Jony Ive, Designer for Apple, Departs

[lpetrich]

Datelined June 27, 2019
Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client - Apple

Cupertino, California — Apple today announced that Sir Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, will depart the company as an employee later this year to form an independent design company which will count Apple among its primary clients. While he pursues personal projects, Ive in his new company will continue to work closely and on a range of projects with Apple.

Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design - noting his mixed record.

In my writeup of the first interview, I said that in those latter moments he sounded “like a man trying to describe God to a world without religion.” And that still seems true: I think he was someone used to describing what he did much more by instantiating it — making it physical — than painting verbal pictures.

In the first interview, he also admitted to admiring people who work on satellites, where you have to justify every iota of space consumed, every gram of weight, because they’re expensive and you only get one chance to get them right. “When you look at how a satellite is made — the formal solution that has to answer a bunch of imperatives, what goes in, what doesn’t, how you fit it together, there’s so much stuff that people don’t think is consciously designed,” he said.

Although the original iMac gets a lot of praise for its design, and IMO well-deserved praise, the original iMac had an incredible clunker: its mouse. Its hockey-puck mouse was poorly-shaped, with very embarrassing ergonomics, and it provoked a big industry of alternative USB mice.

I note that the iMac was nice in some other ways: being stripped down in I/O devices. For it, Steve Jobs dumped the Apple Desktop Bus. Despite being autodetecting and hot-swappable, it was only supported by Apple. Intel had developed USB, the Universal Serial Bus, but had not gotten far with it. When SJ decided on USB for the iMac, an Intel executive reportedly called him and wept tears of gratitude. SJ also dumped the floppy drive, though floppy-drive makers soon created USB drives.

SJ himself conceded that the hockey-puck mouse was a big mistake. Author Charles Arthur then discussed the AppleTV's remote control, finding it too limited.

The ongoing problem was that Ive’s desire for “less” kept showing up, and when it wasn’t headed off, the results could be disastrous

Like the original Mac Pro, that black cylinder. Elegant design, but not what professionals often want: expandability. It was like the G4 Cube of 2000, an effect to pack as much computer as possible into a small volume without using cooling fans.

Great artists don’t ship air

A common thread between the G4 Cube, the trashcan, the hockey puck mouse, the iPad, the iPod, the newer iMacs, and the newer MacBook Pro and MacBook designs: no excess air. Jony Ive hates selling you air, which you could say is to his credit. (There’s an apocryphal story about Steve Jobs dunking an early iPod design into a fishtank in his office, pointing to bubbles coming out of it and saying “too big” — apocryphal, because he never kept fish.) But this approach also led him down some mistaken paths.

By the time we got to post-2011, Ive wasn’t into upgrading things. You might repair them, but the days of clever latches that let you replace RAM and hard drives were long past. The iPhone seems to have been the first mobile phone without a replaceable battery, and turned that into an industry standard.

CA continued with

In truth, I think Ive’s best work came when he and the design team were given challenges to incorporate by the marketing or research teams. The original iMac is the best example, where the implicit brief is: “design a computer for a low price that will stand out from every other machine on sale.”

Then the iPod, a little box with click-wheel controls. They tried moving the buttons off of the wheel, but it flopped, and Apple then reverted to its original design.

Overall, though, there are many hopeful signs. I think Ive’s departure is going to be good for the Design Team and for Apple. The new Mac Pro design is a clear return to the sensible, accessible shapes of the blue G3 and the beloved G5 “Cheesegrater.”

The new Mac Pro was designed to be easily upgradeable, so one can stick in more memory or more video cards or whatever.

It will come out this fall, and if it is successful, then I expect Apple to make more of its systems easily upgradeable. I'd like some medium-sized box Mac, something between a Mac Mini and a Mac Pro.