And of course props Ives, as fought for it to be, and from stories posted about it’s design process, burnt himself out designing it.
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New Profile Delves Into Background of Jony Ive Successor Jeff Williams
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Don’t bet on it - in fact, I can assure you this is not the case.
Ive had next to nothing to do with the new Mac Pro, and we’ve already established that Jeff Williams was instrumental in making WATCH into an actual functional device, and the new angular design of the latest iPad Pro models are a throwback to a design of the iPhone 4. Now with Ive and Newsom gone, you can be sure that we will see not just changes in designs, but actually a lot of the flaws of past designs being corrected (as is already happening with the laptop keyboards).
Again, Ive was not involved in the iPadOS breakout.
Thanks, you beat me to it.
Except for the past 2 years, there has been a reduction of 20% year over year of customers upgrading to Apple’s premium iOS products - coinciding with the introduction of the X models, and the loss of the Home Button and TouchaiD - which amounts to pretty much an epic failure. That’s 20% less of premium upgrade every single year. It’s no coincidence that Apple has stopped reporting unit sales numbers as a form of damage control.
He doesn’t. It remains to be seen what LoveFrom (dumb name) will do.
OK went to check him out and found this vid - I really like him. I see he is also behind research kit which is revolutionising medical trials.
Traditional trials normally have great difficulty recruiting sufficient participants and are very costly and cumbersome, usually requiring frequent visits to hospitals and doctors offices. In their latest trial Apple recruited thousands of participants practically overnight - unheard of - and immediately started collecting accurate data for next to no cost. Just as they are revolutionising the medical diagnostics industry they are also revolutionising the medical trial industry. I think this guy has a Tricorder vision and the engineering know-how to realise it. Very impressed.
Traditional trials normally have great difficulty recruiting sufficient participants and are very costly and cumbersome, usually requiring frequent visits to hospitals and doctors offices. In their latest trial Apple recruited thousands of participants practically overnight - unheard of - and immediately started collecting accurate data for next to no cost. Just as they are revolutionising the medical diagnostics industry they are also revolutionising the medical trial industry. I think this guy has a Tricorder vision and the engineering know-how to realise it. Very impressed.
NO HE IS NOT.
Someone (either the SWJ or MacRumors) totally misunderstands what is going on.
Jeff Williams is being groomed as Tim Cook's replacement! The only connection to Ive and Design is that Tim Cook Jr needs to prove himself as a potential manager of every part of the company.
Presumably his PRIMARY task will be to appoint the new Jony Ive (maybe a very public individual, more likely an individual but not big deal made about it, perhaps a committee or a pair or something) --- but someone(s) who will be the actual head of Design. If he handles that well, and the inevitable squabbling that will follow, well, he gets a few more points towards the longer term goal of replacing Tim Cook in the nearish future (maybe when the Apple car ships in five years or so?)
LOL and Ive has charisma?? i’d wager my salary to say Jeff has more charisma than Ive
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‘Cool’ LOL are we in high school? what made Ive cool? His british accent?
Oh, I guarantee they know exactly what course they've got Apple on. As I said, it's the exact same course Sculley took Apple on. You must have misunderstood me and thought I was implying they didn't know where they were taking Apple. They know exactly what they're doing and they will all make insane piles of cash for themselves in the process.
Okay, thank you for clarifying your definition. Apple no longer has that kind of success, Timmy and co. have already burned it for quick short-term profit. Just this week: https://www.macrumors.com/2019/07/05/apple-paid-samsung-683-billion-missing-oled-target/
Apple paid Samsung $683 million for not purchasing the minimum number of screens they committed to. That much money would pay for about 8.5 million screens outright, but if Apple were paying anywhere near the full cost for the screen, they'd take them and warehouse them, when they're making over 30 million devices a quarter, you're not going to burn $683 million to avoid having several million extra screens for a few months.
