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Comment by ajaimk | Hacker News Reader

I agree. Jon Ive was a genius with design when he had to work under constrained scenarios. But the moment he had unconstrained power, form was able to win over functionality.

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I think Ive was a fantastic and visionary industrial designer, but when he debuted as the design czar over software as well I think Apple’s UX kinda entered a nosedive. The actual designers “on the ground” there really pulled iOS through those times and I agree with other commenter that nowadays Apple is really so much better.

Yes, it felt like Ive had too much unilateral decision making power. Steve loved the push and pull of constructive arguments and disagreements and famously lamented that even he didn’t always get his way if others had compelling arguments. Ive is and was a designer. Design and—more specifically, his design asthetic—always came first under his tenure post Steve.

He needed to have Fadell around to argue with, but Tim prefers an office style with less tension. Which has been great for shareholders, bad for consumer design tho. It’s hard to know what is more “right” since more people have apple products than ever before, but wow I love my post-Ive Mac a lot more, and design across the board has focused a bit on function w/ Craig getting a bigger role

Apple's post-Jobs success has been the snowball effect of iPhone capturing more of the market.

Mac suffered a lot under Jobsless Ive (Cook doesn't care about product one way or the other), surviving the butterfly / touchbar winter because customers were able to keep their old Retina laptops, customers groaned and beared with lemon laptops for a few years, and desktop declined in overall relevance (except gaming where Apple never had a presence anyway), and started to recover in the post-butterfly/post-touchbar/M1 era.

From what I have read Fadell didn’t seem to have a lot of internal fans, and there were some major software issues under his leadership, but there is no doubt he has clout with Jobs and provided a different perspective. Jobs was always willing to play the role of tie breaker that I am not sure Cook is comfortable in, so it makes sense to have a more harmonious leadership team that can come to a consensus more often than not without an intermediator.

There does seem to be more collaboration and sensible compromises from all internal stakeholders than at any time at Apple, at least that is how it feels as an end user. Apple products of the last few years have less head scratching omissions and/or design/engineering decision.

The MacBook Pro from 2016 to 2021 is the embodiment of that weirdness.

Yes, he's a great physical product designer. But to bring that, and apply the same principles into SW just doesn't make sense

I’m not so sure he’s even that, I think the hockey puck iMac mouse was his?

He's a great physical aesthetic designer. He's terrible at human interfaces, hardware or software.

I feel like you can't be a great designer if you neglect human interfaces, at that point you're just an artist. Nothing wrong with that, but good design it is not.

I’m not sure if having some badly designed products doesn’t make one a great physical product designer. It’s completely possible to be a great product designer with few bad products.

I’m not arguing that Ive is a great designer. Ok just saying that the iMac hockey puck mouse doesn’t invalidate that claim.

Fair. I use it as an example of uncontroversially bad design, and his most infamous mistake being ages ago does count in his favour (even if the dead cockroach charging mechanism of the modern mouse is also his), even though I chose that example in part because people argue both ways about his more recent design choices. Myself, I do not like any design choice I’ve heard attributed to him, but that’s not enough by itself either.

Jonathan Ive got rich and started designing luxury products for himself. Stuff like gold Apple Watches that were soon obsolete or ridiculous luxury bands for them. Even a regular leather Apple Watch strap ended costing hundreds of dollars. At one point I needed a new leather band for mine and I bought a perfectly nice third party band for the same price as the sales tax on the equivalent Apple one.

I think part of the reason they sold insanely expensive Apple Watches is that they wanted to compete with luxury watches. Of course, the functionality is very different; the similarity is that both are methods of conspicuous consumption.

I’m not an Apple Watch fan myself (still clutching my Pebble for dear life), but I can understand why the uber-expensive Apple Watches would appeal to a certain audience.

> I can understand why the uber-expensive Apple Watches would appeal to a certain audience.

I never could understand why Apple (or anyone else) this would be a possibility. Luxury watches are almost synonymous with heirloom; there is no way anyone will be wearing a functional Gold Apple watch in 2085 with the anecdote "This was my dad's watch" - it would be hopelessly outdated, and likely non-functional by then. This is not the case with other luxury watches. This has little to do with branding, but everything to do with expected longevity and utility.

That heirloom stuff is purely marketing the fantasy of rich parents handing down a bauble (instead of, say, a business or real assets) aimed entirely at middle class and upper middle class people. It’s not real.

I may not be understanding your point: are you suggesting that 60-year-old still-functional swiss-made "baubles" don't get inherited? Old money is almost entirely defined by items inherited from forebears.

Old money is not about baubles it’s about the means to earn a living, connections and the knowledge of how to retain wealth.

Passing down a watch or car is an incidental thing and the watches real old money passes down are not the ones like Patek Phillipe who find it necessary to run ads suggesting otherwise to the middle class readers of The Economist.

I agree that they won’t be heirlooms, and old money folks would never be fooled into thinking they would.

But a lot of people wear luxury watches simply to show off how much disposable income they have. To these people, having a watch that is recognizably expensive is the only requirement.

I can. It's for an interval including instagram-flexing up to heirloom, not actually competing properly with a really nice watch. You wouldn't see a the drivers at a Grand Prix wearing an Apple Watch but the influencers (grumble) are.

This is somewhat true throughout all of apple's products. Release a new Mac or iPhone, you'll notice a lot of people (especially musicians) buying them for no utilitarian reason other than because it's new and because it'll be theirs - and it's expensive. Apple's marketing and reputation is so brilliant it's ingrained almost like a religion (Certainly socially what religion was to a ye olde' peasant)

From the article:

> nonrecurring engineering costs led Apple’s business division to suspend the iPad [redesign]

That doesn’t sound like Ive had unconstrained power?

That was after he left.

Imagine a design change costing $1 billion. There are very few people with that much power.

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