago
  10 Jonny Ive quotes you'll have to read out of context. You'll never believe 7.
kmfrk 12y ago
I imagine they wanted to make it a paywalled article but thought no one in their right mind would want to read the story outside of the magazine anyway and made it free. :) Speaking of, does their iOS app still crash five minutes into reading an article? I had to give up on reading the magazine altogether, when their digital app couldn't even be bothered to remember my reading position in their longform articles after each crash.
hengheng 12y ago
23 pages in two-column Calibri 10pt ... I'm going to spare that one for lunch break.
pervycreeper 12y ago
There is a segment of the population who will read anything, as long as it is related in some way to Apple. Some of them are on HN, too.
- mariodiana 12y ago
  There is a tiny segment of the population who will read the New Yorker, where pieces of this length are the norm. This segment represents the last of the literate.
arrrg 12y ago
What's liking Apple got to do with that? Even if you despise Apple you cannot just ignore its relevance and the role it plays. Do you really think it's wasted effort to write a couple thousand words about a designer as influential as their lead designer – even if you think his work sucks or is just average or whatever?
- blisse 12y ago
  Not trying to bash the company, meant the comment as even Apple fans are going to have a hard time reading that much, especially with the writer's prose. I love in-depth material, but this feels a lot more like an author's book rather than journalist's article.
  - eropple 12y ago
    I have no problems reading long-form articles. I have an attention span, and for things that interest me I will use it. Do you not? I mean, this is how journalism was fifty years ago. Go read an old issue of Harper's or The Atlantic from the fifties or sixties. They're better, because in addition to being informative they're a joy to read. They're written by people who understand and respect English and want you to enjoy the prose of their work as well as the content.

amelius 12y ago

> Things are "developed to be different, not better." This is certainly true for the Apple keyboard. It is totally an-organic. Give me a cheap standard Logitec keyboard over an Apple keyboard anytime.

zelos 12y ago
Funny - the Apple Wireless keyboard is my favourite keyboard. I love the feel of the keypress.
- glhaynes 12y ago
  I love how much it feels like the MacBook keyboard so there's a consistent typing experience when I'm using my computer at a desk or in my lap.
lewisflude 12y ago
I respectfully disagree completely. The Apple keyboard is one of the best non-mechanical keyboards I've used. Typing on a cheap Logitech keyboard is the worst thing ever.
- spacecowboy_lon 12y ago
  Well its better than a CBM 2001 (PET) or a ZX80 or Spectrum keyboard i will give you that - compared to the rolls royce IBM Type M and F Keyboards its very poor
  - spacecowboy_lon 12y ago
    oh dear did the nasty man rain on your parade I thought this was Hacker news and not some Macbooks and MBA echo chamber.
- joshuapants 12y ago
  I find Apple's keyboards to be mostly inoffensive, but I can't say I really like using them. The one on my MBP is a bit shallow and the key shape doesn't feel right since they're just flat square pieces. I like the oft-vaunted Thinkpad keyboard - even since the advent of their pseudo-chiclets - a lot better. When it comes to desktop keyboards, they're better than the typical cheapo rubber-domes but it's still not terribly ergonomic.

joosters 12y ago

A TL;DR would be useful. Is there a focus or a direction or a point somewhere in the article? I've read the first few pages but it's just a meandering nothingness so far.

IBM 12y ago
It's a profile of Jony Ive.
- joosters 12y ago
  Was the author paid by the word?
  - jethro_tell 12y ago
    By the compliment, and or celebrity name drop, I would think.
justincormack 12y ago
Flushed out of the UK after a toilet manufacturer turned down his designs, Jony Ive, who is friends with Stephen Fry, Bono and lots of other celebs, clicked with Steve Jobs and now wants to retire but is chained in by the watch and the billion objects he designed that were sold, so he is driven around in a Bentley but hey he can get rid of Job's awful taste in calendar apps designed to look like the interior of his (now Ive's) private jet. The Apple store will have carpets because no one will buy a watch on a non carpeted floor.
- acqq 12y ago
  So he wants to be free. Well, there is already a petition: https://www.change.org/p/apple-free-jony-ive-from-his-white-room https://www.change.org/p/apple-free-jony-ive-from-his-white-...
- mojuba 12y ago
  Thanks, it's a nice summary of a very ADHD-unfriendly article :)

