
Jony Ive is departing Apple, but he started leaving years ago - forgingahead
https://www.wsj.com/articles/jony-ive-is-departing-apple-but-he-started-leaving-years-ago-11561943376?mod=rsswn
======
RodgerTheGreat
If one chooses to be _extremely_ cynical, this is exactly the story Apple
would want to tell shareholders in the wake of Ive's departure: Everything is
fine, Ive was already detached from the company's recent successes, Eurasia
has always been at war with Eastasia. Nothing to be worried about.

Dialing that back a few notches, I genuinely hope that Ive's departure means
Apple is considering a new approach for the design of their products. Years of
product releases with crummy butterfly keyboards, nixed headphone jacks and
missing magSafe have left me with no desire to purchase my next laptop from
Apple. Maybe once the current pipeline drains we can look forward to Mac
laptops that _gain_ useful features and don't fall apart in months.

Maybe. I'm not holding my breath.

~~~
mrwww
I'm so glad they finally removed magsafe. FINALLY, both cables going into the
powerbrick are replaceable. It never once saved my laptop from cord trip doom,
but did cost me a lot in buying whole new powerbricks when the cord eventually
wore out.

But whatever, who buys apple for the hardware? I mean, its a super nice bonus
that it is overall the best hardware, but that's not the key reason.

~~~
gomox
The actually desirable feature was for the cable not to fray and disintegrate
every 2 years. Making it replaceable at the expense of Magsafe is hardly the
solution.

~~~
jedberg
The first I do when I get a new power brick is tape both ends of the cord with
electrical tape. It looks ugly but they last as long as I have the laptop
(usually 6+ years), and I don't care about how it looks.

------
forgingahead
It's interesting that a lot of the frustrations being expressed online over
the past few years about Apple's product design choices (Macbook Pros losing
their developer focus, iPhones getting more ridiculous with their designs,
etc) are linked directly to what this article claims -- that Ive has been
pretty absent since 2016, and it's not just the lack of a strong product
leader at Apple, but also a rudderless design team that has led to these
issues.

Whether any of that will improve now remains to be seen.

~~~
threeseed
Hilarious how Ive gets blamed for everything.

He is not responsible for the features that goes into a product. Nor is he
responsible for which demographic a product is targeted towards. It's a
combination of various executives in particular Phil Schiller and Jeff
Williams.

~~~
huffmsa
He used to be responsible though. Until 2011. And even if Steve wanted
something batshit insane, he made it work.

I've said it elsewhere, but I've suspected (as this article seems to confirm)
that he's been coasting / lost the spark he once had a while ago.

Designer's and artists have fickle motivation. He clearly fed off of Job's
"fuck you, fuck this, this is trash, make it better" style of challenges.
Because Job's actually 1) knew when it was a good design and 2) appreciated
it. I'm doubtful that the flock of MBAs who took over have that same passion,
so Mr Ive has lost his own.

~~~
MR4D
I think you made a great point there. Ive was the Scotty to Job's Kirk - he'd
make it work somehow, even if it was crazy.

------
nobrains
The last line is so crushing:

"Mr. Ive’s old design team—a group of aesthetes once thought of as gods inside
Apple—will report to COO Jeff Williams, a mechanical engineer with an M.B.A."

~~~
huffmsa
That's how journalists used to sneak their opinion into otherwise factual
reporting. WSJ still has enough old-school editors that Tripp Mickle couldn't
go full WaPo or NYT and write a pure opinion page rant, so he used a factual
statement to thinly veil his opinion.

