'After Steve' Examines the Tensions That Led to Jony Ive's Departure From Apple

[MisterK]

This tension between aesthetics vs utility vs marketing vs vision has become infinitely more difficult externalized outside of Steve Jobs. And that makes sense. Apple famously organizes internally with a DRI (or Directly Responsible Individual) around every product and feature as the driving force. They call the shots, make whatever concessions and compromises to balance all these angles and how they weight these things makes things more or less "Apple". When Jobs died, Apple lost the greatest DRI in business history. He was more of a designer than Federighi, more of an engineer than Ive, more of a visionary than Cook... and I think Cook is brilliant. It's just hard to replace someone who was so rounded across all of these facets and his taste was what so many fans fell in love with about the company.

That's all to say that I don't think the answer is for "Apple to become more utilitarian" or "Apple to become more aesthetic focused". It's that they need for find a product visionary. And that person needn't be the CEO. Tim Cook can keep doing his thing.. He's great at it. But they need a cross-departmental product lead.

 

[EdT]

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.

Phones weren’t the only devices that Apple emphasized how thin their new models were. I think that Ive would actually love to be designing around Apple Silicon technology. He could make laptops even thinner and lighter and still get impressive performance increases.

Doesn’t really affect his love of the Butterfly keyboard, and he probably would be dead set against ADDING ports back onto computers. I think that where he wanted to go was completely wireless. Everything connects wirelessly including peripherals and monitors so no need for physical ports at all.

 

[mjs916]

People who think Jobs tempered Ive obviously never tried to use the original iMac's mouse.

They looked really cool in our yearbook/newspaper classroom but they were completely round so hurt your hands after awhile. Ugh.

 

[hybrid_x]

Blaming Cook for "not being a good partner for Ive" is a bit of a cop-out, and essentially proves that Ive learned nothing from his time working in partnership with Jobs.

When Steve was ill, he should have been coaching Jony on how to challenge himself to be a design leader, instead of relying on Steve's insights all the time, because he knew he wasn't always going to be around to challenge Ive.

Ive's focus on making Apple laptops thin-and-light above all, removing things people valued like swappable batteries, upgradeable RAM and storage, and ports people actually use on a daily basis, a keyboard design that was prone to failure, the useless Touch Bar, and poor thermal management, were all signs that he was out of touch with being a designer of products people need to do their work. Instead, saw himself as a designer of fashionable objects of art. He wasn't designing for users. He was designing for himself.

The story of the Apple Watch launch just cements that.

 

[techfreak23]

His initial approach to the Apple Watch was pretty laughable. He tried to position it as a fashion accessory, but many (including myself) got the original Watch for the fitness tracking and notifications. The $10k gold Edition model of the Watch was ridiculous too. Sure, some people bought it, but that was Ive’s attempt of positioning the device as a high end fashion item like a Rolex or something. Rolex doesn’t need software or hardware updates and can last for decades. The first gen Watch became obsolete after series 1 and 2 came out the following year and was dropped in software support when watchOS 5 was released. I don’t blame the finance and marketing teams for not liking his strategy. Glad that they changed the strategy the following year.

 

[chucker23n1]

Phones weren’t the only devices that Apple emphasized how thin their new models were. I think that Ive would actually love to be designing around Apple Silicon technology. He could make laptops even thinner and lighter and still get impressive performance increases.

I'm glad he isn't. The 2021 14/16 MBP is great as it is. No, it isn't as attractive as the 2016 was. But it's far more functional. And given that this is literally the only "pro" laptop Apple is offering, it better focus on functionality more than attractiveness. And that's where Ive-era Apple fundamentally went wrong. They had an entire laptop lineup consisting entirely of machines designed around thinness. And that's on top of their desktops also being severely compromised.

Doesn’t really affect his love of the Butterfly keyboard, and he probably would be dead set against ADDING ports back onto computers. I think that where he wanted to go was completely wireless. Everything connects wirelessly including peripherals and monitors so no need for physical ports at all.

Yeah, well, there's kind of a point where people just lose him and buy from Dell instead.