rotub 12y ago

TL;DR via Article Summariser (Chrome extension): Ive is uncomfortable knowing that a hundred thousand Apple employees rely on his decision-making-his taste-and that a sudden announcement of his retirement would ambush Apple shareholders. The Apple Watch-the first Apple device with a design history older than its founder, or its designer-was conceived "Close to Steve's death," Ive said. John Gruber, an influential Apple blogger, has written that the prices may be "Shockingly high ... from the perspective of the tech industry," but perhaps "Disruptively low from the perspective of the traditional watch and jewelry world." Sebastian Vivas, the director of a watch museum maintained by Audemars Piguet, the Swiss manufacturer, recently described his industry as unperturbed by Apple's plans: "We're not afraid; we're just a little bit smiling." It would be a greater threat, he told me, if men widely accepted that they could wear gemstones without a time-keeping pretext. Ive has begun to work with Ahrendts, Apple's senior vice-president of retail, on a redesign-as yet unannounced-of the Apple Stores.

puranjay 12y ago
That's a criminal disservice to some incredibly insightful writing.
- minthd 12y ago
  Care to write a better summary ? I'm sure many would be interested and upvote.
  - arfliw 12y ago
    Read it. It's an awesome piece.
    - minthd 12y ago
      I started reading it ,but didn't find it very interesting. A summary would be surely far more interesting.
    - falcolas 12y ago
      Personally, I find the brand of his sunglasses and the cut of his pants to be irrelevant. They may help paint a picture of the man (if you're familiar with the brand names or the latest styles), but for the most part they are a part of the narrative I could do without. I'm not reading a novel where I must paint my own picture of the characters, I'm reading a news article related to tech. A picture would have sufficed. Long form narrative requires long form attention and a decent chunk of time. This piece is competing against 29 others on the front page of HN (and another 10-15 which hit the front page and subsequently fell off since I last logged on), and I prefer a concise summary to see if there's information I want or need from this article.

juliangamble 12y ago

A fun bit is the defence of the hockey puck mouse (at the end).

leoc 12y ago

> Behind Ive, at a distance that suggested self-exile, was Steve Wozniak, who, in 1976, co-founded Apple with Jobs, and who was wearing a black steam-punk watch the size of an ashtray. (“What is that?” Ive later asked, rhetorically, in mock affront at its design.) Well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2gy53vVRNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2gy53vVRNs , the binary watch is a silvery-metal colour and not as big as the Nixie watch, so it's probably the Nixie watch http://www.cathodecorner.com/nixiewatch/ http://www.cathodecorner.com/nixiewatch/ . (But of course you knew that. ;) )

m-i-l 12y ago
The one he was showing to the BBC yesterday was the Nixie tube one: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31463351 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31463351

felixbraun 12y ago

I have no idea why they are giving this article away for free (loaded it into Instapaper and won't see ads). Who wouldn't pay $3 for this via Stripe?

nicky0 12y ago
> Who wouldn't pay $3 for this via Stripe? A lot of people, I think. I'd guess less than 1% of those who would read it for free.
jacquesm 12y ago
I wouldn't pay $0.10 for it.
- felixbraun 12y ago
  You spend 60 minutes on something that isn't worth $0.10 for you?
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    No, I didn't spend time on it at all. Apple does not interest me.
    - puranjay 12y ago
      Which explains why you are here, commenting on an article about Apple's lead designer.
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        I structurally read most comment threads on HN, even on subjects that I don't care about to see what's going on in the world of software and hardware without having to go and work with each and every device and piece of software out there. Part of my job is to stay informed about lots of things that I don't have direct experience with, there is simply too much out there for any individual to experience directly. So I use HN as a time-saving device, the collective wisdom and time invested vastly exceeds my own and it's not rare at all to find that HN comment threads are more informative and correct than the articles themselves. FWIW if a subject does interest me I'll read the article too (obviously...), and plenty of times the HN comment threads make me change my mind about what I should be interested in. The effect of this is that I can state with some certainty why apple does not interest me without investing a chunk of cash and a large amount of time first. Of course that wasn't what you were after, you'd like me to admit that I'm secretly interested in apple after all. But there isn't a single apple product that I'd like to own or use (I have an ancient Imac here that's been off for more than a year now), I don't want to buy an 'experience', I only believe in being able to run whatever software I want on the hardware that I own. As soon as I need to jailbreak a device in order to be able to really use it you can safely count me out and OS/X is not such a large step up from Ubuntu that it makes me want to run a different OS on my desktop than on my servers. So as far as I'm concerned Apple is not (currently) interesting to me.

