Jony Ive is just the Shigeru Miyamoto of Apple.
ha, that's a great parallel to draw. miyamoto is behind many of the most iconic videogame characters AND game designs ever seen. so, in fairness to miyamoto, he's got a little steve in him as well.
Steve Jobs left designer Jony Ive more power than anyone at Apple
131–140 of 161 posts
Re: Steve Jobs left designer Jony Ive more power than anyone at Apple
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there anyone who can replace Ive in his current position? If you think there’s not then you already have the answer to the question whether Ive could become CEO. His ability as a CEO doesn’t even figure into it, at least not very much. He can’t be CEO and designer at the same time and a designer like Ive is at least as important for Apple as a good CEO. I used to like the idea of Ive as a CEO but in hindsight that…
Not promoting someone because they're too good at their current job is a mistake bad companies make.
Promoting someone to a job they're less good at because they're really good at their current job is also a mistake bad companies make.
Keeping high performers in a role where they can perform highly, but giving them status, titles, and compensation in line with their importance to the company is the solution to both problems. This is why great engineering companies have career paths for engineers that don't necessarily extend into management. Hell, that's why Ive has a "Senior Vice President" title in the first place.
Re: Steve Jobs left designer Jony Ive more power than anyone at Apple
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
A big reason for this is that what Apple does is very, very _hard_. It's really hard to build physical objects with design good enough to be featured in museums. It's really hard to build your own software ecosystem, from operating system to software distribution to entertainment services. It's hard enough just to do them; it's extremely hard to be great at them. Even if other companies _wanted_ to replicate Apple's…
>It's really hard to build physical objects with design good enough to be featured in museums. True, it's hard, but not that hard. These guys did it on a regular basis: http://www.lushpad.com/articles.php?id=16&pag=1 The true reason as you point out is organizational and it is the same as that age-old killer of creativity: fear. The subordinates are afraid of doing something the boss does not want. The boss is not pu…
The article you link to has a photo of arguably some of the greatest designers of the mid 20th century, and Ive and his team are perhaps as consistent as the Eames or Saarinen. Doing good design is easy, great design however is much, much harder.
Re: Steve Jobs left designer Jony Ive more power than anyone at Apple
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that, it's just that we as a community are keenly afraid of HN's comments section turning into reddit's. Reddit's threads are often clever and sometimes hilarious, but that crap has choked off most everything else. That's not what this forum is about. If we don't remain hyper-vigilant, it will creep in while we aren't looking. Comments that consist solely of a joke will almost always be voted down here.
that's nice and all that you responded. any idea how i delete my account as this obviously is not the place for me.
There's no way to delete your account. If you really want to delete it, maybe email YC or pg himself?
Re: Steve Jobs left designer Jony Ive more power than anyone at Apple
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
By "sensible" you mean "disastrous." Owning Sony Pictures has been a consistent money loser, and the studio IP concerns at Sony Music and Pictures hamstrung their electronics arm from innovating in the face of the iPod threat.
In Sony's defense, the idea of a modern electronics company owning actual content was an interesting idea, especially as they introduced new media formats. It's not far removed from what Amazon is attempting in publishing and what turned out to be a very successful model for the game industry. Unfortunately for Sony, it turns out that the economics just don't work for music and movies.
It's more than the economics of owning a studio - Sony's ownership of their studios actively harms their other, actually profitable, product categories.
Look at the PSN's movie rental store - perpetually hamstrung by limited selection. Why would competing studios want to get into bed with one of their biggest competitors on their closed service?
Similarly, it creates internal conflicts of interest. Sony's electronics are constantly crippled when it comes to content, probably at the pressure of owning their own content themselves. For the longest time it was impossible to get any movies on a memory stick, forcing PSP users to buy them on expensive and battery-murdering discs instead. It took years to fix that mistake, but of course, by the time they did, public interest in mobile movies had basically all but disappeared.
Re: Steve Jobs left designer Jony Ive more power than anyone at Apple
#136Those are some damn nice CNC mills in the background of that photo. Wonder how much use they get.
If he is a designer who understands the manufacturing process, then that is awesome in my book. My father owns/runs a CNC manufacturing business. Sometimes the designers/drafters (more the case they have a background in CAD) don't understand the subtleties of manufacturing and materials. I mean, they aren't big gaps or anything. Best comparison is maybe coder vs tester. Both technical, but look at the same thing from…
Manufacturing process and material science are critical to the education of industrial and product design. A designer that isn't thinking about how a product will be produced isn't really a good designer.
