Turnover Hits Apple’s Famed Industrial Design Team | Hacker News Reader

Turnover Hits Apple’s Famed Industrial Design Team

wsj.com

115 pointsmudil96 comments

I suppose anyone leaving Apple's ID team (especially Jony Ive's inner circle) would get the equivalent of Jony Ive's job at any number of companies around the world. And companies would be happy to have that calibre of talent on board.

Some of it might be better career prospects, and some of it might really be "I've been at the pinnacle of my profession, I think I'm done"

Or something as human as, "I'm tired of designing laptops, phones, and peripherals. I want to try designing something very different for a while."

Life is fleeting. Go start new careers every 5-10 years if you have the luxury of that option. You decide what "career" means. Maybe you go become a stand up comedian. Maybe you just go program something different than you have been.

Just wanted to say I love this advice.

Yup, that's the best thing about working in this field - every 5-10 years you get to reinvent yourself so that the job doesn't go stale

When you say “this field”, do you mean design or tech more generally?

tech in general, I've variously: ported unix kernels, designed graphics cards, did low level chip design, chil design tools and a cloud startup, cable/satellite crypto, embedded RF/voip .....

How did you make these jumps?

In a commencement speech, Jeff Hoefer goes a little bit into why he left the team four years ago and how he's changed his job each year since:

https://youtu.be/a7cJHTpW4Tg (jump to 49:00 or so for the more relevant bits)

Note also that he had a quarter century of experience before Apple, having worked on anything from the (RotJ?) Darth Vader helmet to the Oral B CrossAction, which is, a bit surprisingly, the product he thinks defines his career.

That's what I'm going to try to do. After being paid to code for over 10 years, I simply don't want to do it anymore.

I'm going to start an aerospace company and try something radically different.

I'm single, I have no kids, and don't own a home. Why not? You know?

I know. Do it! You don't have anything to lose.

I mean, know what you're walking into, but if you have that, then yeah. My family makes me risk averse. No complaints. Happy as is, you can chase after whatever, as long as you're vaguely relevant in the field.

Very interesting. I'm just beginning my dev career (still in college) but I've always fantasized about doing something in aerospace. I'm in no position to start up something like that now, but maybe (hopefully) in a decade or two.

Would you mind expanding on what your goal is with your company?

Eh, I don’t really think I want to do that. I like my job, where it is comfortable and familiar, and I can do it easily 9-5. They pay me well, keep giving me more money and incentives to stay, and they like me.

I like having an easier time at work, and then being able to spend my hours and brainpower relaxing with my kids and wife.

Yes, life is fleeting. I don’t want to spend all my creativity and brainpower on work.

I like my work & field (including subfield), and even aside from not wanting to make my life about work I enjoy the incremental improvements as I hone my skills year after year. And honestly there is so much to learn that I dont think I'm anywhere close to hitting the skill ceiling.

At the same time, Apple quietly opened a design centre in Shenzhen half a year ago.

It felt to me that they wanted to do this with the least publicity possible. They don't even have their company name at the index at first floor.

As long as they don’t try to replicate their Apple-specific tactics.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marketshare/2013/04/09/ron-john...

Yet they’ve been there forever. People don’t simultaneously decide that they’ve hit their peak. They do get pissed off in clusters though.

The more straightforward guess is that perhaps there are problems with some aspect of working on this team.

“People do get pissed off in clusters” is the best description of a team/company meltdown that I’ve ever seen.

I'm sure most of these people have exceptional career options but there really isn't an equivalent of Jony Ive's job at other companies.

This might be the only video of most if not all of the ID team at Apple [1]. I've been following Apple since I was 16 or 17 and I think in that time they've been pretty anonymous in the Apple story. Found a photo of them [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEW4D_CERkE

[2] https://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Apple_I...

I personally think right now that industrial design, architecture and still fashion have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to designing great things with regards to technology. Gone are the days where you can be concerned with the physical looks of a thing. I've met designers who can do everything just that the upper management team(s) don't get it.