jballanc 12y ago

My favorite story of Jonny Ive happened in the summer of 2008. At the time I was in the student internship program at Apple, and as part of the program each of the executives at Apple would sit down in Town Hall for a chat with that year's group of interns. Some of the executives would come with a slide deck briefly explaining what they did, something about the company, etc. Johnny just came in, sat on a stool in the middle of the stage, said "What would you like to know?", and started taking questions. About 20 minutes in to the conversation, one student asked him: "Why are so many of Apple's products white?" I think all of us expected some long explication of the clean and unassuming quality of white as a color. Instead, Johnny closed his eyes, took a breath, and said (as best as I can recall), "Imagine something that doesn't exist. Imagine something completely new. A new shape. A new device..." After a beat he continued, "Can you imagine something like that?" At this point he was obviously doing the very thing he was suggesting we all try. Then he opened his eyes and plainly said, "Well...when I do they're always white!" Then he laughed like a little kid and said, "I guess that sounds pretty ridiculous, huh?" and moved on to the next question...

simonh 12y ago
It always strikes me how things that other companies obsess over and create entire vocabularies for (we don't sell products, we sell experiences!) and experiment with obsessively come so naturaly to Apple. Other companies produce hundreds of tweaked and targetted models of things in dozens of colours and patterns that are produced by different market oriented product groups and focus-tested to death. Apple makes two products in the same category and they're both white, and they're white not because marketing, esperiences, focus groups or demographics but becuase Johny thinks it feels right for new things to be that way. Every 3-5 years or so they produce them in 5 different vivid primary colours, just for fun. Conversely Apple absolutely obsesses at the executive level over and exhaustively iterates on seemingly trivial details like optimising the exact minimum necessary number of buttons in a UI screen, the precision and fluidity of a scrolling action and bounce animation, even just exactly the correct shade of yellow in an icon (real example). Things most companies would assign to a random intern and then forget about.
- 12y ago

ebbv 12y ago

I'll be honest I couldn't finish this article. I am so sick of writers fawning over Steve Jobs in every single article about Apple. Jobs has been gone for over 3 years now. It's time that he was only mentioned in passing in an article about Apple's future.

ff10 12y ago
I would not say the author was fawning, but it is obvious, and such articles try to explain that exact detail, that Jobs was and still is an immense influence. Writers need to – at least – acknowledge that, even if some people are tired of it.
- ebbv 12y ago
  Of course he's a huge influence. But it's been 3 years of everyone who talks about Apple talking about what a huge influence he is. It really does not need to be mentioned other than in passing any more. This article spent way too much tiem on it right away, to the point where I only made it through the first section and had to stop.

dharbin 12y ago

I thought the bit on cars was timely: > Ive acknowledged that he and Marc Newson, who recently joined Apple as a London-based employee, could “incite ourselves to a sort of fever pitch” of design distress; they’ll complain about things “developed to a schedule, to a cost,” or “developed to be different, not better.” He and Newson are car guys, and they feel disappointed with most modern cars; each summer, they attend the Goodwood Festival of Speed, where vintage sports cars are exhibited and raced in the South of England. “There are some shocking cars on the road,” Ive said. “One person’s car is another person’s scenery.” To his right was a silver sedan with a jutting lower lip. Ive said, quietly, “For example.” As the disgraced car fell behind, I asked Ive to critique its design: “It is baffling, isn’t it? It’s just nothing, isn’t it? It’s just insipid.” He declined to name the model, muttering, “I don’t know, I don’t want to offend.” (Toyota Echo.)