~~~
dannyw
Good journalism is more than just fact regurgitation.

~~~
huffmsa
Correct. It's the distillation of those facts into something digestible, and
provide a bit of an angle to it.

It is certainly not the breathless pearl clutching which has taken over the
NYT and WaPo (amongst others).

------
redthrowaway
I was struck, reading this, of the analogous situation at Boeing: a company
founded on engineering talent and propelled to stardom by a string of
successful moonshots, merges with McDonnell Douglas, a government contractor
par excellence. At first, it seems synergistic: the dynamic Boeing can build
amazing planes and MD can secure a steady defence revenue stream.

But then the moonshots quietly end. Boeing makes cost effective tweaks to its
current lineup, and lands fat defence contracts that pad the bottom line and
drive the stock to stratospheric prices. It gets comfortable, it gets
efficient, and it stops being what made it great in the first place.

Apple post-Jobs will likely be an extremely profitable company for many years
to come. But it will never again be the pioneering company that forged whole
markets from vision and belief.

And that's sad.

------
wodenokoto
2 things I don’t understand:

1\. If Ive has been on his way out for over a year ago (some say since 4) why
is he so prominently featured in the design videos?

Give a little room to the next guy, surely someone must have been in the
pipeline for such a long departure.

2\. If Ive have been practically absent all this time, working on the office
rather than product, why will his actual departure turn things around with
regards to product design?

~~~
ninedays
1\. Because in most Apple videos, the product is the most important person in
the room. Ive is a great storyteller when it comes to design (probably the
best at Apple) so it makes sense that he is the one telling that story. Steve
Jobs was by far the best keynote speaker at Apple so he did most of it
himself.

2\. Because the organisation is now structured with the design team reporting
directly to Operations which is unusual as designers at Apple didn't use to
report to anyone (except the CEO).

------
olliej
This seems like a reasonable summary. I can understand his (apparent, based on
the internet :D) frustration with finance and ops people filling the executive
ranks.

But never forget the wireless "magic" mouse with the lightning plug in the
bottom.

~~~
e1ghtSpace
I don't think the lightning plug being on the bottom was really that big of a
deal since a full charge lasts 2 months.

~~~
untog
It still means the thing is unusable when charging, no matter how long a
charge lasts.

In the grand scheme of things, no, it isn't that big of a deal. But it
showcased a stereotype people associate with Apple: aesthetics over function.
The plug could have gone in the top of the mouse, so you could use it just
like you would a wired mouse while it charged. But no, the plug _must_ be
invisible, damn the inconvenience.

~~~
lyxsus1
> It still means the thing is unusable when charging, no matter how long a
> charge lasts.

That was the whole purpose of putting it in a bottom. The thing works several
months on a single charge and it takes just a couple of hours to recharge. And
it starts giving notification at least a day before battery's depleted.

It's not aesthetics over function mantra, but realisation that they can't be
decoupled or developed by separate divisions.

That's what concerns me about Ive leaving. He and Jobs evidently had enough
courage to ignore public opinion to make things the right way and in most
cases it turned to be excellent decisions. With no successor I'm seriously
afraid they'll eventually resort to safe decisions and become another
Samsung/MS/Android/whatever..

~~~
izacus
> That was the whole purpose of putting it in a bottom. The thing works
> several months on a single charge and it takes just a couple of hours to
> recharge. And it starts giving notification at least a day before battery's
> depleted.

But... why? Logitech managed to build a significantly more comfortable mouse
that can still be plugged in while charging. It's a nicer, more usable and
practical product.

Aren't you really going out there on a severely stretched limb to defend this
mouse design?

~~~
lyxsus1
> But... why?

idk exact reasoning, but it seems like they've decided to maximise design
focus on primary user experience from device sacrificing almost nothing.

> Logitech managed to build a significantly more comfortable mouse

Can you please prove it by a link? I had to build a specific PC for a work-
related project about a year ago, wasn't a pleasure.

> Aren't you really going out there on a severely stretched limb to defend
> this mouse design?

I honestly don't understand the popular kind of critics that Apple receives.
Those details and choices are what hooked me into their products. When I see
somebody complains about no CD-ROM in laptop or that mouse charging thing or
that monitor stand, it feels more like trolling.

I mean really, more comfortable mouse? Which one is that?

~~~
izacus
Pretty much any mouse is more comfortable and ergonomic than the wrist pain
inducing Magic Mouse.

