Anyone who A) likes Apple and B) has ever been in a Dixons store in the UK will be overjoyed with the other departure, Browett (head of retail and previous Dixons CEO) who is leaving immediately (compared to Forstall's year long "transition" departure). Dixons is everything that Apple should never be; terrible customer service, clueless minimum wage staff, horrible retail experience, and generally used only by people…
> Great decision from Cook
Cook hired him, which many commentators pointed out was a mistake in the first place.
Anyone who A) likes Apple and B) has ever been in a Dixons store in the UK will be overjoyed with the other departure, Browett (head of retail and previous Dixons CEO) who is leaving immediately (compared to Forstall's year long "transition" departure). Dixons is everything that Apple should never be; terrible customer service, clueless minimum wage staff, horrible retail experience, and generally used only by people…
> Great decision from Cook Cook hired him, which many commentators pointed out was a mistake in the first place.
People make mistakes, good that he could recognize he made a mistake.
(No internal knowledge) I'm surprised he got fired over maps. Mapping is hard - comparable to writing a search engine. Apple did as well as can be expected for a first attempt. They had some kind of problem with Google Maps, and wanted to build their own capability, which was never going to be easy. He might have been fired if he cheated, by creating a well curated Valley dataset to prove to the other execs what a gr…
If he did get fired over maps, it wasn't because mapping is hard, or that the app didn't deliver. It would be because he over promised and under delivered. Sure, it was embarrassing to Apple to release a half-assed Maps app, but even more so to tout it just a few weeks earlier as being soooo good.
> It would be because he over promised and under delivered.
The speed at which you can present text to the reader is not the end-all, be-all of the reading experience. In fact, the logical conclusion, of having zero transition whatsoever, is actually a pretty terrible experience. Why do you think people use smooth scrolling on their OS? Transitions are very valuable in producing a good user experience, whether it's a simple horizontal slide as the Kindle iOS app uses by defau…
I don't know when it has been introduced, or even if it was always there and I didn't notice, but iBooks also supports continuous vertical scrolling and it IS much faster than looking at an animation that shows a page turn or a slide. The default mode, "page turn" doesn't make any sense. When I scroll through an ebook through the continuous scrolling, the text appears INSTANTLY, without a perceptible delay and since…
Scroll mode was introduced in the just-released iBooks 3.0. And I personally think think a never-ending scroll of text is not a good way to read a book. Pagination is very helpful. I realize other people like scroll mode, but that's a personal preference.
The man's got taste. That's good enough for me. Though I fear that it probably is "bye bye overt skeumorphism", but what if the new ideology is "hello excessive minimalism/removing every last pro feature left"? Let's hope not. I don't use iCal or Address Book much, so I don't hate that stupid skeumorphism like the rest of the world (I like it though when it's used sparingly and isn't just keep getting in your way)...
The man's got taste. That was true of Jobs as well... but holy crap, have you seen his yacht? Unfortunately, good aesthetic judgement in one area doesn't always carry over into other areas, even those that seem closely related. Human-machine interfaces have a functional aspect that can't be handled by dashing off yet another homage to Dieter Rams. Ive hasn't yet shown competence in this aspect of design.
> That was true of Jobs as well... but holy crap, have you seen his yacht?
On the other hand, have you seen the designs the approved for the future HQ?
Doubt we'll be seeing any major change like that at least until iOS8. For iOS7 it seems too soon. We might also see it in Mac OS XI, but I also doubt that's coming until 2014.
I think it's pretty clear where the direction of Apple is going: http://www.apple.com/itunes/new-itunes/ So it could be coming sooner than you think.
iTunes 11 is obviously not free of skeuo. There is at least the brushed metal volume knob and the pseudo-LCD display. I don't see how the new iTunes went away from the old iTunes, skeuo-wise, apart from the less-but-still-skeuo-looking LCD display.
Just to be clear, he's not "leaving." He got fired. He got fired because after the map fiasco became apparent, he refused to send out an apology or sign his name to the one Tim Cook sent. (internal knowledge)
Thanks for confirming this.
It seemed obvious that his back-to-back failures with Siri + Maps and the fact that lots of people inside Apple hated him were the reason for this, but it was impossible to know for certain without somebody inside taking a risk and saying that.
Care to speculate on who would be next in line to be CEO now? That was presumably Forstall. Now it would be Cue or Ive or...?
Interesting timing on the announcement, given that the stock market is closed today and likely tomorrow too. As both a fan and shareholder of Apple, I'm very pleased to hear Browett is out. The stories that came out a couple months ago about the changes in Apple Retail did fill me with admiration for his management style. Also, given how Forstall is described in a Business Week profile[1], and that Bob Mansfield is n…
Pretty standard (and smart) timing of the announcement. They release it while the media is focused on Sandy and the election so the minimum amount of scrutiny will be placed on Apple.
One of the biggest questions about Tim Cook was whether he could keep the management team together. Now one of the longest serving and most importance pieces of that unit is leaving. Whether or not it was a good decision, the market is going to interpret this negatively and they'll be scared there will be more of this.
If this were good news this is the last time Apple would have released it...
Nobody's posted this yet, so I'll give it a try. Dear Scott, Could you please start up NeXT again? That would really rock. Thanks, Bud
Forstall was the executive most like Steve Jobs within the company, so it will be interesting to see what he does next. He got forced out, just like Steve did. Now will he start a new company and get acquired and become the CEO down the road?
> Scott Forstall will be leaving Apple next year > Jony Ive will provide leadership and direction for Human Interface (HI) across the company And thus ended the reign of skeuomorphism at Apple. Or, at least, the reign of hyper-realism and hyper-whimsy in UI design. Jobs or Forstall always seemed to favour it, but could you imagine Jony Ive signing off on a Podcasts app where half the screen is a reel-to-reel tape tha…
Excellent news. I have always been surprised by the opposing philosophies guiding hardware vs software design in Apple products. They consistently offer beautiful hardware designs that emphasize simplicity, sometimes at a cost in usability (e.g. the sharp edges of the newer iPhones are less ergonomic than the first models). On the other hand, their software makes few compromises in usability, which is a good thing. But it never showed this taste for simplicity and purity that makes Apple devices so appealing from the outside. From the brushed metal windows and shiny plastic scroll-bars of early OS X, to the leather borders in iOS applications, Apple under Jobs and Forstall has pursued the opposite direction. Stock Android actually has the edge here (although inconsistently), something I would not say about the hardware or usability. Hopefully this change means we will see Apple software that preserves usability without the tacky visuals.