If we can get these super thin laptop designs why can't we create new form factors? It's purely because people are afraid right now to create new product segments or try new things.

I imagine a lot of these designers are leaving because they're trying really hard but keep making things that never see the light of day.

The last paragraph rings true to me. I've had designers leave my company because I consistently picked other designs over their's. IMO it comes down to a builder versus maintainer mindset.

And so begins the inevitable rise of tonerheads at Apple.

It ebbs and flows over the years. The lowest stinkiest neap tide of the worst ebb ever was the QuickTime 4.0 Player Debacle. "Think Different" but "Do Same".

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtimeno.htm

Interface Hall of Shame

- QuickTime 4.0 Player -

Amid much fanfare, Apple recently released a beta version of the QuickTime 4.0 Player. Intended to showcase the technological improvements of the QuickTime 4.0 multimedia technology, the QuickTime 4.0 Player sports a completely redesigned user interface. The new interface represents an almost violent departure from the long established standards that have been the hallmark of Apple software. Ease of Use has always been paramount to Apple, but after exploring the QuickTime 4.0 Player, the rationale behind Apple's recent "Think Different" advertising campaign is now clear.

While there are some who would conclude that the revised interface represents innovative thinking at Apple, we would have to conclude otherwise. There is nothing innovative about the user interface of the QuickTime 4.0 Player; the developers adopted the same misguided principles employed in IBM's RealThings, copied some of the same features we critiqued in our reviews of IBM's RealPhone and RealCD, and added a few new follies of their own.

It was much worse than that, long before that. Copland, Taligent, and the warehouses full of aging beige boxes. A million different product lines with inscrutable model numbers. Consumers had no clue which Mac to buy.

Then Apple bought Next and Steve Jobs came back and discontinued all of those product lines and all of the dead-end operating system development and set about turning NextStep into Mac OS X. He released the iMac and Apple finally had a recognizable consumer computer for the first time since the 80s.

>Consumers had no clue which Mac to buy.

Interestingly I think they may be falling back into that now, the laptop line in particular looks confused to me.

Same goes for the iPad and iPhone. Never thought I'd see the day when iPhone model names became as meaninglessly inscrutable as Nokia's or Blackberries (e.g. BB Curve 9730).

iOS devices are easy.

There’s the ones that you can buy, and the ones that they want to sell.

Thanks for the link. I have fond nostalgic reminiscences of these gone wrong interface experiments when skeumorphic design was king. There was an aspect of being patronising about the thinking that went with this, an implicit assumption that users were stupid. Nowadays these design patterns have great retro feel.

To a certain extent everything goes in phases and fashions. The Windows XP style buttons were all the rage for a while, nowadays everything is flat. They won't be flat forever.

As we move further away from the analog world the interface mistakes of the past that hark back to skeumorphic analogues of analog devices have a special quality, maybe not for everyone or every thing, but, if you wanted to design a game and set it back in the last century then things like the QT Player or Microsoft Bob provide great inspiration.

Ted Selker at IBM Almaden Research had an amazingly successful streak of getting useful innovations from the lab to the market with the ThinkPad, including the TrackPoint (the red joy button), the butterfly keyboard, and the transparent LCD display with removable back cover that works with an overhead projector (at a time when overhead projectors were much more common that expensive video projectors).

IBM Pointing Stick #1 - 10_25_91:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6guBllqPPY&feature=youtu.be...

(Not Edwin Selker!)

Ted Selker Oral History:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpw7Bml_XvI

>He worked for short times at Atari and Xerox PARC before joining IBM in 1985. At IBM, first at T.J. Watson Labs, then at Almaden research labs, he rose to Fellow, inventing the TrackPoint cursor control device, making major contributions to the ThinkPad notebook computer, designing artificial-intelligence help and teaching systems, designing wearable computing devices, researching eye tracking systems, and designing an intelligent "living room of the future".

