Apple today announced that Sir Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, will depart the company as an employee later this year to form an independent design company which will count Apple among its primary clients. While he pursues personal projects, Ive in his new company will continue to work closely and on a range of projects with Apple.
There’s a lot to dig into here, but for once, I fully agree with John Gruber’s take.
First: Wow. There’ve been rumors for years that Ive had one foot out the door, that his last real interest at Apple was designing Apple Park, not Apple products. But it’s something else to see it. This angle that he’s still going to work with Apple as an independent design firm seems like pure spin. You’re either at Apple or you’re not. Ive is out.
[…]It makes me queasy to see that Apple’s chief designers are now reporting to operations. This makes no more sense to me than having them report to the LLVM compiler team in the Xcode group. Again, nothing against Jeff Williams, nothing against the LLVM team, but someone needs to be in charge of design for Apple to be Apple and I can’t see how that comes from operations. I don’t think that “chief design officer” should have been a one-off title created just for Jony Ive. Not just for Apple, but especially at Apple, it should be a permanent C-level title. I don’t think Ive ever should have been put in control of software design, but at least he is a designer.
I don’t worry that Apple is in trouble because Jony Ive is leaving; I worry that Apple is in trouble because he’s not being replaced.
Nothing to add.
Maybe under Jobs this was the case, but is Tim Cook’s Apple the same?
If designers are now reporting to operations, then it makes even more sense that Apple would be more willing to contract out design to company’s like Ive’s.
Makes sense to me. PC’s and mobile phones are well past the top of the S-curve: nothing to see here. What’s someone like Ive going to be doing there? Changing corner radii every couple of years?
I agree. Yes, Ive has been important to the turn around of Apple. But at this stage, how important is he to the company?
In themselves, the App / Music stores success doesn’t depend on an industrial designer.
The Beats products have never relied on Ive’s input, and frankly where there is overlap in Apple products, it’s better to let those guys handle it.
Computers and phones have long since had their templates: Laptop = aluminium, thin and compact as possible. Phone / tablet = thin, compact, edge to edge display.
In fact, with phones, competitors have edged past Apple in hardware design – notchless screens, in screen fingerprint readers, and cameras – regardless of how you feel about Android vs iOS.
Executing that formula doesn’t need Ive – and arguably, Apple have been running into problems recently trying to “refine” things that simply didn’t need replacing, e.g. Mac keyboard.
It’s so bizarre to see how the IT field has becoming so commoditized that is now another source of drama a la sports.
Jony Ive hasn’t been a designer for ages. He’s been a manager far longer than he’s been a designer. Apple’s design isn’t going to collapse suddenly because he has left.
In fact, his principal role for the past decade and a half has been as official British-accent pompous marketer in chief for Apple events. . Apple can even create their own virtual Jony Ive with a soundboard:
https://peal.io/soundboards/jony-ive
Just mix and match, and boom done. In fact, make it an artificial Jony Ive bot out of machined aluminium for product introductions. It would be glorious.
Meh, those at the top always get way too much credit anyways. The world keeps spinning when they get replaced, IMHO it should happen more often to give more opportunities to new people and ideas otherwise things just become stale (including apple under Ives BTW). I’ve heard that Japanese culture is more willing to share credit for things as a team rather than focus all credit to top individuals, is that true? It’s kind of like in movie production where tens of thousands might work diligently behind the scenes only for a few on the silver screen get all the fame and money. The talk show circuits and reward ceremonies glorify those who are famous, these are completely unrelatable for me. Many audiences are programmed to listen to stars as though what they have to say is important or even insightful. I’d rather see average joes doing remarkable things rather than famous stars doing average ones. Excessive focus on the very top seems to be a common refrain in many disciplines…whether I like it or not.
Sorry about the rant, haha.
Apple will be just fine, and so will Ive. With any luck maybe something new can come out from under Ive’s shadow!
Can he do grater than the new Mac Pro case?
Ive been wondering if this pun could sieve the day…
Seriously the new mac pro case, was probably created first before the trash can. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was why he left.
If that was truly the case, he’d have left 5 years ago.
