While I have tremendous respect for Sir Ive as a designer, I'm beginning to notice a trailing-off of quality in Apple's software products ever since Jobs departed. Little quirks and irritants which would never have made it to the outside world in Jobs' days, are now sneaking out.
Apple has the design part covered, but it seriously needs a fanatic who will make sure that every iOS release is perfect. They lost that fanatic, and he hasn't been replaced.
I'm sad that we're losing a lot of great designers from a company like Apple.
I feel like with Ive's exit and the exodus of many members of his team there, Apple has been too scared to evolve its industrial design language.
- The iPad Pro has looked the same since 2018, and now all iPads look just like it.
- The iPhone hasn't had a meaningful design change since the iPhone 11 in 2019.
- The MacBook Air now just looks like a skinny MacBook Pro.
I'm sure having the COO with no design knowledge heading the design team isn't doing them any favors. They're probably just sticking to what's worked to squeeze out any juice left in Ive's designs.
I was hoping they'd build a new design "era" of sorts with the release of the M1 iMac, but it feels like they've effectively given up on it. And now it stands out like a sore thumb among all these aging designs.
Look at Jony's designs, everything from the first iMac to the soon to be released Mac Pro can be boiled down to a rectangle with rounded corners. 20 years of the same core element has caused it to become stale.
It's a perpetuating cycle. Apple, Google and Microsoft all need to be seen to be iterating on the freshness of their designs, otherwise people will assume their products are stale next to their competitors.
I don't think Ive is 'the greatest designer of our generation' at all. Apple's innovation has fallen off a cliff, they are now a financialized company focusing on essentially being a bank, and watch fashions are not something I have any interest in from them.
I wish they would get some of their old mojo back and get back into the spirit and excitement of Apple circa 12 years ago when everyone was waiting to see what they'd come up with next...
/written on an ancient macbook air because they haven't come up with a good replacement yet
It's interesting that a lot of the frustrations being expressed online over the past few years about Apple's product design choices (Macbook Pros losing their developer focus, iPhones getting more ridiculous with their designs, etc) are linked directly to what this article claims -- that Ive has been pretty absent since 2016, and it's not just the lack of a strong product leader at Apple, but also a rudderless design team that has led to these issues.
Whether any of that will improve now remains to be seen.
Apple made a hard U-turn from form-over-function to the current state which was much needed
The design iterations over generations are now fairly static and that's a good thing - because Apple high end bulk customers are mostly developers, not the eccentric designer or the lone musician. It matters to keep thousands of your $2000-wielding developers happy than a handful of $50,000 carrying artists who are finicky about post-modernistic aesthetics. The kinds Jonny Ive felt a natural kinship with. His design ethos were good to make a splash from the moribund vanilla boxes in early 2000s. But keep making those splashes (without Steve Jobs to rein in with criticism & engineering team getting second-classed), you got serious product troubles.
Thinkpads come to mind when I think about MacBooks lineage. Well maintained product line which has kept their hardware UX fairly unchanged - the net result being they are an extremely dependable product in corporate environment.
Edit: I remember talking to a designer who once worked at Apple. I am told Jonny Ive even seriously floated the idea of a smooth slab iPhone/iPad devoid of any power buttons, charging slot or rockers - only featuring touch sensitive edges & speaker grille. Glad engineering team didn't take up on it. Would have been a recovery & update disaster.
The iPhone is stale in the same way that the 911 is. This years 911 is better than last years, and this years iPhone is better than the last one. But this isn't about the iPhone, it's about iOS. A lot of the discussion has focussed around the devices themselves but that's not the point of the matter.
iOS in some respects is stale. The 'look' has been the same since the first iPhone came out of box. Is that a bad thing? Sure, to some people it is, they want new and fresh and different. That's not how Apple works though, they settle on a design paradigm and iterate repeatedly until they think it's time to move on.
I'm so happy this guy is no longer in charge of designing Apple devices. They were among the most beautiful computing devices ever made.... at the cost of usability, durability, repairability, reliability.
They're far from perfect even now on these aspects, but there are tangible, non-trivial improvements already (except on repairability for now, but one can dream...)
Apple is focused on consumer products and consumers can be fickle. While it won't be anytime soon, it's not impossible for Apple to someday lose the design mojo that makes their products popular. Steve Jobs and his RDF aren't there anymore and neither is Jony Ive.
It’s probably one of the reasons for his departure. According to Ive, Apple is no longer pursuing design for the sake of design and it’s instead going for products that work but in a more “mundane” form. And this somehow is a bad thing.
Dad must know better, surely! It's absolutely impossible that almighty Apple is now full of subpar UX wannabes.
Apple design has been on a downright trajectory for a long time now, basically since Ive was promoted to the very top (yes he left now, but the damage was done). The Peter Principle doesn't make exceptions.
I share your optimism, that people who remember what good Apple design felt like, will carry on the torch.
The generational knowledge transfer seems to have broke down somewhere within Apple, that only the superficial aesthetic is being carried on, while the fundamentals - user-friendly design, repairability, extensibility - are getting left behind.
> ..take all the good ideas from Apple's heyday and make another good OS. Maybe, if we're lucky, it'll even be open-source.
There are a number of open-source community projects that impressed me as having such a vision, going back to the roots, keeping the dream alive and designing the way forward.
Apple had some pretty nice stuff before Ive, I see no reason it won't have amazing stuff in the future without him.
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