 

[spiderman0616]

Blaming Cook for "not being a good partner for Ive" is a bit of a cop-out, and essentially proves that Ive learned nothing from his time working in partnership with Jobs.

When Steve was ill, he should have been coaching Jony on how to challenge himself to be a design leader, instead of relying on Steve's insights all the time, because he knew he wasn't always going to be around to challenge Ive.

Ive's focus on making Apple laptops thin-and-light above all, removing things people valued like swappable batteries, upgradeable RAM and storage, and ports people actually use on a daily basis, was a sure sign that he was out of touch with being a designer of products people need to do their work, and instead, saw himself as a designer of fashionable objects of art. He wasn't designing for users. He was designing for himself.

The story of the Apple Watch launch just cements that.

It's silly season again in Apple reporting because the holidays have been over for months and WWDC isn't for another couple months. There's no notable news, so it all has to be bad news to keep the clicks coming. This Tripp Mickle book isn't even the worst of it. Jason Snell is over on MacWorld preaching doom and gloom because of supply chain issues, 9to5Mac was posting clickbait garbage all weekend, and the iPad is apparently doomed again, but this time it's because of supply constraints. Like the old Yogi Berra joke about the restaurant that nobody goes to anymore because it's too crowded. Except in this case Apple said "The iPad is severely supply constrained right now" and everyone else said, "Nope, it's because iPadOS sucks."

The articles and editorials and books written by half-wits that don't know anything about Apple are just a small fraction of the problem. The sites that run with them ad nauseum just to drum up anger and arguments just feed the machine. It could be argued that I'm feeding it right now with this response. Best to NOT do what I'm currently doing and ignore all of it. Stock price of any given company is mostly nonsense. Speculation on rumors and entire novels being written based on one anecdote are not even worth reading for the most part.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

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.

Actually, it was exactly the opposite of what you were saying that’s been reported.
Apparently, Apple’s maps contract with google allowed for one more year of Google maps on the iPhone, meaning up through 2013 and including iOS6.
It was Scott who pushed Apple to just go ahead and make their own as fast as possible just to ditch Google, even before they had to.
After it came out and it was terrible, he refused to sign an apology letter, wanting to take an “antenna gate” style approach to the whole event. Basically a Steve Jobs type “you’re using it wrong, just deal with it” type thing.
And that’s why he was let go, and apparently the people inside Apple, these colleagues that you said he was defending, celebrated his downfall because he was just that insufferable.
Apparently without Steve there to moderate, Scott pretty much got along with no one, was hated by most, and couldn’t even be in the same room with some including Ive.
The difference between Steve and Scott was that Steve could inspire people. Sure he was ruthless, but overall people that worked with him have positive thoughts about him.
Scott was the opposite. He was just hated by everyone, he was pompous, unlikable, overly political, and thought very highly of himself.
Even Tony Fidel, the man responsible for the iPod, said that “he got what he deserved.”
Also, it’s quite interesting that almost a decade later, no other tech companies have tried scooping up Scott. I wonder why that could be…

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

Also for those who think that Steve Jobs wasn’t against upgradability, those nonremovable batteries began in 2009, under Steve Jobs.
The First MacBook Pro with non-upgradable ram only came out seven and a halfmonths after his death, you better believe he knew about and played some part in approving it

 

[citysnaps]

Plain and simple.. Jobs failed at most of his projects, had a few hits and one big hit (iPhone) which came at a time when the Chinese developed new miniature hardware that Apple put together with good software.
Oh yes, there was another hit of Jobs: he knew that Cook was the man to bring Apple to new heights and cook delivered every year since.

And... Jobs and Apple learned a ton partnering with Motorola on the ROKR. At that time Motorola was pretty much on top of cellular communications. The top three companies were referred to as MEN (Motorola, Ericsson, and Nokia) in the industry. Back then all three were very secretive with their techniques and technology relating to cellular communications - both on the handset and basestations sides.

Without that relationship with Motorola, and the knowledge acquired as a result, I don't believe Apple would have been able to launch iPhone when the did. I will say that was a shrewd move by Jobs.