(Check out his red TrackPoint lapel pin!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_760

>IBM ThinkPad 760CDV - Similar to the 760CD, this unique model had a removable back cover on the LCD that would permit light to shine through for use on an overhead projector.

IBM ThinkPad 701c "butterfly" keyboard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLj3aCfqzOM

Opening and closing IBM ThinkPad 701c with unique keyboard folding mechanism.

ThinkPad TrackPoints - how do they work?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3A7LDyizlc

Early TrackPoint prototypes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4Ss6F1qIHU

He sounds like a ‘product’ guy.

The TrackPoint grew out of his university research, and a lot of user testing and measurement and iterative improvement went into it before IBM allowed him to ship it in a real product. (The youtube video talks about the pressure=>velocity mapping curve they developed and refined.) He collaborated with his father, a material scientist, who designed the rubbery grippy material so it felt just right.

I had a 760CDV. That was an amazing machine in an era where you had to carry projector panels around. It never failed to amaze onlookers.

It was brilliantly focused on solving such a practical real-world problem of the era. But its window of opportunity has closed. Today's laptops can't just afford the overhead or support such open transparency. ;)

That sounds really interesting. You don't happen to have any pictures of it? I didn't find anything through Google, just that it existed.

there are pictures of the 755CDV doing that, if that's of any interest:

http://www.lenovoblog.cz/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/3566815....

http://www.lenovoblog.cz/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/755cdv.j...

http://www.lenovoblog.cz/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/thinkpad...

(from http://www.lenovoblog.cz/2016/02/historie-rodiny-notebooku-i... )

https://thinkwiki.de/755

Yeah those pictures show it very well. The only thing you don't really see is the existential dread as you hook your expensive laptop to the projector in an inbalanced fashion using velcro straps....

> Ted Selker at IBM Almaden Research had an amazingly successful streak of getting useful innovations from the lab

I always thought that ThinkPads were done by IBM Japanese RnD centre

> If we can get these super thin laptop designs why can't we create new form factors? It's purely because people are afraid right now to create new product segments or try new things.

It could also be diminishing returns as technologies mature. Most smartphones have converged on the black slab. That may because physics and relatively inelastic customer needs define the form factor. Said another way, is a breakthrough new form worth ever larger amounts of nonrenewable resources? At what point does it stop? Do we mine the Earth into a wasteland for a single, levitating, all-knowing monolith?

"People don't design ships, the ocean designs ships". The black slab is popular not because people are making it, but because people are buying it. This doesn't mean that it is optimal, but companies have to respond to market pressures.

What alternatives are there to the black slab? A modern smartphone is over 99% screen, all you've got is bezel and the back to play with. And on the other side, what alternatives are there to actually buy?

Also your quote doesn't seem to support your argument. You can't claim that design is customer led, and then use an example where it's led by something else.

MSFT had a demo/concept of a foldable device with a stylus many many years ago.

It basically felt like a notebook and was super interesting, even without having a foldable screen. Sadly, it didn't go anywhere. Could we have a thing that opens up like a deck of cards/fan? How about we use that back side for a low-consuption always on screen?

I refuse to think phones are "solved".

Phones aren't solved because we keep reinventing what a 'phone' is. The phone was solved 100 years ago, then we decided people should do their own dialing. Now we are at the point where a smartphone isn't really a phone anymore.

I can think of a few improvements to phones as well. Make them smaller, and add a headphone jack, sd card reader and removable battery....

There's probably some good books on the subject that I can't remember right now, I think that design in the large, has a good amount out evolution to it, I mean that in the proper biological sense. It finds one, or a few local maxima, but needs really shaking up to 'progress' from there. We have found the local maxima in the smartphone space, but then Stove Jebs will come along with a voice activated communicator that you wear on your chest, and we'll start again.

I think Stove Jebs did a great job changing what we think a 'phone', or for that matter a 'computer' is, and that shouldn't be underestimated.

