Firing Jonny Ive was one of Apple's best decisions. The guy ruined an entire generation of MacBook Pros and churned out iPhones that barely lasted half a day, all to shave off 1 mm in thickness.
He made a few cool things in the early 2000s, but I find his designs to be lazy and really dull. It's clear that he's being used as hype tool for Open AI to make people think they're developing the next iPod/iPhone. The problem is that Apple has dominated because they've got the best supply chain and manufacturing relationships....not because they had an overrated designer. The design part is easy, and Ive wasn't even good at it....which is why he was let go.
Thinness was worth it. Without Apple constantly making them thinner, we’d still walking around with the (relatively speaking) bricks of early smart phones.
I don’t fault Apple for making this choice and especially at scale: it has made the whole category better; a category that includes billions of users.
A person can mitigate thinness (usually expressed as “lol battery life”) if it doesn’t suit them. But they cannot mitigate weight.
To make the iPhone work, Apple designed new SoC that could be small and light and low-power. They overcame battery life issues by not making fatter batteries but making better hand-computing devices. You were never gonna get that out of Samsung, et al, if they didn’t have to work desperately to try and keep up.
Of course, without Ive, Apple phones have been getting positively obese (sarcasm) which is why I’m intrigued by the iPhone Air even if it’s probably not going to be my next iPhone. But by iPhone 19, iPhone Air 17 will be the standard so we’ll end up owning an “Air” eventually.
Sorry to bang on so long, but if Apple rests for a moment in making hand-sized (and smaller) computers smaller/lighter, AND faster/low-power, then they lose.
Also, why io will fail with whatever they build: they think that design is what wins, but it’s execution at volume that matters as much if not more. Even if they do, by some miracle, design a device that does something a phone can’t do, they still have to iterate the engineering and manufacturing. To “need” to hit it out of the park on the first generation to succeed is to almost assuredly fail. Apple was fortunate to have Steve Jobs who could sell elephant shjt to zookeepers so that the original iPhone could live on a combination of astonishing design and social aura—they *then* went on to make it better and build the capacity to ride the wave by growing their manufacturing into a colossus.