Though it may have been a significant contributing factor to the growing gulf between Cook and Ive
Apple is in trouble because of how terrible the butterfly keyboard is, and how terrible mac os has become. Jony Ive? Probably can do with out him. He also designed the trash can mac pro. I mean how can we live without that kind of design forward products? I mean with out him, they might have created a mac pro more similar to what came before it and what came after it. Then the pro users wouldn’t have abandoned the platform and discovered how good Windows 10 is. And we can’t have those kinds of loyal professional customers sully the design language of Apple products.
That’s it then, Apple goes into a downward design spiral …Oh, wait.
Probably unrelated, but I saw this in the news today…
Apple shifts Mac Pro production away from US to China
https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/28/tech/apple-mac-pro-production-china/index.html
It’s an odd shift in the heavy tariff climate. Even with the international tariffs, that’s still not enough to make US factories attractive to huge billion dollar multinational corporations.
Apparently it has to do with shipping by rail from China to the rest of continental Eurasia being much cheaper.
Completely unrelated indeed. Producing the Mac Pro in the US was a PR stunt and that plant hadn’t been used to built new MacPro’s for a while. It had been repurposed to repair several other brands of computers*.
The only connection between Ives and that plant might be this one: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/28/a-custom-screw-was-the-bottleneck-in-us-mac-pro-production
*Source: https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/725?autostart=false
Jony left Apple a long time ago, at least its product design operation.
This is the best analysis I have come across so far
https://stratechery.com/2019/jony-ive-leaves-apple-ives-legacy-the-post-ive-apple/
Maybe idea of breaking company In smaller vs being forced to be split? Like some politicians are talking about?
Apple is circling the toilet at the moment. Their time has been and gone, and now they’re spiralling down to nothingness.
With the collapse of the smartphone and tablet markets, Apple has lost it’s most successful revenue streams and simply cannot make the sort of money they used to be able to. This affects everything, from R&D, aesthetic design, software and marketing. Whilst it is well known that Apple has cash piles bigger than some countries, most of it is “locked up” in subsidiaries, and cannot be liberated without a lot of tax dodging. As such, with declining sales, Apple has less available cash (and incentive) to spend on designing newer models, and It’s really started to show.
Poor quality keyboards on Macbooks. Lack of distinguishing design elements in newer iPhones and iPads. $1000 iPads you can bend with your hands. Macbooks with critical internal design flaws such as backlight issues, and poor placement of power traaces in connectors. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that Apple has lost a lot of the elements that made them a premium brand.
Apple used to design high-quality products designed to look good and last a long time. They still have the former, to a degree, but the latter has practically evaporated. You can buy better quality hardware from a multitude of other vendors, for a lot less.
The123king,
It’s true that smartphone markets are becoming saturated just as with PCs, but even so they’re still one of the richest companies and they still have an incredibly strong market duopoly that continues to extract tons of fees from 3rd party developers through it’s walled garden. If they want to complain about where they’re at, millions of us would be willing to take on their burdens in exchange for the perks of being so wealthy & powerful, haha.
As for money in tax shelters, I have absolutely zero sympathy, If they merely invested that money in “business expenses”, they can legally deduct those expenses from their tax liability. Their new headquaters can be paid for with money that was never taxed. They can invest in totally new business. They could invest in their own space program like other private companies have been doing. They could donate it to a charitable cause tax free. The point being, corporate accountants have a lot of tools to allow corporations to legally avoid paying taxes. Not for nothing, but they could always just pay their taxes like the rest of us. Imagine that right? Sure it would be a huge tax bill, but they’d still have over half a trillion afterwards.
Yeah, I think that’s true. Whether I like it or not, apple has done very well selling form over function. We’ll see if the next mac pro reverses any of that when it comes out, but boy did they miss the mark on price, The base model is just absurdly expensive and the specs aren’t very competitive for the prosumer market. I’ve said before the 2019 MP might be better suited for enterprise use than as a pro workstation, but apple would really need to change their marketing. Apple’s past enterprise product lines never became especially relevant. They could technically invest in their own datacenters to compete with google, amazon AWS and microsoft Azure, but I don’t think it’s in their blood and if they wanted to do that they should have started it years ago.