Some crazy absolutist comments on here and so much animosity. ? Ive’s had good and bad qualities like any other employee / leader, ones that needed to be balanced out by others. But I don’t think his impact can be denied. He’s one of the people who saved Apple and created multiple products that changed the industry. His partnership with Steve was a once in a century event. There was no way that streak could continue forever. I think if you’re writing your comment on a device Ive helped create you could temper the hate just a bit.
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'After Steve' Examines the Tensions That Led to Jony Ive's Departure From Apple
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He did some fantastic designs during his reign, but he was also at the helm during some very questionable design decisions, such as the butterfly keyboard.
Haters gonna hate.
The absolutely fantastic fact is that now Apple seems to have an audience of engineers or aspiring ones, people who make design paper ass.
And, the flat edges were taken from the iPhone 4, another Ives design..
You should have seen the original design before it was revised to the released version!
I can understand the hate for his obsession with making everything thinner but there's a lot of unjust hate for Ives in this thread and I'm only on page 3 of 10 lol. There's a lot of people constructing a Jony Ives straw-man that either are exaggerating or misremembering his role at Apple.
Heres a thought, Apple's greatest and worst creations were vanity projects. They just wanted to see what was possible even if it wasn't the most practical or was designed to even last as long as its previous computers would. This may sound bad but it resulted in quite a few great designs, from an esthetic sense. Some of those systems were quite a pain to repair and take apart, which I hate, but they did shake things up. Had the numbers or money people been in charge they would have kept going with more conservative designs while the rest of the industry kept getting faster and cheaper. These vanity projects probably helped turned things around because it garnered the attention of people who would not have paid as much for these systems as Apple asked for at the time. It also attracted the creatives which really helped them in the long run. The soul of Apple was the people in it who wanted to create something different, to make a computer into something you really fell in love with because they probably saw it as more than just a money making thing. Now its a money making thing primarily. The only risk they take today is in how much can they charge for something without alienating its customers.
There’s also a very large amount of people in this very thread who have a fundamental misunderstanding of who Ive was and his role at Apple. Literally, on every page of this thread, there’s somebody chiming in that has no idea what they’re talking about.
The AirPods, the first iPad airs, Apple Pencil 2, and the Apple Watch S4 were some of the few that I really liked without reservation in the post-Jobs era up until Ive left. The white antenna bands on the iPhone 6, iPhone Smart Battery Case, or the Apple Pencil 1's charging were some of the worst in my opinion. Everything else was just okay.
Most of his post-2011 hardware designs would have been great in a vacuum, but did not always consider the hardware realities or practicalities for the user. For example, if the M1 was around when the 12 inch MacBook was introduced, things might have been quite different. The trash can MP might have been very nice by itself if it didn't need a spaghetti of cable plugged in constantly in the back. My favorite era of Apple design was the last of his collaborations with Jobs, like the pre-retina MacBook Air, iPhone 5s, and the 6th gen iPod nanos. They were robust and functional while being great pieces of industrial design.
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They would be super niche products for apple. Selling far less than the Apple TV
Wintel & Android people.
People who, thanks to that idiocy of using x86 and who buy iPhone to brag (which I boast then ..) are here but do not even know why.
People who could safely use a bazooka as a can opener, among them the ultimate are the engineers, who have always swallowed bitterly with Apple since they no longer chose beige for the Mac case.
Which is still Apple’s current mouse. Having to flip it over onto its back to charge it is asinine. I don’t care that it will not need another recharge for days. It still seems to get low when I have a deadline and I end up partial charging (10 minutes) to make sure it will last until whatever I need to finish is finished. Which probably isn’t good for the life of the battery. Having the ability to plug the mouse in AND still be able to use it doesn’t seem to be rocket science but I guess it is.
Or you just go and buy a Logitech mouse and not have to worry about it.
I'm guessing the trashcan needs an excuse for the tech to split up into three separate PCB's with chips requiring about an equal amount of moderate cooling whereas the engineering is now all about one mega-SOC.
But yeah, if you put the Studio next to the Pro 2013 and ask someone not familiar with these Apple product lines, they'd probably think the old Pro was the newer device.
I'm one of the few who liked the small size. Could control it just with finger tips.
Not sure why people had trouble using it...like every other mouse, you hold it on the end without the cord.
Apple device costs have become absurd. Apple would be well served by price rationalization. Not sure if this is all Cook and profit, all function with boundary pushing hardware but even wealthy people are thinking twice about hardware replacement. Maybe it’s an eco choice. 
Photos and it’s connections with iCloud need usability improvements. We need a better workflow for focusing on and sharing or saving our best photos.
iCloud needs more flexibility of subscription cost vs functionality. iCloud Drive size options are awkward.
Photos and it’s connections with iCloud need usability improvements. We need a better workflow for focusing on and sharing or saving our best photos.
iCloud needs more flexibility of subscription cost vs functionality. iCloud Drive size options are awkward.
Ive has a place in Apple's history. It's good to make a leap-of-faith from time to time. But overall, there is only so much experimentation that people can take before they bail.
Witness the steady trickle of Android users to iOS, despite the price-tag and other issues with iOS.
In the end, people value stability a lot.
Thank god, the pragmatists prevailed at Apple.
Witness the steady trickle of Android users to iOS, despite the price-tag and other issues with iOS.
In the end, people value stability a lot.
Thank god, the pragmatists prevailed at Apple.
How about it *wasn't* a mess? Forstall was forced to come up with Apple Maps within a short period of time that was unrealistic even by Apple's standard due to a crash with Google. And later Apple Maps spent years, order of magnitude more resources and multiple reboot before they got it right. Blaming Maps fiasco on Forstall was a power play to remove him. Forstall stood up for his colleagues, and ultimately got him removed.
god no, it's already bad they got rid of universal ports to bring back the power/hdmi/sd slot
problem is apple didn't have Jobs to push the rest of the industry to get on board with USBc - they all wanted to keep cheap ports.
I don’t think that he would. Because it Mx chips run much cooler than x86 chips this would give him an opportunity to make laptops even thinner: just get rid of those bulky cooling fans. Locking down people about system memory size means you don’t have to provide slots for memory upgrades either. Need more memory? Buy a new computer. I can see Ive liking that philosophy.
He probably would throw a fit about increasing the number of ports.
So, the management designs the products now? They are to blame for the terrible top case design, I see. And because they felt nostalgic they separated the trackpad, battery and keyboard again, you know, too keep things fresh after 4 years, technically 5 considering the MacBook.
Are you serious?
This. And taking reality into account is part of the job. Something went wrong for the butterfly keyboard to become the only option in the entire laptop line-up, and for almost every laptop of the time to have heat/noise/throttling problems.
Not enough is said about Jony Ive's brilliant design for AirPods and even moreso for the AirPods case design.
It is Apple's best product since the iPhone and currently sells more than 100 million sets a year.
Any discussion of Jony Ive which does not prominently feature AirPods as an all-time design icon is seriously missing out.