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Funny how people who know nothing about design and Ive's work shout so much hate out.
I don't hate the guy, but I think it's long overdue to let him go. Clearly, he wanted to do his own thing and felt restricted by the contract limitations he was under, working for Apple.

He did some great things for Apple's design in the beginning, but it's a little odd he was allegedly frustrated that Apple's board was populated with directors with backgrounds in finance and operations rather than technology. I mean, Apple always pitted the technology/engineering people against design people like himself.

When you let the technology folks run the whole thing, you tend to get generic-looking boxes. Laptops are thick "bricks" and likely noisy with a lot of cooling fans. They want the most powerful CPU and GPU, the most and the fastest mass storage, and the most and fastest RAM. If making it lighter, thinner or more attractive means you have to compromise on those things, the light, thin, attractive stuff is out the window!

When you let designers like Ives call the shots, you get obsession with light-weight, thin, and beautiful looking finishes on the outside of things. The tech people have to find ways to shoehorn something usable into those shells.

Steve Jobs was the right kind of jerk to make the two come together in generally good compromises. He'd make people like Ives go back and redo things hundreds of times if need-be, and he wouldn't accept technology ideas that didn't fit with whatever his dreams were about the capabilities of the final product. Obviously, Apple doesn't have someone like that in charge anymore and probably never will. Now, you've got people acting more like typical tech companies, worried about costs of production, ability to ramp up inventory by certain deadlines, etc. etc. The overall look of an Apple product is pretty well defined at this point too, so Ives isn't needed now to invent that.
 
Score:

Function: 75%
Form: 25%

yearly change:

Approx. 6% and growing (towards Function).

(Ive says board is bunch of bean counters. Ive no longer has job there)
 
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Funny how people who know nothing about design and Ive's work shout so much hate out.
They’re called customers. They don’t need to know about design theory, just design consequences. It was said that Steve knew what you wanted before you wanted it… Jony knows what he wants to want when you never will.
 
“Rumors have indicated that Ive left Apple because he became dispirited after the launch of the Apple Watch, with Ive reportedly feeling discontent as Apple was becoming less design focused and more focused on operations. Ive is said to have felt that Cook had little interest in the product development process, and he was allegedly frustrated that Apple's board was populated with directors with backgrounds in finance and operations rather than technology.”

Well, he’s not wrong there.
 
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They couldn't have ripped that bandaid off any slower if they had tried. Well, actually, I think that was the point. They did try. I think it was Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, and they probably were somewhat desperate about losing him. You'd have to be desperate to be a three trillion dollar company that is notoriously insular and outsource your most-prized asset—design—to a third party company. I have to think he made good contributions besides the things people lambast him for. Apple has gone back and forth throughout the years with making incredibly modular, easy to repair products, with some odd choices and less repairable products. Ive designed the Molar Mac, which definitely put function over form. Maybe with someone smarter at the helm with product design than Cook, Ive could have continued successfully with a sparring partner. Tim Cook's skills seem to be in the field of intimidation, international economy, and supply logistics. I think as sad as parts of his role are to the state of the world (the worst parts of globalization), he's very good at them. It just seems to be what he was already doing before Steve Jobs left and then died. I mean, they weren't even planning on Steve actually relenting control. As sick as he was, he was remaining chairman and probably would have continued providing product advice. They were probably all in denial. He's never actually been replaced. Not just in a "He can never be replaced" type way, but in a literal way. No one has taken the role he created, which was of tastemaker. Tim Cook is a COO who fills the ceremonial role of CEO, but he's not like other tech CEOs (not passionate about the actual products like even Mark Zuckerberg however much people might detest him). Under Cook, they've lost someone who by all accounts was a great NeXT software engineer and knew the iPhone OS in and out, Scott Forstall. They lost Ive. I'm in no position to work at any tech firm, but if I were, not sure I'd pick the one led by someone who seems like he'd be just as suited at being CEO of Herbalife.

TL;DR: In short, I think they had good reason to worry about losing him. They've already lost a lot more than just him, though. Tim Cook is good for shareholders, not sure if he's great for the people who loved Apple before Wall Street did.
 