Even now, ten years later, I find myself amazed at how much of a change in the adoption of computing the iPhone has made, and how we are still trying to understand the effects, good and bad, this has on society. I still vividly remember 'chat' being something geeks do, or self-consciously using my stylus-based Palm device for todos and calendaring because I sure as hell didn't want my high school classmates to catch me in the act.

But I'm also very curious about what the next thing will be that punts us out of this 'local maxima', whether it's some reconceptualization of how we actually use these devices responsibly, a completely new device, or something I can't imagine.

My point was that designers don't get to decide what products get launched, the market does. If there was an alternate design that created excitement and was relatively affordable, it would very quickly become popular. Products are created through user testing, market research, and limited by available components (which themselves are limited by what's already out there), so change is slow and conservative.

The market decides what is popular, to a point. They don't get to decide what is launched. I don't think designers really get to decide that either though.

I'd disagree that change is slow and conservative. In the smartphone biz they're coming out with half baked ideas all the time. I'd agree progress is slow for certain things, but then its astonishingly fast in other ways.

Trying to identify what we actually disagree about here, it seems you see a lot more order in the process? I made the point in another reply in this subthread that I see it more like evolution. Its messy, with lots of dead ends, and as soon as you start trying to generalise, the Duck billed Platypus says hello.

For every product that has gone through user testing, we have Samsung coming out with one that evidently hasn't.

We are getting new form factors, they're just so radical you don't recognize them: laptop->tablet/phone, phone->watch, desktop->VR headset, home assistant. None of them are perfect substitutes yet, which is why the old form factors persist, but look at how many people are doing on their phones today what used to require a laptop or desktop. It's not hard to imagine a watch plus earbuds replacing the phone for most (but not all) users, and home assistant replacing a desktop for some (but not most).

Essentially, if you are a public company, you can't afford to spend resources on products that have a limited market when you have projects that you know will be successful to produce. You can only spend the occasional resource on what I call "technological flexing" where a company develops a product to show off what they are capable, such as the Galaxy Fold.

As someone that work in the product design field, I fully expect that the vast majority of my ideas don't see the light of day. You have to have zero ego when it comes to discarding good but impractical ideas. My job is to come up with the best ideas that provide the most value to customers and the lowest cost to the company.

If we only concentrate on market forces then we'll always be making faster horses instead of cars.

Do these three people have 45 years combined experience on the industrial design team, or do you get promoted into that team after substantial experience on other teams at Apple? That could be the difference between a dramatic loss of institutional knowledge and ho hum normal turnover (12% annually).

Probably the former, given that the team has been around for a long time. There was another defection even before their earliest example of 2016. In that case it was someone with a decade of experience on the team and another 25 years in the field who went to Google (ouch).

From the New Yorker profile of Jony Ive a few years ago:

>Apple employs three recruiters whose sole task is to identify designers to join the group; they find perhaps one a year.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/shape-things-c...

I wonder if any of them were involved in the Macbook Pro keyboard.

The self awareness to leave the stage before you're asked to.

Do you think the industrial designers were actually involved in the engineering of the keyboard (the source of the issues) or just the aesthetics (which look fine)?

Given that the old keyboard worked fine, and the only reason we have a new one is to shave a few millimeters, then yes I believe the designers are most directly responsible. Plus ID would tell you their role is much more than "aesthetics."

Maybe I'm an outlier, but I actually really like the feel of the new mbp keyboard, and going back to the old keyboard feels like i just stepped back in time and my ipod has a wheel on it again... This opinion subject to change if keys stop working.

I would, however, give up some thinness for better battery life, that's for sure...

I use a mechanical keyboard (blue) on desktop, and previously used a relatively thick Lenovo laptop. If my 2018 MBP wasn't constantly double typing 'e', I'd rank it right up there with them in terms of feel. It's shallow, but very crisp, with just the right activation force.

Though, if Apple couldn't fix its issues in three generations, it may be time for them to move on.