But if you want more concrete models - Logitech's MX Master 2 is incredibly
comfortable once you put your hand on it and it's significantly better than
anything Apple ever did in mouse area. I can't understate how good it felt to
switch away from the Apple's mouse to the Master. And it can even charge while
in use and remain connected via both USB receiver and Bluetooth to three
devices (which is very useful because you can just leave the USB receiver in
the monitor hub and avoid the BT pairing process everytime someone else sits
down on a workplace).

If you want a smaller, laptop portable, alternative, MX Anywhere 2 is again a
rather comfortable mouse (although nowhere near the Master due to its smaller
size) and can still charge while being used.

> I honestly don't understand the popular kind of critics that Apple receives.
> Those details and choices are what hooked me into their products. When I see
> somebody complains about no CD-ROM in laptop or that mouse charging thing or
> that monitor stand, it feels more like trolling.

I don't understand what kind of details are there in the Magic Mouse? It's not
comfortable, it doesn't give very clear click feedback, the gestures are
finnicky even on macOS... Which mouse are you comparing it to?

~~~
lyxsus1
I don't think I'll convince you to try the latest MM, so I've ordered the one
you've mentioned (Logitech's MX Master 2). It should be delivered to me
tomorrow. I'll be using it for at least 1-2 weeks just for the sake of this
argument.

After that I'll contact you in this thread and share the results if you're
interested. I don't expect your or mine opinion changed, but I guess it'll be
stupid not to test.

------
MR4D
There seems to be a lot of turnover at the top lately, also considering that
Angela Ahrendts left earlier.

What worries me are two things:

1, prior turnover in the design department (as noted by the WSJ in their
article);

2 - what happens when Craig Federighi leaves?

I think their design language is pretty strong that nobody should muck it up
for a while, and hopefully someone can rise to the top.

But #2 - "Hair Force One" is a force of nature. I really worry that his
leadership is the last thread upon which Apple's greatness hangs.

------
starik36
Well, that's a hit piece if I've ever seen one. They even manage to paint
spending time with his ailing father in the UK as a sign he was neglecting
Apple.

------
betimsl
He left because he's hit his limit. So better leave than start designing bad
products. Plus apple has lost its compass among other things.

------
pcr910303
It seems most of the comments have an assumption that current Apple hardware
is not doing well, pushing more for aesthetics and failing to be a truly
useful computer.

I don’t really think so, negative reviews get to have much more spotlight and
views than positive ones; (One reason is that positive people about the
devices won’t be ‘whining’ as loudly as the negative ones do; another one is
that post-SJ Apple is constantly criticized by ‘not becoming innovative as
much as SJ’) and HN is a particularly great place for these negative reviews
take place.

While I also think time to time that Apple could do better than the current
HW(e.g. turning on haptic feedback on the TB as default), the current HW
lineup is pretty great, I would say.

I find the TB immensely useful in my workflow, (partially because I use a
custom Emacs that I took my time to hack on to display touchbar buttons for my
workflow... why doesn’t Emacs/gVim gain TB support?̊̈) especially when I’m
using Finder or Safari, Emacs, MS Office... and my friends that sneered at
using an Apple laptop started to evaluate using it after '18, when the
keyboard issues got pretty much fixed.

I also find the discussion around the butterfly mechanism of the MacBooks
pretty much disconcerning, there are pretty much people who love the feel of
the butterfly, (not all people like long pitched keyboards, especially on
laptops), and Apple managed to fix the keyboard issues with dust in 2018,
which I would say, pretty much immediately after it was discovered.

I’m fine with Mr. Ive departuring from Apple, as far as Apple designs great
products that value on both function _and_ form. If Apple becomes a usual
computer company that starts to listen to all consumer complaints and makes
and sells usual computers that other companies can make, that’s a pretty
concerning future.

