Opinion: Jony Ive leaves Apple, but it's not on design a high - Notebookcheck.net

We probably won't be seeing photos of Cook and Ive together like this in future. (Source: Apple)

Apple fans were shocked by news that legendary design guru Jony Ive is leaving the company. While Ive has undoubtedly contributed significantly to numerous iconic Apple designs in the past, he is not, however, leaving Apple on a design high.

Jony Ive will always be an Apple icon. Behind co-founders Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak, Ive is perhaps the most significant figure in the company's history. His partnership with Steve Jobs during Jobs' second coming as Apple CEO took Apple out of the doldrums and helped position it to become the largest and most successful technology company in history. Who can forget the iconic Bondi Blue iMac G3 (1998-2003) that helped to turn the company's fortunes? It was the first of a succession of iconic designs including several iPods and then of course the 2007 iPhone which initiated the second Apple-triggered computing revolution after the original Apple II.

However, Ive leaves Apple not on a product design high. Arguably the last properly iconic design to come from directly under his tenure was the iPhone 5 (which was then rehashed for the iPhone SE). Over the past few years, however, rehashed designs have become the hallmark of Apple flagship products. Apple is no longer the design leader on the market with plenty of other smartphone makers and even PC makers stepping in to take away Apple's mantle. As I wrote recently for Notebookcheck, Apple is becoming synonymous with boring as a result, even if it continues to be spectacularly successful on the whole.

Steve Jobs once said, "There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been. And we've always tried to do that at Apple." This is not Apple today under CEO Tim Cook. Its MacBooks are very conventional, save, for the questionable Touch Bar and its flaghship iPhone is headed for a third year fundamentally unchanged, unsightly display notch included. In fact, the competition is doing a better job of skating to where the puck is going to be. 

Vivo's APEX Concept Phone 2019 is a perfect example. It is fashioned from a single unibody glass structure that is both buttonless and portless -- it is the kind of stunning and perhaps controversial design that we used to expect Apple to deliver first. Same too for the Asus Zenbook Pro Duo, which features an advanced dual touch screen design that leaves Apple MacBooks eating its dust for innovative design. There are many other examples of both smartphone and notebook designs from Android and PC makers that eclipse Apple's offerings for things like display resolution and other design features that we used to expect it to deliver first -- Oppo's breakthrough in-display selfie camera is but another example of this.

The past few years have seen Jony Ive focused primarily on bringing Jobs' vision for the Apple Park campus to life and it is undoubtedly an iconic building design; but that is not what will, or has, defined Apple - this is has always been its hardware. Under Tim Cook (who has been content to penny pinch by the said rehashing of product designs knowing they will sell to the Apple faithful anyway), Apple is pivoting to offset declining iPhone sales by focusing more on software and services. Little wonder that Ive is just the latest of several Apple product designers to leave the company. Notably, he is also taking the highly regarded Australian-born designer Marc Newson with him to form LoveFrom, Ive's new design studio.

Although Apple and Ive have been at pains to point out that Ive's relationship with Apple will continue as the first design client for LoveFrom, it will focus on the only Apple product in recent times that has held interest for Ive - the Apple Watch. This is where both Ive and Newson expended most of their energies. Perhaps only the new Mac Pro design also bares significant input of the two designers and the timing of Ive's departure following its recent launch suggests that this in fact the case. While everyone can see that the new Mac Pro will be a more effective product solution than the circular "trash can" Mac Pro it replaces, the 2013 design is arguably more iconic, if not simply more adventurous.

So, Ive leaves Apple not on a design high, but at a time where much of its product line is comprised of rehashed designs. While nice enough, none are the kind of cutting-edge industrial designs that made Apple the envy of the consumer technology market. Given this scenario, it is not like Apple is going to especially miss him. In his role as Chief Design Officer (effectively akin to an emeritus professor title in an academic institution), Ive hasn't been central to the design of Apple's products for the past few years. And it probably shows. His interests have been elsewhere and starting up his own design firm is a natural evolution of where things have been heading. Five or ten years ago, losing Ive would have been a massive blow. Losing him now isn't going to dramatically shift day-to-day operations at Cupertino, even if the market has reacted with some shock at his departure.

