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Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client

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Re: Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client

#371

Post by azernik »

sytelus wrote: post #283
atombender wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like that phrase, "tyranny of design". It implies design is just one side of a product. But design is everything . It is both form and function. A product that has great visual design is still a failure if the functional design is bad. A great designer is holistic and will be able to bring form and function into harmony.. While I don't have the inside scoop on how Jonathan Ive works, my impression is that he'…

The iPhone has one of the most slippery surfaces of almost all objects I own. It looks great in photos and ad videos but completely incompatible to the goal of safely holding it in the human hand. Things have became so bad with iPhone XS that I have never seen anyone using it without some ugly sleeve. If anyone has dared not using case/sleeve, they would experience heart wrenching drop out of hand within their first…

It's a bad design feature that is sadly common across premium smartphone brands - e.g. the Pixel 3 is also quite hard to grasp. One thing where I think lower-end phone design tends to be better, a function of their lower priority on aesthetics.

Re: Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client

#372

Post by dx7tnt »

I'm finding it hard to understand how being external to Apple is going to work for Ive and his team, given Apple's approach to secrecy and paranoiac insularity.

A seeming contradiction from the very FT article Jony is pushing his new role and company:

“[Apple Park] was a really significant project that was unlike many of our others, because it was for us,” Sir Jonathan said. It also brought Apple’s entire design team together for the first time into one purpose-built studio, with industrial designers sitting side by side with font and interface designers.

ie. we're going to be putting all the design team in one place, except me and my design team - we'll be somewhere else.

All I can speculate is that Ive will become some kind of conceptual overlord, but one ultimately well at arms length from what is happening at Apple. I can't help but feel that Ive's been pushed, in the most graceful way possible given his contribution to making hundreds upon hundreds of billions for the company. Remember the drastic way Scott Forstall was kicked out despite being seemingly successful, and for what? too much skeuomorphism? It can be easy how ruthless these people can be.

It could be quite telling that recently they had to do an unheard of (for them) backtrack in the form of the Mac Pro - essentially reverting it to the decade old design of the cheese grater and re-incorporating PCI desperately needed by longterm partners such as Blackmagic Design - heavily pushed in the last keynote, who've been suffering since the trashcan came out, with many of their leading capture cards only able to be used in the horrific solution of a thunderbolt-PCI lunchbox. This announcement does seem like it could have stemmed from that, given they said something along the lines of "we had designed ourselves into a thermal corner" with the never-revised trashcan, that ultimately lacked all the features that make it worthwhile for pro users ie graphics, PCI, storage and RAM.

Ultimately, pushed or not, Sir Jony could well feel his work was done in many ways with the creation of the new UFO campus and such a string of successful products all having reached maturity. What else is there for him to do? After so much success, it could just becomes boring. Even the best artists don't try and keep churning out number one records year in year out - there's just too many other things to do.

Re: Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client

#373

Post by cowmoo728 »

rsync wrote: post #363
hinkley wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the building Jony Ive designed. People literally walk into walls. Maybe the world is better off if he works on computer hardware all day every day.

Can you provide some more background here ? What building was it that Jony Ivy designed ? The new Apple campus ? Where can I read more about people walking into walls, etc. ? (genuinely interested)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/05/apple-par...

I heard that employees started putting post-its on walls to help people walk around safely, which infuriated someone important, because they were all taken down and told not to do that any more.

Re: Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client

#376

Post by HeadsUpHigh »

Bud wrote: post #197
PunksATawnyFill wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about decisions like removing the headphone jacks from the company's most popular music players, the very devices with which people are supposed consume the media-centric services that Tim Cook and analysts say are the future of Apple? For Apple's and consumers' sake, I hope NOT.

This decision was promptly copied by every other major phone manufacturer, for the same reasons Apple made the decision. The 3.5mm jack is obsolete and getting rid of it enables a better, tougher device which is more waterproof.

It blows my mind how people call things obsolete without replacing all of their functionality. The only reason the 3.5mm jack is considered obsolete is because Apple said so. Literally nobody had any problem with it existing up until the day Apple announced that iphone. If this isn't the definition of sheeple then I don't know what it is.

Re: Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client

#377

Post by [deleted] »

mstade wrote: post #94
jedberg wrote: post #42

Given his penchant for thinness over function, I hope this means we can have a thicker pro laptop again, with all the ports back and a more robust keyboard.

It’d be interesting to see the results of a survey on this I think, I and I know many of my peers are of the exact opposite opinion. I like the move to usb-c, I like the new keyboard, I don’t mind (but also don’t really use) the Touch Bar but I can’t live without Touch ID at this point. The big trackpad is magical to me, and the thickness and weight of the 13” is just right. I have an older MBP as well, 2013 maybe, a…

[deleted]

Re: Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client

#379

Post by LgWoodenBadger »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #344
tjohns wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you remember the original iMac, they did the same thing with USB-A. Everybody was concerned that the iMac's only I/O port was USB (when others had serial, parallel, and maybe SCSI/USB as an afterthought), and it was completely incompatible with legacy peripherals. For many years USB accessories were considered specialty items for the Mac market. It kinda sucked at first... but it's not clear if USB would have even…

> but it's not clear if USB would have even caught on if Apple didn't do that. Here's the problem with that argument; Macs are a pretty small percentage of the computer market, and always have been. Consumer peripheral companies are driven by what people will buy, not moving the market forward. USB was always going to be what it is, and if you want evidence of Apple's lack of power here just look at FireWire. They pu…

Everybody needed a keyboard and a mouse at the time.

Only a few people needed a camcorder (the most populous of the firewire-enabled devices).

Re: Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client

#380

Post by dbspin »

fortran77 wrote: post #318
jedberg wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with USB-C and the big trackpad is fine too, and I would love to have touchID on my 2015MBP. But getting rid of mag power and the USB-A ports, HDMI port, and SD card slot was a big step back. Maybe you don't ever need to present anything from your laptop, but if you talk to anyone who does, they will tell you how awful it is to not have an HDMI port. The USB-C to HDMI is the worst adapter I've ever seen…

Pro cameras us CF / CFast cards, so the SD slot won't really help them. It's probably OK not to have it wrt the pro market. https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/learn/educ...

Define 'pro'. My Sony A7iii uses SD cards. My Blackmagic pocket cinema writes to USB-C. If anything C-Fast is a dying medium. SD cards are tremendously cheaper, and at this point likely as fast.
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