If the penalty is 25-33% the cost of the screen, that's 25-34 million iPhones Apple missed their lowest possible target by. That is a huge disaster for Apple. It will cut their revenue 10's of billions of dollars on top of the big hit to the bottom line from paying the penalty. If the penalty gets any higher than that, Apple would be foolish for not taking the screens even to store as spare replacements the next few years, not to mention using the current generation screens in the lower cost tier of 2019 phones that should be going into production any time now. So I suspect 25% is actually a very high estimate.
Anyway that's just this week. Big picture, Apple no longer breaks down sales of any of their hardware lines. They hare hiding as much data as they legally can from the shareholders. They've clearly got something to hide.
As far as how they keep up current profit levels in a time when their sales are obviously plummeting, they've got their assets hidden all over the world, they wouldn't be the first company to keep profits from exceptional quarters off the books and then introduce it later to mask less profitable quarters later to smooth out their performance graph and stock price. There's even ways they can do it that aren't technically illegal. What would be illegal is reporting false unit sales...but they don't report those at all anymore.
I didn’t misunderstand. I’m countering where Apple is headed is sculley plus Steve Jobs. Give the customers what they want and the customers will buy their products and make them lots of cash. Everybody has their data points they look at to form an opinion.
Let’s see who really has the crystal ball.
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In this mature market how many are leaving Apple vs how many are coming into Apple new? Customers who may have had a battery replacement, o/s upgrades who stay with Apple is more tellingly metric because that’s money flowing into Apple for its’ other products and services.
As far as Apple reporting unit volumes, they are now in line with the remainder of the industry that’s no coincidence either.
Oh, okay. So which customers wanted the butterfly keyboard? Which customers wanted soldered RAM, SSD, and a glued and soldered battery? Which customers wanted to dump the headphone jack? Which customers wanted to eliminate any headless desktop with consumer-grade desktop parts?
Which customers wanted the iPhones to be so thin the battery that would power it was so underpowered that the CPU has to be throttled to a level the nearly new battery can handle? Which customers want to make sure their phone doesn't have a MicroSD slot while storage upgrades have a 95% margin?
Which customers wanted to get rid of the glowing Apple logo and start-up chime?
Which customers wanted Apple to abandon their hardware products to stagnate for years while pivoting to focus on being a services company. How many customers prefer Apple try to be the new Netflix rather than offering ultrabook computers that aren't so poorly thermally designed that they overheat and throttle as soon as you try to do something a bit more intense than posting to macrumors?
You know what, I have a better idea, why don't you try to suggest more than a couple of things Apple has actually done in the past couple of years to the Mac and iPhone (their two biggest products) that the majority of users actually want more than a USB-3.1 port, better keyboard and upgradable SSD/RAM on their Macs, or a headphone jack and microSD slot on their iPhone? I supposed OLED screens on the phones count, but it was still 5 years after Samsung offered the feature on phones at less than half the price. It's especially sickening as the RAM/SSD, keyboard, and headphone jack were all taken away within the past few years. That's really giving the customer what they want.
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Maybe the same ones that wanted the Samsung folding phone? Or the ones that wanted the iPhone 6. How can one answer a disingenuous question like that?
The same ones that wanted the removal of the card slot or ir blaster from Samsung phones? Again another disingenuous question.
This might be me and I’ll take chances with the throttling and battery. In fact this might be me multiplied by millions.
This might also be me as I could give a whit about an sd card slot... see above.
I guess a number of them because if that’s what Apple wanted that’s what people requested.
As far as becoming services their hardware products are not stagnating (unless you want to cherry pick) and becoming services has long been in the game plan as Steve started it with the App Store.
I have a better idea, why don’t you suggest why in this saturated smartphone climate how Apple can take in $51B in revenues when they have done such folly as opined above? And how they take the lions share of profits in this sector. Apple is too big to please everybody 100% but that doesn’t mean they have a 100% dissatisfaction rate either. YMMV.