I still own a 2012 MacBook Air. While the old keys have a hell of a lot of depth, they’re also much more vague and “mushy”. I too prefer the new keyboard, although I wouldn’t rank them anywhere near an actual mechanical switch.

My main fear with the new switches is the durability, but since my only new MacBooks are company machines, I won’t pay should some dust disable a key.

It’s interesting that you lead with “I type on a mechanical keyboard”. I have long considered that at least part of the issue is related to heavier typing styles. I know that sounds like “your holding it wrong”, but thats not what I’m saying. As engineering solutions go, the keyboard they designed is extremely elegant. Maybe they didn’t account enough for how people type.

You are not alone. When the new keyboard actually works, it feels great. Going back to the old one feels mushy.

I’ve had two MBPs fail on the keyboard issue. One that I’ve already had repaired is having the issue again. I do like the typing feel on these keyboards, but they should toss this design given the poor reliability. Every single person I know with this laptop has had issues.

My uninformed guess is the designers insisted on thinness that engineering was unable to achieve without compromising other goals (reliability, feel, battery life). Aesthetics don't exist in a vacuum, and as a not-so-proud owner of this model I'd say Apple made the wrong choice.

I still don't get the pre-occupation with thinness. Lightness I get, but thinness doesn't equal that. Seems absurd.

The thing I like most about my MacBook Pro is that it's made out of aluminum. As long as its not absurdly heavy, I don't really care how thick or heavy it is.

What exactly is it about aluminum that you like?

I like the solidity. I like the texture. I like how it feels cold when I haven't used it in a few hours. Psychologically, it makes it feel more like a machine and less like a toy.

That's another thing I don't get at all. I'm ridiculously happy still with my galaxy s3 (yes 3), plastic back that i can remove in seconds. I've never had a case for it, and because it's plastic, when i've dropped it, it actually has some cushion. It's also thinner than my wife current iphone x with a case on it. What is the use case for aluminum other than "premium feel"?

Agreed. Of course thinness matters to some extent— I wouldn’t want to cram a three-inch-thick laptop into my bag. But—even ignoring ultrabooks— any, say, MacBook Pro or Dell Latitude from the past decade (or two!) is thin enough to not give a second thought.

I’m all for maximizing portability, but it’s not worth sacrificing durability and utility. That’s what tablets are for.

Thinness is highly correlated with lightness when the device is made out of aluminium.

How about some light non-thinness in the form of air flowing through to cool it better!

(Unless you use all that extra internal space for cat hair storage.)

Not really, the aluminum is just on the outer edge. The bulk of the volume, and thus the weight, is battery.

True. While replacing the battery of a Retina MBP I was surprised at how light it was without it.

Definitely, in fact most of their design work actually consists of designing fixtures and other parts used in the manufacturing process rather than the laptop parts themselves

I was under the impression that Industrial Design, as a discipline, is primarily concerned with the aesthetics of the end product, although my interactions with others about this leads me to believe this might be an American interpretation or a newer distillation of the concept.

Never worked at Apple, but from what I've heard from friends there ID is a much more powerful role than at most hardware companies. They are the ones who define what the product should be and how the user interacts with it and tend to get the final say on such matters. At other companies this would be in an MRD/PRD defined by product managers or another group.

Industrial Design as a discipline is no longer primarily concerned with aesthetics. It's a much more holistic discipline now with focus on manufacturability and TCO and so on and so forth.

Yes. That is industrial design. Industrial design degrees are heavily engineering based. Source: studied industrial design.

What country did you go to school? ID in the US definitely does not focus on engineering, but I hear in the UK and abroad product design and engineering degrees see a bit more inclusion in eachother’s curricula

I studied in the UK and it was a BSc degree. Industrial Design should be engineering lead, if it isn't then it's Three Dimensional Design or Product Design. I studied it back in the early 90's, so it's not a new thing. I firmly believe that you cannot design something if you don't understand how it works or how it will be made. Design isn't about aesthetics - it's about solving problems, after all engineers design solutions.

