
Ive’s Legacy, the Post-Ive Apple - quanganhdo
https://stratechery.com/2019/jony-ive-leaves-apple-ives-legacy-the-post-ive-apple/
======
pazimzadeh
Maybe Steve Jobs' greatest accomplishment was getting titans like Jony Ive and
Steve Forstall, who could each run their own successful design and/or tech
companies, to put aside ego and work together under one roof.

~~~
xuki
Yup.

“My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other
kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total
was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things
in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people.”

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The Beatles exploded into rancour, hate, and bitterness, so they're maybe not
the ideal role model.

Bands are hard. People in bands are passionate, often drunk and/or on drugs,
almost guaranteed to be egotistical, and fiercely competitive - _not at all_
team players by default, more like literal 10X music rock stars. (It doesn't
help if they are.)

There's almost never a supervising manager to keep it all together. (Producers
are temporary, and band managers are more like salespeople and hired
negotiators than corporate managers.)

It's interesting to wonder what would happen if you took difficult but
talented musicians and somehow managed them into smooth cooperation. Maybe
Jobs did indeed do the software and design talent equivalent - but even he
would have struggled with getting to happen in the music business.

~~~
braythwayt
Genuine bands are hard. So are genuine partnerships in every field, including
founding companies.

Top-down, command-and-control organizations that churn out product are
different. Not all achieve the same success, but nearly every industry has
figured out how to industrialize “creativity.”

In music, pop has had industrialization for sixty to seventy years. Instead of
The Beatles, think of all the “bands” that were actually vocalists fronting
for The Wrecking Crew or The Funk Brothers.

Think of producers and arrangers like Quincy Jones or Trevor Horn or Prince.
They produced many acts, including their own, but they were essentially
scaling themselves.

Bands of equals are hard. But industrializing music is an understood business.

------
blunderkid
I liked iOS' "skeuomorphic" design and despise the flatness that Mr Ive
introduced, i think 5 years back. The first iPhone was mind blowing because it
seemed to make apps pop out of the screen and invited you to tap on them.
Flatness is two steps back and made iOS Androidish, not a great design
inspiration.

Also the ridiculous obsession with thinness of macs and iPhones probably at
the cost of making them do something useful, if that is Mr Ive's doing, he has
clearly outlived his usefulness.

Those iMacs though were pretty. Never used one but Ben is right about them
being Ive's best work. Wish him a happy and most well deserved retirement.

~~~
dijit
I also really loved the skeuomorphic design that came with my iPhone 4s.

Buttons looked like buttons, leather and denim accents made the phone feel
like a luxury device even though it was just digital fabrication.

Even the notes application looked like a sketch pad with a special
“handwriting” font. I was sad when it went but now I’m in full nostalgia mode.

I wonder why they decided to kill it. There must have been a good reason.

~~~
raverbashing
> I wonder why they decided to kill it. There must have been a good reason.

Because it is tacky and it didn't age well

I'd say the initial use of it was maybe in discoverability, but I suppose when
smartphones became more popular that lost its main function.

I think it gets distracting sometimes and it is needlessly design heavy (think
how much images you need to do that).

~~~
acqq
My parents still handle easier the UI where they see the "buttons" for the
navigation. They are just confused when some of the text is clickable and some
is not.

For those who don't know them, the "buttons" like "Cancel" "Next" here:

[https://www.dummies.com/wp-
content/uploads/293595.image1.jpg](https://www.dummies.com/wp-
content/uploads/293595.image1.jpg)

Young users don't have such problems, but original iOS was easy to use for the
older generations too. Steve Jobs cared about the easy discoverability. That
is something that started as early as with Apple Lisa:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-
atKrg0T4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4) also recently on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20247545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20247545)

It was a big step back for my parents when iOS removed the buttons present in
the older design and replaced them with the plain text.

~~~
raverbashing
I'm not sure how that looks like in a modern iOS version

I'd say this is a good example of (light) skeumorphism (which is mostly good
and non-intrusive), I was mostly talking about stuff like the notes app
[https://www.dummies.com/consumer-
electronics/tablets/ipad/ho...](https://www.dummies.com/consumer-
electronics/tablets/ipad/how-to-use-ipads-notes-app/)

~~~
acqq
> I'm not sure how that looks like in a modern iOS version

[https://www.authsmtp.com/images/setup/iOS11-smtp-server-
setu...](https://www.authsmtp.com/images/setup/iOS11-smtp-server-setup-iphone-
ipad-step-6.png)

They never know that they are supposed to click on these to proceed. With the
button look it was obvious to them.

------
ryeights
>In their separate interviews with the FT this week, Mr Cook and Sir Jonathan
insisted that no single person at Apple decides which innovations graduate
from its R&D labs and which are sent back to the drawing board. “The company
runs very much horizontally,” said Mr Cook. “The reason it’s probably not so
clear about who [sets product strategy] is that the most important decisions,
there are several people involved in it, by the nature of how we operate.”

This would certainly explain Apple’s apparent lack of direction in recent
years. Between this, their recent refocusing on “services”, and the
clusterfuck of ports, dongles, and redesigns on new products, I am fearful for
the future of Apple hardware.