So your position is that the *apple* customers who wanted Soldered SSD and RAM in their laptops are the exact same people as the *samsung* customers who wanted a folding phone?
It's not a disingenuous question. Those "features" are 100% customer-hostile in the pursuit of profits. Thats why you can't point to anywhere anyone asked for their devices to be gimped like that.
And this is how you're proving my point. You couldn't give a whit about an SD slot. That means having one or not is a non-issue to you, as long as it doesn't make the phone bigger/less waterproof, or negatively impact the phone in any way.
So you don't actively want a phone without an SD card, you just don't care. You are not a customer asking for a phone without an SD card. Nobody asks for a lack of feature unless the feature negatively impacts them in some way.
So where I'm listing customer-hostile defects in the devices, your only argument is that Apple is 100% altruistic and everything they ever do is at the request of customers? I notice you didn't comment on the headphone jack...so who complained about having a headphone jack in the 6S? Link please.
I'm trying to avoid cherry-picking by leaving it up to you to provide any meaningful improvements over the past few years that even compensate for what has been taken away, much less make the new product better. And you just can't do it.
Once again, you can't do it. I've listed many new "features" that nobody wants and I can list many more. Don't even get started on the emojiBar Apple introduced with such fanfare and never mentioned again... or how much hate iTunes generated for years before Apple finally took notice and made it into a joke. You can't even come up with anything Apple has done with their hardware that customers have really been asking for.
Instead you want to go on about their profits. But that's where we started on this, they're going full-tilt Sculley you can't point at short term profit to argue against that. That's all you've got...Apple is the best at taking money from zealots and that's your only argument.
You've conveniently failed to mention the effect the reduction of Chinese sales that have occurred, for a variety of reasons outside of Apple's control. And, ignoring market saturation as well as customers holding onto their devices longer.
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So...nice deflection, looks like you're sticking with your assertion: "Cook is trying to make himself look better by surrounding himself with worse people."
Being that Apple is the most studied/profiled US corporation by university business schools, they need to add your view of Cook hiring inferior executive/management staff, to make the CEO "look" good, as a driver of Apple's amazing success.
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No, my position is that by listing the way hardware is built and then saying it’s a feature nobody wants is disingenuous.
A good example of arguing a negative.
No, that Apple is 100% altruistic is your argument. My argument is the sales and market research drive the product direction. And with competition being what it is people should vote with their wallets. Every company produces products that for one reason or another are “user hostile “. User Replaceable batteries are a good example. As far as the headphone jack, I noticed Apple tanked with the introduction of the iPhone 7. While the headphone jack was surely a sticking point for some, it’s not coming back. Again the competition has phones with one.
Looking at the iPhone the max nailed it. The lack of an headphone jack and sd card is irrelevant.
What you’ve done is make a laundry list of things you don’t like. You can’t prove the “nobody” part so I won’t even ask you for a citation. And while Apple may not be perfect they have a better track record than what is portrayed in this post.
You know why I go on about their profits, because profits is a fact. And while you can have an opinion about then significance of $51B most of this post is an opinion about how you feel about apple’s engineering choices and then making a veiled criticism out of a question. (An questionable debating tactic at best). Tim Cook has figured out sculley + jobs. And your bottom line is Apple has figured out how to line its own pockets from zealots. That’s some good spin.
Well I guess we can but wait and see how he does - I still think those hoping for an instafix to some of Apple's more questionable design choices recently are going to be disappointed, but maybe a fresher perspective to nail down the general look and design, and then handing it over to Ive to polish off some of the finer details could work a treat?
So why do you believe this, considering it is his job? And what proof do you have from Apple... I would say this is nothing more then your personal opinion that choose to ignore Ives responsibilities in his position. Unless you have any factual proof from Apple that is..
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That information was made up by analysts, NOT Apple, I thought you may have had something else more then this, considering Apple has never made public its Apple Watch sales figures, not even I believe it’s revenue either.