leoc 12y ago
I'm willing to guess that the word in the notebook wasn't 'Airbug' either.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

minthd 12y ago

There's really one clear goal behind this: building Ive's image as a design genius, responsible for the major decisions behind Apple's products, in the same way Jobs's image was created. Why ? because it creates a unique image for Apple's products - the products of genius, which really helps positioning them as luxury brands.This is a common technique with many luxury brands. But it's most likely a false image.Most likely Apple 's products design is due to the talent of many designers within it's halls,the unique culture within, and their intense attention to detail.

ErikHuisman 12y ago
"their intense attention to detail". Someone has to lead otherwise you'll get design by committee no matter how talented.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
leoc 12y ago
That seems unfair in this case: if anything this article seems to be intended to raise the profile of the other studio members and acknowledge them by name.
mike_hearn 12y ago
Yes, you nailed it. They know Tim Cook can't carry the brand as a detail obsessed designer so they need Ive to do so instead. The problem is, does it work? I got a few impressions from the article, beyond "Jony Ive is a really nice guy" which everyone seems to agree on. One: all his experience is in hardware. All of it. He wasn't given any responsibility over software design when Jobs was in charge at all. This leads to the question of why, given their closeness .... I suspect it's because Jobs knew that Ive is really an industrial hardware designer and the skills needed to do great software design are different. Two: he comes across as kind of burned out. He's spent years designing a relatively small number of products, most of which are (as the article points out) basically just variants on the same "slab of glass with a button" idea. Can he really feel like he's fully exercising his design muscles in such an environment? The article says several times he's sort of wanted to leave and go off and do other things like luxury products several times, but feels he can't go now because so many Apple employees depend on him. Another thing is that the Apple (hardware) design team seems to be a lot smaller than I expected. They have three recruiters and hire one designer per year? Seriously? I've seen picky hiring before at Google but one hire per year given three full time recruiters is crazy. This is meant to impress upon us how incredibly elite and discerning Ive is. I read something else in it: they are all friends who trust each other, and quite simply don't like hiring. They are expected to do it by the company but would much prefer not to. It also leads me to think they are having problems. The iPod and iPhone were huge successes, partly because none of the competitors in those spaces cared much about industrial design. In some areas (in-car systems?) that's still the case. But increasingly Apple has been competing with Google and the big Asian firms for consumer electronics, and there they have been losing their edge. They started talking about the Apple watch in 2011. In 2015 it's still not on the market. Meanwhile the Android team and their hardware partners have launched several watches, of which the round Moto 360 has been attracting the most attention (disclosure: I got one for Christmas, it's neat). But despite a 50+ page article, the journalist lets Jony Ive dismiss round watches in the span of a single sentence. Apparently they just "don't make sense" because smart watches are using "for lists". Except that they do make sense and the one I have works pretty well. I got the strong impression from reading this that the design team at Apple is small, insular, ignores their competition completely, doesn't want to scale up and doesn't feel any real sense of urgency. For example, they work long hours but many of those hours were spent making dozens of slightly different sized models so they could rediscover the insight that people wanted larger smartphone screens. Something that all the other smartphone makers had already realised ages ago, designed and shipped. Surely they could have reduced their time to market by simply spending some time with their competitors products instead?

runj__ 12y ago

The cloth covering the table nearest the door was curiously flat. “This is actually complicated,” Ive said, feeling through the material. “This will make sense later. I’m not messing with you at all, I promise.” This sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel.

bravo22 12y ago
it was the watch display case the author talks about later.