~~~
alpaca128
> Apple managed to fix the keyboard issues with dust in 2018

Then why did they put the newest 2019 model's keyboard into the same
replacement program before it even launched?

~~~
pcr910303
(AFAIK As Apple stated too,) to give confidence to customers that are
skeptical due to keyboard issues.

------
sverhagen
I had not heard about mr. Ive before his departure. I must be a function over
form person. But I'm just wondering if he wasn't just tired of his design
leadership turning into people leadership (increasingly so, from the article).
Apparently the design team "ballooned" into a big organization, and overseeing
those people may not be where your ambitions lie, as a world-renowned
designer. As a (small? -- don't know what he has in mind there) design firm,
it may be clearer that he comes in as a design brain, not as a department
head. He is accomplished enough to be just working on where the true passions
lie, or even just tuning out when a loved one is in bad shape, or retire
altogether (if he chose so).

------
dependsontheq
I think the article shows how ridiculous it is when they talk about Tim Cook
seeing products for the first time on the exhibition floor in photos.

Really? So the CEO of a technology company has never seen the products they
release and this is not just a pretty dorky PR shooting ?

------
msoad
People I know at Apple have been working on 2020 iPhone SUPPLY CHAIN since
last year. That means designs are almost final.

What I'm trying to say is, impact of this departure will be felt in maybe 4~5
years. Apple's hardware development pipeline is steady but slow.

------
wayanon
Is Apple Park such a success? Agree it looks wonderful but I saw reports of
people getting injured from walking into glass and it not being a comfortable
place to work. Style over substance?

~~~
ssully
Honestly, those just sound like growing pains for a new building. I would be
curious to hear an update on how people like it in a few years.

------
ninedays
AirPower and the macbook butterfly keyboards are probably good examples of
what is not working in terms of design. The balance between thinness and
function is not right the last few years at Apple and change is most
definitely welcome. Still Ive departure is hard to swallow and marks a huge
shift in Apple's history. Time will tell if is the right move.

------
crunkykd
Ive is a great soldier, but Jobs knew which battles to fight. Apple has lost
its way and doesn't know what directions to go in, where technology needs to
move to serve its users. And Apple's huge money chest and insularity are of no
help. They need an inspired product leader.

------
mukundmr
There was no point in Jony Ive hanging around when the passion was gone. It is
good to know that Apple is engaging the new firm launched by Jony to help
Apple continue to design and improve their products.

------
jordache
Good.. maybe they can dial back a bit on the interview format promo video with
Ive talking like the new Apple TV is possess museum caliber design.

------
inflatableDodo
Wonder if we will get to see an IvePhone?

~~~
ben509
Ive not seen any indication of such a thing.

~~~
inflatableDodo
As long as he doesn't release a Jony Walkman.

~~~
anjc
Well _I_ appreciated the word play

------
exabrial
Sigh, Tim Cook is the Steve Ballmer of Apple. Just pay him out before is too
late and put another creative in his place.

To lose a person of this caliber indicates a total lack of vision and trust in
the executive leadership at Apple.

~~~
maxxxxx
From a business point of view Ballmer did an excellent job. The company grew
every year and was always one of the top tech companies. The same will
probably happen to Apple (and Google) too. They magic touch goes away but they
will be solid companies run by business people.

~~~
vitorgrs
That's debatable. [https://imgur.com/a/8mderpX](https://imgur.com/a/8mderpX)

2000-2013 was pretty... frozen. You don't need to remind of the failed battle
of Mobile (that even Gates said it would give them at least 400b). Also the
Xbox One launch fiasco, Surface RT, etc. And of course, the longhorn... Which
I don't think is a Ballmer problem exactly, but it happened.

------
tomrod
I've not used but a handful of Apple devices over the years. For those
(probably few?) of us out of the loop, is this particularly newsworthy?

~~~
TaylorAlexander
I don't know if Apple is still the biggest company on earth, but they're
pretty big in tech. They are also a notoriously design focused company and
their main designer is leaving after 20 years. The story feeds in to people's
fascination with the company, which has an added aura of being part of the
original Silicon Valley boom.

~~~
tomrod
That makes sense. Thanks!