You said Apple is giving the customers what they want. I say many customers do want to be able to pull the SSD out of their laptop either for data recovery or upgrading, and no customer wants that to be impossible. Apple is not giving the customers what they want, it's an inferior product in the interests of their profits. Which is my whole point.
You're the one equating not caring about a feature to actively wanting the feature to be absent. I'm saying people who don't care about a feature don't care one way or the other if it exists as long as it doesn't impair the device.
Apple can follow that market research in different directions. One is to accept lower margins to provide a better product at the same price point in the interest in customer goodwill, long term loyalty and greater long term profit. The other way is to squeeze the maximum possible profit each quarter with no thought about goodwill, loyalty, or two quarters in the future. Jobs followed the first path, Sculley/Cook are on the second.
Yep, the max nailed it. That's why Apple is paying Samsung $683 million in penalties for max screens they didn't order because they couldn't sell enough phones. $683 million will pay for 8.5 million screens, but the penalty is at most 25% the cost of the screen or apple would just warehouse the screens and use them over the next couple of years. So that's a good 34 million fewer phones than Apple's worst case estimate. This is where Timmy is leading the company.
Yet you can't list anything Apple has done for the past few years. Evolutions in the industry like faster CPUs, better cameras, more SSD (which Apple doesn't even give) don't count because it has nothing to do with Apple, chip tech improves year after year outside of Apple's control or efforts. There is nothing Apple has added to the iPhone Max vs the iPhone 7, and a great deal taken away.
Cook/Sculley's technique of profit above all is a fact indeed. I wonder what company will win your loyalty in 10 years when Apple is a business school case study in what not to do. And before you say Apple is too big to fail, Yahoo had a market cap of $110 billion, a bad CEO brought that to 0.
What I said was that apple is giving customers what they want as evidenced by the financials. I also said Apple will never satisfy 100% of it's customers. The bottom line to those two items, is that not every apple customer will be happy. That doesn't negate that apple isn't giving it's customer base what it wants in a general sense. Which is why I said the post was disingenuous.
You're the one saying the lack of a headphone jack is a feature no one wanted. The way it is worded is designed to troll as I'm sure apple did some market research and instead concluded omitting the headphone jack will not disrupt the usage for a majority of it's customer base (or however they worded that). There is a big difference in saying it that way vs the way your post reads.
The reason this post is again, disingenuous, is that Apple released the iphone 1 at $599 and had to lower the price, which means Jobs was doing a money grab, what you accuse Cook of doing.
What you really don't know is how that "penalty" will be applied to future product, in other words, all is known is the payment, but I doubt apple would let the penalty line the cash vaults of Samsung (but that's imo). I can't defend the max as being cheap, but it is a hell of a phone and the changing market may have caught apple by surprise, but no one else sells phones in the numbers that apple does at that price point. So Apple will move on and that is the direction Timmy is taking Apple. As I said Tim is a genius and figured out how to do Sculley + Jobs.
If I can't list anything Apple has done for the past few years, that equally applies to when Jobs was running the company. I think there is a selective case of bias at play if all that can be said about the max vs the 7 is your comment.
Of course, Blackberry and Yahoo, great study cases. Here is Tim Cook study case:
Bottom line, we all have different views. Apple hasn't collapsed in 5 years as was predicted here. Now I remember somewhere here reading that Apple will collapse in 10 years. Let's see who is more prescient.
edit: one more observation. Absolutism has no place here. This is an all or nothing proposition. When the word "nobody" is used, it signifies an absolute. Now "some customers" a completely different take on the matter.
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When Jony Ive announced that he is leaving Apple to start his own design firm, Apple confirmed that chief operating officer Jeff Williams is set to oversee many of the product design responsibilities previously held by Ive. In a new profile today by The Wall Street Journal, Williams' history at Apple is highlighted, including his potential as a future successor to CEO Tim Cook.