Osmium 12y ago

Apparently, Ive helps design lightsabres now too: > And Ive once sat next to J. J. Abrams at a boozy dinner party in New York, and made what Abrams recalled as “very specific” suggestions about the design of lightsabres. Abrams told me that “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” would reflect those thoughts, but he wouldn’t say how. After the release of the film’s first trailer—which featured a fiery new lightsabre, with a cross guard, and a resemblance to a burning crucifix—I asked Ive about his contribution. “It was just a conversation,” he said, then explained that, although he’d said nothing about cross guards, he had made a case for unevenness: “I thought it would be interesting if it were less precise, and just a little bit more spitty.” A redesigned weapon could be “more analog and more primitive, and I think, in that way, somehow more ominous.” Kinda cool, though no doubt this will be result in some more pointless controversy. I thought this was also revealing: > He [Abrams] later told me that Ive had shared some of the company’s news in advance, and that they had discussed “the fact that we were both working on things that had a level of expectation and anticipation that was preposterous.”

Eric_WVGG 12y ago
“less precise, and just a little bit more spitty” I initially took that to be in reference to the handle, but the trailer clearly shows blades that appear to be almost made of flame.
kenferry 12y ago
Ive probably doesn't know that there was already precedent for a lightsaber with an uneven blade. https://www.google.com/search?q=unstable+lightsaber+crystal https://www.google.com/search?q=unstable+lightsaber+crystal

bshimmin 12y ago

"His manner suggests the burden of being fully appreciated." - I don't really know what that phrase means, but I love it.

skore 12y ago
I would imagine something along the lines of - After you have been right so many times (and profitably so), people stop challenging you and just take your word as gospel. At that point, there is no longer a burden to convince people, which is a very helpful mechanism to keep you on your toes. This mechanism is what you then have to internalize and have out with yourself (and perhaps the very few people you have to work insanely hard on to keep out of acolyte mode) because it is now the only thing in the world that even can keep you on your toes.

golemotron 12y ago

> Jobs’s taste for merciless criticism was notorious; Ive recalled that, years ago, after seeing colleagues crushed, he protested. Jobs replied, “Why would you be vague?,” arguing that ambiguity was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” Sociopathy in a nutshell. I've seen this line of thought in a few places in popular culture. It's toxic. Caring about other people's feelings can be authentic.

melling 12y ago
'''He lamented that there were “so many anecdotes” about Jobs’s acerbity: “His intention, and motivation, wasn’t to be hurtful.'''
itchyouch 12y ago
Keep in mind that the unspoken context in the preceding paragraph illustrates Ive's tact in passing criticism through a metaphor rather than the Jobsian, "this sucks."

brackenbury 12y ago

Am I the only one who thinks Jony Ive is a fraud? Let's examine the evidence, shall we? Let's consider Jony's performance on software design first. This is what some prominent people have said about iOS 7: The Verge wrote in their review: "iOS 7 isn't harder to use, just less obvious. That's a momentous change: iOS used to be so obvious." In iOS 7 basic usability features such as making buttons look like buttons are now stuffed under Accessibility options. About this, Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment wrote: "If iOS 8 can’t remove any of these options, it's a design failure." (And iOS 8 hasn't.) Michael Heilemann, Interface Director at Squarespace wrote, "when I look at [iOS 7 beta] I see anti-patterns and basic mistakes that should have been caught on the whiteboard before anyone even began thinking about coding it." And famed blogger John Gruber said this about iOS 7: "my guess is that [Steve Jobs] would not have supported this direction." And what about Jony's other responsibility, industrial design? The iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and other Apple products are all amazingly well designed and breathtakingly beautiful. But these products weren't designed by Jony Ive all by himself. He designed them under Steve Jobs's guidance and direction. Steve was the tastemaker. Apple's post-Steve products are nowhere near as well-designed. Consider iPhone 5c, for example. The colors are horrid, and when you add those Crocs-like cases it looks more like a Fisher-Price toy than like a device an executive would want to be seen holding. Then they released some ads for the 5c, and I kid you not, one of the ads had sounds of bleating farm animals. (It was titled "Every color has a story", published on tumblr. That the 5c hasn't done well in the market shouldn't surprise anyone. Of late Apple has done phenomenally well, financially. But this isn't because of Jony Ive's design. It is because of the ecosystem created by Steve Jobs. The larger phone size met an important demand, and is not an innovation, and this is not repeatable innovation. References: http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/18/4741724/ios-7-review http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/18/4741724/ios-7-review http://www.marco.org/2013/12/15/button-shapes http://www.marco.org/2013/12/15/button-shapes http://fireballed.org/linked/2013/06/18/heilemann-ios-7/ http://fireballed.org/linked/2013/06/18/heilemann-ios-7/ http://daringfireball.net/2013/10/this_weeks_ipad_event http://daringfireball.net/2013/10/this_weeks_ipad_event