Hopefully it's the people who thought the macbook pro keyboard was a good idea...

that's just a natural step in the "thinness is the top priority in a laptop or phone" direction they have been following for years, I'm afraid.

I don’t think Apple leadership is concerned about being the world’s most valuable company in any given quarter or any given year.

This article alludes to a tie between design team departures and declines in sales growth.

Apple did not get big chasing quarterly profit numbers, it got big releasing game changing products and product improvements at the right time.

While this design group deserves strong regard, building AR glasses and software interface to control them is not something that a dozen people solely define, it comes from trial and error and enlightened engineers building and offering alternative ideas based on what only they could know is achievable in windows of potential release.

In fact, over the air updates, which was one of the most amazing accomplishments and features of iOS has little design at all. It’s just smart engineering that works well.

So I do not see these departures as a threat to glasses or autonomous systems because the prestige of the company combined with its quality of “taste” as jobs put it means it is not going wayward because three people leave.

> Apple did not get big chasing quarterly profit numbers, it got big releasing game changing products and product improvements at the right time.

they released those products over a decade ago. they got big because they took the momentum from those innovations and turned them into a lifestyle, creating “upgrade” fever and everything else that came with that. in the meantime, they became an industry bully, pressuring suppliers and vendors for more and more discounts while pressuring consumers to pay more and more for moderate iterations of their products.

>In fact, over the air updates, which was one of the most amazing accomplishments and features of iOS has little design at all. It’s just smart engineering that works well.

I disagree with your statement completely, a lack of interface is still an interface and requires careful design considerations on the backend.

I think this quote sums it up:

Good design, when it’s done well, becomes invisible. It’s only when it’s done poorly that we notice it. - Jared Spool

Are these people being pushed out over the keyboard fiasco, or is no one in the company being held accountable for that disaster?

I like the MacBook Pro butterfly keyboard.

I did, too... until it failed for one of my teammates and myself. It’s a pretty awful feeling to have spent money on what’s considered the best-in-class laptop only to have the keyboard - something that’s never failed on any iBook or MacBook I’ve owned in over 15 years - have really weird error modes.

They need to fix this.

Me too. I like the keyboard and the feeling. But after 1.5 years now I get stuck keys from time to time, and this is just bad for a computer of this price range. It is good if you do not have any problems, but sooner or later everyone will get problems - it is a ticking bomb.

I wonder how many are going to Juul. They already have the guy who was in charge of the iPod.

What has changed in the design really? I keep getting the most recent generation as they don't have a long lifetime and they are good with warranty replacements. All I can tell is the material is a bit darker and the corners are more beveled.

I don't know but he's been there since the beginning.

Apple's industrial design team was great when Steve Jobs was alive. After his passing the team hasn't produced anything good. Take Homepod for example. It is an amorphous blob. Google Home has a better industrial design, and so does every single Bose speaker. Apple's industrial design team is coasting on the reputation built during the Jobs years; their current work is crap.

As someone who’s wearing an Apple Watch and listening to AirPods, I’m inclined to disagree that Apple’s ID is resting on their laurels.

Agreed. Just picked up my first Watch (S4) and it’s probably the most successfully “Apple-y” Apple product I’ve used for a long time (meant as a compliment!). Beautifully designed hardware and the combination of thoughtful software and hardware design has created a device that enhances your day to day life with useful functionality and keeps an eye on your fitness without being intrusive, annoying or addictive. I like it much more than I expected to.

I also think iPhone X and the new iPad Pro are fantastic pieces of design. As someone who used the iPad for music software, I really wish they hadn’t got rid of the headphone socket, but otherwise it’s a very well designed device.

I actually like the design of the homepod, it's quite clever.

The apple watch being held together by glue vs interlocking plate or screws although is something I don't like. It makes the water resistance fail when you are in a hot situation, like a hot sunny day, a warm shower or a hot tub.

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