 

 

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https://www.notebookcheck.net/Opinion-Jony-Ive-leaves-Apple-but-it-s-not-on-design-a-high.426697.0.html

2019-06-29 10:05:51Z
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He designed the iPhone. Now Jony Ive is leaving Apple - CNN Business

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2019-06-28 15:27:17Z
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Apple will be fine without Jony Ive - Engadget

You could smell the hysteria at the news. Where will Apple, a company famous for its commitment to design and its famous designer, go from here? Sir Jonathan Ive's departure, however, may be less of a catastrophe than some think. What if, actually, this isn't just a good thing, but a sign of an even more positive future for Apple?

Apple has always prided itself on its culture, rather than its personnel. Tim Cook once said that Steve Jobs' greatest contribution to the company was its culture and work to nurture new talent within it. But Apple also lionized Ive as an embodiment of its design skill, as evidenced by his regular (much-parodied) appearances in product videos.

But Ive was never a single figure in Apple's design team, just the most famous -- and the most powerful. Apple may have avoided the PR shock if it had other designers who were similarly visible outside of the company. Some longstanding rumors suggest any potential successors to the Ive mantle were pushed out of the company by the designer himself.

Ive's departure may not hurt too much because Apple's hardware division isn't going to be the only thing the company is focusing on in future. The smartphone and tablet markets won't see the sort of explosive growth that they have done in the past. And, as the company pushes into services as a key vehicle for profit, there's less need for a superstar hardware designer hanging around.

It's not as if the iPhone and iPad, among other products, are going to see radical innovation now, anyway. Their forms are pretty settled at this point, and it must have been a challenge for Ive to come up with a new tweak on a design he (arguably) perfected in 2012. And even inside Apple, Ive has always sought to design other products, like a limited-edition Leica, Diamond Ring and a watch. Not to mention Ive giving notes on how Kylo Ren's lightsaber should work.

In fact, some of Ive's obsessions saw him butting up against the laws of physics in a way that he must have found frustrating. For someone who wanted his designs to be unobtrusive, the lens humps on the iPhone and iPad cameras must have rankled. Similarly, Intel chips have lagged sufficiently that a laptop redesign would be tough, these days. And Ive's desire to make thinner and lighter products sometimes made them less usable.

Take his infamous line from 2015, when Ive said that people were essentially using their phones in the wrong way. Rather than admit that his obsession with size and weight meant the iPhone battery was far too small, he blamed the user for their overuse. Similarly, the new MacBook Pro keyboard, built to shave precious millimeters from the laptop's body, has met plenty of derision.

On the other hand, his philosophy achieved the impossible feat of shrinking a phone into a device as small as the Apple Watch. It's a product that, for all its flaws, every one at Apple deserves praise for creating in an era of clunky wearables. But it wouldn't be a bad thing if Ive's successors, Evans Hankey and Alan Dye, loosen up on some of his more famous hangups. A gram of weight, here, for a bigger battery; a less elegant design for a more functional keyboard, there.

Neither figure has been in the spotlight much until now, but we can expect to see more of them in the near future. Both handled Ive's responsibilities for software (Dye) and hardware (Hankey) while he was working to finish Apple Park. So they're both used to the day-to-day parts of the job, without the increased scrutiny their new titles will involve.

In many ways, Ive leaves Apple with the most settled product line it has had in years, with the Mac Pro rounding out the set. The iPhone and iPad are both in rude health, and there's little more that can be done with the iMac these days. If Apple does make an ARM laptop in the near future, then it's likely Ive and his team have already designed and built the chassis for it.

We'll still be living in Jonathan Ive's world, it's just that he'll be off in his office, building a new toilet, or standard lamp... or something.

In this article: Alan Dye, apple, Design, Evans Hankey, gear, Jonathan Ive, mobile, personal computing, personalcomputing, Sir Jonathan Ive, Tim Cook

All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

By Daniel Cooper @danielwcooper

After training to be an intellectual property lawyer, Dan abandoned a promising career in financial services to sit at home and play with gadgets. He lives in Norwich, U.K., with his wife, his books and far too many opinions on British TV comedy. One day, if he's very, very lucky, he'll live out his dream to become the executive producer of Doctor Who before retiring to Radio 4.