According to people who work closely with Williams, he has been "more visible" in the development of Apple products than Cook. Williams has displayed interest in the look and feel of certain products, and helped pivot the Apple Watch away from its fashion-focused launch to one predominantly concerned with health and fitness features that can be achieved without a connected iPhone.
Additionally, Williams was on the product development team that was responsible for the iPhone 4, and his contributions reportedly "quieted doubters" within Apple about his ability to contribute to the design stage. One unnamed source described Williams' knowledge in a thermal-engineering meeting: "It was impressive for a negotiator, and spreadsheet guy, and it just came naturally to him."
Yet, some people wonder if Williams' executive skills are enough to lead Apple product design, and live up to Ive's legacy.
Apple chose to promote from within instead of finding outside blood to replace Ive, which analyst Bob O'Donnell said would have been almost impossible anyway. "What they're doing is saying, 'let's reallocate how we think about this and put someone else overseeing a few young designers to give them leeway.' It's time for fresh blood. The last few iPhones have looked really similar."
Many of WSJ's sources wondered about Apple's future and what its next major product invention will be, and how that will be achieved without Ive's leadership. "You could have looked at Jony and said: 'He's the soul of Steve Jobs,'" said Ensemble Capital president Sean Stannard-Stockton. "I just wonder about their ability to invent the future now."
Ive is set to leave Apple sometime later this year.
Article Link: New Profile Delves Into Background of Jony Ive Successor Jeff Williams
Well, as the saying goes, you don’t miss what you don’t need.
It’s not so much that I want soldered ram or SSD, but that I recognise that moves like these are what is necessary to allow for a thinner and lighter form factor in a laptop. The butterfly keyboard was clearly a misstep, but again, it exists primarily to allow the MacBook to be as thin as it is. Which I think many customers would appreciate. Because all other things equal, a thinner and lighter design is a more portable design.
I recall an interview with Techcrunch a couple of years back, where Apple revealed that about 80% of their Mac sales are macbooks, and about 30% are pros. So there are a lot of “non-pro” consumers who are never going to upgrade the ram on their devices ever even if they had the ability to do so, but would instead benefit from features which are enabled via the removal of these features.
Same with the headless desktop segment. It’s not so much that consumers actively wanted it killed, but that it likely wouldn’t have sold enough to justify its existence anyways. 20% of Mac butters choose desktops, and the “enthusiast” market generally choose PCs. Plus you already have the iMac and iMac Pro. So it’s not so much the action which killed it, but inaction.
The same customers who appreciate Apple’s design language enough to pay for their products.
First off, it undercuts their design philosophy. Apple is about minimalism and purity in hardware design. In the eyes of Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, perfect products are made by cutting out everything not absolutely required in the design. To them, it's about creating products that are cut down to their absolute most basic form, with nothing standing between the user and the device. The products aren't about having the most features, or being the "most useful", they're about distilling out the purest mixture of form and function possible. In the iPhone, Apple has found, to them, a perfect balance of form and function. The devices are beautiful products that retain full functionality. Note the "to them" up there. It's obviously not something everyone agrees upon, but this is through the eyes of Apple's design department, not the general population. And while you may disagree, you have to admit that they're close to correct.
So what does this have to do with replaceable media? Simple. Apple believes that it's better to have a high capacity, monolithic phone than one with an extra "feature" that many people don't care about, or even need.
"Now hold on, Abazigal," you say, "that's just your inner fanboy talking. Plenty of people want removable memory, and shouldn't what people want determine what goes in a product?" Sure, there are many users who want it. There are even some people who need to be able to swap out media. But Apple doesn't care about that. If they listened to what people wanted, we wouldn't have the iPhone, iPad, or anything else like them on the market. No one wanted an iPad when it was announced, until they started using them. For the people that do truly need removable media for whatever reason, Apple really doesn't care about them. It's sort of a niche feature, and time and time again, Apple has proved that they don't care about niche features or markets (See: 17" MBP, XServe, Airport, iPod Classic, or other useful products that Apple has either discontinued or left for dead.)