Re: Steve Jobs left designer Jony Ive more power than anyone at Apple
#137Great, but... Ive only does industrial design, as far as I know. The other side of the coin is the software, and if that declines, Ive's going to be creating very well-designed paperweights. So who does Apple's software design?
I’ve also wondered this. iOS and Mac OS both have a penchant for faux-realism and pastiche which always seems strangely incongruous with the austere industrial design. It’s a trend that seems to be getting stronger, just look to the most recent version of iCal for example. Apple’s current industrial design patterns seem to have a solid foundation in quite traditional modernist values, such as ‘truth to materials’, so…
> to put it another way, there is certainly no ’true’ interface for digital information, but if there were one… I can’t imagine faux leather would be it.
I've wanted to make this argument in favour of sometimes using skeuomorphic (e.g. faux leather) design for a while:
All the other applications that come with Mac OS (say, iTunes, Mail.app, or iPhoto) have clearly-defined, strongly-typed content "atoms"—respectively, songs, messages, and pictures. The apps themselves just serve as magical databases with filters and specifiers to find and manipulate that content. They don't have to look like anything, because they're just "the box you put your music in" or "the box your get your mail from."
iCal and Address Book are the two main applications in the default set that break this pattern: they don't hold a clearly-defined type of content at all. It's just raw information: information about events, and about people, respectively. Because of this, you could get away with simply using text files for the same purpose, and nothing of value would be lost. It would even be as easy to sort and search, if you have a good text editor.
So Apple needs to offer a value proposition that makes a user want to use Address Book rather than a text file: familiarity in function and ease of learning curve. In a more design-oriented view, in cases where the data itself is arbitrary (you could technically store anything in a vCard), the software must bring over the rules and constrictions of the physical medium to give the proper context for the controls in the UI to actually afford their proper use.
A set of overlapping boxes means nothing; a set of overlapping boxes on a screen that looks like a calendar suggests what you should use the boxes for. A set of blank index cards seems to suggest no use whatsoever, until you bind them into a familiar rolodex-like facade.
You can see the same thing play out with the iOS apps that Apple has given design awards: the kind that hold strongly-typed information tend to get the UI out of the user's way, and let the information stand paramount; while the kind that hold raw data retain a strong skeuomorphic metaphor to suggest use over-and-above "put text here."
Re: Steve Jobs left designer Jony Ive more power than anyone at Apple
#138It staggers me that time and time again Apple lays out the reasons for it's unrivalled success for all to see, yet non of it's rivals seem interested in copying their methods and opt for simply copying their products. Fortune favours the brave.
I personally think it's impossible to replicate what Apple have done. It's not just one thing that has caused a change but a series of changes starting when they introduced the iMac. Apple is more of a "love mark" than a technology company. Back in 95, Microsoft was a love mark, people loved it when a new version of windows came out, now people dread it. People started looking for an alternative and Apple was there,…
To be fair there is little in common between the iPad and Windows Tablet computers, it is a shame they both manage to be called the same thing simply for lack of a physical keyboard. The windows ones, with the stylus, certainly deserve the name, as they are identical in spirit to a stone tablet: the defining feature is the ability to write freehand. Definitely not the case on the iPad, in fact, we use a digital keyboard on the iPad! It's no "tablet."
Re: Steve Jobs left designer Jony Ive more power than anyone at Apple
#139Well, not THAT much power: 'Ive wants to spend more time in the UK where he wants his sons to go to school, the Times claims, but the Apple board has refused to support his relocation. The story quotes a family friend as saying that "they have told him in no uncertain terms that if he headed back to England he would not be able to sustain his position with them".' From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2011/f…
Is not that just a story with no reliable source whatsoever? And the true tabloid Daily Mail actually interviewed some of Ive's friends and they all said never heard of such a desire from Jony Ive himself. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1367481/Appl...
>true tabloid Daily Mail
I seriously hope you're being sarcastic...
Re: Steve Jobs left designer Jony Ive more power than anyone at Apple
#140I'm not surprised - Ive deserves it. The designs he came up with were the driving factor in Apple's success.