> but recovered nicely afterwards
After Ives was fired/forced out/decided to leave to pursue his creative vision.
After Ives was fired/forced out/decided to leave to pursue his creative vision.
The guy litterally built modern apple from the ground up in equal with Jobs.
Thankfully he was fired and sanity prevailed which coincided with Apple Silicon line professors. The MacBook Pro that was immediate predecessor to M1 series was by far Apple’s worst hardware. It was bad on nearly every count.
How do you justify such a take?
The arrogance on hacker news is insane, or the self agrandizement and misunderstanding of how rare that is.
You have likely never done 1/1,000,000,000th of the scale or impact of this designer and then make flippant remarks that belay your ignorance of the matter.
I really would like to understand what your thought process is here. This is quite litterally like saying Michael Jordan was a pretty poor Basketball player and claiming Jerry Reinsdorf was somehow the real reason he succeeded.
In case Jony Ive or others like him, we simply do not know how many dozens or hundreds of very talented engineers and designers worked relentlessly under him so he can do beautiful presentations in British English.
Another person comes to my mind is Marissa Meyers. "Brilliant Executive" known for keeping Google Home page clean that's visited by billion people. But we all know how great she was when ended up at Yahoo.
Its all also well published and covered fact. I am genuinely shocked someone could have such a insistantly foolish take.
Yes, but how much of that was luck and how was extraordinary talent?
It's like saying "Donald Trump is really rich, ergo he must be a financial genius"... getting really rich isn't that hard if you're born into money and invest in New York real estate.
Now someone like Jobs who had fairly working class parents and founded a multi-billion dollar (now trillion dollar) company that radically changed the modern world, that, I would argue, is extraordinary talent.
While I don't personally have much an opinion on Ives's skill as a designer, I understand the GP's point of view - any "good but not great" designer could have done what he did, Ives was just lucky enough to win the lottery w.r.t. what company he worked for.
For a similar example, consider the case of Hollywood - you'll have plenty actors as talented as Brad Pitt (or whatever big name you'd like to choose) that don't end up staring in massive blockbusters, not because they lack talent, but because they weren't quite as lucky to get that first big break, which led to more recognition, more job offers, all of which compounded into making him a proper movie star. Obviously Pitt is a really good actor, but part of his success is likely due to luck as much as it is acting talent - he has tons of talent, but others might have equal talent and less luck, and therefore be less successful/have fewer people influenced by their work.
To use a software metaphor, consider the relative popularity of FreeBSD and Linux. Both are good OSes, but Linux got "luckier" because they didn't have to deal with a lawsuit, which meant it got more attention, more features, which led to a compounding "Matthew effect" where it now has a far larger market share than FreeBSD, despite them originally having roughly the same 'quality'.
Asside from your complete ignorance of the history at play, (Ive refounded Apple with Jobs) you seem to not understand what a 'mediocre' designer is capable of and how mind-bendinly hard it was to design the imac, ipad, iphone and apple watch
I genuinely can't believe you could be so wild to beleive such a thing. It becomes frankly stupid to the point of disrespectful of the work individuals put into their craft and the success they can find.
There is no person in the world outside of someone in this forum who would claim that somehow this was 'luck'.
HN has truly become one of the most toxically stupid places on the web.
Stupid and uninformed are different things. The constant stream of personal attacks and handwaving about abstract difficulty is not compelling.
Someone raised the idea of flagging new accounts. That would make it easier to simply ignore them.
Your take on crediting Ive with the success of Apple's product line would be exactly like crediting some designer at Nike with the success of their never ending line of sneakers.
If your theory of Ive's design genius being such a game changer was true, then why has Apple continued to flourish since he left 7 years ago? It seems pretty apparent that it's the brand/image established by Jobs that is successful, just as it's the Nike brand (bootstrapped by MJ & Nike Air) that propels Nike, not the magic of their designs.
Ive should have left shortly after the death of Steve. He was creatively spent at Apple.
He's not doing commoditised consumer design any more. He has enough money now, so he no longer needs to. The most consumer-oriented work recently has been an interior for the new Ferrari Luce EV.
I agree his post-Jobs years at Apple were somewhere between mediocre and hopeless (gradients...) and not many people seem to miss him.
Although to be fair, he wasn't responsible for Liquid Glass, which has set the bar for design failure at Apple to new depths.