You see the same philosophy in the lack of removable battery. Apple decided that would sacrifice the integrity and the beauty of the phone were the battery removable, and they're right. Having a solid frame with an internal battery makes the phone more durable than it would be at the same form with a removable battery, and the battery lasts longer too, because it can be built larger within the phone. Why not just make the phone bigger? Because that would compromise Apple’s design principles. Again, Apple is trying to make the most pure product possible, in their eyes. Thin, light, yet uncompromising simplicity is the goal here. That, not a huge feature list, is what Apple believes makes a product good.
So, again, back to the memory. Think about how many people you know who really need removable memory. Most people would just stick a MicroSD card in their phones and forget about it. Apple would rather you just buy a 64 or 256 GB phone. It's more straightforward, and admittedly they do make more money. (People try to make it about Apple grabbing money everywhere they can; this isn't really the case, but money is always a bonus...)
Having no removable media is less complicated for the end user, and helps simplify and perfect the design of the phone overall.
I could go on, but I think you get my gist. Complexity is not the key selling point here. Simplicty is. That’s what they wanted, that’s what Apple has delivered.
See my explanation above. The glowing logo was likely removed to allow for a thinner form factor, which again, is what many consumers would appreciate.
The same consumers who are in the Apple ecosystem for precisely that - the ecosystem. Which is made possible by Apple’s hardware, software and services playing well together.
My MacBook Air is collecting dust in some drawer somewhere. My iMac + iPad Pro combo is working great, and I don’t see myself needing a dedicated laptop for a while.
You asked. I am answering - I am fine with Apple neglecting the products that I don’t really care about, so they can focus on further pushing the product areas that I do.
I have a better answer.
I currently have an iPhone, AirPods, Apple Watch, iPad Pro with Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard. I use Apple TVs in the classroom to mirror my iPad. I use Apple’s services when I can.
It’s not wrong to try and single out Apple’s flaws, but doing so shows a very fundamental misunderstanding of what Apple continues to be as successful as they are.
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Skeuomorphism is used as a bridge between old and new design paradigms. Once you know you're in notepad it's just nostalgia. Nostalgia (for things like a notepad) has no meaning for the younger generations.
When I see Jeff Williams on state at keynotes, he seems positive and knowledgeable. It would seem like he would be a cool person to work with. However, we have an in-house creative department which I help to oversee. When the operations department has ideas, they can be extremely helpful. However, creative people don't follow an outline. We don't create from A-Z and make a series of logical decisions from beginning to end. We don't "optimize" our creativity. In fact, it's been proven that the most creative people have the "most," not the "best" ideas. Great ideas come from hundreds and thousands of false starts and mini failures.
https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_the_surprising_habits_of_original_thinkers?language=en
Forward to 13:00 in, if you want to see the example
Even if Jony Ive is a super genius and could go from A-Z in his creative design work, I would doubt that the breakthroughs came that way.
Creative teams sometimes look aimless, unproductive, expansive and expensive. But, you can't come in and impose structure from the outside. The results have to come organically, in bursts, sometimes from areas nowhere near the current objective. Operations decisions can look very clean and productive, even to the creative staff. But, some creative breakthroughs can't be planned out.
I just hope that's not what happened with Jony Ive.
https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_the_surprising_habits_of_original_thinkers?language=en
Forward to 13:00 in, if you want to see the example
Even if Jony Ive is a super genius and could go from A-Z in his creative design work, I would doubt that the breakthroughs came that way.
Creative teams sometimes look aimless, unproductive, expansive and expensive. But, you can't come in and impose structure from the outside. The results have to come organically, in bursts, sometimes from areas nowhere near the current objective. Operations decisions can look very clean and productive, even to the creative staff. But, some creative breakthroughs can't be planned out.
I just hope that's not what happened with Jony Ive.