~~~
mevile
I'm ready for a post-Apple world. Fine attention to detail in the user
experience of their products, but at the expense of a pernicious ecosystem
that traps you in and works with nothing else. It feels weird to say it, but I
much more prefer Microsoft and their recent culture change. They're putting
xbox gamepass on non-Microsoft devices, their own PC games on Steam, open
sourcing their software, building world class android apps. I don't care how
many Jony Ive's you've got, it's the openness and willingness to work with
others that I want.

~~~
snazz
Apple has their own walled garden ecosystem because they can afford to. It
really isn't much different from Microsoft in the 90s and early 00s, when they
were at the peak of their market lock-in with Windows. Then the rest of the
world changed, and it took them a really long time to adapt. Since they've
been forced to open up their software and their ecosystem, the consumer has
benefited immensely. Had everyone still been working on Microsoft Office on
Microsoft Windows with generic PC hardware and the mobile revolution had not
occurred, Microsoft would have never left their old ways because they didn't
need to.

Whether the same thing will at some point happen to Apple we do not know
(although I'll wager we're nearing Apple's peak), but it will likely take a
monumental change in the way that the technology world works for such a
transformation to happen.

~~~
wbl
Microsoft always wanted 3rd party apps on windows and never really tried to
monopolize distribution or creation. They wanted the platform to be valuable
to customers.

------
myt6fore
Does anyone else miss 'early' Ben Thompson?

Ben of Then would easily spend an hour meticulously crafting around the topic
whilst carefully rationing his listeners' attention. Once listeners are
thoroughly primed, Thompson would then proceed with a sudden, massive
contextual leap shifting the laid groundwork (vertically) into potential
energy, lifting us along.

Ben of today, writes mechanistically, with two main pillars: 1)catering to his
technocratic subscriber-base 2)asserting himself as an expert historian of the
industry.

Technocrats demand affirmation of their worldview (that is what they do), so
static narratives provide an important anchor. The preeminent historian
supports this rigidity as his main competitive advantage (over lesser
historians) is his cultivated cache of (niche) interlinks.

In our (violently) changing world we need thermonuclear Ben not the historian
Ben.

------
amelius
I hope Apple goes back to Frog Design, I think those designs had much more
character.

Also, if you make a design slimmer and slimmer, you're bound to end up with
something flat and uninteresting.

I also don't like the sharpness of the aluminum at the edges. The plastic
designs were much more friendly, imho.

~~~
zapzupnz
> you're bound to end up with something flat and uninteresting

That's the ideal: a computer that gets out of the way. They've been wanting
that since long before Steve died, too.

Hence the iPad, literally just a screen. Or last year's iPad Pro, where they
took the bezel away and there's even less screen, same for the MacBooks. The
iMac must be the poster child: literally just a screen.

The less device you see, and the more content (ergo screen), the better.

> The plastic designs were much more friendly, imho

But plastic also chips and breaks. Of all the plastic MacBooks I had, none of
them finished life without a few chips of plastic missing. The plastic also
didn't vent the computers' heat very well.

I agree that the sharp edges aren't fantastic but, strictly speaking, you're
supposed to keep your wrists raised above the keyboard to avoid developing RSI
so the edges shouldn't come into it anyway.

I miss the PowerBook G4 design. That was aluminium but had round edges. That
design but with modern thinness, that would be nice to have back.

~~~
amelius
> That's the ideal: a computer that gets out of the way. They've been wanting
> that since long before Steve died, too.

Yeah, but what's Ive's role here? Isn't the miniaturization more due to
electrical engineering efforts (placement/routing/PCB design), than to visual
design efforts (making it look thinner than it actually is)?

> But plastic also chips and breaks.

Yes, and I think it gives a device more identity and character :)

> The plastic also didn't vent the computers' heat very well.

True! But Apple is known for their obsession of "form over function", so this
is a curious aspect that goes against their principle.

> the edges shouldn't come into it anyway

Yes, that's a good point. But you can't always prevent that e.g. when
traveling, or lying down, which is what laptops are made for.

Anyway, I just wanted to share my view because I don't understand what all the
fuss is about. I liked Apple in the days of the Apple ][, but I absolutely
despise their walled garden, and their assimilation of the supply chain.
Design is absolutely secondary to all that.

------
mekpro
"even Ive’s exit was beautifully designed."

------
IloveHN84
The best Ive's product is the Magic Mouse... How could you put the charging
port UNDER the mouse?

~~~
philjohn
Because they didn't want you to plug in the lightning cable and just use it as
a wired mouse ... because that defeats the purpose of it.

I mean, I plug mine in once in a blue moon ... and always when I leave the
office for the night ... and it's fully charged for many weeks thereafter.

You might have more of a point if the battery only lasted a few hours ...