Johnny Ive's more recent work gave us butterfly keyboards and touch bars. Sometimes, a guy just needs to know when to retire. Glad Apple forced it along before more damage could be done.
Don't forget, Ive's job is a designer, not an engineer. He worked brilliantly with Jobs, because Jobs had the strength and conviction of his own genius to know when to say no. Little Timmy is just a bean counter, gave Ives too much power, and then shot the messenger. Any impractical design that made it through is not Ive's fault, he merely produced the beautiful creations. It was up to the engineers to say no, that's not going to work, make it work around this functionality. It was/is up to Timmy to put the correct power structure in place, to make that happen.
 
Sad to see Jony's relationship with Apple come to an end.
Not surprised at all though. Anyone who have been with Apple since Steve's days have seen this coming. Surprised it took that long personally.

Tim and Jony, have seemed to me at least, to NOT have any kind of connection at all.

I am certain that Jony will survive totally fine without Tim's Apple of today.
We'll see how this affects Apple on long term.
It will, just as Steve's and Jony's Apple don't exist anymore either.
But financially it will of course continue to thrive under Tim's leadership. He is good at what he's doing. But he is not Steve and Jony, with how and what they built Apple from.

But that's life, it moves on, always.
Some things we will never see again, we adapt, change, grieve some, but at the end it's just tech for me today. Da#@mn good tech still though.
I don't watch keynotes with any other expectations than a product report today, they run in the background sometimes without sound, not unusual that I don't see a sh#@t of the presentation at all. Takes too much time, and are generally just plain boring, hyped and exhausting with all they try to push into it.
I rather check the news afterwards instead.

At Steve's and Jony's Apple it was like Christmas eve magic for a child, almost.
Thank you Steve & Jony.
 
You can tell Ive has barely input on the iPhone as it’s looked the same for the last 3 or 4 years!

Apple’s loss.
 
I‘m a little confuse, did I’ve design the butterfly keyboard or did engineering take his design and implement something based on it? The latter isn’t Ive’s fault.

Jony Ive was Sr. VP of Design. He would have been responsible for evaluating and deciding on the keyboard implementation based on the thinness and reliability tradeoffs.

In the 2015 Apple Special Event, the butterfly keyboard was the first thing Jony talked about and how it defined the thinness of the new MacBook.
 
Don't forget, Ive's job is a designer, not an engineer. He worked brilliantly with Jobs, because Jobs had the strength and conviction of his own genius to know when to say no. Little Timmy is just a bean counter, gave Ives too much power, and then shot the messenger. Any impractical design that made it through is not Ive's fault, he merely produced the beautiful creations. It was up to the engineers to say no, that's not going to work, make it work around this functionality. It was/is up to Timmy to put the correct power structure in place, to make that happen.

Yes this seems logical. And this sort of thing must be extremely common in corporations. So many things died with SJ.
 
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I am not going to bash Ive. He did some amazing things for Apple. But since Jobs passing, many times his obsession with thinness design was way ahead of function and some of his decisions were very odd.
Apple seems far more in balance now on that front.
It's not Ive's job to calculate the heat performance, it's the engineer's job. It's the management's job to make sure that the engineer's calculation provides Ive's with his minimum specs to work with. The failure wasn't in the design team, it was either in engineering, or in management.
 
Maybe Samsung or Huawei will hire him. Wouldn’t that be crazy?
 
Ive is form over function. The new laptops that walk back work Jony Ive oversaw are Apple's greatest ever.
He's a designer, his job is form over function. Function over form, is the engineer's job. The balance, is management's job, which is one of the many reasons why Apple flourished under the genius of Steve, but slops about randomly under Tim.
 
Bittersweet symphony indeed, when and where the Job's era ended we may finally decide or be told one day...
 
LOL

He was Senior Vice President of Industrial Design. You make it sound like Jony Ive worked in a silo and didn't have a team of hardware and mechanical engineers reporting to him.

Industrial design. Say that again, Industrial Design
 
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