Why Jony Ive left Apple to the ‘accountants’

In this case of course having multiple products to graduate their own silicon through, and enough cash to design and build a chip, require you to be a huge company. But it shows strategic excellence and a long-term planning horizon to pull this off.

(Note I’m using the original strict definition of Disruption from Christensen, not the hand-wavey TechCrunch slogan.)

This is easy to do when you eschew any and all commitment to backwards compatibility. Every major OS update has introduced breaking changes and I gotta be honest, everyone except the most diehard of Mac fans is getting pretty sick and tired of routinely re-purchasing software, not to mention Apple breaking their own applications. Example: obsoleting iTunes by force and coding hooks so it refuses to run without patching the app. (For those wondering, Apple coded a version check into the Mac version of iTunes so that it refuses to launch if the OS is "too new.") Ignore the fact that Apple Music is a shitty replacement that didn't replace all the features of iTunes (like removing the XML library sync, which a ton of third-party apps relied on, breaking them all in one move), but dont't let that stand in the way of progress.

Show me one person that has never been affected by Apple breaking apps, and I'll show you ten people with Avid or Pro Tools rigs who "never update the OS" as a general policy. It's 2022 and I'm still waiting for official EOL/support dates published by Apple. Everyone from Microsoft to FreeBSD does this. Saying "well they traditionally support N-2" or whatever doesn't cut it. People need hard dates so they can plan adequately. Apple's commitment in this area is like depending on your stoner friend to follow through on a promise.

The M1 era is going to redefine the industry in subtle and not so subtle ways.

No, it is overhyped (not by Apple), and it worries me. Apple's platform jumps are impressive (and this last seamless platform switch is more about macOS, good decisions NeXT made a very long time ago, developer empowerment decisions), but let's not confuse that with how bonkers every user of M1 and family are going. We have a bit of anecdotal data coming in, no one can believe, and I quote 5000 new M1 owners, "how snappy" the M1 is.

But look at the benchmarks. Each M1 model is a typical and negligible increase in performance over whatever most recent previous Intel model. We are talking about 1.05x performance increases! For example, take the 2018 6-core Intel Mini with the 3.2GHz processors and compare performance to the 2020 M1 mini, and it is immediately apparent, the 2020 M1 mini is really only a little bit more performant. And this is not bad news, it just means everyone is out of their minds, but it is typical of new Apple releases. The new models are always just a little more performant than the last revision (except 2010-2012, when models doubled in performance 3 years in a row and did not double again until 2018).

So the hype on M1 is overwhelming, and the M1 and family are not at all under appreciated. People seem to think M1 is miraculous, and I admit I think it is pretty neat... even after comparing benchmarks with previous models and realizing this is not a quadrupling or even doubling of performance; the increase in performance with Apple switching from Intel to ARM is... merely incremental. This was a lateral move, and not a giant leap forward, not yet. Go look for yourself. But don't be sad about it, again, this is entirely typical of Apple new releases... the new models are always just a little better than the last revision. Of course, performance is not the only metric.

So the hype says M1 walks on water, but misses the truth, that M1 does what x86 does with less power. Again, M1 isn't what a lot of people are saying... it doesn't blow Intel out of the water, it merely keeps pace with Intel, and that is impressive enough... but add the efficiency gains, and what we have are chips as good as Intel's (more or less), but use less power. Anything evangelized beyond this is crazy hype.

The M1 chips are nice. But Apple also continually throws developers under the bus forcing them along their deprecation strategies.

If you can’t balance those constraints you are not a good designer.

I'm stuck using this "cool design" as a desktop now because it costs ridiculous money to repair. And I get to flip my monitor on and off twice to get it to come back from sleep.

This is my 4th macbook pro. Previously, I had 1 battery problem in my first 2008 model and it was replaced at the Apple Store same day. My old macs ran until the batteries finally swelled years later. They weren't just sleek and cool, but super high quality and amazingly sturdy.

The other thing that stinks is that the issue wasn't something accountants did to save some bucks, but a design feature that cost me more.

I'm honestly only buying an M1 because I know that they've left the sexy-at-the-expense-of-the-customer approach.

I think Ivie sans Jobs got too focused on design and not customer experience. Apple made excellent hardware before Ivie, and likely will after. Just maybe not as many fashion shows.

I would say the majority of people disliked the small key travel, that’s why apple “fixed” it in the latest iteration, specifically calling it out as a benefit.

What do you like more about it compared to the newer one?

I think that your comment is insightful in that while Ive's time at the top of Apple product development was far from perfect, his success was undeniable.

Jony might not always have been right but he was always wrong for the right reasons. Principled in his vision for design and human interface. I think his worst successes (lol) were those he had over software UI and removing information from the UI in the name of aesthetics or the Touch Bar in the name of changing how we see keyboards.