 

[Lioness~]

Wow, I am really surprised that Ive is getting so much flak. Although I understand, I am a design nut and I loved his presentations for Apple. Ive really was so much Apple, his magic did work for a long time.
And I think Ive has outgrown Apple at the end.

That is exactly the point. Jony did outgrow designing for only Apple, not the other way around.
I wasn't surprised he left, I was more surprised he stayed as long as he did after Steve died. But grieving takes its time too.

I am sure there's a lot of other things he want to explore designing. Regardless of what Apple users think of his today's exploration in the design field.

 

[chucker23n1]

Jason Snell is over on MacWorld preaching doom and gloom because of supply chain issues

I don't think that's a fair assessment of Snell.

 

[txscott]

TC has done his job. He has created shareholder value. Lots of it. And not just for hedge funds or other institutional holders, for millions of regular people's retirement savings. He has done it so well that AAPL is almost as good of a proxy for the S&P as an ETF like SPY.

The job of company management is, first and foremost, to create shareholder value. With market cap of $2.55 Trillion, even when the stock is ~$30 off of its high and up from ~$390 Billion in 2011, few stock holders can argue with what has transpired.

Challenges abound today (they always will). The increase in value of the company was partly fueled by production efficiencies gained in China and expansion of sales in the Chinese market. How quickly TC can pivot away from those exposures will impact the success of the company over the next 5 years. Navigating regulatory environment changes in the EU, and possibly the US, will also be a key factor.

Napoleon said that military amateurs think about strategy and tactics while professionals talk about logistics (and I would add operational capabilities). The truth of those statements holds true today and can be seen easily in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The same holds true of companies. The operational art trumps theory. I would suggest that TC was the power behind Jobs. Had Apple been unable to execute, the brilliant ideas would not have mattered.

 

[8CoreWhore]

If by "soul" they mean Macs that Mac fans hate, then good, Apple lost it's "soul."

 

[EdT]

I'm glad he isn't. The 2021 14/16 MBP is great as it is. No, it isn't as attractive as the 2016 was. But it's far more functional. And given that this is literally the only "pro" laptop Apple is offering, it better focus on functionality more than attractiveness. And that's where Ive-era Apple fundamentally went wrong. They had an entire laptop lineup consisting entirely of machines designed around thinness. And that's on top of their desktops also being severely compromised.



Yeah, well, there's kind of a point where people just lose him and buy from Dell instead.

Not saying that I agreed with his priorities. I remember presentations where they announced that a device was 0.2 mm thinner than last year’s model. That’s 0.007874 of an inch. Make the device 1 mm thicker and increase the battery by most of that amount and you will add hours onto how long that the battery will last for most people. Any and all of the camera bumps are are probably thicker than 1 mm is.

 

[Xand&Roby]

If by "soul" they mean Macs that Mac fans hate, then good, Apple lost it's "soul."

Wintel users & wannabe engineers, not Mac fan.

 

[DaveTheRave]

IMO Ive didn’t work without Steve. Steve was the practical balance to some of Ive’s more extravagant tendencies. I hated the original Apple Watch launch - it felt so pompous and like Apple wanted to be some sort of tech Burberry. That was the last thing I wanted.

Rebranding the Apple Watch to a fitness accessory saved the entire product line.

Agree. I was confused by the fashion emphasis when it launched. It was the first time - in my opinion - that Apple released a product in search of a problem to solve.

I guess that’s why Angela what’s-her-name didn’t last long either. Moving away from fashion made her fashion retail skills less relevant.

 

[chucker23n1]

Not saying that I agreed with his priorities. I remember presentations where they announced that a device was 0.2 mm thinner than last year’s model. That’s 0.007874 of an inch. Make the device 1 mm thicker and increase the battery by most of that amount and you will add hours onto how long that the battery will last for most people. Any and all of the camera bumps are are probably thicker than 1 mm is.

Yeah, the iPhone 13 camera bump seems to be about 2mm.

I think I wouldn't mind the entire phone being 2mm thicker to avoid a bump, and as you say, the battery might even be thicker as an added bonus (but this might make the overall thing too heavy). I'm guessing their market research says most customers would dislike that.