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https://www.engadget.com/2019/06/28/apple-jony-ive-departure/

2019-06-28 15:00:40Z
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Vergecast: Jony Ive leaving Apple and public betas arriving - The Verge

What a topical show we’ve got this week on The Vergecast. I’m going to be honest, there’s a little bit more editing than usual here.

Initially, we began the episode with some overviews of the public beta software for Apple’s iPadOS, iOS 13, and macOS Catalina. The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller discussed what’s different with the updates and how the iPad feels now compared to using an iPhone. My favorite part is when Dieter questions what it even means to be an iPhone.

But halfway through the show, Apple put out a press release announcing that Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer and one of the most influential people in Apple history, will be leaving the company later this year to start his own design firm.

It’s great to have the crew reacting to this organically on tape (check out the cold open), but I don’t think we could have done the show without starting off with this breaking news in the tech world, so we went back and started over.

We also didn’t want to lose all that great tape about these betas, so we kept all that stuff in and just added it later in the show. So this is me letting you know that we recorded the software chat before knowing Jony Ive was leaving Apple. The timeline is moved all around, but it’s fine. You’ll get it.

After that, it is back to the original timeline (“where actions have real consequences,” says Paul Miller), and we’ve got our usual updates on Foxconn’s factory in Wisconsin (happy anniversary!), Paul’s weekly segment “The sweetest pis,” and some analysis on Bill Gates saying Microsoft losing to Android is his “greatest mistake”

I’m sure there’s a lot more that happened during this episode that I don’t remember (another disclosure, I was watching the Democratic debate while editing), so I guess you’re going to have to listen to it all to stay informed.

Stories discussed this week:

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https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/28/19102536/vergecast-podcast-360-jony-ive-leaving-apple-ios13-ipados-macos-catalina-public-beta

2019-06-28 14:44:06Z
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Jony Ive Once Insisted on Apple Car Without a Steering Wheel - MacRumors

Following the big news that Jony Ive will be resigning from Apple later this year after nearly 30 years at the company, new details continue to emerge about the iconic designer and his work over the years.

One of many secretive projects that Ive worked on was the so-called Apple Car, according to The Information. The report claims that Ive came up with multiple early prototypes of the autonomous vehicle, including one made out of wood and leather that lacked a steering wheel at Ive's insistence.

Ive instead wanted the vehicle to be controlled by Siri, and to demonstrate the concept to Apple CEO Tim Cook, the report claims a nearby actress pretended to be Siri by responding to voice commands from Apple's executives. It is unclear exactly how this would have worked or how serious Apple was about the idea.

The report adds that Ive also worked on a much-rumored but never-released Apple television set and early prototypes of the Apple Watch.

In an internal memo to Apple employees obtained by BuzzFeed News, Cook noted that Ive has collaborated closely with Apple's COO Jeff Williams for many years. Williams, who has led development of the Apple Watch since its inception, will spend more of his time working with Apple's design team in their studio.

Cook's full memo:

Team,

I'm writing to let you know about some changes to the ET involving two people who embody Apple's values and whose work will help define Apple's future.

I'm happy to announce that Sabih Khan has been named to the executive team as senior vice president of Operations reporting to Jeff Williams. Sabih has worked on every Apple product since the late 90s, always committed to delighting our customers while advancing quality, sustainability and responsibility in manufacturing. His team makes possible some of the most beloved — and most complex — products in the world, and Sabih leads them with heart. I am thrilled to have him overseeing our supply chain.

Today, we also mark another important evolution for our company. After nearly 30 years at Apple, Jony Ive is starting an independent design firm which will count Apple among its primary clients and will depart the company as an employee later this year. Jony's contributions are legendary, from the central role he played in Apple's revival beginning in the late 90s, through the iPhone and perhaps his most ambitious project, Apple Park, where he has put so much of his energy and care in the past few years. I am proud to call Jony a friend, and those who know him know his ideas and curiosities are boundless. We will all benefit — as individuals who value great design, and as a company — as he pursues his passions and continues his dedicated work with Apple.