His understanding of how to make a computer something you wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen with but also something that you can take with you everywhere (thin and light are good when the tech can match) have certainly made his devices more a part of our lives.

Jobs could match him on this stuff but I would imagine that it would go over a lot of business and engineer types' heads. Takes all sorts.

Which is actually incredible when you think about it. They might not know or care about what "M1" is (although I doubt that), but it's clearly a commercial success.

Your consumer gadget choices should not define you or your "look".

Nobody else cares what computer you use. It's fine.

That seems obvious, Cook was never the "taste" person, which is what Jobs was (brutally so). Cook has always been the ops guy (his original role was SVP for worldwide ops, then EVP for sales and ops, before becoming COO).

If a design is for some reason repulsive to a user then it is not good design.

I think Ive and Jobs together raised the bar for tech so many times that its easy to forget what computers used to look like.

"A Pattern Language" was supposed to be about designing buildings that the inhabitants could then adapt for their own purposes, but it's unclear if this actually ever happens.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/18/qatar-...

How would you know how architects think? Are you an architect?

I think my personal opinion is between what I just said and what you said.

I'd also love to see attack surface brought down. For new messages from unknown contacts limit imessage payload to ascii. Yes. No emoji's no anything :) At least as an option. Etc etc. Re-write stacks on internet facing side if needed in safer languages? I'm kidding but...

There's no way apple is that petty or instructive. The wireless keyboard can be charged while in use, so your theory kind of falls flat.

I'm certain that apple just doesn't care. There were probably some tricky engineering problems during the design of the mouse which pushed the product team towards having the charging port on the bottom or it was a purely aesthetic decision — a recess / inlet for the lightning charging port probably didn't look great, and the designers rejected it.

So, they went with the port on the bottom. I'd wager the way Apple sees it, having to wait two minutes to get 9 hours of battery life if your mouse dies unexpectedly isn't the end of the world, and the battery lasts ~2-3 months on a full charge, so what's the problem?

I sort of agree with the hypothetical take I presented above. Yah, it would be nice to be able to use it while charging for those rare situations where you forget to charge it, but it's not the end of the world. Even if you disagree, it's astonishing to me how much ink has been spilled roasting apple for the magic mouse 2.

Is this a common problem? I only use wired trackballs but I notice other major brands of rechargeable wireless mice don't seem to care whether you use them plugged in or not.

What I think would have been better would be to put the charging port on the back instead of the bottom so you can still use it if you absolutely need to while charging but it's just awkward and uncomfortable enough to discourage doing so on a regular basis.

Same as the first generation Apple Pencil: it spends 30 seconds in the Lightning port, it's ready to go for long enough. The only people who think it's a problem are those who've never owned one and assume Apple wants people to leave it there all the time.

That's possibly one of the best "fooling you while telling the truth" in print.

Just think of the travel experience of the poorest consumers versus the richest.

(The trick in the Coke thing is the petitio principii that you'd want to drink it.)

Unless you use any application that requires more or less precise scrolls. Like any game, or any map in the browser. The experience of using Google maps / Apple maps / Openstreetmap with Magic Mouse is unbelievably shitty. Almost every time I want to make a click it interprets it as a scroll and zooms in or out. I eventually replaced magic mouse because of this with a regular mouse when I use an Apple computer, and it is much much better.

Sure, the iconic designs of the G4 Cube, iMac, metal Powerbooks and later Macbook were what drew people in, but the usability is what kept many people with Apple.

Is the better scrolling a design or a tech thing? Probably tech, but I'm sure it's only that good because someone really understood how people use it and what it really needs to do well and then insisted that the tech worked flawlessly.

Which is exactly why many Apple fans had become so frustrated with bizarre "form over function" design in the waning Ive years. Even if the butterfly keyboard hadn't been vulnerable to making an entire computer unusable due to a tiny speck of dust, the "tapping on glass" feel of it was the prime example of "usefulness be damned" at the alter of Ive's bizarre obsession with thinness. If anything, the most recent MacBooks, where they just essentially undid all the bad decisions of the previous 3-4 years, were an admission that they had chased weird design obsessions at the cost of "it just works".

The other commenters have already pointed out the absurdity of a mouse that can't be used while it is charging.

Apple has frequently ignored how it works for looks and still do. They would for the longest time stick all the USB ports on the left hand side of the laptop very close together such that a larger USB stick or a 3G dongle or whatever would block your only other port. They do things like awkwardly hide the power button on the back of iMacs, no fronting facing or side mounted ports, etc.

A better example though might be the mess that is the design, or rather lack thereof, of the notification system and haphazard gesture meanings in iOS. I use both a Pixel Android and an iPhone, but mainly the iPhone these days and it’s clear that Apple don’t get everything right.

