That being said, his range is impressive. He's capable of working in many different scales and materials. Beside the fact that he's a friend of Ive's, this seems like the best argument for him being a good fit at Apple.
I could not agree more. Newson is someone I really want to like because he seems like a cool guy, but I've just never been very impressed with either his work or how he talks about it.
He's most famous for this: http://static0.bornrichimages.com/wp-content/uploads/s3/imag...
Which I find to be a cool idea, but:
a) not very functional b) not very aesthetically pleasing in execution
A lot of that is just my taste, but I did not expect to see the top voted comment here be something I so thoroughly agreed with.
Can you elaborate on this?
Excessive rounded edges, bright pop-colors and lots of plastic seem to me a staple of the 90s. CAM techniques were just starting to hit their stride, so the work from the period often feels like it's just a direct product of the software. Newson's work looks to me like it popped out of a rendering on a Silicon Graphics machine. Karim Rashid, Greg Lyn are easy references. There are many others I can't think of.
It's not just that his work fits the style, but that even his recent work still employs the same techniques.