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Ive’s Legacy, the Post-Ive Apple

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Re: Ive’s Legacy, the Post-Ive Apple

#11

Maybe Steve Jobs' greatest accomplishment was getting titans like Jony Ive and Steve Forstall, who could each run their own successful design and/or tech companies, to put aside ego and work together under one roof.

Yup.

“My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people.”

Re: Ive’s Legacy, the Post-Ive Apple

#13
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm ready for a post-Apple world. Fine attention to detail in the user experience of their products, but at the expense of a pernicious ecosystem that traps you in and works with nothing else. It feels weird to say it, but I much more prefer Microsoft and their recent culture change. They're putting xbox gamepass on non-Microsoft devices, their own PC games on Steam, open sourcing their software, building world class…

You always compromise on quality when you go for cross compat. Either the quality in hardware suffers or the quality in software suffers or both. And this is someone who never uses Apple. But I acknowledge why they do what they do.

Even Apple is capable of using standards when they want to - all the way from Samba, USB-C, Bluetooth, CalDAV/CardDAV, and more on every level.

They just tend to choose not to these days to make our user experience slightly worse and extract more money for dongles or force us to buy more of their special hardware.

Re: Ive’s Legacy, the Post-Ive Apple

#14
post #8
post #3

>In their separate interviews with the FT this week, Mr Cook and Sir Jonathan insisted that no single person at Apple decides which innovations graduate from its R&D labs and which are sent back to the drawing board. “The company runs very much horizontally,” said Mr Cook. “The reason it’s probably not so clear about who [sets product strategy] is that the most important decisions, there are several people involved i…

It’s incredible that Apple have pushed so hard on a misguided design aesthetic at the expense of practicality in recent years. I’m temporarily using shiny slim new MacBook...with a third party Franken-dongle-appendage hanging off the side so I can actually plug it in to anything. Not to mention the insanely loud and clumsy keyboard. Definitely looking forward to my old MacBook getting back from the apple repair shop.

> misguided design aesthetic at the expense of practicality in recent years

That is not at all a recent thing.

Example: the first iMac mouse in 1998 was round. A casual observer might not realize how misguided this is until they try to use one for 5 seconds and can't keep it in the correct orientation.

Another example: dreadful charger cables that predictably break. It's been this way for at least a decade now.[2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_USB_Mouse

[2] - https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Apple-chargers-always-break/ans...

Re: Ive’s Legacy, the Post-Ive Apple

#15

Maybe Steve Jobs' greatest accomplishment was getting titans like Jony Ive and Steve Forstall, who could each run their own successful design and/or tech companies, to put aside ego and work together under one roof.

Blaine Garst who worked for him at NeXT and Apple said that this was indeed true: https://youtu.be/qtEIq7fe_KQ?t=9502.

> So Steve Jobs’ real talent was hiring good people. 'Cause he didn't invent most of that stuff but he sold it. He had ideas, and some of his ideas were the inventions and some of them got battered around and thrown away, you know, but he knew how to hire great people. And the people he hired, the reason they were great was they were great together. It was a very egoless environment in all honesty. People had their ideas, they would push 'em but they could be talked out of 'em. They could learn, we were all there, we were small enough. As you said, I was doing kernel work, language work, you know, whatever work needed to be done, we were all in it together. So it was a very positive environment. It was the closest work environment to my high school that I ever had. Tolerant, directed, but you know, and focused.

Re: Ive’s Legacy, the Post-Ive Apple

#16
Does anyone else miss 'early' Ben Thompson?

Ben of Then would easily spend an hour meticulously crafting around the topic whilst carefully rationing his listeners' attention. Once listeners are thoroughly primed, Thompson would then proceed with a sudden, massive contextual leap shifting the laid groundwork (vertically) into potential energy, lifting us along.

Ben of today, writes mechanistically, with two main pillars: 1)catering to his technocratic subscriber-base 2)asserting himself as an expert historian of the industry.

Technocrats demand affirmation of their worldview (that is what they do), so static narratives provide an important anchor. The preeminent historian supports this rigidity as his main competitive advantage (over lesser historians) is his cultivated cache of (niche) interlinks.

In our (violently) changing world we need thermonuclear Ben not the historian Ben.

Re: Ive’s Legacy, the Post-Ive Apple

#18
I liked iOS' "skeuomorphic" design and despise the flatness that Mr Ive introduced, i think 5 years back. The first iPhone was mind blowing because it seemed to make apps pop out of the screen and invited you to tap on them. Flatness is two steps back and made iOS Androidish, not a great design inspiration.

Also the ridiculous obsession with thinness of macs and iPhones probably at the cost of making them do something useful, if that is Mr Ive's doing, he has clearly outlived his usefulness.

Those iMacs though were pretty. Never used one but Ben is right about them being Ive's best work. Wish him a happy and most well deserved retirement.

Re: Ive’s Legacy, the Post-Ive Apple

#19

I liked iOS' "skeuomorphic" design and despise the flatness that Mr Ive introduced, i think 5 years back. The first iPhone was mind blowing because it seemed to make apps pop out of the screen and invited you to tap on them. Flatness is two steps back and made iOS Androidish, not a great design inspiration. Also the ridiculous obsession with thinness of macs and iPhones probably at the cost of making them do somethin…

I also really loved the skeuomorphic design that came with my iPhone 4s.

Buttons looked like buttons, leather and denim accents made the phone feel like a luxury device even though it was just digital fabrication.

Even the notes application looked like a sketch pad with a special “handwriting” font. I was sad when it went but now I’m in full nostalgia mode.

I wonder why they decided to kill it. There must have been a good reason.

Re: Ive’s Legacy, the Post-Ive Apple

#20
post #19

I liked iOS' "skeuomorphic" design and despise the flatness that Mr Ive introduced, i think 5 years back. The first iPhone was mind blowing because it seemed to make apps pop out of the screen and invited you to tap on them. Flatness is two steps back and made iOS Androidish, not a great design inspiration. Also the ridiculous obsession with thinness of macs and iPhones probably at the cost of making them do somethin…

I also really loved the skeuomorphic design that came with my iPhone 4s. Buttons looked like buttons, leather and denim accents made the phone feel like a luxury device even though it was just digital fabrication. Even the notes application looked like a sketch pad with a special “handwriting” font. I was sad when it went but now I’m in full nostalgia mode. I wonder why they decided to kill it. There must have been a…

> I wonder why they decided to kill it. There must have been a good reason.

Because it is tacky and it didn't age well

I'd say the initial use of it was maybe in discoverability, but I suppose when smartphones became more popular that lost its main function.

I think it gets distracting sometimes and it is needlessly design heavy (think how much images you need to do that).

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