Of all his accomplishments, Jony cites the team he helped to build as one of his proudest. His longtime collaborators, Evans Hankey and Alan Dye, are strong stewards of Apple's design ethic and creative culture. Collaboration and teamwork are defining features of Apple's success across the company.

Evans and Alan will report to Jeff Williams. As many of you know, Jony and Jeff have been close collaborators and partners for many years. In particular, Jeff's leadership in developing Apple Watch brought together a cross-organizational team, unprecedented in scope, to produce Apple's most personal device ever. This is what Apple does at its best: elevating a category beyond its imagined limits, and revealing how a single device can be so much more than the sum of its parts. I'm incredibly excited about the design team's work, both underway and yet to come.

Tim

In line with a Bloomberg report, The Information claims that Ive's day-to-day involvement at Apple has already been declining since the Apple Watch launched in 2015. Ive's recent focus has been on the company's Apple Park headquarters, which had a formal grand opening in May.

Apple announced that Ive will be forming an independent design studio named LoveFrom that will count Apple among its "primary clients," suggesting that he will continue to have some influence on the company's products.

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https://www.macrumors.com/2019/06/28/jony-ive-apple-car-without-steering-wheel/

2019-06-28 13:42:00Z
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Americans still love Mexican beers Corona and Modelo - CNN

Shares of Constellation soared 7% in early trading Friday after the company reported earnings and sales that topped forecasts and also issued a solid outlook for the rest of this fiscal year.

Constellation, which imports the Corona and Modelo brands from Mexico, posted a more than 7% jump in beer sales and nearly 12% increase in operating profits from its beer unit compared to a year ago.

"Our iconic beer portfolio continues to be a cornerstone of growth in the U.S. beer industry," said Constellation CEO Bill Newlands in a statement.

The solid beer performance helped offset a decline in revenue and earnings from its wine and spirits business, which owns the Kim Crawford wine and Svedka vodka brands. Constellation reached a deal earlier in April to sell some struggling wine brands.

Constellation shares are now up about 25% this year. The stock briefly plunged in May due to concerns that President Donald Trump would impose higher tariffs on products from Mexico unless the country took a harder stance on illegal immigration to the United States.

But Trump dropped the threat earlier this month after the two countries came to an agreement on border enforcement.

Constellation is also poised to benefit from the boom in legal marijuana sales in Canada and some US states as well as increased demand for products derived from CBD -- the non-psychoactive component of cannabis -- following the passage of the Farm Bill. That's because Constellation owns about a 37% stake in Canadian cannabis firm Canopy Growth (CGC).

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2019-06-28 13:34:00Z
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Apple and the end of the genius - The Verge

As the news about Jony Ive leaving Apple sinks in, you’ll be seeing a lot of people weighing in on what the Ive era of Apple meant and what’s next. That’s all for the good, because Ive was remarkably influential — a singular person who drove the design not just for Apple’s products, but for the industry at large. The only person who could claim the same level of both fame and influence was Steve Jobs himself.

It’s annoying to keep using the word “era,” but that’s the word. It sounds unnecessarily portentous for talking about designing computers, but it’s appropriate to the scale of this turnover. So, with Ive leaving, I’ll join in and say this: the era of the singular genius at Apple is over.

The truth is, it’s been over for some time. I would like you to take a look at this remarkable quote Tim Cook gave to the Financial Times, meant to assuage those who will argue that Apple is in serious trouble without Ive:

“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.”

There’s a much more pithy phrase for what Cook is talking about. It’s the phrase for when decisions are made by a consensus from a group instead of by one sole person. That phrase is, of course, “design by committee.”

It’s a damning phrase, so it’s no wonder that Cook avoided it. But make no mistake, that’s what he’s referring to here. It’s a scary thing to consider for Apple, because so much of our idea of what the company is and what it means has been tied up with the idea of a singular genius.