georgespencer 12y ago
lol
12y ago

72deluxe 12y ago

Likely an interesting article, but to warn you: it is difficult to read, due to, the, many, many, commas. And short sentences. And, short, pithy statements, with no, obvious direction, with added details thrown in, that are nothing, to do with the, main reason for this, paragraph. There is also consistent incessant name dropping. Meant in good humour.

at-fates-hands 12y ago

The Wired article which was referenced in the beginning of the article: The cover: http://hypercritical.co/2013/09/02/images/wired-pray-cover.png http://hypercritical.co/2013/09/02/images/wired-pray-cover.p... The article - "101 Ways to Save Apple" : http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple.html The list is pretty interesting we can look back and see which ones were spot on and the others were way, way off.

bsdpython 12y ago

As a software developer I am of course biased but I feel like Ive wielding so much control without a strong technical counterpart is a mistake. The first evidence of this in my mind was the iPhone 5C - a cute shell around 1 year old technology. It's too early to tell but I feel like the Apple Watch has similarities - cute designs and features without compelling utility or really any sort of technical innovation, which is surprising. You also see this in the lack of focus on stable software throughout Apple's ecosystem which I honestly think has gotten a lot worse in the past year. I can appreciate what Apple has done for industrial design, user interfaces, and heck even in packaging, but there is a tipping point.

sbuk 12y ago
The shell isn't all what Ive and his team does. They will work closely with the electronic engineering team. They also will have a decent level of technical knowledge themselves; that is what an industrial designer is. Industrial design degrees tend to be bachelor of science degrees...
- bsdpython 12y ago
  I didn't say they only design the shell for everything - the shell was the only change for the iPhone 5C so for that particular product that is all they did. It's not even about how technical the design team is, it's that they are making the majority of the decisions and hold clout over other teams within the company.
  - brenschluss 12y ago
    Uh, that was the whole point. The 5C was not a new phone, but a way to gradually introduce a low-budget iPhone so that, one year after its introduction, Apple could offer an iPhone free with contract, expanding their market share and App Store consumption.
jkestner 12y ago
What exactly do you think is the mistake in the iPhone 5C? Does every new product have to be technologically more advanced than the one before? Market segmentation by introducing lower-cost models is nothing new. Also no technical innovation: iMac, iPod, etc.

inthewoods 12y ago

"J. J. Abrams, the filmmaker and showrunner, is a friend of Ive’s, but he could not attend the September launch, because he was shooting “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” in London. He later told me that Ive had shared some of the company’s news in advance, and that they had discussed “the fact that we were both working on things that had a level of expectation and anticipation that was preposterous." Am I the only one that thought that sounds a lot like you just gave away material, non-public info to someone who could have easily acted on it? Probably nothing beyond what was in the rumor bin, but still.

snowwrestler 12y ago
Having non-public information is not criminal. Only trading on it is.
- isamuel 12y ago
  It's not even criminal to possess material, non-public information and trade on it. It's only illegal (at least in the United States) if the insider gives you the information in exchange for some tangible benefit, and then you trade on it.
  - inthewoods 12y ago
    Yes, that is true - however, it is generally frowned on by public companies to admit you shared such information outside the company.

randomsearch 12y ago

I love this piece. What a fantastic work. I love that it's much longer than most articles shared on HN, and that reading the whole thing took me a long time, but was totally rewarding. A whole day of coffee breaks, in fact. And now I'm too late to join in the discussion! More high quality articles like this, please internets!