But the design of having the charge port not on the bottom would not negatively affect how it works. In fact, the port on the bottom goes against "how it works" philosophy.

I use one (several, actually — that’s what work provides) and I absolutely think this matters.

I forget to charge it. I don’t check the battery level. I don’t remember to plug it in at the end of the day.

I also shouldn’t have to. That’s an annoying, unnecessary cognitive load.

If it dies in the middle of something important (and it does), stopping for some unknown number of minutes to let it charge is not a suitable option.

Currently, my fix is to have two magic mice; when the battery in one dies, I swap it out for the other one.

This is the only solution that doesn’t offload the cognitive burden of remembering to charge something at the end of the day onto me.

This is also a ridiculous solution to that problem.

You got that backward. The people who are annoyed by these shortcomings don't use an Apple Mouse.

I actually would use an Apple mouse and I think this matters. I don’t use one because of this issue. See my response above; tl;dr: I don’t ever want to leave the mouse unplugged.

> First, it ignores that it doesn't matter whether the charging port is on the bottom, because that mouse cannot operate when it's plugged in.

Yes, and this is a fundamental design flaw and it should be fixed.

> Second, it ignores that you can charge the thing in a few minutes, so, again, it doesn't matter that the port is on the bottom

Interrupting my flow for a few minutes is really unacceptable.

I don't know if it qualifies as genius, however it's plainly obvious that Cook is an exceptionally competent manager and logistician. He has also been a stable hand on an increasingly sprawling behemoth that easily could have gotten out of hand (~$400 billion in operating profit every five years - in the wrong management hands that's a disaster waiting to happen). He's successfully operating a mass consumer product company with the profit of Saudi Aramco, a once unthinkable outcome (Aramco used to tower over the profit of most every other corporation globally). Ten years ago Microsoft was one of the few global profit giants with ~$20b in annual profit; Apple is near six times that scale now. Cook has done a relatively good job of keeping a leash on Apple's financial behavior.

> That's just the spirit of Apple and the place where Steve Jobs wanted it to be.

Eh, there's nothing that points in the direction that Steve Jobs wanted Apple to be computers for the rest of us. Apple was always marketed as expensive and exclusive. Which is ironic because Apple devices are clearly mass products, with design that has little variation over the quite limited product line, and almost zero variation between Apple products owned by people. Somehow Apple made people believe it is hip to own the same thing as everybody else, and feel privileged about it, which defies all logic.

On Windows, none of my headsets or controllers would automatically connect, most of the time requiring me to pair them manually every time.

On Mac, pairing would generally stay remembered but I'd typically need to manually select the device I want to connect to in the Bluetooth menu.

On Linux, prior to Pipewire, I had to close all of my audio apps to connect Bluetooth headphones. Now with Pipewire, the connection is so "sticky" that I have to turn off Bluetooth on my desktop if I want to use it on any of my other devices, since it always steals the connection.

I also appreciate that Apple leaves a highly amplified headphone jack on their MacBook pros because there’s tons of Pro applications where Bluetooth headphones just don’t work due to latency.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/06/28/who-are-alan-dye-...

People like big phones. The idea of a big iPhone that has contemporary guts but lacks some of the really wild camera abilities of the Max models didn’t inherently seem like the wrong plan to me. But it just kinda went nowhere, probably because you can just go buy last year’s iPhone model.

His value existed solely when his extremes were moderated by someone like Steve Jobs.

When handed the reigns, Ive ran roughshod over what made Apple — and his own work — worthwhile. He prioritized form over function, and ego over empathy.

Eg. The clean aluminum case and the black keys etc. It looks fundamentally the same.

Contrast with the butterfly keyboard, which was new in a post jobs world. And universally a disaster.

Software is designed. Hardware is designed. Design is not how something looks on the outside. Design is how something works.

Maybe your intended message is just unclear to me but your whole comment seems like pendantry without any substance.

There wasn’t enough room for the people Apple already employed at the time it was finished, much less now.

The collaborative spaces that eat up huge square footage are never used, because (1) that’s not how most people actually work, and (2) they’re right outside people’s offices, and conversations in those spaces are hugely disruptive.

If you’re fortunate enough to be afforded a private office, it’s a glass fishbowl. You constantly feel the need to watch over your shoulder.

Most people are in large shared desk spaces. They’re noisy, distracting, and frustrating to be in, and they’re also a fishbowl.

Sure, Apple Park has tons of high-end mass market designer furniture. Looking like a DWR showroom doesn’t make it a nice place to work.

I genuinely believe Apple Park has had a measurable negative impact on the quality and value of the work being produced by people there.

The shape has been slightly tweaked and there are some new bands and sensors. But they got the basics of the design right the first time. It’s easy to overlook how rare and difficult that is.

What did you find impressive about him?