The singular genius is the mythos of how Apple was founded and how it became the global giant it is today. And I don’t mean “genius” just as “very smart,” but as the Romantic Genius — the person who is in touch with the sublime in a way the rest of us cannot understand. That version of “genius” still lives with us today and — like many potent concepts — turns out to be more of a social invention buttressed by technology (the need to assign value to copyrighted works) than some innate human divinity.

While Apple might have a good story about having been founded in a garage, the true founding myth of Apple is the myth of genius. You know the fable, which has the benefit of also being true. When Steve Jobs was in charge, Apple made amazing things: the Apple computer, the Mac. Jobs not in charge: the very bad ‘90s with Scully and the Newton. Jobs back in charge: the renaissance, the iPod, the iPhone.

After Steve Jobs, that mantle was passed to Jony Ive. And he quietly (quite literally) took it. It was important to our concept of Apple that there be a single, discerning decision maker. Somebody uncompromising about quality. Somebody with very good taste. A capital G Genius.

The genius is the opposite of the committee. John Gruber very correctly points out that it is deeply weird that the two people tapped as Ive’s successors report to the Chief Operating Officer. I agree, but mainly because it’s deeply weird at Apple.

There are two big changes to pick apart. First, there are two people replacing Ive, not one. And second: they report to the COO, not directly to Tim Cook. That is precisely the opposite of how Steve Jobs had set up Jony Ive at Apple. Here’s how Jobs himself described Ive’s role:

He’s not just a designer. That’s why he works directly for me. He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me. There’s no one who can tell him what to do, or to butt out. That’s the way I set it up.

Compare that quote about Ive to the earlier one from Cook about how product decisions are made. The difference is stark! Cook’s vision is not how we imagine Apple operates. As Gruber succinctly put it: “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.”

It’s far too early to know whether that level of worry is warranted. I do know that it comes from a real place — it’s a place where I also sit. From here, it looks like Apple has lost a step when it comes to design leadership. There are the easy dunks you can make on some of Apple’s products like the first Apple Pencil, the iPhone battery case, and the iPad Smart Keyboard. But there are much more fundamental worries about the MacBook’s keyboard, the length of time it took to recover from the “trashcan” Mac Pro, and the weirdly unergonomic Apple TV remote.

The thing about those missteps is we don’t know their cause. One way of thinking about them is that they stem from a lack of product focus — there’s no genius sending things back to the drawing board when they’re not good enough. Another, though, is that they stem from too much focus — focus on form over function, on making things thin and beautiful instead of making things usable.

In that framework, the problem was either that Jony Ive wasn’t paying attention or that he had too much power and misused it. That’s how the thinking goes, because our thinking about Apple has been defined by trusting in the taste of a singular genius, because design by committee is obviously worse than that.

The reality is that boiling down Apple’s design to those two contradictory explanations is reductive. Apple’s product strategy is not dictated by a single person anymore — and I wonder just how much even Ive drove it, especially in the last couple of years. Multiple stories — including this one from Bloomberg — suggest Ive hasn’t been as engaged as he once was.

Even though Ive is leaving, he’s still going to be around. More importantly, the team he led isn’t going anywhere and isn’t suddenly going to change their entire design philosophy overnight. At the very least, Apple designs products years in advance, so Ive’s designs are going to be with us for a little bit longer.

Nevertheless, his departure will have real consequences. The first consequence isn’t Apple’s problem, it’s ours: we should stop thinking of Apple as the singular expression of one person’s genius. History has moved beyond the Great Man theory, and so too should our ideas about how Apple operates.

When I look at some of the design decisions Apple has been making in both its hardware and software, the only word that comes to mind is “uncompromising.” That’s a virtue when it applies to a leader who is paying attention to quality, but it can be a vice when it applies to products that need to be used by messy, messy humans.

Committees are a pain, they’re not as mythic as a singular genius, they’re often more timid than they should be. But maybe what Apple design needs right now is a little less mythos and a little more compromise.

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https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/28/18870887/apple-jony-ive-design-genius-committee

2019-06-28 12:00:00Z
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