I didn't even mind the very-thin 2015 MacBook. It's "alright, let's bring multiple of those design cues to all laptops" where I think things went south. On top of that, Apple was unlucky in that Intel's Core M strategy failed. If they were to do the Air like that again, today, with an M2? Sure, maybe? Might be quite popular.

 

[Xand&Roby]

Not saying that I agreed with his priorities. I remember presentations where they announced that a device was 0.2 mm thinner than last year’s model. That’s 0.007874 of an inch. Make the device 1 mm thicker and increase the battery by most of that amount and you will add hours onto how long that the battery will last for most people. Any and all of the camera bumps are are probably thicker than 1 mm is.

What haters pretend to forget is that the subtlety trend doesn’t launch Apple but Samsung.

Dell played Samsung’s part in laptops.

It is not that because we are surrounded by a mass of imbeciles we have all become imbeciles, someone with a minimum of memory is still there.

And at least someone is not hypocritical.

 

[Silencio]

Personally, I think trying to market the Apple Watch as a high-end fashion accessory was a far greater sign that Apple was losing its soul, and was completely antithetical to the company that was founded to create "the computer for the rest of us" or "a bicycle for the mind."

Ive is a brilliant industrial designer, there's no questioning that. The problem was, he was given responsibilities that fell well outside his areas of expertise, such as setting the marketing direction for products or even overseeing software UI/UX.

I can live with relatively boring Apple ID for a while and enjoy the rapid innovation being produced by the Apple Sillcon team. I can't say the Mac Studio is a terribly inspiring design, but the bang for the buck it provides is excellent, so I will be buying quite a few.

 

[Xand&Roby]

I can't say the Mac Studio is a terribly inspiring design

Design?

What design?!

It is a corpse assembled by engineers, you can see a mile away, even the texture of the ventilation is not consistent with other professional desktop Macs.

It’s an stretched out Mac mini, an unspeakable crap.

And if I know a little about the engineers Apple will have heat dissipation problems if used for what you really need, the Mac Pro 2013 had them which was a tube with the fan on it, imagine this dissipating air from one side.

 

[jakebrosy]

I don't believe we would have the new Apple Studio if Ive were still at Apple. And we would probably still be stuck with the (polarising) Touch Bar on MB keyboards.

It appeared that Ive was more interested in slimming products to the point of uselessness than considering what the user really wanted. I don't need my desktop monitor to be super slim: it sits on a desk and I don't lug it around with me. The MBA yes: it's a form-first premise. The MBP no: I need ports.

I'm glad he's gone.

 

[KPOM]

Phones weren’t the only devices that Apple emphasized how thin their new models were. I think that Ive would actually love to be designing around Apple Silicon technology. He could make laptops even thinner and lighter and still get impressive performance increases.

Doesn’t really affect his love of the Butterfly keyboard, and he probably would be dead set against ADDING ports back onto computers. I think that where he wanted to go was completely wireless. Everything connects wirelessly including peripherals and monitors so no need for physical ports at all.

I agree that Ive would probably like designing around the M1 series. The 12” MacBook seems like the perfect “envelope” for the M1. Just give it the improved keyboard and make the USB-C port a Thunderbolt port (and maybe replace the audio jack with a second TB port) and it would rocket to the top of my “must buy” list. I’m surprised they didn’t try to revive the 12” MacBook, but let’s see what they do with the M2 MacBook Air.

 

[AbhiAchShan]

And, the flat edges were taken from the iPhone 4, another Ives design..

True. Most of the people here blame Jony for something he was not responsible (Actually such decisions are taken by the HW Engineering Team like USB C only, Thinner, No Fans etc.)

 

[troublador]

Design?

What design?!

It is a corpse assembled by engineers, you can see a mile away, even the texture of the ventilation is not consistent with other professional desktop Macs.

It’s an stretched out Mac mini, an unspeakable crap.

And if I know a little about the engineers Apple will have heat dissipation problems if used for what you really need, the Mac Pro 2013 had them which was a tube with the fan on it, imagine this dissipating air from one side.

Of course it has a design. It's a desktop computer. What do you expect it to look like? The Venus de Milo? And the texture of the ventilation? Really? It's on the underside for Christ's sake. Who cares?